Roland H Brown
Ezekiel 33: 11
1 Thessalonians 1: 9-10
Acts 26: 17-18
You will notice that each of these passages speaks of a turn. The gospel is preached, dear hearer, that you might make a turn, a change of direction. Each of us is on a course, and the man whose words are in the last two scriptures that I have read knew what it was to make a turn in his course. He was an orthodox Jew, and he thought he should do much against the name of Jesus, and against those that were loved by Him. Indeed, the scripture tells us that he was “breathing out threatenings and slaughter” against them, Acts 9: 1. That is very graphic language, is it not, employed by the Spirit of God to describe a heart that was full of hate, “breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord”? And something happened to that man that changed his course. He turned. He made a turn in the course that he was on. Towards the end of his life he said, "I finish my course", Acts 20: 24. That was a very different course from the course that he had been on on the road to Damascus, but he came to have to do with Jesus personally, and the result, as men would say, was life-changing. Everything in his life changed. Now, what about you, dear hearer? Have you come to know the Lord Jesus? Has it had any effect upon you? If you have not, God is appealing to you in the preaching.
Behind what the preacher says lies the appeal of God Himself, and it is expressed in these verses that I have read that were uttered many years ago by God through His prophet, but coming from the heart of God to His own people engaged in a course of idolatry and self-will. To such a people came the appeal from the heart of God, “Turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways”. Now, I do not know what course you are on. I do not know whether you are engaged in evil ways. God knows. Nothing can be hidden from Him. We can deceive others. We may at times deceive ourselves, but we never deceive God, the all-seeing God. He takes account of us and of our ways, and He says here that He has “no pleasure in the death of the wicked”. You see, some of us might take pleasure in that. By nature we like to see people getting their ‘comeuppance’, as men say. By nature we like to see people who behave badly suffering for it, particularly if they behave badly to us . Well, God tells us that He is very different from that. He "commends his love to us" in the gospel, Rom 5: 8. It comes from His heart, a heart full of love. The Scripture tells us that "God is love", that is what He is, and "love is of God", 1 John 4: 7, 8. If you encounter love, it is of God and, in the glad tidings, "God commends his love to us"; and it is a very distinctive love is the love of God. It is not to be compared with natural affection. It is very special love, is the love of God. It is His own, holy nature, and He commends it to us in the gospel. He tells us in the epistle to the Romans that “scarcely for the just man will one die, for perhaps for the good man some one might also dare to die; but God commends his love to us, in that, we being still sinners, Christ has died for us”, Rom 5: 7, 8. I wonder if that affects you, to think that God has taken account of your sinful state, of your responsible history, and what is even more, your impotence to do anything about it, “for we being still without strength … Christ has died for the ungodly”, Rom 5: 6. God has taken account of you, dear hearer, as a sinner. I can say that with great authority. Though I may not know you, and I may not know your history, one thing I do know about you is that you are a sinner and that you need a Saviour. That is what the Scripture tells us, “for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God”, Rom 3: 23. One is historical: “all have sinned”; every one of us in this room has a history, a sinful history. That is historical, but the present position today is that you "come short”. As one man was told, “Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting”, Dan 5: 27. God has a divine standard. Do you remember those scales of old? You do not often see scales like them now, but the weight was put on one side and the goods were put on the other; and God has a standard, the weight on the one side, and each of us as we are put into the divine balance discovers to our shame that we come short of God’s standard. God’s standard has been expressed in a Man, a Man who walked this earth, a Man who went about doing good, never an evil word, never an evil thought, never a lie spoken, nothing underhand. Everything that He did was good. He went about doing good, and people who came in contact with Him were never harmed, they were never damaged. They were healed, they were blessed, their hearts were cheered. A wonderful Man is Jesus, and He walked the earth, and He expressed all that God is. All that God is was expressed in a Man who did not "come short". He set out all that God is, but He expressed under the eye of God all that God sought from man, all that He seeks from you and me, dear hearer, we who have come so far short by nature of that standard.
