I should say, by way of announcement, that
tomorrow morning we'll be working in Chapter 41.
Another message along the same line of words
of hope, comfort, and cheer, but this morning's
message, we hope, will give you to see
that Chapter 40 is really a section by
itself.
It comes to a wonderful climax, as we
shall see in the last verse.
Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and speakest, O
Israel, My way is hid from the Lord,
and my judgment is passed over from my
God?
Hast thou not known, hast thou not heard,
That the everlasting God, the Lord, Creator of
the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither
is weary?
There is no searching of his understanding.
He giveth power to the faint and to
them that have no might.
He increaseth strength.
Even the youth shall faint and be weary,
and the young men shall utterly fall.
But they that wait upon the Lord shall
renew their strength.
They shall mount up with wings as eagles.
They shall run and not be weary.
They shall walk and not faint.
The earthly career of a child of God
has always been a difficult one, and that
is because of two things.
In the first place, a child of God
in this world is in a hostile siege,
even a siege that is contrary to him.
And strange as it may sound to some
of us who've always lived in what we
call a Christian country, the children of God
have always been in the minority.
We are plainly in the minority today.
We are hopelessly outnumbered by those who do
not know God.
You take the so-called professing Christian population
of the world and compare it with the
total population, and you will see exactly what
I mean.
If we are to win out simply because
of sheer force of numbers, we may as
well give up, because we can never win
on that basis.
And then the second reason why the career
of a child of God is a difficult
one is because it is an upward climb.
It is an upward trend, an upward path.
It leads up, and therefore he can never
move under his own momentum.
It's not like going downhill where all you
need is a push and you'll keep on
going.
That's not true of the child of God.
His path is an upward one, and he
requires fresh spiritual impulses to keep him going.
That's one of the real purposes of a
conference like this, of our church services as
well as of our personal devotions, every day
that we need these fresh spiritual impulses in
order to keep us moving upward.
Otherwise, we'll drift like the world.
Now, I say these are the two reasons
why the path or the career, the earthly
career of a child of God, is a
difficult one.
And it is because of these things that
we are frequently discouraged and departed, even to
the point where we question God himself.
And that is where we begin this morning
in our studies in verse 27, where God
turns to his favored nations, addressing them under
the name of the patriarch Jacob, and says
to them, Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and
speakest, O Israel, my way is hid from
the Lord?
Now, that's a strange statement, isn't it?
For anybody to think that there's anything hidden
from God, that there's anything that he doesn't
know.
In other words, to charge him with ignorance.
That's what it means.
If you and I say in our hearts,
God doesn't know what I'm going through, we're
actually charging God with ignorance.
My way is hid from the Lord.
And there's something even worse than that in
the latter part of the verse, and it
says, My judgment, or my justice, is passed
over from or by my God.
Think of that.
Charging God with injustice.
And you say to me, that sounds terrible,
and it does.
It sounds very terrible.
But I believe these are the implications of
these two questions that we have here in
verse 27.
That these people, either in their very words
which they use, or otherwise in their actions,
they have charged God with ignorance, and what
is worse, with injustice.
Now, I've only to put it that way,
dear friends.
And I believe that if you're honest with
yourself, you'll say to yourself, yes, and I
believe I've done that more times than I
dare to confess.
I have actually charged God in my teaching
with this, that He does know what I'm
going through, and what more He hasn't done
right by me.
Especially when I compare my luck with other
people in the world and see how prosperous
they are.
And you get a perfect illustration of that
in the 73rd Psalm, don't you?
Where the psalmist was through just as inexperienced
as I.
He sees the prosperity of the wicked, he
sees how healthy they are, and so on.
And he wonders whether he's made a mistake
in taking the side of God.
He says, lo, I have washed my hands
in vain and innocently, and so on.
All my faith is for nothing.
And there's nothing the enemy would delight more
in than just that, to get you and
me to the point where we mistrust God.
That's how he began in the Garden of
Eden.
He didn't come with a direct denial of
God's Word.
He comes with a question.
If you remember, he came to you, he
said, yea, half God cares.
He doesn't say God didn't care.
I'm merely asking, raising the question, such as
we can instill doubt in the heart of
anybody by raising a question about it.
I remember when I was just a little
fellow at school, we were learning our two
-time table.
And there was one little fellow there who
was never sure of himself on his two
-time table.
He would pound his fingers whenever the teacher
would try to teach him that two and
two make four.
But she made him put his hands on
the table where she could see them.
She says, now, tell me this, how much
is two and two?
Two and two, two and two is four.
He wasn't too sure of himself.
And in order to press it upon him,
she said to him again, I don't know
if it's good pedagogy or good psychology, but
she says, how much is two and two?
Five.
Just by receiving questions.
And so the enemy raises questions in our
minds concerning God.
Now, what is God's answer to all of
this?
I believe we have it now in the
verses which follow.
There God asks some questions which are similar
to the questions which he raised in the
portion which we had before us last night.
Remember last night in studying verse 21, we
noticed there were four questions which God puts
to those who doubt him.
He says, have you not known?
That is, you should know by intuition that
I exist.
Have you not heard?
There is a communication concerning me.
Has it not been told you from the
beginning?
What about these traditions concerning me?
And have you not understood from the foundations
of the earth?
By studying creation around you, you should have
come to conclusions that I do exist.
But you'll notice in addressing his people, he
raises only two questions.
He says, hast thou not known and hast
thou not heard?
And here was a people who rarely did
direct revelation from God.
Of all the peoples in the world, they
were the most inexcusable.
And Saint Paul, you remember, in his epistle
to the Romans, he makes a point of
that.
Because what advantage, then, has it to be
wise that people, much every way, but people,
because of them were committed to the articles,
that is, the spoken words of God, they
had this communication.
