Now of the things which we have spoken,
this is the sum, that we have such
a high priest who is set on the
right hand of the throne of the majesty
in the heavens, a minister of the sanctuary
and of the true tabernacle, which the Lord
fits, and not man.
Now, I like these passages where the Bible
writer sums it up for us, so that
if we haven't understood what he meant before,
we will now.
He said, Now I sum it up, and
this is the sum, that we have such
a high priest who is set on the
right hand of the throne of the majesty
in the heavens.
And I want to talk from that verse
a little, and we'll begin with the majesty
in the heavens.
A year ago now, I spent, I think
it was 13 or 14 evenings, trying to
focus attention upon God himself, showing what kind
of God he was and is, for all
that he was, he is, and all that
he is and was, he will ever be.
And I can do little more now than
to say that this is fundamental to our
Christian faith, that we see that God is
in the heavens, the majesty in the heavens.
This is fundamental to human sanity.
If you rule God out of your thinking
and out of the universe, then we are
simply curious and wonderful relics of what nobody
knows.
You rule God out of your thinking and
out of his universe, and we simply have
deep longings for what is not and has
never been.
And we have heard a universal tradition of
an origin that never existed.
So if we're going to keep sane at
all, most people manage to keep sane by
not thinking about it.
But if you think about it, you'll find
that if you're going to keep your mind
restful at all, you've got to think God
into his world and allow him to be
in his world and allow him to be
in your mind what he is in his
world.
And this idea that God exists and that
he is the sovereign majesty in the heavens
is fundamental to human morality.
All that is yet moral in human beings,
and there is a good deal that is
yet moral in human beings, from human standpoint,
there is nothing morally right that God can
approve, but there is much morally right that
men can approve, that the police can approve,
and the authorities, much that we can approve
in our neighbors, honesty and courtesy and neighborliness
and friendliness.
And all that is yet left, that is,
that we can approve in human life, came
from and comes from a belief in God.
You know the old expression, noblesse oblige, that
if you are noble, then you should act
nobly?
I believe that the belief that we are
from God gives to us a certain upward
moral thrust that we couldn't possibly have if
we didn't believe it.
A belief that we must go back again
to God and report to God for the
deeds done in the body is a strong
power, a hoop to hold our soul together,
a light on our way.
Now we sing a song, a charge to
keep I have a God to glorify, a
never dying soul to save and fit it
for the sky.
And back in the book of Ecclesiastes it
says, Let us hear the conclusion of the
whole matter.
Fear God and keep his commandments, for this
is the whole duty of man.
For God shall bring every work into judgment
with every secret thing, whether it be good
or whether it be evil.
Now I tell you, there's a lot of
difference between the man who's convinced that this
is true and the man who doubts it
or doesn't believe it at all.
For if we believe that we must fear
God and that this is our whole duty
and that God shall bring every work into
judgment, whether it be good or evil, then
there's going to be a difference in us.
So I say human morality rests upon this
belief that there is a majesty in the
heavens.
I believe also that it's fundamentally human decency.
Decency, you know, is that which is proper
or becoming.
And human decency depends upon an adequate conception
of God, a conception of human nature.
And if we believe that there is no
God, then we can't possibly have a right
view of human nature.
No adequate view of human nature is possible
until I believe that I came from God
and that I shall go back to God
again.
So we have faith in God.
This is the rock on which we build.
I rise today, said the old saint, to
a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity.
Through belief in the threeness, through a confession
of the oneness of the Creator of creation.
It was old Saint Patrick himself who prayed
that prayer every day.
And I believe in this.
I believe that when we rise in the
morning it ought to be in a mighty
strength, a belief in the Creator, in the
belief in God the Father Almighty, Maker of
heaven and earth.
Now that's the one thing it says, the
majesty in the heavens.
And then it says the throne of the
majesty.
Now the Bible teaches that creation is a
universe.
That is, it teaches that all that we
see around about us, from the farthest star
that might be picked out by the most
powerful telescope, down to the tiniest cell that
must be seen through a microscope, and all
things living and inorganic that make up what
we call the world.
The Bible teaches that this is a universe.
That is, that it is one vast single
system embracing matter and spirit and life and
mind and space and time and all beings
that are.
And it teaches that these are not separated,
independent of each other, but that they are
united and working harmoniously.
You know, I hesitate ever to mention these
things because there's always someone whose body is
wracked with it or who has lost some
loved one, but the fact of cancer we
must recognize as being one of the terrible
facts of human life as we know it
now.
And if you have ever studied about cancer,
you've learned what it is.
It is simply cells that no longer take
orders from the rest of the body.
The cancer is composed of free cells, anarchic
cells.
