A Sermon by John Duncan
Revelation 1:17, 18. And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead. And He laid His right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last: I am He that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.
The gentle and loving John had long and often lain on the bosom of Love incarnate. To Him Jesus had granted, in His condescension, such familiarity with Him in the days when He tabernacled among us in the likeness of sinful flesh. John was now, in his old age, in banishment for the cause of Christ. He was favoured with a visit of his exalted Lord, manifesting Himself in those symbols of His resurrection glory and ascension majesty, which weighed down the powers even of this beloved and loving disciple, and made him fall down at the feet of Jesus as one dead.
It was one thing to have known the Man of sorrows, acquainted with grief; it was one thing to have seen, by the teaching of the Holy Ghost, the glory of the Godhead shining forth in that condescension; but it was another to behold the marks of effulgent glory, that dignity inconceivable, to which Jesus is now exalted. And this should teach us that, though we should have faith in Christ and love to Him that is ardent as John’s, we are yet unfitted to bear that weight of glory which is about to be revealed. Without supports that are to us inconceivable, we would be crushed under the weight of the Redeemer’s glory.
We should learn to reverence, adore and love the Saviour; we should cultivate a love, deeper than the deepest human love, but removed from all that is incompatible with the prostration and reverence due to the dignity and glory of the Saviour. If John fell at His feet as one dead, how little are we prepared for such displays as He could easily make but which we could by no means endure! Jesus loved His servant; He did not come to trouble and to destroy His servant, but to show him, as a mark of honour to His apostle and for the permanent benefit of His Church, things that must shortly come to pass. The merciful Saviour laid His right hand upon him and spoke to him, in words full of cheering and consolation, to revive him. He was making known to John that all this splendour, of unsupportable brightness and glory, encircled One who was still his ancient Friend – “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and for ever”.
We have set before us the sources of support which Christ administered to His servant, the causes why John should not fear. And we ourselves – though not called to see Christ as John saw Him, in prophetic vision – are called to behold Him, and may soon be called to behold Him as we never have, in stately steps and majestic goings in providence, calculated to inspire, if not the same degree of fear, then the same kind.
It may thus be well for us to ponder those supports which Jesus gives as adequate. They are taken from His own character: “I am the first and the last”. Jesus is the Eternal One. This is the first ground of support, the first dispelling of our alarm:
The Eternity of Christ
When we look at the multiplicity of things that exist and of events that take place – at their magnitude and importance, and the apparent disorder and conflict that often takes place in them – our minds are apt to be thrown off their balance, and reduced to trepidation and alarm. But Jesus here directs our view to His unchangeableness. He is “the First”: Jehovah, the self-existent God, the same in nature and perfections with the Eternal Father and the Blessed Spirit; Jehovah, before all, and by whose commanding word all things came into being.
He is “the Last” – the great final end of all, for whom all things were made, as well as by whom and in whose glory all will terminate. This is a consideration which may well establish the soul. Jesus is the same through the whole course of time and of events. Ten thousand changes may occur, and some of these we hail with joy, and call them glad and prosperous; others we quail before, and view them as bitter, blasting adversities. But change what may, He is unchangeable. “His throne is fixed of old.” “From everlasting to everlasting, [He is] God.” We are in the midst of a changing world; we are changing creatures ourselves, but our God, our Saviour is unchangeable. With Him “is no variableness, neither shadow of turning”. “A glorious high throne from the beginning is the place of [His people’s] sanctuary.” And from first to last, His unity of being and of character gives unity and consistency to the whole – unity and consistency which we are unable to read in itself. Nor need we care much; we cannot tell what all things are, and what all things may be, but we know what He is; He is unchangeably good, wise, holy, gracious, just – and that suffices.
The next ground for confidence is taken from the consideration of
Christ as Mediator
“I am He that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore”. The words in Greek are very emphatic: “I am the Living One, and I became dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore”. In this, we may say, is summed up the whole faith, the whole hope, the whole stability of the Church of God. Jesus directs our attention to Himself as truly God: “I am the Living One”. “As the Father hath life in Himself, so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself.” No eye of man, no eye of seraphim can indeed penetrate the mystery of the eternal generation, of the paternal and filial relation of the Godhead.
