"And it came to pass the same night, that the word of God came to Nathan, saying, Go and tell David my servant, Thus saith the Lord, Thou shalt not build me an house to dwell in." -1 CHRON. 17. 3, 4.
A VERY profitable lesson for the present day may be gathered from this chapter, and close dealing with ourselves may prove that we are as prone to carry out our thoughts in service for Christ, as David was in following his own mind in relation to the Ark of the Covenant. Nor is this danger confined to David's times, nor to ours, since Pentecost and the descent of the Holy Ghost. The same limitation of Christ to human expectations was manifested on the mount of transfiguration, when Jesus Himself was in the midst of His disciples. as answered Peter, and said, Lord, it is good for us to be here; let us make here three tabernacles, one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias."
This variance from the counsels of God and the mind of Christ are not confined to the holy mount and the unveiling of the kingdom of glory when Jesus was transfigured before them (excusable then, if ever), but a similar divergence is seen, as regards the sufferings and death of Christ, when Peter began to rebuke his Master, saying, " Be it far from thee, Lord, this shall not happen unto thee. But He turned and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan, for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men." Mary Magdalene and the women at the sepulcher with the spices are further witnesses of how natural it is, at all times, to be behind the thoughts of God in relation to Jesus Christ our Lord. " They entered in and found not His body." The comment which the Holy Ghost makes upon this action is important, as giving the word of God its place, "For as yet they knew not the Scriptures, that he must rise again from the dead."
With such examples and warnings let us turn to consider David in this chapter of Chronicles. The Ark of the Covenant of the Lord was of all importance in those days, as the manifest token and witness which connected Israel, as a nation, with the counsels of Jehovah respecting their final establishment in glory upon the earth. All the interests of David's soul were therefore rightly directed to the Ark, and the preceding chapters give us the record of his actings in relation thereto, and its remarkable journey from the house of Abinadab to the city of Zion. Sharp lessons were taught David and his followers at the threshing-floor of Chidon, where the oxen stumbled and shook the ark, and Uzza put forth his hand to hold it, and the anger of the Lord was kindled, and He smote him, so that Uzza died there before God. He who teaches when necessary with a strong hand, instructed David that if God sanctioned the new cart and two milch kine as a mode of transit from the country of the Philistines, who knew Him not, to its own place and people who did, that His own order must be strictly followed when Israel and Jerusalem were in question. David's displeasure against the Lord and David's fear of God (things which exist together in the soul which is not in communion with the thought of God) must be alike judged. David then learns that none ought to carry the Ark of God but the Levites, for them bath the Lord chosen to carry the Ark of God and to minister to Him forever. The shoulders of the Levites must bear this precious burden and witness of Jehovah's covenant with His people, and all goes well to the last step of their journey.
It is of the greatest moment in our intercourse with God to be assured we are of one mind with Himself in the object which governs us, and the glory of which we pursue. In a day like this in which we are living, a day so prolific in ways and means pressed in upon the service of God and of Christ, many a one as devoted as King David, and as earnest as Uzza, might on that very account profitably pause to distinguish between the new cart and the shoulders-of the Levites, and betwixt the two milch kine and God's appointed order by the Holy Ghost in the Church. Many a breach would have been avoided, and many a pending one averted, were such distinctions observed by the Lord's people in reference to Christ and His saints. " None ought to carry the Ark of God but the Levites" was the ancient order of service and worship; but later on the Lord says, " The hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth; for the Father seeketh such to worship Him." As to service, Paul asks, " What concord hath Christ with 'Belial, or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers, for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness, and what communion hath light with darkness. Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing, and I will receive you."
David and the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord are at last together, and the interest of David's life and the affections of his soul go out towards it, and rightly, as ours do to Christ, by the Holy Ghost. Shall we be cast down if other and deeper lessons await him as well as us in closer associations with God, according to the varying revelations He makes of Himself.?
Now, " it came to pass as David sat in his house, that David said to Nathan the prophet, Lo, I dwell in a house of cedars, but the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord dwelleth under curtains." If David takes thought with his own heart he will do what is in it, and make the same mistake as he had just been delivered from, in reference to the mode of bringing up the ark from the house of Obed-edom. Nor is there security at such a moment even in a Nathan, nor in anyone less than the Lord, and the knowledge of His own mind. " Then Nathan said unto David, Do all that is in thine heart, for God is with thee;" but the prophet, as well as the king, have each to learn that the secret of all successful service lies not only in. God being with them; but in their being with God, and in the current of His mind about the work. " And it came to pass the same night that -the word of God came to Nathan, saying, Go and tell David my servant, Thus saith the Lord, Thou shalt not build me an house to dwell in." Mere piety, then or now, will suggest a thousand activities in reference to the ark and to Christ, which, if carried out, would only separate us from the intentions of God, who reserves to Himself the establishment of His own glory in connection with His people, and the times and seasons of their fulfillment.
