Revelation 22: 16-17 “bride say, Come”
Isaiah 53: 1-3
Colossians 2: 5-7
Ephesians 3: 14-19
I was interested in this matter of “the root” that is spoken of in Revelation and in Isaiah, and also in the matter of being “rooted and built up” and “rooted and founded” in the scriptures read in Colossians and Ephesians.
In Revelation it is the Lord Jesus who is speaking; it is not through a prophet or an angel, but the Lord Jesus Himself. He says, “I Jesus”. He has sent His angel to testify certain things, but then He says, “I am the root and offspring of David, the bright and morning star”. The Lord is bringing before us something as to Himself. We might find the scripture a little mysterious. What does it mean, “I am the root and offspring of David”? If you feel that certain scriptures are mysterious and hard to understand, seek help from ministry which helps us to understand the scriptures, and which is a great help to us in building us up and letting us have things in order in our minds. What I believe the Lord is referring to - and you can read about this in ministry - when He speaks of Himself as “the root … of David” is His own deity, that He is God. He is “the root … of David”. That was there before David ever was; it was outside the genealogy in which you can trace David’s roots, naturally speaking, back to Adam. God was the Originator of all of that. In referring to Himself as “the root … of David”, the Lord Jesus is drawing attention to His deity. The Lord Jesus is wonderful! He is beyond our comprehension. There are scriptures that speak of that. Jesus said at one point, and it is recorded in John’s gospel, “Before Abraham was, I am”, John 8: 58. That was something that the Pharisees who had gathered round Him were entirely unable to understand: “the root … of David”. The Lord Jesus speaks of Himself in a similar way in a passage in Matthew: “And the Pharisees being gathered together, Jesus demanded of them, saying, What think ye concerning the Christ? whose son is he? They say to him, David’s”. The Lord says to them, “How then does David in Spirit call him Lord, saying, The Lord said to my Lord, Sit on my right hand until I put thine enemies under thy feet? If therefore David call him Lord, how is he his son? And no one was able to answer him a word”, chap 22: 41 - 46. The Lord Jesus was drawing the attention of these unbelieving Pharisees to the greatness of His Person, and they were not able to answer Him a word, indicating that He was drawing attention to His own deity. How wonderful His is! How majestic a Person!
He is also the true Melchisedec. If you read in the Hebrews, you will find one “without father, without mother, without genealogy; having neither beginning of days nor end of life”, Heb 7: 3. What a personage he was, “assimilated to the Son of God”. Scripture speaks of Melchisedec in that way, “without father, without mother, without genealogy; having neither beginning of days nor end of life”. Christ is “the root … of David”. He was there before beginnings were, and we are able to speak of Him as the Lord Jesus, the One who spoke of Himself as “I Jesus”. The same eternal majesty was there, whether as “the root … of David”, or “Before Abraham was, I am”,. What a wonderful personage, and He would bring Himself before us in all His glory, “I Jesus”, “I am the root … of David”. He would do that to fill our hearts with a sense of His majesty and of His greatness. He was there in all eternal counsels, the great One. What can we say about that pre-incarnate period, the immense scope of eternity before the working out of divine counsels when the Lord Jesus became flesh? In time, the One that we know as the Lord Jesus became flesh: but He is “the root … of David”. The thought of the root conveys fruit that is going to be borne. It conveys the thought of life in potential in the root, and I am sure there is some reference to that here. It was God’s purpose that He should dwell with men, that He should bring into existence creatures that were after His image and after His likeness. He would put hearts in them that were capable of affection and intelligence, and finally God would dwell with such. That was God’s purpose, that creatures would know the blessedness of His heart of love. His counsels involve how that should be brought about, how one Person of the Godhead has come into manhood. That has taken place. We refer to it as the incarnation, when one blessed divine Person was found here in manhood’s form, when the Word became flesh. What a marvellous matter that was; the One who is the Root of David came into manhood’s form. I speak of these things, not as able to open them out in detail, but to appeal to our hearts and minds and to bring before us the greatness and wonder and glory of this One who speaks of Himself as “I Jesus”. Wonderful Person!
