This portion of the Word of God sheds light on our meeting here today. There are some people of an ultra-pious type who make a great deal of talk, saying that we should not make too much of men. No one knew that more than the Apostle Paul. He had a very low opinion of himself. “Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ.”1 In writing to the Philippians he exhorted them to be followers of him as he followed Christ, so he understood that the main thing was to follow Christ. He also understood that the Lord is pleased in His Cause and kingdom in this world to use instruments. There were plagues that destroyed the power in Egypt for the deliverance of the children of Israel out of that land, but Moses and Aaron were the instruments raised, and Israel remembered Moses and Aaron. The Lord does use instruments for the upholding and the preservation of His Cause, and the Apostle says here that the Hebrews were to remember them. Now it is evident from this portion of Truth that those who were referred to as being guides and having rule over the people, and teaching the Word of God, were no longer in the world. They had reached “the end of their conversation”. They had reached the end of their lives. That was something which had to be remembered in connection with them. He refers again to those who had the rule over them in a later verse — they had to obey them; they were present in their day and generation. But this verse has to do with those who were no longer with them, who had ended their course and were now in everlasting glory. They are to remember them, and they are to remember them as those who spoke the Word of God, who were preachers of the everlasting Gospel, and as those whose faith they were to follow. As I stated, this portion of the Word of God casts light for us upon what we are engaged in today, when we remember the event to which I have already referred. It was carried through by an instrument, through a minister of Christ. If he had not been there it would not have taken place; but he was there, and he was there, not only in the providence of God, but by the grace of God, and he is to be remembered because of that.
Now we shall briefly consider who they were to remember, and what was the characteristic of those who were their guides and teachers. They were those who spoke to them the Word of God. They did not speak to them the latest philosophical theory, they did not speak to them the latest sociological notion. They spoke to them the Word of God. That is why they were remembered and are to be remembered. We shall consider that in the first place. Secondly, we shall consider what it means to follow their faith. Now, when they spoke the Word of God, they were preaching the faith in the sense of it being a body of doctrine, a body of Divine revelation. We believe that the phrase here “whose faith follow”, has to do with the exercise of the grace of faith. Now the grace of faith is in the heart. “With the heart man believeth unto righteousness.”2 It is hidden in the soul, but its outward evidence is its obedience to the Truth. It is the preaching of the faith for the obedience of all nations, and we shall consider that in the second place. Lastly, we shall consider the end of their conversation, that is to say, the end of their life.
First of all, let us then, and briefly on this occasion, consider those who were to be remembered and what was true of them. What was true of them was that they spoke the Word of God. Now they could not speak the Word of God until God had spoken to them. No one is a preacher of the Gospel and speaking the Word of God to others who does not know in his spiritual experience what it means for God to speak to him. God in speaking to him by His Word and by His Spirit imparts to him the knowledge of the Word of God in which he is to be engaged in teaching others. He needs that teaching just as much as Simon Barjona, to whom Christ said, when he confessed, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God,” “Blessed are thou, Simon Barjona; for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father Which is in heaven.”3 They shall all be taught of God. All God’s people without exception are taught of God, and all ministers of the Gospel, before they can speak the Word of God, must be taught the Word of God. In God’s speaking to a soul, He begins by giving a knowledge of the Law of God.
No man is a minister of the Gospel who does not have a knowledge of the Law of God. The Apostle tells us the knowledge he discovered by the gracious operation of the Holy Spirit shining the light of the Word into his understanding, reaching into his conscience, showing that the Law was holy, spiritual, just and good, but that he was carnal, sold under sin. This is what happens when God speaks to a soul by His Word and by His Spirit, and all the ministers of the Gospel to this day, and to the end of time, will come to a true sense of sin through the inward grace and teaching of the Holy Spirit. Therefore they will have a high place for the Law of God. Men in our day imagine that they can speak the Word of God while at the same time they are Sabbath-breakers, and breaking the other commandments of God. They show they have no genuine love or appreciation of the beauty and the glory and the preciousness of the spirituality and the holiness of the Law of God.
