Zephaniah 3:1717The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing. (Zephaniah 3:17); Matthew 11:16-3016But whereunto shall I liken this generation? It is like unto children sitting in the markets, and calling unto their fellows, 17And saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented. 18For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, He hath a devil. 19The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners. But wisdom is justified of her children. 20Then began he to upbraid the cities wherein most of his mighty works were done, because they repented not: 21Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. 22But I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the day of judgment, than for you. 23And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell: for if the mighty works, which have been done in thee, had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. 24But I say unto you, That it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for thee. 25At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. 26Even so, Father: for so it seemed good in thy sight. 27All things are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him. 28Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. 30For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Matthew 11:16‑30)
It is a wonderful thing that we should be able to speak of rest on our way through such a world. But there is something more wonderful still in the first passage before us: “He will rest in His love” (Zeph. 3:1717The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing. (Zephaniah 3:17)). It is that God should speak of finding rest for Himself in the thoughts and ways of His love as to us. He had been satisfying Himself. He saves, but it is to “rejoice over thee with joy.” And this is the primary thought of that parable of His heart in Luke 15. It is the perfect, blessed joy of God, not only to receive and eat with sinners, as the Pharisee said, but deliberately to seek that He might have them to receive, and that to eat with Him. Nor will He rest until the poor, convicted prodigal sits at His table. He rests in His love. It satisfies Himself, because He has no more to do. He has us out before His gaze in the perfection of Christ and is satisfied. What amazing blessedness for us! But the firstfruit of it is for Him. And this gives us the source of all rest for us; it is found in the rest there is for God, in the thoughts of His love and in their accomplishment.
His Rest in His Love
But if He rests in His love (in Matt. 11), He brings us to rest in it. But notice the way it is introduced, for it is this that gives it its full character. (Read Matthew 11:16-2416But whereunto shall I liken this generation? It is like unto children sitting in the markets, and calling unto their fellows, 17And saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented. 18For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, He hath a devil. 19The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners. But wisdom is justified of her children. 20Then began he to upbraid the cities wherein most of his mighty works were done, because they repented not: 21Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. 22But I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the day of judgment, than for you. 23And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell: for if the mighty works, which have been done in thee, had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. 24But I say unto you, That it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for thee. (Matthew 11:16‑24).) The Lord Jesus had been through this world and found nothing in which to rest. But He had a secret of rest: “At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.” The trial that pressed upon Him was the ordering of infinite wisdom and of a Father’s love. Thus was He tested and proved perfect in confidence and in obedience. The deeper glory of His person comes before Him and the work He had come to do in connection with it: “All things are delivered unto Me of My Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him.” Rejected when presented as Messiah to Israel, He reveals the Father to whomsoever He wills.
Our Rest of Conscience
But now comes the anxious question: To whom does He will to reveal Him? “Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Are there troubled hearts who have found nothing to satisfy, no source of rest in this poor world? He bids us come to Him that He may reveal the Father to us and thus bring us into the secret of His own perfect rest, so that where He laid His head, who had nowhere to lay it in this world, we can lay ours now, even on the bosom of a Father’s love.
The immediate connection of the verses is to be maintained, for this gives both the aspects of rest He speaks of their full character and preciousness. This first rest is not rest of conscience merely in the forgiveness of sins, although this must be first and be included in it. But it is nothing short of the revelation of the Father to our souls.
Relationship
The heart wants relationship; nothing but divine relationships will satisfy it, and this is what He brings us into. It is not all at once that we enter into the knowledge of the Father, and yet in 1 John 2 The babes in the family of God are addressed because they know the Father. Thus it is the privilege of all. When we come to Jesus, He would have us know that it is to the Father we have come: “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father” (John 14:99Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Show us the Father? (John 14:9)). What blessed rest it is!
This brings us to the source of all the trial that comes, whatever may be the character of it. A Father’s love has put us into it, whatever may seem directly or indirectly to have brought it on. How remote the trial in His case might have seemed from the Father’s dealings with Him, but it is faith’s title to take nothing any lower down than from a Father’s known love. Then there will be something more present and real to the heart than the circumstances of the trial, namely, the One who puts us into them and the certainty of His wisdom and love in doing so: “I thank Thee, O Father. ... Even so, Father; for so it seemed good in Thy sight.”