They are not subject to the balance and
order of the rest of the cells of
the body.
They go wild and pretty soon they've brought
the victim to death.
And if the world were, everything in the
world were to be independent of everything else,
you would have universal cancer throughout the vast
universe.
So God brings everything together and interlocks them
and makes them interdependent, not independent.
One man said that you couldn't move a
stone on the seashore, but what you'd change
in some manner the balance of the world.
Another man said that there couldn't be a
leaf fall from a tree, but it changed
the order of nature a little bit, just
that much.
There isn't a baby born into the world,
but it makes the world a little different.
And there isn't a man or woman that
dies and goes out of the world, but
it's changed the face of the world just
a little bit.
For all things interlock and depend upon each
other.
And the Bible further teaches that this universe,
that is this uni, this meaning one, this
one great interlocking system has a central control.
And that control is called the throne of
God.
That it's controlled from that center.
Now this seems to be logical to me.
An organism that has no central control, such
as the human body, you know what would
happen to the human body if it had
no central control?
There have been lots of fables and stories
told, made up and told about the body
that wouldn't obey the head, and you can
imagine what it would be like.
And there must be a head on every
organism or else there could be no harmony,
no coordination, no cooperation, and no life.
And it's logical also because every organization has
to have a head.
If you organize anything, you have to have
a head.
Anywhere from the simplest little literary guild consisting
of a half a dozen ladies who have
nothing else to do, they always have to
have a president.
And the president must preside.
If there are only half a dozen there,
there must be someone there.
And it goes right on up to the
largest empire that ever touched the world, right
on up to the great nations of the
world, there must be heads to a head
to an organization.
That's logical.
Or like a machine, there must be a
head to a machine.
When I travel by airplane, for instance, I'm
very grateful for the man up front.
I don't see him after he swaggers quietly
down the aisle with a friendly smile, carrying
his little bag, locks himself in there, that's
the last I see of him.
But when you're landing, particularly if it's New
York or Chicago, the two worst places in
the world to land in.
Mountain is an easy, smooth landing compared to
those two horrible places, New York particularly.
And I look down and wonder always, where
is LaGuardia?
Where is Idlewild?
Is there an Idlewild?
Is there an airport down there at all?
Because there are flat rocks, water, mud, buildings,
an ocean out there, and everything.
And I think to myself, and sometimes say
good-naturedly to somebody sitting beside me, well,
I'm glad the boy up front knows more
about this than I do.
Because I don't know where I started for,
I know where I bought my ticket for.
But how to get down is his problem.
And I'm glad to leave it with him.
He's younger than I am and studied machinery.
And so we have in every airplane one
head, not four or five.
You'll have a co-pilot, but he takes
over only if the first fellow has a
heart attack.
The man who runs that machine runs it.
And if you had a great machine weighing
tons up there in the air with gravitation
screaming for it to come down, and you
suddenly had no head up there, you know
what would happen.
There would be crash after crash until they
were all down.
So if it means that an organism has
to have a head, and if it means
that a machine has to have a head,
and if it means that an organization has
to have a head, then is it not
logical to believe that somewhere in this vast
universe there is a throne where somebody sits
who runs it?
I believe that.
And I believe that one is God, the
majesty in the heavens.
Now the Bible, I say, calls this central
control the throne of God.
And from that throne God governs his universe.
He governs according to an eternal purpose.
And that eternal purpose embraces all things.
Two little words that are used so often
in the scriptures, all things.
And yet they are bigger than the sky
above.
They are bigger than all the worlds, or
as big because they take in all things.
So we have the majesty in the heavens
sitting upon his throne, and then we have
someone sitting on the right hand of the
throne.
Why?
And who is he?
Well, he is Jesus Christ, the minister of
the sanctuary which God made and not man.
And the reason for his being there briefly
is this, and I'll talk to you for
a minute as if I were talking to
people who have never heard this before, though
I know of course you all have, that
there is a province which has revolted, a
province revolted in this that we call the
universe.
In all this interdependent and interrelated and interlocking
universe, one province suddenly revolted and said, We
don't want to be ruled by the head.
We will not be ruled from the throne.
We will rule ourselves.
We will build this great Babylon up to
heaven.
We will not have God rule over us.
So that province we call mankind, and mankind
inhabits a little rolling sphere we call the
earth.
They are asking if man exists anywhere else
in the universe, and they are going up
to find out.
But I don't think he does, because the
scripture says, The earth has he given to
the sons of men.
I take that.
I think the earth belongs to the sons
of men.
They have not done much with it and
they have not done a very good job,
but it belongs to the sons of men,
and that province is now in revolt against
the majesty in the heavens.