But this we know, that the very life itself which distinguishes the Father from all that is not God by nature, distinguishes the Son from all that is not God by nature – that He is the Eternal Life, who was with the Father and was manifested unto us; the Word that in the beginning was with God, and was God, in whom is life. That life is the light of men. Jesus is the Living One. He has underived life in Himself. He is the well-spring of all derived life. Life is natural, essentially natural to Him. Even in death He lived. He was the Living God, and death could never make an approach to Him as God. He was the Living One when He expired; and all the living beings, living with whatever kind of life, were upheld in life by Him even at that very moment when, committing His spirit into the hands of the Father, He bowed His head and gave up the ghost. “Jehovah is the true God; He is the living God, and an everlasting King.”
It is the glory of the Church that she can avow that God has died and bought the Church with His own blood. So it is a new blessedness to know that “the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth fainteth not, neither is weary; there is no searching of His understanding”; that “God over all [is] blessed for ever”; and that to Eternal Divinity death can never draw nigh. “I am the Living One, and I became dead.” The Eternal Life who was with the Father was manifested to us. He who has life in Himself took to Himself a nature in which He was capable of bodily pain and mental anguish, capable of weariness, sickness and death. He became dead; the Living One became dead. He who then lived and did not die as regards His Godhead, He died as regards His manhood – He Himself, the Son of God, when He Himself “bare our sins in His own body on the tree”. It was thus that God bought the Church with His own blood. He became dead. This then is the second basis of the Church’s faith and hope.
The first is Christ’s essential Godhead; the second is His death as Mediator; the third is His resurrection life, never to be followed by any death. “And, behold, I am alive for evermore”. Death had an apparent victory; Jesus had the real one. “Through death He destroyed him that had the power of death.” He entered into the domains of death, but it was to grapple and to slay. Death has reigned hitherto, from Adam to Moses and downward; death assaulted Christ, for death was permitted, because justice found Christ standing in the room of sinners and, for a little, death gnawed through the bands which united the soul and the body of the Lord to one another.
But death was unable to effect his real work. Death’s work is to separate – to separate entirely, not only man’s body from his soul, but to separate man from God. But here death could effect nothing on the hypostatical union which bound the soul of Christ to the Godhead, and the body of Christ to the Godhead. It was our Lord and our God who was with the pardoned thief that day in paradise. It was our Lord and our God who lay in Joseph of Arimatheia’s tomb. Our Lord and God – that blessed soul, not separated from the Eternal Deity; that blessed body, not separated from the Eternal Godhead. This union remained entire, and death was vanquished. It was impossible that he should be holden by the bands of death. Justice was satisfied when He poured out His soul unto death; and soon that body and that soul which, each united hypostatically2, still subsisted in the person of the Son of God, came together and He rose again.
He rose victorious: death could not hold Him. Thus the Church finds the last enemy already subdued. We have, in a risen Saviour, the proofs of a power beyond the most dreaded of all hostile powers – the power of death. He is “alive for evermore”. In that He was crucified, He was crucified in weakness; in that He lives, He lives by the power of God; in that He died once, He died for sin; death has no more dominion over Him. “Wherefore He is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for them.” He then, who is the First and Last, is also the Living One, who became dead and is alive again for evermore. We are not called to contemplate abstractly His eternal and unchangeable Godhead, but to consider it as possessed by Jesus Christ, Emmanuel [God with us], the only “Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus”.
And then, connectedly with this, Jesus has
The Keys of Hell and of Death
He has the keys of the unseen state, for the word involves not only what we call hell, the state of those dying unbelieving and impenitent, but the state of men, of disembodied spirits, both of those who are reserved in chains of darkness and of those who have departed and have gone to be with Christ. That state, dark and mysterious to us, of human souls unconnected with the body; that state which intervenes from the time that soul and body are separated, till the time that soul and body are reunited – of that unseen state Jesus has the keys. He has the disposal of soul and of body: the disposal of the soul and its state, the disposal of both soul and body at the time of the resurrection. He has the keys of the unseen state and thus has power to dispose of souls – power to shut the gate of hell and to open the gate of glory, power to repel and to cast from Him and to refuse a place in glory, power to cast from His tribunal down to everlasting destruction.