The Rest of Submission and Obedience
But this leads us simply and naturally to the next character of rest, and this too was illustrated in the path of the Lord Jesus. “Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.” It is the rest we enter into by submission and obedience to the Father’s will, for what was the yoke of Jesus that He bids us take upon us? It was what we have just seen in Him—that perfect obedience that submitted itself in everything to the Father’s will. It is wonderfully brought before us in the words of Isaiah 50:46. He who was Jehovah (vs. 4) has taken, in grace, the path of the learner. “Yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered” (Heb. 5:88Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered; (Hebrews 5:8)). “Morning by morning, He wakeneth Mine ear to hear as the [learner].” Thus He can say, “The Lord God hath given Me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary.” How deeply it enhances its preciousness that He spoke it out of the experience that He had gained in His own path in the world, which we have to go through. Now He calls us to learn from Him, to take His yoke upon us. This is the one necessary condition for our enjoyment of maintained rest of soul. His rest was perfect in His path through circumstances of unparalleled trial, because His submission was perfect, and He would have us know the same perfect rest in whatever we may have to pass through, making proof that His yoke is easy and His burden light.
The Working of Will
It is the working of will in the trial that gives it its bitterness; God has to set Himself against any working of it in us, to smash it, for our blessing. The instant we take God’s part in submitting ourselves absolutely to Him, the sting is gone out of the trial. We are brought into the path of Christ, and there is the full comfort of the sympathy of Him who knew no will of His own. We have been sanctified to the obedience of Christ. It was the knowledge of the Father that He brought us into first, and the title we have thus to take all from His heart, that makes it possible and easy now to submit ourselves under His hand.
The Rest of God That Remains for Us
One more character of rest remains. It is that presented to us in Hebrews 4. The various characters of rest we have been looking at are present. This is future: “There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God” (vs. 9). We are on our way to it. Believers enter into it (vs. 3), but what gives it its character is that it is “His rest.” It is the rest of God, and it is thus developed: “He that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from His” (vs. 10). It is not the rest a soul enters into now by believing the gospel. It remains to the people of God. It is rest at the end of the path, when the work of faith and labor of love and patience of hope are over. The works from which God rested were not bad works. He saw that they were “very good.” He rested when His work was done, and into His rest the people of God will enter when their works are done. They are not the works of vainly seeking to establish our own righteousness, but the work and toil and energy of faith that is needed now for every step on the path of our heavenly calling. There is a sphere of rest God has; it is His own rest, where these will have place no longer.
They little knew the heart of God who sought to bind the Lord Jesus to rest on the Sabbath day in a scene where a man was afflicted with disease for 38 years (John 5). When all was yet as fair as He made it, “He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made,” but when sin came in with its attendant train of misery and death, all this was broken up. “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work” — till that wonderful work was accomplished, on the ground of which we might be introduced out of all the unrest here into the rest of God. The rest of God is a scene suited to the heart of God for the blessing of His own, where no trace of sin or its consequences can ever be found, where no tear or breath of trial shall ever come. The danger is lest any of us should seem to come short of it, that is, by thinking of finding rest anywhere short of that of the counsels of God for us — the rest of God that remains for us.
The path of faith now has to be made good, step by step, with diligence of heart, through a world whose principles oppose us. When we will have come to the rest of God, we may relax the diligence and let the heart go out to everything. All there will only be the reflection of His glory and beauty. In the rest of God, “they ... rest from their labors,” but now we have to labor (or “use diligence”) to enter into that rest. And we have the Word of God to be our most powerful and needed guard to detect for us, as a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart, all that would slacken our pace in pressing on through everything here to reach the blessed scene that opens before our hearts — the bright vista of an eternal rest, the rest of God. Here God shall stand, as it were, on the threshold of a new heaven and a new earth, to wipe away all tears and every trace of the sorrow that came in by sin in the old creation. But it was in this ruined world and by the very ruin that we have been brought to know Him who has revealed to us the Father, and where the trials and exercises of our way through it are made to yield fruit so rich in blessing for our souls. Learning then from the meek and lowly One who has trodden the path before us, may we submit ourselves absolutely to Him, till the scene of His ways with us closes for us in that of His rest and glory forever.
J. A. Trench, Truth for Believers, Vol. 1