We find that the great aim, all through Scripture, is to connect the soul with God personally. After the fall, it was the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden that accosted Adam; and it was from the presence of the Lord God that Adam hid himself—and so on. The personal connection of the soul with God is given in how many instances I need not say, until we reach the culminating point of it in the gospel of glory committed to Paul; “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Here alone the soul is in true worship. There are other truths and other parts of the testimony for God; dispensational truth; principles, etc., all most important in their place, and valuable as far as they go; but this alone goes the whole way, as it were, and reaches the goal.
I may illustrate what I mean, as to these two lines of truth and testimony, by the prodigal in the father’s house. In order that he might not feel his unsuited condition to the house, the father summoned the servants and directed them to invest him with habiliments indicative and assuring of his high position. Very happy and interesting work for the servants this, and of an order which engages many amongst us now; but however interesting, it does not reach the end of the father’s purpose. If the prodigal were only dressed and decorated, and not then conducted into the house of the father, both son and father would have been deprived of the great end and fruition of their reconciliation.
In like manner, in Joshua 56For the children of Israel walked forty years in the wilderness, till all the people that were men of war, which came out of Egypt, were consumed, because they obeyed not the voice of the Lord: unto whom the Lord sware that he would not show them the land, which the Lord sware unto their fathers that he would give us, a land that floweth with milk and honey. (Joshua 5:6), I have all the preparation for possessing the land; and a skillful servant might educate me earnestly and deeply in one and all of the details, from the circumcision to the corn of the land; but I should lose the real power and conscious title of entrance, if I had not seen the Captain of the Lord’s Host, and, as an unshod-worshipper, known that it is with Him that I take possession. In 2 Cor. 4:66For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. (2 Corinthians 4:6), the Apostle has been showing how the reception of the Gospel connects us with Christ in glory, as it had thus connected himself at first, when he was taught this Gospel, and was enjoined to be a minister and a witness of the things that he had seen. Now it was a glorified Christ that he had seen; therefore, if any one sees not this light which is the ministration of righteousness, it is not salvation merely that he is rejecting,—but the “light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face [or person] of Jesus Christ.”
I have often felt, that, in preaching or teaching, the person and presence of the Lord was not made the great object set before the soul. By some (the evangelicals) the gospel is preached by calling on sinners to present Christ to God as an all-sufficient atonement for their sins; others, more enlightened, proclaim the love of God declared in His Son giving eternal life to every believer. But both these fall short of the presentation of God establishing righteousness in His own Son, and through Him, and in His life, leading the believing prodigal to His own house, and nearness to Himself forever, in full and unbroken joy to both. In the two former, though the gain of the sinner be largely insisted on, God’s satisfaction—His gain, we may say His joy—is not entered on at all. We little comprehend the gospel of the glory of Christ disclosed to Saul of Tarsus, who from thence became the witness of the things that he had seen. The glory of God became the starting point of the sinner; as it was also the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
Under the law, there were sacrifices, which, however, never saved the transgressors of the law from legal penalties. The gospel preached, even now-a-days, is more the presentation of the sacrifice, proclaimed, I admit, as all-sufficient and satisfactory, and the call on sinners is to approach it; but this is not presenting to faith God’s salvation, because to Him the sacrifice is full and endlessly satisfactory, His satisfaction being the great subject-matter presented to faith. The reception of the prodigal, great as was his rescue, does not derive its chief excellence from the completeness of his safety and the greatness of his deliverance, but from his happy and welcomed nearness to the father.
We want a gospel which connects us with the presence of God in His joy and we want an education in His word which would connect us with our Lord personally as the living transcript of the mind of God.