Then He refers to Himself as the “offspring of David”, the One who is the true Son of David, ’Great David’s greater Son!’ (Hymn 36). He is the One that we sang about; He is the One whom Israel will come to know in a day to come, the “offspring of David”. The “offspring of David” would bring before us His royalty. David was the king, and even now people in Israel know about King David and call things after him. As far as an Israeli is concerned, David was the king. Well, there was One greater than David and He was here. When He was here His own to whom He came did not receive Him. The Light was there, and it shone on them, and they turned their backs on Him. In general, as a mass, that was true. There were those that did receive Him and there was one man who said, “Rabbi, thou art the Son of God, thou art the King of Israel”, John 1: 49. There was one man in that scripture who recognised the greatness of this One, the “offspring of David”. He recognised His true royalty, His moral right to be king. You might say there was no king in Israel at that time. They were bound to the Roman yoke, and the Romans allowed a governor to be over the Jews, but there was one Man who had the right, and the sway was His, the sceptre was His, and He was not recognised, He was rejected.
You see that in Isaiah 53, but there will come a time when the One who is the Offspring of David, great David’s greater Son, will be on the throne. That is the day that we know as the millennium, the day to come. It says, “the habitable world which is to come, of which we speak”, Heb 2: 5. Maybe we could speak about it more. That is when the Lord will hold sway, and He will hold sway on this earth. He will do that through the assembly, which is not of the earth; and through His people, Israel. It says at the beginning of Isaiah, “that the mountain of Jehovah’s house shall be established on the top of the mountains … and all the nations shall flow unto it”, Isa 2: 2. There will be a recognition that there is blessing which has its source in the Offspring of David, the true King, and it will be available to men through His people who are now the tail of the nations and who will become the head. That blessed One who speaks of Himself here as “I Jesus ... the root and offspring of David” will exercise benign sway. It will be for the blessing of men from shore to shore. What a wonderful time it will be! If you read Isaiah you get some idea of it. Isaiah is full of references to how wonderful His reign will be. The government will be on the shoulder of One who is “Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, Father of Eternity, Prince of Peace”, Isa 9: 6. How could it not be a wonderful time when such a One is in the ascendancy; when that One, the true Offspring of David, is on the throne? It goes on to say, “And there shall come forth a shoot out of the stock of Jesse, and a branch out of his roots shall be fruitful; and the Spirit of Jehovah shall rest upon him”, Isa 11: 1-2. This is a reference clearly to the Lord Jesus. Later in that passage you can see the Lord in His pathway here brought out, but you can also see the greatness of His millennial rule, “And righteousness shall be the girdle of his reins, and faithfulness the girdle of his loins”, v 5. Then it goes on to say in verse 10, “And in that day there shall be a root of Jesse, standing as a banner of the peoples: the nations shall seek it; and his resting-place shall be glory”. What a wonderful matter that is, this blessed One who speaks of Himself as “offspring of David”, the One whose right it is to reign and who will reign. He will reign actually over this earth. He will stand “as a banner of the peoples: the nations shall seek it”. The nations do not know what to seek at the moment. They seek peace and they find destruction and they find war, and somebody was quoting a scriptural expression earlier - the Psalms speak of that as to the sailors, “they are at their wits’ end”, Ps 107: 27. Men are like that, and there is one Man who has the answer. He will have the answer and He will reign in righteousness. It will be a wonderful time when that One who is the true “offspring of David” exercises His blessed rule.