Well, God has taken account of us. He has not turned away in disgust. He "is ... not willing that any should perish", 2 Pet 3 9. As you go out of this room this afternoon, you may go out unsaved but you will not go out unsought. God does not desire that any should perish, any of us in this room, and He has made provision. That is the good news in the gospel that God has made provision that you might not perish but that you might have life eternal. And so the appeal goes out in the glad tidings to turn, to make a change in your life, a change that is fundamental. It means turning from a course of self-will, turning away from evil ways and turning to God, and the question is raised, ”for why will ye die ...?”. Are you on a course, dear hearer, that is leading to death, death morally, death actually? Are you on a course like that? You know, “the wages of sin is death”, Rom 6: 23. That is the wages of sin. You slave away, and you get your wages. “The wages of sin is death”, but in the gospel God is offering you something freely, “the act of favour of God”, undeserved, unearned, unmerited, presented to you freely, but not without cost. What God is presenting to you freely, what He is presenting to you for the acceptance of faith that requires nothing on your part but "repentance towards God and faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ" (Acts 20: 21), is presented to you at immense cost, a cost so great, dear hearer, that you could never meet it, a redemption so great and so glorious that it would be beyond your means ever to secure it; "the redemption of their soul is costly", Ps 49: 7, 8. If your soul was to be saved for time and eternity, great cost was involved in it. “The soul that sinneth, it shall die”, Ezek 18: 4. That was the divine word. Well, God is presenting to you a salvation that involves the death of His Son, One who died for others. Death had no claim upon Him because He was sinless. There is a remarkable verse in the Scripture that tells us that “Him who knew not sin he has made sin for us, that we might become God’s righteousness in him”, 2 Cor 5: 21. If you look at that verse, who is “Him who knew not sin”, who is it speaking about? You could look through the genealogies of the human race; there is only one Man who could be so described, “Him who knew not sin”, the sinless One, “he was made sin”, the Scripture says, “for us”. Who are the “us”? Are you among the “us” for whom Jesus was “made sin”? Are you among those that have embraced the efficacy and value of that finished work for yourself and for your own sin? “He has made sin for us”; sin, the thing that God hates, the thing that He hates: He hated lawlessness. He loved righteousness and He hated lawlessness (Heb 1: 9), and He was made the very thing that He hated. Have you ever contemplated that? I doubt it lies within the ability of human tongues to explain the profundity of that, that One who was infinitely holy and sinless should be “made sin for us”.
I have often thought that in this very prophet from whom we have read, the prophet Ezekiel, you get a figure of it, because this prophet was made to lie on a bed and unable to move. God put bands upon him so that he could not move, and his food was given to him as he lay there. God said it was to be cooked, it was to be prepared in dung that cometh out of man. You can read all about that in chapter 4. Most people would say that is gross, it is the sort of thing that is utterly repugnant to any one of us in this room; and in the awfulness of the prospect, the prophet pleaded with God that he might be spared that. The only mitigation that was granted to him was that his food was to be cooked in cow’s dung instead of human dung, and there he lay and that is what he ate, what would be loathsome to any one of us. Now that is only a figure; it is a very poor figure, but it conveys, I believe, something to our souls of what it meant to One who was intrinsically holy and sinless to be made sin for us, and that is one of the many examples in the Scriptures of one thing done with another thing in mind.
What was in mind was that those He was made sin for should be made God’s righteousness in Him. You think of that: God has a righteousness for you. God has a righteousness for people like you and me that have no righteousness of our own; God has a righteousness for you. He can approach you and me as guilty sinners. He can approach us righteously and He can clothe us with His own righteousness, the righteousness of God. It is available to all. The righteousness of God is towards all. No-one is excluded from it. Some of the great so-called religions of this world are limited to people of a certain race or a certain geographical area, but the great blessing of Christianity is that God shines out as a result of the work of Jesus. He shines out to all men everywhere. The righteousness of God is towards all. He is no respecter