David must not make haste to be a builder, though he may be instructed afterward as to the patterns and splendor of the house reserved for the Solomon days, lest the Lord God of Israel make a breach upon him a second time for that he sought Him not after the due order. " And it shall come to pass when thy days be expired that thou must, go to be with thy fathers, that I will raise up thy seed after thee, which shall be of thy sons; he shall build me an house, and I will establish his throne forever."
The persecution of Saul, the cave of Adullam, the rejection of David, and the Ark of the covenant in its migratory character, or under curtains when in Zion, were all in agreement and in perfect keeping with the purposes of God, who orders everything according to the counsel of His own will. What striking and exact types are all these of a greater than David as known to us in these last times. Foreshadows of our Lord's persecution by the prince of the earth, and of the world's rebellion against its rightful King, of the Lord's rejection by Israel, and of His crucifixion by the hands of wicked men. What a type of this present period, when all above and below is under curtains or stained by blood. The Lord hidden in the heavens and our life hid with Christ in God; the cast out One of the earth set down on His Father's throne till the day when God shall make His enemies a footstool for His feet, and He shall rule in their midst. The time of David was judged- unsuitable for building a temple, because he had shed blood. So when Jesus was on the earth He justified Himself for the supposed violation of the Sabbath, and of Israel's day of rest, on the same tooting as David when he entered into the house of God and did eat the shewbread, which was not lawful. With whom coUld he keep a Sabbath, or a rest, in a world like this, into which He came in grace as a Savior to redeem His own out of it? Can God build a temple by the side of the cross, where His Son was rejected, and His blood cries for vengeance?
Many a Christian, sitting in his own house like David, may think of a rest in creation, and if so he will make God's providential mercies the guide of his thoughts, and labor for an extension of the same character of blessing and seek to make. God at home on the earth, as it is. All the world would consent to bring God back as a giver, and admit Him as the author of all good to men as they are, provided He will let them enjoy themselves. This was plainly shown in John 6, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, when the multitude would have come and taken Him by force to make Him a king, but " he departed again into a mountain himself alone." But let a Christian leave his own house and get outside his own circle of pious and philanthropic enjoyments, and go in, as David did, " and sit before the Lord," to learn that God has His own range of operations, and that Christ is the rule of His action as regards His own glory and the everlasting blessing of the redeemed, and at that very moment (so to speak) all his thoughts perish.
It was of immense consequence to David then, as it is to Christians now, to distinguish between the times of a rejected king and the times of a regnant Solomon, between an. outgoing David and his incoming Son, between a period when God was going from tent to tent and from one tabernacle to another, and " the dispensation of the fullness of times when He shall gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth.", This is the hour when the whole creation groaneth and travaileth together in pain, but there is a millennial day "when it shall be delivered into the glorious liberty of the children of God."
These dividing points are properly, and in the ways of God, the differences between the first and the second coming of our Lord Jesus; and it is instructive to observe the change- which these-discoveries wrought in the mind of King David. Now these be the last words of David, " He that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God, and he shall be:"as the light of the morning when the sun riseth, even a morning without clouds. Although my house be not so with God, yet He bath made with me an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things and sure, for this is all my salvation and all. my desire, although He make it not to grow." David has at last reached the purposes of God. respecting His own glory in the yet future Son, according to the flesh, of whom he and Solomon were but the types. Moreover David is content that the mercies of Jehovah towards him and the nation should be made sure in the death and resurrection of Christ at a future day, when the Lord shall come a second time to Zion, and turn away ungodliness from Jacob, and righteousness and peace shall be the stability of the times.
How necessary it is for our communion with God and our service for Christ (if it is to be in the truth of His own mind and in the power of the Holy Ghost) that we should at least have learned these three lessons in the school of God. Displeased and afraid of God those must be who are contented with the new cart and the trine instead of the shoulders of His redeemed and anointed ones. A pious evangelization which sits in its own house and makes itself the rule and measure of its enterprise towards the world around, thinking, as Nathan said to David, that to do " all that is in thine heart for God is with thee" is a sufficient guarantee for success, will find, perhaps too late, how short this comes of sitting before the Lord and getting at what is the purpose of His heart in the establishment of His own glory and the blessing of His people. So again, in a day of great missionary effort and religious organization it is well not to allow our natural feelings to anticipate the yet future Solomon and His reign of outward prosperity and glory, but keeping the patterns of royalty and the coming kingdom in mind (as David did), reject the place of a builder, and own the curtains and the hidden One in the heavens during this day of His rejection, and of the decline and corruption of Saul's dynasty.