He is the “one lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy”. He has power to keep in the grave while it pleases Him; power to bring from this prison into glory, to the everlasting mansions; power to raise to dishonour and send back into eternal fire. He is the universal disposer of man’s state – of man’s state here, of man’s state at death and throughout eternity. This then is another cause why we should not fear. There is One who has more power than hell, more power than death. What is stronger than death, than the grave, than the pit with her devouring mouth? The most terrible thing about man’s power is that he has power to kill the body, but after this he hath no more that he can do. But it is because Jesus has power beyond this – it is because He both died and revived and rose again, that He might be Lord both of the quick and dead – that, trusting in Him, there is no cause for fear.
Another reason for confidence is that Jesus has intimate
Knowledge
of, and right of direction and government in all the proceedings of divine providence. We have no cause to be alarmed because the feebleness of our understandings cannot penetrate very far into the relations of existing events, or at all into the obscurity of coming events; for the whole chain of things, from the beginning to the end, is known to the Lord Jesus. Many and awful are the events which are written down in this book, which records the providence of God from the time of the vision till the time of the consummation of all things – a dark and mysterious book, originally sealed. John wept much because no man was found worthy to open and to read the book, neither to look thereon; but he was comforted by the announcement that “the Lion of the tribe of Judah . . . hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof”.
Jesus knows all events – manages all events. Were there aught beyond His knowledge or inspection or control – were it but the least thing possible – then indeed we would have cause of trepidation and alarm. But all things that are, and all things that shall be hereafter, all are well known to Christ – all are managed by Christ, and managed in a way which, though His poor, silly people do not always sufficiently see this, is working by His administration, working for His glory and for their good.
The devil and the wicked world are doing, and will do, all in their power against the Church; such is their intention, and such the direct nature of their operations, conducted with great cunning, and carried on with awful strength. Yet the operations of devils and wicked men are but part and parcel of that one mystery of “Him who worketh all things after the counsel of His own will”, by which His intentions for the highest advancement of His glory, and the greatest good of His believing people, shall be promoted. It does not then matter to me that I do not know how to trace events, or scan what is likely to take place as a result of this event or that event. If I had to take care of myself, these things might be my care. But it is all fruitless and needless. It is enough to know that He knows all, that He governs all and that His very purposes are in all things being accomplished.
The last source of support and consolation to which our attention is here directed, is
The Presence of Christ in His Church
“The mystery of the seven stars which thou sawest in My right hand, and the seven golden candlesticks. The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches; and the seven candlesticks which thou sawest are the seven churches. Unto the angel of the church of Ephesus write, These things saith He that holdeth the seven stars in His right hand, who walketh in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks” (Rev 1:20, 2:1). He who is the Eternal God, the Living One, the Mediator, who was dead and is alive again, and who has at His girdle suspended the keys of hell and of death, opening and none shutting, and shutting and none opening – He who knows all events and, as Mediator, conducts and manages all events, having the universe at His disposal – has His walking place in the midst of the seven candlesticks, supporting the seven stars in His right hand. Christ is universal Lord. He is so as Head of His Church and for His Church’s benefit.
Would we know why the world is governed? It is for the glory of God in His Church: God has made Him the “head over all things to the Church”. Jesus is present in His Church as He is not in the world. As eternal God, He fills immensity with His presence; but as Mediator – the living head of influences to His people – He is specially, mystically, but really, with His Church. According to His Word, He has not left His people orphans; He has come to us. “I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” With the light which is from heaven He has placed His candlesticks. With the light of His Spirit and gospel He has lit these to give light unto the world. He who is the Light has done so and put it in the candlesticks, and He walks among them. He who is the bright and morning Star, the Sun of righteousness, has placed the stars in the heaven of His Church, and His hand upholds them.