of persons. He does not pay any attention to the colour of our skin, or the amount we have in the bank, whether we are old or whether we are young; whether we have led a very sinful course or a less sinful course, the need is the same. The Lord Jesus spoke of two men, one who owed a lot and one who owed little, but they had one thing in common and that was that they had nothing to pay, Luke 7: 41, 42. Whether your history is long and deep in sin or whether you have led, as men would say, a respectable life, the fact remains that you have nothing to pay, but God has the answer. His righteousness is available to all. It is "towards all", but it is "upon all those who believe", Rom 3: 22. Are you clothed in it, dear hearer? I ask you these things. They are the most important questions that you will ever address. In the world many things are clamouring for your attention. If you walk down the street there are advertisements. People are soliciting your custom. People are wanting decisions about this and that. Everywhere you go people are trying to get your ear, but God has something to say to us in the gospel, and what He has to say outranks anything else in its importance because it involves the eternal destiny of your soul. You know, nothing could be more important than that. You might want to read the newspaper to find out what is going on in the world, but what is going on in your soul, dear hearer? Where do you stand in relation to God? God is appealing in the preaching and He says through the prophet, “Turn”. He has no pleasure in persons going on to doom and destruction. He is a Saviour God. That is a title by which God delights to be known, a God who saves, who is able to save. Scripture says, “Jehovah’s hand is not shortened that it cannot save”, Isa 59: 1. Think of God’s reach, if I may so speak reverently. He is able to reach and to save to the uttermost. He is a Saviour God, but He is a just God too, "a just God and a Saviour", Isa 45: 21. He is not turning a blind eye to what you are and to what you have done, but He is able as a result of the work of Jesus to approach you in all the blessedness of His nature and present you with an accomplished redemption, a work that has been done and a work upon which many in this room are trusting for their eternal salvation. Are you among them? Are you trusting? Do you have faith in the Saviour? He is worthy of your trust. I commend Him to you personally as One who is worthy to be trusted. God, if I might say so reverently, has trusted Him with everything. “The Father loves the Son, and has given all things to be in his hand”, John 3: 35. You can trust Him with your small matters if God has placed everything into His hand. There He is "upholding all things by the word of His power", Heb 1: 3. Have you ever thought about that, one blessed Man upholding all things, even upholding the physical creation in which we are, maintaining this cocktail of air that we breathe? Our breath is in His hands, you know. God gives "to all life and breath and all things". You have received that from Him. You have received the very breath that you breathe from God. How easy it would be for Him to withdraw it. “If he only thought of himself”, one said, “and gathered unto him his spirit and his breath, All flesh would expire together”, (Job 34: 14, 15), but He is keeping men alive. His is keeping you alive that you might hear the gospel, that you might be saved, saved from your sins, saved presently from this present evil world and delivered from the wrath to come.
So Paul relates of these persons in Thessalonica - they were recent believers, they had not long heard the gospel - how they had turned, they turned to God. That would be a wonderful result from the gospel preaching if you turn to God, not just to listen to what the preacher says, but turn to God; get down on your knees, perhaps in your own room, and turn to God personally. Do not just accept what the preacher says, but find out for yourself the blessedness of it, turn to God, turn to Him in repentance and humility, tell Him that you want these blessings that you have been hearing about, you want them for yourself. Turn to God from idols. These persons were idol worshippers before they made this great turn; it has often been pointed out that it does not say ’they turned from idols to God’ as if they had become fed up with the pagan religion that they were following, but they had listened to the gospel preached by the apostle Paul and they had heard of the attractiveness of Jesus and their hearts were drawn away from idols that could not see or speak or feel; they were drawn away to a living Man in glory. He became a reality to their souls. They “turned to God from idols to serve a living and true God”; and not only that, but they had a hope, “to await his Son from the heavens, whom he raised from among the dead, Jesus, our deliverer from the coming wrath”.