Though we are the sons of God it cloth not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that, "when He shall appear, we shall-appear-with him in glory." David, who spake in other language and a lower key, said, " Although He maketh it not to grow, yet he bath made with me an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things and sure." We must go out to Him before He can come into His earthly people, and the building and the growing go on together; then, " as the days of a tree, shall be the days of His people, and they shall long enjoy the work of their hands." But we wait for the shout which will bid us rise up to meet the Lord in the air. Our wisdom is to rise up from ourselves, and our little interests which would always make God at home where we are at home, and go in and sit before the Lord to learn the thoughts of His heart about King David's greater Son and greater Lord. The only one who is the rule of God's actings is the Son of His love-He who said,
Now is the Son of roan glorified, and God is glorified in him; if' God be glorified in him God shall glorify him also in himself, and shall straightway glorify. him." So Nathan will not suit us for revelations such as these. He and David have served their day and generation, and have recorded the times that went over them, and over Israel, and over all the kingdoms of the countries; and died full of days, riches, and honor. The Holy Ghost is now the only competent glorifier of the Father and of His Son our Lord Jesus Christ. Prophets long ago made known the ways of God to Israel in types and promises. Evangelists have by the Spirit of God traced the great mystery of godliness, the Word made flesh, when presented as the long expected Messiah to His earthly people and to Jerusalem. Jehovah God has been refused in the tent, the tabernacle, and the temple, and last of all as God manifest in the flesh. The first man has proved himself to be no connecting link with God, in His ways of righteousness and peace on earth. The second man has come forth from the Father and been born into the world by incarnation, and born out of it by resurrection from the grave, and sits at the right hand of-the throne of the majesty in the heavens, the head over all things to the Church.
Building times and growing times are out of date below, where all is in ruin, waiting in hope for the manifestation of the sons of God. A new and far different basis of divine operation has been laid than the book of Genesis relates. Redemption is now obtained by the blood of Christ out of a fallen state and from a groaning creation as the eternal basis of God's counsels in grace to us; and it is upon this platform the Holy Ghost, in quickening power, gathers the elect. The spirit of prophecy guided the sweet Psalmist of Israel to such a day when he spake of the stone which the builders refused, and said, " It is become the head stone of the corner; this is the. Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes." Peter was taught the same lesson after he had abandoned the mount of transfiguration as a building site, and said, under the subsequent anointing of the Holy Ghost, " To whom coming as unto a living stone, disallowed, indeed, of men, but chosen of God and precious, ye also as lively stones are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God by Jesus Christ."
A dispensation such as this, when God is calling out from the Gentiles a people for Himself, cannot possibly be one of universal blessing to those left behind. Now that the Father is gathering His many sons to a portion and place with His rejected Son in the heavens, as heirs and joint heirs, it cannot be the time of blessing for His betrayers and murderers below. If we follow Peter in the lesson of growing and building times, and take our places with him, and sit before the Lord " as a spiritual house, an holy priesthood," we shall be carried beyond ourselves, and the narrow and ofttimes erroneous thoughts which prevail, when Christ is considered more in reference to self than to the eternal counsels of God, for His own glory now and hereafter.,
For instance, in Peter's first epistle and its opening subject of the inheritance, it is declared to be " incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you"; consequently, to think of this earth and this dispensation in relation to it, would be to disconnect it from the heavens. Moreover, we are begotten to this lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead; and it is-therefore on the other side of death and judgment, and all the ills of this present life-indeed, where flesh and blood never were nor can be. So as to the second epistle, in relation to the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, Peter uses the holy mount in reference to the future majesty, honor, and glory which the Lord received from God the Father by the voice from the excellent glory; and instead of building three tabernacles, Peter speaks of putting off his own, as the Lord had showed him. He preferred to wait a while till the day dawn, when by redemption title he will enter it, with the King in resurrection power.
David in his own house limited the ark of the covenant to himself, and the blessing of Israel in connection with his times and with his seed according to the flesh. Nathan himself had to be taught ere he could rightly direct David to look into the thoughts of God, and learn that when he was gone to be with his fathers Jehovah's purposes would find their footing in the person of his son that should come after him. So Peter refuses to connect any expectations with himself in the earthly house of his tabernacle, but says, " Moreover, I will endeavor that ye may be able, after my decease, to have these things always in remembrance"; and provides the lamp for the hand, and the light for the foot, for those who continue in the dark place " till the day dawn."