Thinking of these things enhances the glory of the Lord Jesus in the heart of the believer. The day to come will be a day of majestic and wonderful rule. Righteousness will rule and things will be in order. People will invite each other under their own vine and their own fig-tree, the families on the earth will do that. But these things are available in their principle and in their characteristics to the believer now, because Jesus must reign in my heart and He must reign in your heart; and as He does so, there will be peace and order, grace will be known, and neighbourly relations will be rightly worked out. What the Jews and those on the earth will do in the day to come, when they invite one another under their own vine and their own fig-tree( Zech 3: 10), believers to whom Christ is Lord can do now. They can know these felicitous conditions now. We were speaking of some of these conditions in our reading together. These matters are real. What will be in the day to come has its reflex, has its imprint, as it were, now. We have to be interested in these things, in “the habitable world which is to come, of which we speak”. All of this is to enhance our appreciation of the glory of, “I Jesus ...I am the root and offspring of David”.
Isaiah 53 speaks of Christ prophetically, and most wonderfully prophetically, coming in as Man. The fifty-third chapter of Isaiah is truly remarkable. If you wanted proof for your mind of the divine inspiration of the Scriptures, you could read the fifty-third of Isaiah. It is undeniable. It was written, I suppose, about seven hundred and fifty years before Christ was here, and it speaks about Him so wondrously accurately in every respect. It speaks of Him growing up before God “as a tender sapling, and as a root out of dry ground”, and this is that blessed One whom we have read about as “the root ... of David” now coming to manhood, now as a real Man on this earth. He grew up “as a root out of dry ground”. There was that root character in Him as a tremendous source of life. There was the potential there to cover the earth in life that is according to God, but He grew up out of dry ground, that is that the earth naturally conveyed nothing to Him, He drew nothing from it. He drew nothing from the human race after nature because He was a different kind of Man altogether. You read the rest of this chapter and you see how different He was. He was not like you and me. He was not like any other kind of man. He was God’s Man, but He is God Himself. He is the Centre and the Object of the faith and love of every believer, I trust of everyone in this room. It is very significant that He grew up before God ”as a root out of dry ground”. This would remind us that there is nothing in this world that is for Christ, nothing that He can draw from or identify with in this world in its fallen moral state. What a sad condition the world is in. I do not want to occupy you with that, but there was nothing that Christ could draw from here. The established religious orders cold-shouldered Him; they would rather that He was not there. He made them feel uncomfortable. They were worried that if Christ’s teaching and preaching went on the Romans would take away their place and their nation. But there were some that found Him, people who were able to say that He spoke like no-one else could speak, who did things that no-one else did.
I wonder if you have found Him like that, friend, Somebody who you feel that you could not do without. How blessed it is! Read the rest of this chapter. I do not think any believer can read it without being affected. He was “despised and left alone of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief, and like one from whom men hide their faces; - despised”, and then it says, “and we esteemed him not”. How sad and sober that is, and how true. Unless the Spirit of God had worked in my heart and stirred up something there that appreciated something of the glory and wonder of the Lord Jesus Christ, I would not esteem Him. Naturally we would not esteem Him were it not for God’s sovereign work in our souls. This remains the case today, but thanks be to God, there are those who do esteem Him, there are those who appreciate that “root out of dry ground”. He is One who grew up before God, who went on to glorify God in all His pathway here, One who brought out the fulness of committal to God’s will, obedience in all its fulness, even to the cross. It speaks later of His sufferings, as being “stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted”. I suppose that is what the orthodox Jews thought, that the Lord Jesus was being smitten of God. Well He was, but not in the way that they thought: in Him being smitten He was bearing your sins and my sins on that cross at Calvary. This One was doing that, One who grew up before God “as a root out of dry ground”. He is the One who is the Saviour for every one of us. Do we love Him? Do we hold ourselves for Him? Are we loyal to Him? Is there none like Him in our eyes? There is none like Him in God’s eyes. This One is now exalted. He was “raised up from among the dead by the glory of the Father” (Rom 6: 4), and He exalted Him and sat Him down at His right hand, having given Him a place that is higher than the heavens. Wonderful Person that He is, He is now rightly crowned; the One who was once that “tender sapling ... a root out of dry ground” is now crowned with glory and honour. How worthy and how wonderful an Object for our hearts and for our lives, dear brethren! He is a wonderful Person.