Have you ever heard about the coming wrath, dear hearer? People speak about all the tsunamis that there have been on the earth and the earthquakes and the unsettlement in the Middle East, and people wonder what is going to happen and what direction the world is taking, but have you heard about the coming wrath? God will tell you about it. You might not read about it in the newspapers, but you will read about “wrath of God from heaven” (Rom 1: 18) in this Book that we are reading from. “Wrath of God from heaven” is coming upon a world that has rejected God’s Son. His voice once shook the earth, but He is going to shake not only the earth but also the heaven, Heb 12: 26. “Wrath of God from heaven” is a solemn reality. There was a time when the wrath of God came in the form of a flood, the windows of heaven were opened and the water came down from above, and the water rose up from beneath, the springs were opened up and there was no escape, Gen 7. There was no escape for sinners when wrath of God from heaven came in the flood; there was no escape for sinners when fire and brimstone fell upon Sodom and Gomorrah. Certain persons were dragged out and saved by God’s grace, but there were those that mocked when they heard of coming judgment and were ultimately consumed by it, Gen 19: 14-25. Do not mock the prospect of coming judgment. It is a solemn and sober reality. As one man of God once said, it forms no part of the gospel preaching, but it forms the dark background against which the gospel is preached, FER vol 20 p38. God is not seeking to scare persons into receiving the glad tidings. He is presenting the attractiveness of Jesus that you might be drawn to Him, but I would be failing in my duty if I did not remind you that for the Christ rejecters there can be nothing else but judgment, and the reason for that is that, in presenting to you and to me in His Son, the One that He raised from among the dead, God is presenting all that He has in His heart. The scripture says, “no good thing will he withhold”, Ps 84: 11. The apostle says, “He who, yea, has not spared his own Son … how shall he not also with him grant us all things?” (Rom 8: 32); all things, "every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies", Eph 1: 3. Think of the blessings that are at God’s disposal, and they can all be yours through faith in Christ. You can see therefore that, if you reject that, reject Him, what more has God to offer? What more could He do? What more could God do to bless you than to give His own Son? He “so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son” (John 3: 16), and I ask you to think for a moment, what more could God do to make His love known to you? You can see therefore that the coming judgment and the ultimate limiting of evil to the lake of fire is a provision of the love of God. You think about that. It is a very profound thought and it is not mine, but it is the truth that God is going to limit evil to the lake of fire, and there is going to be “new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwells righteousness”, 2 Peter 3: 13. There will be no place there for unforgiven sinners. There will be no place there for persons who have died in their sins, and who will be raised in them, and who will stand before God in them, to be judged by Him on the basis of their responsible history. If you or I were to stand before God to be judged in relation to our responsible history, there could only be one outcome, but God has a righteousness for you.
So the apostle tells us in the Acts how he came to know the Saviour. He was travelling along the road to Damascus to persecute believers, and the Saviour intervened in his life, so he came to know Him. Do you know Him? Do you know the Saviour? He says, “I know whom I have believed”, 2 Tim 1: 12. He had a relationship with Him, and not only did he have a relationship with Him, but he wanted to know Him better. He says, “to know him, and the power of his resurrection”, Phil 3: 10. You say, ’ Well, Paul, I thought you knew Him’, and he did know Him, but he wanted to know Him better. If I might be allowed to use the figure, it is like getting married. When I first met my wife I knew her, not very well, but I knew her, but as I entered into a commitment and a relationship, I came to know her much better. You may have heard about Jesus. You hear about Him in the gospel preaching, and God desires that you should hear about Him, but He is looking that you might make a commitment to Him in faith and that you might come to know Him better, come to know Him not only as your Saviour, but come to know Him as your Lord and Master. That is something else, is it not? To come to know Him as your Saviour is a very important thing, but I am speaking to believers now, have you come to know Him as your Lord? Somebody said once, and it affected me, that in coming to know Him as my Saviour, I learn that He gave His life for me, but when I come to know Him as my Lord, it means really that I give my life to Him. He becomes my Lord. I am no longer at my own disposal. I am turning, through the effects of divine grace, from an evil way. To own Jesus as Lord is to take a different way altogether and a very blessed direction, "to await his Son from the heavens". What a prospect!
But then the Lord speaks of "... the nations, to whom I send thee, to open their eyes". The gospel preaching is preached that your eyes might be open, but then the gospel preacher cannot turn you. You must make that turn for yourself, but the preacher may be able, through God’s grace, to open your eyes to what is available, of which you may perhaps have been unaware. He says, “to open their eyes, that they may turn”, make this turn, “from darkness to light”. Are you in darkness, darkness of ignorance and distance from God? God desires that you should turn towards the light, the light of God as revealed in Christ, and He says, “from the power of Satan to God”. You know, the power of Satan is a very real power. It holds men in bondage, but I can tell you that the power of Satan has been broken. There is one blessed Man whom he failed to overcome, who went into death in order to "annul him who has the might of death", Heb 2: 14. How great He