What is God going to do?
God might have with a wave of his
hand swept that province out of existence, but
what did he do?
God sent his only begotten Son that he
might redeem that province and bring it back
into the sphere of the throne again, back
into the sphere of the kingdom.
And that kingdom is called the kingdom of
God.
And when a man is converted, born again,
he is born into the kingdom of God.
What does that mean?
It means he is born out of the
old rebellious province into a new kingdom and
owns the throne, which he didn't own before.
No sinner owns a throne.
No sinner owns a throne of God as
being valid and the right of God to
rule over him.
He will talk about God and he will
appeal to God and he will use the
name of God, but he will not obey
God.
And that is why he is worried, that
is why he is a sinner, that is
why he is called a sinner.
And that is why it is said that
he will perish unless he repents and be
born again.
When he repents and is born again, then
he leaves the old world, the old province
that revolted and moves into the kingdom of
God and comes under the rulership of the
triune God again.
That's how simple it all is.
You see, you can't get there by being
baptized, though we all ought to be baptized
according to the teaching of Jesus.
We don't get there by joining a church,
though we all ought to join a church.
You don't get there by praying, you can
pray for the end of your life, 24
hours a day and not be there.
It is coming into the kingdom by an
act of the will through Jesus Christ the
Lord that gets me out of the old,
revolted province into the kingdom of God and
under the rule of the throne of God
again.
And now I say God became man in
order to rescue men, and this he did
by forfeiting his own life that he might
bring back to God again those who had
revolted.
This Jesus Christ our Lord did.
And so we have one sitting on the
right hand of the throne of the majesty
in the heavens, some months back at a
midweek meeting when only a handful of people
was present.
I talked a little bit about the man
at the right hand of God, and I
think maybe that I ought to mention that
again because it's so very important.
It is Christianity, you see.
We have a Christianity now, a dozen or
two dozen.
Christianity is intermixing everywhere, and all trying to
do a little bit of good.
But real Christianity says this.
It says, "'Ye men of Israel, hear these
words.
Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God
among you by miracles and wonders and signs,
which God did by him in the midst
of you, as ye yourselves also know.
Him being delivered by the determinate counsel and
foreknowledge of God, ye have taken and by
wicked hands have crucified and slain whom God
hath raised up, having loosed the pains of
death, because it was not possible that he
should behold another.
This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we
are all witnesses.
Therefore being by the right hand of God
exalted, and having received of the Father the
promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed
forth this which ye now see and hear.'"
So this is the teaching of the New
Testament on this subject, and this was the
message of the first Christian.
Sometimes I get blamed, and particularly they blame
our magazine, the Alliance Witness, because we do
not do what they say, engage in the
contemporary dialogue.
Now if you ever find out what they
mean, will you please come and let me
know.
But all of these egghead preachers are busy
doing what they call engaging in the contemporary
dialogue.
And if you will allow me to resolve
it to my terms, I'll tell you what
I think.
I think it means reading Time magazine and
then commenting on the news before the people.
Now, that's not what God sent me to
do, ladies and gentlemen.
He never sent me to preach on Crucifix
or to talk about the Berlin crisis.
Never!
That might come in as a quick illustration
caught on the run, but never become a
central part of my ministry.
God told me to tell people there is
a throne, there is one on the throne,
and the world is revolted from that throne
which can come back through Jesus Christ the
Lord, and that we have somebody sitting on
that throne who is one of us.
That's what the early church was thrilled about.
If those early men and women who were
baptized with the Holy Ghost as recorded in
the 2nd Acts, if they were here, you'd
never hear them talking about all of the
political and industrial questions that excite the ministers
now and the church people are so concerned
about.
You'd hear them talking about God on the
throne and Christ at his right hand and
the coming again of Jesus and the consummation
of all things and the downfall of iniquity
and the purgation of the world and the
cleansing of the starry heavens above, as when
a man throws an old garment aside.
That's what they talked about.
And above all things, they talked about that
man who sat on the throne, this man
whom he crucified.
They said, he is at God's right hand
alive forevermore, and he is one of us.
And they went out ablaze with that.
We were six children in our mother's home,
for three boys and three girls.
I was number three.
And suppose that one of them gone, but
the five of us remained.
Suppose that when I was twenty years old,
one of the families, say my eldest brother,
had suddenly been made President, or had been
given a high job, and no United Nations
then, but suppose there had been, and he
had been given a high position at the
sensitive, throbbing throne of mankind.
Why, I'd have certainly been happy about that.
I'd have said, my brother is there.
I know a missionary whose son is Chief
Translator for President of the United Nations, and
I know I think still is, and she's
a good soul and shows his picture.
