OH 11:47-53 OH 20:17THERE is a remarkable contrast between the commencement of the eleventh chapter of John's gospel and that portion which is found in v. 47-53. " Then gathered the chief priests and the Pharisees a council, and said, What do we? for this man doeth many miracles. If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation. And one of them named Caiaphas, being the high priest that same year, said unto them, Ye know nothing at all, nor consider that it is expedient for us that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not. And this spake he not of him- self; but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation; and not for that nation only, but that also he should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad. Then from that day forth they took counsel together for to put him to death."
Conscious that Israel had, in heart and principle, already entirely rejected Him, the Lord is shown to us in the early part of the eleventh chapter, purposing to display in Israel a new and last sign for God, viz., the resurrection of Lazarus from among the dead. He loved Martha and Mary and Lazarus, and they knew that He loved them. When Lazarus was sick, the two sisters had sent word, " Lord, behold he whom thou lovest is sick." Sympathy there was in the Lord's heart. He is the master of sympathy; especial sympathy for all that look to Him; but He had a guarded heart and the loins of His mind were ever girded up; and therefore " the glory of God " (v. 4), took the lead in His mind and action. He kept sympathy in its proper place, and made it the channel of a higher and better glory than its own. We read, " He abode two days still in the same place where He was." Then, Lazarus being dead, He announces to His disciples, " Our friend Lazarus sleepeth, but I go that I may awake him out of sleep."
Come now (according to the thought of man) too late to be of any use, He meets the bereaved sisters and presents to their faith those two glories of His own person, " I am the resurrection and the life." Occupied with circumstances and absorbed in their own sorrows, they could not rise to meet his mind. But He, bent now upon letting the glory of God and His Father shine forth in a new way, openly enters into the full character of the circumstances which led to the sorrow; and the taste of what death was; death the wages of sin; death about soon to be realized by Himself; because of the very state of His own disciples who loved and yet could reproach Him with forgetfulness of them and with inconsiderateness; and because of the state of the world around-" Jesus wept."
The sisters wept, for they had been bereaved; they had lost Lazarus. He, conscious that he was about to restore him to them, could not have wept for this loss, this bereavement. With their view of their circumstances He could not sympathize; but with them under their circumstances, as He viewed them, He could and did; " Jesus wept." He purposed to use their necessity and their deep-felt sorrow as an occasion of glorifying God, of showing his own recognition of the Father, and that these glories of His being, the resurrection and the life, were displays from the Father. How true His love to them and how wise! And yet, in preparing to set aside the power of darkness and of the devil, He must needs feel the pillars whereon the temple of sorrow and sin was built. He felt them and " Jesus wept "; and then, for the hour was not come in which He would bow His own head in death and set aside sin and man and Satan, He gave them the display of resurrection in their own circumstances. And glorious the display was, yet was it, because it was in man's circumstances and day, the seed and harbinger of deeper sorrows to them all. For His own life and Lazarus's will be sought for, and His own He will give up. This portion of the chapter ends with the 46th verse. In contrast with it we have, in what follows, the deep counsel of the mind of God as to the death of Jesus which He Himself had seen and felt to be close at hand; and it is announced in a marvelous way by means of the prophetic testimony of a wicked man that was an enemy to God and to all righteousness.
" 47. Then gathered the chief priests and the Pharisees a council, and said, What do we? for this man doeth many miracles. 48. If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him; and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation. 49. And one of them, named Caiaphas, being the high priest that same year, said unto to them, Ye know nothing at all; 50. Nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not. 51. And this spake he not of himself, but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation; 52. And not for that nation only, but that also he should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad."
If he spake it not of himself (wretched man!) he had his own feelings and thoughts in speaking it, and, in thus encouraging the council to seek the Lord's death, he showed his own enmity to God and his own darkness in trying thus to suggest the way of preventing the Romans taking away both " our place and our nation." " It is expedient for us that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not."
But he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation, and not for that nation only, but that he should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad."
Of the connection between His death and the blessings of that nation I need not now speak. But there was another result of blessing alluded to, namely, " that he should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad."