is! How great a matter was the cross of Jesus! I ask you to think about the cross of Jesus in relation to your own history, to take account of a Man alive under the judgment of God. What a solemn consideration, to take account of Him as alive under the judgment of God and ultimately forsaken of God, and that on my account. How immense these things are, to take account of a crucified Saviour who, as Peter says, “bore our sins in his body on the tree”, He bore them, 1 Pet 2: 24. The sins that I so lightly and idly committed, that would shut me out forever from the presence of God, were borne by One who was sinless. They were laid upon Him, and they were atoned for, not in a block but individually, each sin received its just and holy retribution from God. He “hath laid upon him the iniquity of us all” (Isa 53: 6); Peter says, writing to believers, “by whose stripes ye have been healed”. Are you healed? God desires that you should be healed. There is healing in the gospel, healing for your soul, healing for your conscience, the blessed balm of peace with God entering into the conscience, the blessed consciousness of "the love of God ... shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit" (Rom 5: 5) is healing balm. Think of a divine Person doing that, filling your heart with the love of God, a heart that once like Saul of Tarsus was filled with hate and bitterness, that in that heart of yours a divine Person should shed abroad, should dispense, the love of God. That is a blessed experience. Do you know anything about it? You can know something about it. If you ask God for the gift of His precious Holy Spirit, you can know something about that consciously, so that it not only becomes a text in the Bible, but it becomes the joy of your own soul, the consciousness that God loves you. You say, ’That is very simple’. It is very simple but it is very blessed to walk through a world that is marked by hatred and violence and fear and malice, and to walk down the streets of Linlithgow with the inward consciousness that God loves me, a precious possession to have, not only peace with God but to know the love of God. The Holy Spirit is given that you might know that love, and that you might walk in the consciousness of it on your new course, having turned, that you might walk here so as to please God. Think of that, there are persons here on the earth who are walking so as to please God. God is looking down upon them, and He is pleased with them. Whereas it says of men in the early days of the Scriptures that it grieved God in His heart that He had made them because of the wickedness on the earth (Gen 6: 5, 6), there are persons on the earth that are walking so as to please God, 1 Thess 4: 1. So it says, “receive remission of sins”. You can receive these things; God is offering them. He is presenting them, but it is for you to receive it, and you can receive it through repentance. You turn to God in repentance if you take account of what you are in His sight as a guilty sinner, deserving of nothing from God but His judgment, and God does not leave you looking at that for very long. He would have you to come to His own judgment of what you are and of what you have done but, if He left you looking like that, you would be overwhelmed with despair; so He points you to a Sin-bearer so that you might receive the remission of your sins. That is a blessed thing to receive, to walk down the street in the knowledge that your sins and your lawlessnesses God will never remember any more, Heb 10: 17. I can look ahead to the day of judgment, and I can look ahead without a qualm because the Scripture tells me that “There is then now no condemnation to those in Christ Jesus” (Rom 8: 1), not simply that they will not be condemned, but there is for them no such thing as condemnation, and that is because the condemnation so richly due to me has been borne on my behalf by Another, and One who was great enough to bear it, to bear the judgment of God and to exhaust it. He was great enough to do that. He was not only the Victim as the Sin-bearer, but in the type in the Old Testament He was the altar. He was the One who was great enough to sustain and exhaust the judgment of God. God as a result can present to you, for you to receive, the remission of your sins, “and”, it says, “inheritance among them that are sanctified by faith in me”.
There is a present as well as an eternal portion. You can come as a forgiven sinner. You are clean. You can come into a sanctified company. There is such a thing on the earth as a sanctified company, a company that has been sanctified through faith in the Lord Jesus. Their sins have been forgiven, and forgiven sinners belong there. You can receive, the apostle says, inheritance among them. What a great blessing Christian fellowship is. It is a provision of God for those that have been blessed through His grace that they might find their companionship and fellowship in the sanctified company. That is what is for them. What is for God is that your voice can be raised among them in His praise. How God is worthy of that! You think of what He has done to deliver you, to deliver you and to bless you eternally in Christ that you might find an outlet in this sanctified company. I could not come into it as an unforgiven sinner. It would not be a sanctified company if I came into it with my sins upon me, but I can sit down as a forgiven sinner among others that are forgiven too, and like them I can receive the gift, the precious gift of God’s Spirit, and my voice can rise in His praise even now as it will do eternally. What a blessed portion it is, but the appeal of God is that each of us might turn, and we can only do that for ourselves. Nobody else can do it for you. Mother and father cannot turn you round, much as they might desire to do it. The preacher of the gospel cannot do it. You must make that turn for yourself in the intimacy of your own soul with God, but I can tell you authoritatively, and there are many others that can bear a testimony to it too, that it is a turn that you will never ever regret, and the greatest blessing will come through it both now and eternally. May you make that turn! For His Name’s sake.
Linlithgow
22nd May 2011