In this knowledge there is imparted what the Scripture describes in these words, “By the law is the knowledge of sin.”4 That will not equip a minister of the Gospel to speak the Word of God in its fullness. He must come to more than that. He must come to what is summed up here beautifully in these words, the knowledge of “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and for ever.” This knowledge is also imparted through the Word of God by the Spirit of God. For “He shall glorify Me,” said Christ. “He shall receive of Mine and shall shew it unto you.”5 The one who has come to see the holiness, the spirituality and the beauty of the Law of God, and his own carnality and the condemnation of his sin, now comes to discover in the Gospel of the glory of the blessed God that God’s provision for the eternal salvation of the lost and the undone is to be found in the Person and in the work that is mentioned here, “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and for ever.” Pointing out that this Person is an eternal Person, and the Scriptures shining their light into the understanding, He gives the soul to see and to understand that this Person is the eternal Son of God, “the Son of the Father in truth and love,”6 “the brightness of His glory and the express image of His Person.”7 The Son of the Father’s love was set up from everlasting in terms of a “covenant ordered in all things and sure,” to be the Mediator between God and man, in order to open up a way for those who were loved with an everlasting love to be reconciled with the God against Whom they sinned. This knowledge is imparted to the soul by the Holy Spirit through the Word of God, so that he comes to a solid conviction that Jesus is the Son of God, and that Jesus is the Son of Man. He is the Son of God Who became the Son of Man by taking into union with His Divine Person the holy humanity conceived in the womb of the Virgin by the power of the Holy Ghost. This is Jesus. His Name shall be called “Jesus for He shall save His people from their sins,”8 and He is Christ, the Anointed of the everlasting Father. He is the Son of the living God. No one knows Christ, the Christ of the Scriptures, the Son of God, who does not know and understand and believe that He is “the Son of the Father in truth and love.” He is not just a person who had a better knowledge of the Father than anyone else, some human being who was in a very exalted condition. No, He is the Son of God, the eternal Son of God in your nature and mine, and in that nature He died the death due to the sins of those whom He loved with an everlasting love, whose sins He bore “in His own body on the tree.”9 The soul comes to a knowledge of this through the teaching of the Holy Spirit, and embraces Christ by faith as all his salvation and all his desire. In doing so he comes to see the beauty of Christ, the suitability of Christ and the preciousness of Christ, and a desire comes up in his heart to preach this Saviour to his fellow-sinners.
He is called by the call of Christ through the Holy Ghost and by the Word of God to this great work, to speak the Word of God, the Word of God of which he now has spiritual knowledge and understanding. He is, therefore, able by the grace and power of the Holy Spirit to give expositions and explanations of the Word of God and to preach the Gospel of the glory of the blessed God. Now these are the ones who speak the Word of God. Others may profess to do it, but they only need to open their mouths or to put their pens to paper when you can see that they know nothing of this Saviour. Look at what is happening today. Look at the evangelicals. Thousands of books are written and poor people reading them thinking they are wonderful expositions. John Stott, an Arminian, Philip Hughes a professed Calvinist and others. What now? We discover that now they do not believe in a lost eternity. They do not believe in the doctrine of eternal death. What does that mean? Well it just means that they are ignorant. It just means that they are dark and ignorant and all their writings are riddled through with spiritual darkness. But this is different. This is speaking the Word of God that has been learned, not in a theological college, nor by turning over volumes of theology, but in the soul’s experience before the Throne of Grace and in meditations on the Word of God, and by the secret teaching of the Holy Spirit. Those who speak the Word of God profess faith in Christ. You cannot call sinners to faith in Christ if you have not got it yourself. If you do not know what it means to come to faith in Christ then what is the meaning of teaching sinners about faith in Christ?
Now they were to consider the faith of those who spoke the Word of God, and as I mentioned, in my view this is a reference to the grace of faith and to their obedience to the Word of God. They speak the Word of God and they are obedient to it, that is to say, their walk and life and conversation is one of obedience to the Word of God. But there is something else. It is this, which the Apostle stated, that they not only speak the Word of God, but, because they have faith they lay hold of the Word of God. This faith is a faith that works by love. They have love to the Word of God as the infallible, inerrant Word of God. They have love to it, and therefore, they defend it. “I am set” says Paul, the man who said “I am less than the least of all saints”. “I am set” he said, “for the defence of the Gospel” of Christ. Therefore those who speak the Word also defend the Word. They defend the Word from the various attacks which take place on it. It is not part of my work at the present time to refer to these attacks in detail, but just to say that we are to remember those who not only spoke the Word of God but who defended it. They are those who are embraced in this remembrance here. They defend the Word of God. Now that was necessary when attacks were made on the Word of God in the Free Church of the Disruption. For all the theological acumen of Cunningham, for all the brilliancy of Chalmers, for all the theological learning of Smeaton and others, there crept into the church those who attacked the Word of God in its infallibility and inerrancy. The fact that the love of God is sovereign and free, that His mercy to the unworthy is sovereign mercy, was attacked, and it all found expression as we know, (I need not explain very much about that), in the passing of the Declaratory Act.