May thousands of the Lord's dear people, who are dreaming in their own houses (instead of sitting before the Lord), about His Christ, and speaking one to another of progress and advancement by present means and agencies, wake up to the blessed hope of " the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ," as the birthplace of their fondest expectations, and accept, in the meanwhile, the " day-star in their hearts," as the harbinger of the morning that shall usher Him in, who is King of kings and Lord of lords. Will they let God's ways and means slip, as to the establishment of His everlasting. Kingdom in the person of His own Son, and reduce themselves (as they must) to other means within their reach, such as the magistrate, the primate, and the premier? Will these take fallen man in hand, and try to make something of him, till in the corning crisis the whole world breaks loose from their restraint, and agrees to worship the beast, and in defiance of God, and their rulers, say, " Who is like unto the beast?"
As quickened, raised, and seated in the heavenlies, the Holy Ghost, by Paul, teaches us in the Ephesian epistle the Father's counsels concerning His Christ, the first begotten from the dead, the risen and glorified Son of man-" Head over all things to the Church, which is His body, the fullness of Him that filleth all in all." Human expectations are on this side of death and the grave, but all divine purposes and operation lie on the other side of sin and judgment at the Cross. This was why Jesus said, in prospect of redemption, "I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how. am I straitened till it be accomplished "; and again, " Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." The " beginning of the new creation of God" takes His place as the first begotten from the dead, and none else can be there except as redeemed by His blood, and born out of death and judgment. " You hath He quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins, and who were by nature children of wrath, even as others."
Here lies the difference between truth and error in practice, and it is immense. Men are occupied, and so is Satan, with the world as it is, and with man in the flesh; but God is not, whether as regards progress or improvement. How can there be even probation, after the cross? On the contrary, He is about "to judge the world in righteousness, by that man whom He bath ordained, whereof He bath given assurance to all men, in that He hath raised Him from the dead." May the Lord teach His saints to have done with their own expectations, and measure the glory of God by nothing lower than His own thoughts, which can only find their answer in the second coming of the Lord.
The language of most Christians to one another is a repetition of Nathan-" Do all that is in thine heart, for God is with thee "; and this cheering but faulty assurance is too generally accepted; so, " they help every one his neighbor, and every one says to his brother, Be of-good courage. So the carpenter encourageth the goldsmith, and he that smoothed with the hammer him that smote the anvil, saying, It is ready for the sodering; and he fastened it with nails, that it should not he moved." What mistakes and blunderings by hand and mouth would have been avoided in the Church of God, had Nathan's first assurance to David been judged in the light of the message from God to him the second time: "Spike 1 a word to any of the judges of Israel whom I commanded to feed my people, saying, Why have ye not built me an house of cedars?" David accepted this timely reproof, and learned that the mind of God touching the Ark of the Covenant was very different to the intentions that were passing in his own. And is it of less importance in Christian service, under the guidance and ministry of the Holy Ghost as it professedly is, that we should have the mind of Christ as to the pace we take, and what we do and say to those around, as regards the Church and the world, and the times of grace and glory through a present Savior, and by the coming Lord and Deliverer?
If we sit before the Lard, and read Paul's exhortations to his son Timothy about the last days, and the perilous times that are now come, we shall no longer dream of progress and improvement, hut "that evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived." Have we judged ourselves, and bowed before such a testimony as this, so contrary to the natural heart and all its thoughts and purposes-so contrary, also, to the unscriptural expectations of the professing people of God?
The testimony by which God is gathering to Himself cannot be the spirit of this age, or run along with it.
Be not thou, therefore, ashamed of the testimony of the Lord, nor of me His prisoner, but be thou partaker of the afflictions of the gospel, according to the power of
God. Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth." Exercises such as these would soon put us into the current of God's mind, and outside our own imaginations, and lead us to detect-the waste of labor and expenditure of power upon wrong machinery and untimely objects in the present day.
Oh! the mercy to take the shoes off our feet and sit before the Lord and worship Him,like the four-and-twenty elders round the throne in the Apocalypse, according to the revelation of His mind, through the man He has made strong for Himself. His own eternal glory-the coming judgment on the world which has cast Him out -our rapture and translation out of it into the heavens, to meet Him presently-are all recorded by the Spirit of the living God. Subjection to His word, and the acknowledgment of the Holy Ghost as the Divine Teacher, are indispensable when we think of having the mind of God; and self-judgment, when we discover, as we certainly shall, the variance of our own.
" And the seventh angel sounded, and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ; and He shall reign forever and ever. And the four-and-twenty elders, which sit before God on their seats (the place where we are to-day in spirit), fell upon their faces and worshipped God, saying, We give thee thanks, O Lord God Almighty, which art, and roast, and art to come, because thou hast taken to thee thy great power, and hast reigned. And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead that they should he judged, and that thou shouldest give reward unto thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear thy name, small and great, and shouldest destroy them that destroy the earth." Amen.
J. E. B.