When that nation would not have Him, He was free to turn to another work than gathering them. And when they rejected Him and put Him to death on the cross, He was free to think of the children of God that were scattered abroad. But more than this, while the kingdom of Israel was God's sphere of manifesting Himself in government, the children of God were a hidden people, scattered here and there, and not gathered together at all, much less gathered together in one. For the expression " gathered together in one " is a much fuller and more distinct one than that of being gathered. In the twentieth chapter of this gospel we get, among the first words of our risen Lord, the instruction about " the children." Risen from the dead He could speak of things of which He never spoke until His humiliation was ended. Till then, He never but once, I think, called God " my God," and that was when on the cross; never once called His disciples " My brethren." But His humiliation ended and now no fear of their mistaking the force of such a testimony, He says to Mary, " Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to my Father; but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God (v. 17). Risen from the dead, He, would both that God should have the first fruits presented to Him, and that His people should understand that the Father's presence was the place where they must look for, find, and enjoy Him in their new character of blessing as sons of God. The Father's presence—-His Father and our Father, His God and our God-is the place in heaven to which He ascends and where we know Him. It is His presence there, known to faith and sealed by the Spirit, which enables each one of us to say, " children of God by faith in Christ Jesus " (Gal. 3:2626For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:26)), and also " because ye are sons, God has sent forth the spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying Abba, Father (Gal. 4:66And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. (Galatians 4:6)). Yet this, while true in a company and so the means of realizing brotherhood, one with the other, as seen in the light of a risen and ascended Lord now with the Father-is first of all an individual thing; for the heart of the individual believes, and Abba, Father, is the cry of the individual.
How little do we recognize that the root and truth and power of this blessing is in the earth-rejected, heaven-honored Lord Jesus. Yet so it is-and as the full blessing of each one of those thus blessed will be in the Father's house, so now all our springs of blessing are in Him who is in heaven. This brings death, and the needs be of death-death of Him who was the Prince of Life-before us; and also the needs be of that which our selfish natural hearts turn from, the needs be of death to selfishness entering our own souls, if we are to be blessed at all; and of death being laid home to our souls if we are to be blessed as practical partakers of the blessing.
When we look at the Lord's death, our need of it was fully seen by God, whose love, perfect as Himself, showed itself thus. God is love (1 John 4:88He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. (1 John 4:8)), and how shown? "In this was manifested the love of God towards us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him" (v. 9). Yes, but what would the gift of life to us as sinners have profited us? This too is met. For it is added (v. 10), " Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation of our sins." Here He was all alone in His death. No one could enter into that sorrow or bear part of it. He was utterly forsaken of God, when the cup of wrath due to us was put into His hand. The sting of death He bore Himself -Himself alone. I get the benefit, we get the benefit of His sufferings-the fruits of His death; but He the just one, was all alone as the substitute for the many unjust, when the cup of wrath was emptied, ere He said, " Father, into thy hand I commend my spirit." The question of God's wrath against a rebel creature in its guilt finds no answer save in the death of the sinner's substitute; the divine wrath against myself personally and individually spent itself upon the Lord on the cross. He bare my sins in His own body on the tree. Not so the question of God's displeasure with the ways of death of any whom He makes to be His children. They have to be corrected in us, and the power of them
to be put aside when we have been made to see their practical inconsistence with the pardon and life which God has given to us.
Other parts of the Lord's sorrow we are allowed to share, to drink, into. The Lord as Son was isolate separate when down here from all the scene around us;
His portion and blessing lay there, whence He had cc al And, if we are sons of God, is there no isolate, no desolate separateness from all around to be tasted and felt by us? It will be the more tasted and felt in proportion as we live above with Him, and know what our portion there is. And yet, as we carry, oft, our dead to the burial, how do our souls realize, as with a certain surprise, that we can hold, retain no blessing in circumstances here below. A father, a mother, a husband, a wife, a child pass from our side, absent from the body, present with the Lord; but we are bereaved, desolate, and not only does our gourd that sheltered us wither-our staff whereon we leaned break in our hands-but we find out then and there, perhaps, how little we were really living as those that were beyond death, dead and alive again in Christ; how little we were walking under the yoke with the blessed Master; pilgrims and strangers in a land of shadows, not our rest, for it is polluted. I know "it is good that a man bear the yoke in his youth." And yet how have I been as a bullock unaccustomed to the yoke; yea, as a bull in a net, when death has thus reached the quick of my own soul. How little able to be still and dumb because " Thou didst it;" to still and silence my soul, as taking the cup at His hand: " The cup which my Father bath given shall I not drink it?" It is not our weakness, it is not God's way with us in our weakness, it is not the power of our circumstances, which in these hours leaves us what we are. But it is this, rather: want of individual, practical conformity to the likeness of the Lord who knew how to be crucified through weakness, and who knows how to perfect His strength in our weakness, and who has given to us the sentence of death in ourselves that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God that raiseth the dead. I justify God when He thus brings death in upon myself, and discovers to me how little I have, as yet learned of bearing about in my body the dying of the Lord Jesus, being always delivered unto death.