In it the Free Church testimony was reduced from a full Confession of Faith to the substance of the Reformed faith, which, of course, has never been defined, and has not been defined to this day. There are even people in the Church of Scotland, like Professor Torrance, uncomfortable about the fact that this “substance” has not been defined. He knows very well why it has not been defined. He knows very well that to define it means making doctrine definite. Now those in the Free Church who belonged to what is called the Constitutional Party, (we’ll be hearing about them), split upon this rock. They said, ‘Let the Declaratory Act be passed. We pay no attention to it. We can still go on and preach the Gospel.’ Gustavus Aird, so popular up in Creich, and the friend of Dr Kennedy, he will do the same. He will go on and preach. But what about defending the Gospel? What about the heretics in the church? Are they to be disciplined? Are they to be dealt with? Are they to be excluded from the church? Is the church to be defended? Is the doctrine of the Word of God to be defended?
“Whose faith follow.” Now this expression “whose faith follow” embraces the fact that as they were obedient to the Word of God, they suffered. You cannot live godly in Christ Jesus without persecution. Anybody who thinks otherwise is thinking what is contrary to the Word of God. These men, who are described here, spoke the Word of God, and their faith revealed itself in the way that it did. It entailed their suffering reproach for Christ’s sake. This is the way and this is the only way, and it was the way in 1893, and now in 1993, for the fulfilment of this exhortation, “Be not carried about with diverse and strange doctrines.” They were not to be carried about with these. They were to remember those who witnessed so that they would not be carried about with these, and we all know, and it is beyond dispute, that the Declaratory Act opened a floodgate for error to enter into the churches in Scotland which has swept them very close to entering into the bosom of the Church of Rome. So, we are here to remember one who stood here, and others who stood with him. They all stood for the faith. They all stood as those who spoke the Word of God, but they were not satisfied with that. They wanted to defend it and they wanted to pass it on to the generations to come. When Charles Sutherland, the godly elder in Lairg, and I were one day walking up and down the platform in Dingwall waiting for a train, he said to me, “I was walking up and down this platform as you and I are doing just now with the late Mr MacFarlane, and he said to me, ‘The Apostle Paul was the Apostle of the Gentiles. I sometimes, think,’ he said, ‘that I am the apostle of the young, for what I have done is for the young of Scotland’.” “What I have done,” he said, “is for the young,” to preserve for them the testimony for Divine Truth. A full-orbed Gospel, purity of worship, proper church discipline and government were preserved for the young of Scotland. True, this testimony has gone to Zimbabwe and to other places as well, but in his view at that time, he was retaining it for Scotland. That is why we are here today to render thanks for the grace that sustained him and upheld him, and gave him to understand that though he spoke the Word of God he had also to defend it. To defend it as he did in the courts of the church meant separating from a church which gave permission to error to have free course. In doing so he did what the Word of God required of him and others to do, that is, that they would have no fellowship with the works of darkness but rather reprove them, and not only reprove them but show the reproof by taking these steps.
Now the last consideration was, as I mentioned, “the end of their conversation”. The word “end” here embraces the idea of deliverance and victory. They came to the end of their lives, and when the end of their lives came, the end of their tribulations came. The end of their trials came, and victory now was to be theirs through the One Who died and Who rose again, and Who is alive and “alive for evermore”. They had entered in to the rest that remaineth for the people of God. There they were numbered among those of whom it is said, “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth . . . that they may rest from their labours; and their works do follow them.”10 We are to consider this. This was their end, to receive the words of Christ on the other side of death, “Well done, good and faithful servant . . . enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.” Therefore, in remembering them, we all need to remember we must be kept faithful to the end of life’s journey. We must all remember that. They were kept faithful. They were kept faithful to the end of life’s journey and the encouragement given for such faithfulness is in the words, “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and today, and for ever.” “Jesus Christ the same” Who said to Abraham, the father of the faithful, “Fear not Abraham: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward,”11 “Jesus Christ the same” in the yesterday of the Old Testament dispensation, and in the today of the New Testament dispensation where He says, “I will never leave thee nor forsake thee.”12 “The same . . . for ever” is the portion of His people world without end on the other side of death. That is where Mr MacFarlane, who stood here, is as to his spirit today with the spirits of just men made perfect, along with others who supported him. They are all together in Immanuel’s land, and let us remember that this is the way they went, by a life of faith upon the Son of God, by a life in which they spoke the Word of God and defended the Word of God, until the time came for them to leave the church below and to go to the church above. May you and I understand, as we remember here today, that we need to be “kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation”13 unto the coming of His kingdom. May He bless His Word.
1 — Ephesians, 3, 8
2 — Romans, 10, 10
3 — Matthew, 16, 17
4 — Romans, 3, 20
5 — John, 16, 14
6 — 2 John, 3
7 — Hebrews, 1, 3
8 — Matthew, 1, 21
9 — 1 Peter, 2, 24
10 — Revelation, 14, 13
11 — Genesis, 15, 1
12 — Hebrews, 13, 5
13 — 1 Peter, 1, 5