I don't blame her at all, because her
boys are pretty high up, you know, as
men see things.
Well, the Jews went everywhere, these converted people,
these disciples, and they said, Did you know
that one of us is in a position
equal to the position of God, next to
God in power and authority, with all power
given unto him in heaven and in earth?
And they went everywhere telling it.
Now, that's what they told, not that Jesus
was God only, but that this God was
the man Jesus, and that one of our
number had been exalted to Deity.
I said I heard a man one time
say that Christ is man, but not a
man, and I'd wonder how that could possibly
be.
How could a thing be a horse and
not be a horse?
I'd like to ask you.
Do you ever see horse nature floating around
somewhere like a glutinous, ill-formed mass of
cloud?
No, no.
Human nature can only be where a human
being is.
And so, instead of saying that Christ is
man but not a man, we must say
that Christ is a man.
There is one God and one mediator between
God and man, himself a man, Christ Jesus.
So said Paul, 1 Timothy 2.5. So
this man Jesus is a man, and he
is at God's right hand, and he does
sit on the throne.
So we worship man as God.
That is, we worship the man as God.
We worship no other man, but we worship
this man as God.
And this man was believed to be God
by the early church, and they worshiped him
as God.
And I pointed out that they never could
quite understand it.
They said, Now, this man here, Jesus, is
God.
And then, of course, if they began to
refine it metaphysically, they said, But he's a
human being, and how can you get on
your knees to a human being?
That would be idolatry.
But they said, This human being is different.
He has union with the eternal Godhead, so
that when you worship him, you're not worshiping
idolatrously, but you're worshiping God.
And after they had gone on happily, joyously
worshiping for a century or two, then the
old theologians thought out a name for it.
They called it the hypostatic union.
And because they found a name, they thought
they'd explained it.
That was no explanation, that was just a
name.
If you saw a strange looking creature, feathers
in front and hair behind and two tails
and three horns and an odd looking thing,
it looked a little bit like a duck,
somewhat like a cat, and it was waddling
about there, and you said, What is that?
Somebody would say, I don't know.
And you had all the scientists in Ontario
and say, We never saw anything like it.
Then some fellow comes along with a name.
He said, Let's name it.
So he names it, and everybody says, Now
we know what it is.
No, you don't.
You just named it, that's all.
And so it is with the hypostatic union.
They said, How can God and man be
one?
And nobody knew how, so they said, Let's
call it a hypostatic union, which means the
hypostasis, which is God, the substance of God
and the substance of man united in one,
so that when you worship that man, Jesus,
you're worshiping God.
That satisfied everybody ever since, except the liberals.
You couldn't satisfy them anyway.
I heard another name for it, Brother Gray,
recently, that I like also.
I think this is a good one, maybe
better than the other.
They call it a theanthropic conjoinment.
Now, that's another word here, another phrase.
Theanthropic, that's such a beautiful little word.
Theos, God, and Anthropos, man.
And so you have man and God in
conjoinment, God and man united.
But that's another way of naming it.
I still don't understand it.
But I can kneel before him and cry,
My Lord and my God.
So there is at the right hand of
God the man.
And if we could see into heaven now,
we would see there creatures we couldn't explain.
We would see six-winged creatures, two is
all we're used to.
And we would see creatures with wheels in
the middle of wheels and coming out of
the fire, and we would see broad-winged
angels and seraphim that burn.
We would see strange creatures and we wouldn't
understand them.
Then somebody would say, Now, wait, wait, look,
look there, I see something that looks like
the form of a man.
Sure enough, you could recognize him, he would
be Jesus.
He would be one of us.
And we could step up to him and
say, We're brothers, I know you, you're of
my race, you belong to me.
Don't you feel good when you're traveling, say,
in South America or Germany or Asia, and
you see a fellow, he walks up to
you and you look at each other and
smile and he speaks and you say, You're
a Canadian.
He says, Yeah, I'm Canadian, I live in
Hamilton or Toronto.
You smile and you say, Yeah, I'm Canadian.
I still, in the little traveling I've done
around the world, I still can't get over
wanting to turn a flip-flop handspring backwards
when I see the American flag, or when
I see somebody that I know is an
old Yankee.
I like them, not because they're any better,
and I like some of you just as
much, but there's something in you that knows
your own people.
And I suppose that if I were wandering
through heaven yonder and I saw an archangel
and I couldn't talk his language, I saw
a cherubim and I couldn't talk his language,
a seraphim, and I'd be abashful around him,
I'd say he burns, I can't go near
him.
And then suddenly I saw a man and
I'd say, Wait, don't I know you?