I want just to speak about some of the ways that we are to be affected by Him, brought out in the scriptures that we read in Colossians and in Ephesians. In Colossians 2 the apostle says, “I am … rejoicing”. He was rejoicing in the Colossian brethren, “and seeing your order, and the firmness of your faith in Christ”, and then he says, “As therefore ye have received the Christ, Jesus the Lord, walk in him, rooted and built up in him”. What does it mean to be “rooted and built up”? One thing that being rooted in Him conveys to my mind is that He is the Source of our life. That is what a root is. We do not need to do much gardening to know that the root is that from which a plant or a tree or a shrub derives its life, and if the roots get damaged, or if the plant or shrub is separated from its roots by rough handling, or by a spade going in, then it dies. It can no longer derive its life from its root, and the root is deep down. Being rooted also leads to steadfastness, firmness and permanence, and a believer is to be rooted and founded in Him. ”Founded” would be more the idea of building, the foundation, what is permanently laid, and we had something of that in the reading. That is very interesting too. It is interesting to see how what is organic or agricultural runs along with what relates to building. The apostle Paul often uses these metaphors, but we are occupied for the moment with this matter of “rooted”, and Paul is exhorting the Colossian brethren to be rooted in Christ. “As therefore ye have received the Christ, Jesus the Lord, walk in him, rooted and built up in him”. I appeal to all of us to be exercised to be rooted in Christ. Where do we derive our life from? Where are my roots? The conditions of the roots of a plant become manifest in its leaves and its shoots. You can read about that in Mr Stoney, whose ministry is always very interesting and who uses many of these horticultural or agricultural metaphors. He was interested in things that grew. He indicates (vol 12 p505) that the state of the plant, and the state of the believer as to our connections with the root will become apparent. The root may be hidden, but what we are and our connection with Christ as rooted in Him will become apparent. If we want to be flourishing and growing in the courts of God, then we need to lay hold of that Root, the One whom Paul is exhorting the Colossians to be rooted in. And who is He? He is the Christ, Jesus the Lord.
So I appeal to all of us, we want to be here as believers who are in life, manifesting something before God and before men as to the life of Christ. That is what the believer is to be, and in order to do that we must be rooted in Him. We are not going to be blown about by things, as this chapter speaks about being deluded by persuasive speech, and then being led away “as a prey through philosophy and vain deceit”. None of us would want to be like that. Being rooted in Christ is the antidote; it is the solution to being blown about. Christ is the solution for everything. Thinking as we are about being rooted, and referring to what is firm and unchanging and immovable, then Christ is the antidote to having a change of mind or being unsure about things or feeling your testimony is not really worth very much because you do not feel you can be firm for Christ. He is the solution to that. Be rooted in Him, love Him, and derive your life from Him. Put your roots down to that One, be occupied with Him. I speak to myself more than any.
Then this will become apparent, because a third aspect that roots make us think of is fruit-bearing. If the root is good, the fruit will be good; and the Lord speaks of Himself as “the true vine” (John 15: 1), which would, I think, include the roots of that Vine, and He speaks about fruit-bearing for God. Christ Himself bears fruit. He went into death that He might bear much fruit, and there is much fruit being borne now all over the world to God because of what Christ has done, and some of that blessed fruit is in this room this afternoon, and we thank God for it. John 15 speaks about bearing more fruit, and the Lord says, “In this is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit”, v 8. What is in mind is a cornucopia, a large harvest of fruit, a plentiful return for One who died so that much fruit might be borne, a horn of plenty. What God has in mind is that you and I should bear much fruit. How are we going to bear it? We are going to bear it as being rooted and founded in the Christ, Jesus our Lord. There is no other way, but what a blessed way it is, and as we find Him and draw from that real and living Man in glory, then we will find firmness, we will find that we are immovable, we will find that Christian life is real and vigorous and bears testimony, and we will find that there is fruit, and the fruit is for God. The fruit is not for me to eat, the fruit is for God. Then, as God is satisfied and pleased with what He sees in me, there is blessing for me. God does not leave us out of that. As He is satisfied in the fruit that is borne to Him, there is blessing for us, there is peace, there is satisfaction, there is joy, there is company, there is everything that your heart desires as a believer in that blessed Christ, in being “rooted and built up in him”.