He who counts the number of the stars upholds them by the greatness of His strength – “not one faileth” – for He has imparted and maintains the simple law of gravitation by which they move in their places. But His own immediate supernatural agency has placed the gospel stars in the celestial firmament of His Church. It has pleased Him to communicate light to a dark world – to shine in their hearts, giving by them, as well as to them, the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ. Jesus then, the light of the world, walks in the midst of these lights – the seven stars which His right hand upholds, the seven candlesticks among which He walks. Therefore we are called not to fear.
There are various
Lessons
to be learned from the presence and inspection of Christ. In one point of view there arises the inference that we should fear, for Jesus is present, walking amidst the candlesticks to inspect. He is displeased when any of these begins to shine dimly, when the light is obscured, and when it is in danger of becoming extinct. Even then He will not put out the candle; but there is cause to fear lest He remove the candlestick out of its place. The heavenly Light shall never be extinguished, but its place and position may be changed. We therefore have cause to fear, not that the kingdom of God shall become extinct, but lest it be taken from us and given to a nation that would bring forth the fruits of it.
But while we thus have cause of holy jealousy, we have in His presence cause for confidence against all hostile attacks, against all other sources of fear. He who is in the midst of the candlesticks may remove a candlestick where it is not giving light, but He will not suffer Satan or all the power of hell to extinguish a candle which is answering its purpose, giving light to those around it. Sooner may the arm of human violence stretch out and pluck the material stars from their positions than pluck these stars out of the ecclesiastical heaven in which Messiah has set them. Who shall pluck His stars out of His hand? There is no fear then – no fear of the humblest and meanest of the people of God being plucked out of His hand. This is true not merely of the stars, which are the angels of the churches, but of each disciple. Christ says that no one is able to pluck them out of His hand.
Let us therefore beware of base timidity. Let us not fear; “the fear of man bringeth a snare”. Let us hear Christ’s encouragement to these churches: “Fear none of those which thou shalt suffer: behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days: be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life”. Fear, believer! What have we to do with fear? “Let us sanctify the Lord God of Israel Himself, and let Him be your fear, and let Him be your dread; and He will be for a sanctuary.” Fear the devil? Fear the world? I would hold it base scorn to fear. Fear the devil when Christ has conquered him! Ah, he is much to be feared if we depart from Christ in anything. Let us then be afraid. And much is the world, ay, and the weakest thing that is in it to be feared then. But humbly believing in and faithfully following that One who is mighty to save, who has “spoiled principalities and powers” and “made a show of them openly, triumphing over them,” let us never fear.
We are called to be soldiers, good soldiers of Jesus Christ. We may fear rebellion, fear mutiny, provoking the Captain of our salvation; but under His guidance, following Him, whom shall we fear? What is our calling? Is it not wrestling, “not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places”? Let us not fear; Jesus has taught us in patience to possess our souls. Let us not be foolish. Let us not say, There will be no evil days, no tribulation. There will be tribulation. There will be evil days. The days are yet coming of which Christ has warned us – come they soon, or come they later – that there have not been such from the foundation of the world. These things are to be counted on; our minds are to be made up; thus are we in patience to possess our souls.
Let us not fear. Why should we? What can men do to us? They can kill us; after that they have no more that they can do. We know their worst, and it is not very bad. They cannot touch the life that “is hid with Christ in God”. They cannot send soul and body to hell. They cannot keep us in the grave. They can kill us, but “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord”.
Only let us be humble; let us seek to abound in that fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom, and with diffidence in our own resolutions and our strength. Indeed let us be diffident of going to future trials and duties in the strength of grace already imparted. Let us “be strong in the Lord, and in the power of His might”; strong in the strength not yet communicated but wrapped up in the promise, “My grace is sufficient for thee: for My strength is made perfect in weakness”. Let us at all times seek to have Jesus much in view; and let us seek in times of difficulty and perplexity to gather this from them: to look to Him more simply. Then “out of the eater” shall come “sweetness”; our afflictions shall be real and exalted blessings, and we shall have to say, “It is good for [us] that [we] have been afflicted”.
1Taken with editing, from The Christian Treasury for 1856. For much of the sermon, Duncan is addressing believers.
2That is, the “personal unity of two natures in the God-man” (A A Hodge).