In the first of these two passages, it is used figuratively, and marks the state of death, the absence of vitality. If this is the sense of it here also, of course, it means the deadness of [the Lord] Jesus to this world and all its allurements, which was true of Him when here, and which He ever exhibited. I think the rendering it "the crucifixion" (as does Dr. Wordsworth), is not doctrinally allowable; because then the believer could not look upon himself as already crucified, dead, and buried, together with the Lord Jesus, but as it the act of being crucified and dying, which would destroy the power of reckoning ourselves dead (Rom. 6:1111Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Romans 6:11)), and so ceasing from sinning. I say this though (according to Suicer) Chrysostom, Theophylact and Cyril, seem to be against me. As also, Bengel, Alford, and Wordsworth, etc. But, doctrinally, I think they err. Jesus's deadness to this world and all its allurements gives to the word the same force exactly as in the other occurrence, and in doctrine it seems to me deeper and less questionable than the dying. Deeper, in that it presents to me One who was dead to the world as the One who, in Heaven, is my life, though I am down here.)
And if this is not sympathy with the Lord in His sorrows, it is, His name be praised a means to that end. Discovery, it may be, most humbling to me, discovery which makes me abhor myself in the dust, and count myself vile, and lay my hand upon my mouth. Oh! how little like the Lord! how much in contrast with Him! but it is good to learn what man is; and nowhere can it practically be better learnt than in such seasons. And if learned, it is, surely, the realization of weakness, a weakness which can have His strength perfected in it. Surely, if we are as water spilled upon the ground which no man can gather up, this only fits the more for the blessed truth that the Father's heart on high, the Father's presence in Heaven, is there where alone we find the spring, or thence the stream of joy, peace or strength. He lets us taste, too, the uncertainty of all below in these scenes of sorrow, the vanity of all our plans, and contrivances, and reckonings; the real character of earth,and the real nature of sin which brought in death. The deaths frequent thus become mementoes to saints to live above, and within their own sphere of blessing-" Behold, I ascend to my Father and to your Father, to my God and to your God."
Having Himself died under the penalty due to us, He has taken a place on high where He is our life, eternal life. But, there on high, in His wisdom He uses the circumstances down here which were proofs, among men, of the sin (the penalty of which He bore), to discover to us all the roots of that selfishness and sinful worldliness which may still remain in us. And so He leads us to judge and separate from it. And thus, too, do we the better estimate the pureness of the grace which led Him to become the propitiation for our sins, and to see how (if shut up to Him for our all) blessed is it to walk in the power of His life and light and love.
If this be so, it is a grand display of His power against Satan, to gather out of the field and harvest of Satan's sowing and culture, the very sins which made His own death necessary as a propitiation for sin, and to use them as the spears of Pharaoh's horsemen to thrust us out of this world, while His own love lures and leads us on.
I have no doubt that in the present breaking up of what did seem steadfast to man, and in the rapid progress of evil, a testimony to the truth, however simple, by those who are not shaken when all around is, and who have, in the midst of acknowledged weakness in themselves, found peace and rest and stability by the truth, is of the greatest value and may be a help to thousands. Hence, I rejoice in the wide dissemination of writings which proclaim the truth and unfold and lead to the study of the word. And I can say this, though some of them should not be without defect of judgment, or should be deficient in exactitude of expression.
The value I have for a friend, the fact that he is largely associated with myself in walk and 'service, the being aware that he is a devoted and zealous servant of the Lord, ought not to be a motive for my not taking notice of statements made by him which Scripture does not bear out, which do not perhaps even present what the writer means and which may be injurious to souls."