He'd say, Yes, I am Jesus whom you
crucified, but whom God raised from the dead,
and I am here for you, pleading your
cause before the Father's throne, my brother, Jesus
Christ the Lord.
He's there, the victorious man.
Now, I point out, this man at the
right hand of the throne and the majesty
is not the victorious God.
It would have been no news to tell
the world God is victorious.
Of course God is victorious.
How could the sovereign God be anything but
victorious?
But what the early church said, there's a
man victorious, a man who is joined to
God, and that man is victorious, and we
are blessed in him, and so if we
are in him we can be victorious.
You know what I think, friends?
I think that we are living on the
very outskirts, the far margin of the kingdom
of God.
We're in it, but we've just barely got
through the door.
I think that we Christians ought to recognize
that our nature has been joined to God's
nature in the mystery of the incarnation, and
that when Christ died on the cross and
rose again and began to join individual Christians
to his body, he meant that we were
to have the same victory that he has.
He meant that we were to have the
same high privilege he has at God's right
hand.
He said, "'Ye in me, and I in
you, and as my Father sent me, I
sent you.' And now he said to God,
"'Thou hast loved them even as thou hast
loved me.'" Jesus did everything he could do
to make his unbelieving people see that we
have the same place in the heart of
God that Jesus himself has, not because we're
worthy of it, but because he's worthy of
it and he's our head.
So he's the victorious man, and he's the
representative man there before God representing us, and
he is the example man.
God is showing what kind of man he
can make, and he's the model man after
which you and I are patterned.
That's why the Lord won't let you alone.
We lived 16 years in the same house
in Chicago, and then came along the war,
and the price control bureau or something, and
they sold the house.
They were renting it, and they sold the
house out from under us, and we had
to find another house.
One of our boys rode in, and they
were scattered all over the world.
When I rode in, he said, "'Dad's whimpering
about leaving that house reminds me of an
old dog who is curled up in front
of the fireplace on a rug, and he's
just stayed there until he can't think of
any other way to live.' I didn't like
it so well when he wrote that, because
I thought it was a rather poor view
that he had of me, but he was
right.
Oh, I was sorry to leave that nice
place on Prospect Avenue, and we went to
another place and got along all right.
But there was that settling down, and we're
like that, we Christians.
We get used to one little viewpoint, one
little tiny, we look at the world and
at God and the kingdom of heaven from
one little tiny dim crack, the crevice that
we're peeking through, forgetting that we'd only dare
to rise and have faith, that that man
at the right hand of God sitting at
the right hand of the throne belongs to
us, and we belong to him, and whatever
he is, we can be in him.
I tell you, it might change our whole
lives.
But here we sit, same old, same old.
Some of you wouldn't be happy if you
didn't look at me from the same direction.
I've sometimes said that we could have a
little bit of revival of some kind in
the Church by just suggesting that everybody sit
in a different seat the next Sunday.
You see, there are people who always sit
over here, and they've got a sit-over
-here psychology.
Then there are others that always sit down
there, and they've got a sit-down-there
psychology, and it's the same over here, sit
over here, and you always see the minister,
whoever he is, from exactly the same angle,
so that there are some of you over
on this side that don't know what the
right side of my face looks like, because
you've never seen it.
You just see it from down there and
vice versa and what have you.
So I say that if we get shaken
up, if we get shaken up, a revival
among other things means a shaking up.
It means that that neat, carefully made up
little pattern of your life has to be
changed, and I believe it ought to be
changed for the better.
I don't go in for change for change's
sake, but I go in for change for
the better.
So I recommend that we raise our eyes
to God, the Majesty in the heavens, and
that we look long and hard and reverently
at him in faith and see at his
right hand one of us, and say, Look,
if he's there, I can be there.
If he is accepted of God, I'm accepted
in him, in the Beloved.
And if God loves him, he loves me.
And if he's safe, I'm safe.
And if he's conquered, I can conquer.
And if he's victorious, I can be victorious.
Change you, my friend.
A little startling.
You get up some morning and the power
of God came on you and you felt
blessed.
It would be a little different from what
you're used to, maybe, but it would be
wonderful.
Why not?
Why not let's seek the face of God
in Jesus Christ.
Never go to God as some poet of
paganism might go from the outside.
Always remember, No man cometh unto the Father
but by me.
But always remember, any man can come unto
the Father by him.
So let us come.
Let's practice it.
Let's begin now.
And let's move into the heart of God
and live in that heart of God, victoriously.
So the things that I've been saying, this
is the sum.
We have a great high priest who will
sit down on the right hand of the
throne of the majesty in the heavens, being
a minister of the sanctuary which God built
and not man.
Amen.