We should look at Ephesians. You could say that in Colossians we are to be in Christ, our roots are to be in Christ; and then in Ephesians Christ is to be in us. He is to be in our hearts and He is to dwell there through faith, “being rooted and founded in love”. I think that refers to us being rooted and founded, Christ being in our hearts, being rooted and founded in Him within us. It seems that what we have read in Colossians relates to moral exercises, as to doing what is right and drawing our lives from Christ, being found in testimony true to Him and pleasing to Him, with a view to bearing fruit. This chapter in Ephesians has to do with spiritual matters. Being rooted in Christ is the source of spiritual life so that there might be response to God, as we get at the end of this section, and so that there might be growth in the apprehension of the breadth and the length and the depth and the height, and growth, too, in the knowledge of the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge. It says “and to know the love of the Christ which surpasses knowledge”, and then the apostle adds, “that ye may be filled even to all the fulness of God”. What blessedness! Could anyone encompass that? I do not think we can comprehend it. Scripture says, “apprehend”. Mr Darby translated this with great spiritual sensitivity, I believe, in using the words “fully able to apprehend with all the saints”. These are spiritual matters, and saints are prepared for the full apprehension of the greatness of God’s thoughts by having Christ dwelling in our hearts, “that the Christ may dwell, through faith, in your hearts, being rooted and founded in love”. This is to be our experience, it is to come off the pages of Scripture and to go into your heart and my heart, and be real there. Thank God that these thoughts are in the pages of Scripture. We have been reading Ephesians on Lord’s day afternoon in Grangemouth, and if these thoughts were not conveyed by the Holy Spirit through the words that have been written in the pages of Scripture, no one could ever have formulated them. They could never proceed from man’s heart or man’s mind. They could only proceed from God’s heart and God’s mind. They have been made known to us by the Spirit-indited Holy Scriptures, and they are wonderful. They have to come off the pages of Scripture and be in my heart, as blessed, living, spiritual realities. The way to them is to have Christ in our hearts through faith, and to be rooted and founded in love. What that goes on to is the capacity to “be fully able to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and depth and height”. What scope God has in mind for us. He wants that sphere to be populated by people, by believers, who are become like Christ. That love of His embraces a whole living realm that is populated, and will be populated for eternity, by those among whom He finds His rest. God is preparing for that now, and there are many being gathered in who will form that rest of God.
Then it says, “and to know the love of the Christ which surpasses knowledge”. You might say that is a contradiction in terms. How can you know something that surpasses knowledge? Well, the Spirit will help us to know that blessed love. It is God’s love and Christ’s love and the Spirit’s love, and the Spirit sheds abroad the love of God in our hearts, and every day, as we let Him, He increases our capacity, “to know the love of the Christ which surpasses knowledge”, and to the end “that ye may be filled even to all the fulness of God”, even to that. What grace, what matchless, glorious grace that this should be so, that God should so operate that we should be filled even to His fulness, so that our hearts should be filled, and so that we should be full vessels who are able to respond to God.
The One who is “the root and offspring of David” is also “the bright and morning star”; and He records, because they are His words in the end of Revelation, that “the Spirit and the bride say, Come”. This brings us in a great circuit, because what is being worked out in the hearts of individual believers is Christ. He is the One who operates in our hearts, who works there, who desires to dwell in our hearts through faith, that we might be rooted and founded in love in Him. He is gathering you and me among the personnel of His assembly, His bride; and the time is coming soon when that One who has made Himself known as “the root … of David” and who is the “offspring of David”, and who is Head to the church - its blessed living Head, will be seen as its Bridegroom, and the church His bride. What a wonderful culmination of all this wonderful process that has being going on through these two thousand years. Well, may we be in it livingly, dear brethren and friends. We are at the close, waiting for and hastening that day. For His Name’s sake.
Edinburgh