And so God doesn't have to ask more
than two questions here.
Hast thou not known and hast thou not
heard?
Surely if anybody had reason to know, if
anybody had reason to hear, it was Israel.
But now notice what God says in connection
with it.
And this is something he didn't say in
the questions which we were considering last night.
But he's dealing now with the people who
should have known.
And here you get four important facts concerning
God.
Four important facts.
The first fact is that he is the
one who is everlasting.
And if ever there was a people under
the sun who had death, both of them
it was Israel.
Remember Moses, in that wonderful song of his,
he includes this wonderful thought.
The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath
are the everlasting arms.
Here is a God who never had a
beginning.
Here is a God who is not like
the gods of which we were hearing last
night, who were made of gold and silver
or wood that would not rot.
Here is one who is everlasting.
As Moses puts it in his psalm, the
90th psalm, from everlasting to everlasting, thou art
God.
Oh, you say that sounds like theology.
Right?
It is theology.
But beneath this fact that our God is
the eternal God, the everlasting God.
The one who never had a beginning and
who will never have an end.
Something that you and I with our poor
finite minds can't even conceive of is there
nevertheless.
God has given us this great thought concerning
himself that he is eternal.
Then the second great thought is included in
that name, the Lord.
You'll notice if your Bible makes a distinction
in the printing that the word Lord is
spelled in all capital letters there.
That means, indeed, the translation of the Hebrew
word, and I give it the old pronunciation.
I know the modernists would use the pronunciation
Galway, but I give it the old pronunciation
of Jehovah.
And I believe it has been well stated
that the definition of Jehovah, or shall I
say an equivalent statement is, it's the one
who was and is and is to come.
The self-existent one.
The one who alone had the right to
say, I am that I am.
I will remember how when a certain man
on the West Coast took unto himself that
right, and he was the great I am,
then one day the news came that he
had died.
The late president, Dr. Houghton, president of Moody
Bible Institute, commenting on the death of this
man, who had taken the title the I
am, and said the great I am is
now the great I ain't.
And that was true, and yet he's got
followers in Chicago right down in the loop.
He still has some of his followers, Saint
Germain.
But there is only one who has the
right to say, I am that I am.
Not only that, but this was also the
covenant name of God.
This was the name by which he revealed
himself to his world as the covenant-keeping
God.
Not only is he the eternal God, the
self-existent one, but he is the God
who keeps his word.
And friends, that's an important thing for us
today, is that our God is the God
who keeps his word.
If he's made any promises, you may be
sure that he'll keep them.
If he's made any threats, he'll carry them
out.
The one side is just as true as
the other.
The threats, the awful threats of punishment and
the word of God, are just as solemn
and just as irrevocable, just as immediate as
any promise that God ever makes, because he
is Jehovah.
Then we come to the third great fact
concerning God here on this earth, that he's
the creator of the ends of the earth.
And here we get something of his omnipotence.
Here is the one who brought everything into
being, and immediately you find that you are
face-to-face with the Lord Jesus Christ,
of whom it is said in the first
chapter of John that all things were made
by him, and without him was not anything
made that was made.
Here is the creator of the ends of
the earth, who neither fainteth nor is weary.
He not only made everything, but he sustains
everything.
He keeps it moving.
That's why this whole world has been moving
along at such a terrific speed, why you
and I are sitting here upon it, walking
upon it.
God keeps it moving, and this creation moves
on, because he not only brought it into
being, but he also maintains it in all
things, all sustained by the word of his
power.
And then we come, lastly, in this 28th
verse to his omniscience.
There is no searching of his understanding.
Or, you say, these are all theological terms.
Yes, but they are terms that I believe
every intelligent Christian ought to be conversant with.
We ought to know something about the eternity
of God, the omnipresence of God, the omnipotence
of God, the omniscience of God.
These ought to be terms that we are
fully conversant with, that we know the meaning
of them, and rejoice that we have a
God of whom all these things can be
said.
What a God we have, haven't we?
But now you notice that he's introduced in
an entirely different way in the verse which
follows, and this is the burden of our
message this morning, and which justifies our title
that these addresses should be called Words of
Hope, Comfort, and Peace.
But in the next verse you'll notice, the
29th verse, God is introduced as a giver,
as if.
And this we find is so true of
him all through the word of God.
In that marvelous text which Dr. Ayer is
teaching from time to time in his hours
of study, God so loved the world that
he gained his only begotten son.
That's how we're introduced to God, he did.
St. Paul, speaking of him in that marvelous
sermon that he is on Mars Hill, he
says, he's giver to all life and breath
and all things.
God the giver, he's a giver.
Not only does he give us life and
breath and all things, and give us his
beloved son as our savior, but he's given
us his blessed Holy Spirit.
Think of that, God the giver.
And then James tells us that he's giver
more grace.
God the giver.
And the psalmist tells us in Psalm 84
that he will give grace and glory.
He's God the giver.
Never think about that.
God, a generous giver.
One who hasn't anything to sell, as it
were, but who's given without money and without
time.
He's giver.
But in this particular text of Scripture, you
notice it's the gift of power.
He says he's giver of power.
And who is there that hasn't at some
time or other, perhaps even now as I
speak to you, he said, oh, that I
had that gift of power.
Oh, that I had the power to be
this, and I had the power to be
that.
And it may be that you haven't qualified
for this gift.
I remember some years ago, speaking to a
lady about the wonderful doctrine of election.
She said, oh, if I could only know
that I was one of the elect.
I said, that's very simple.
Very simple to know whether you can qualify
as one of the elect.
Oh, she said, is that so?
I said, yes, very simple.
So, I took you to the first chapter
of 1 Corinthians, where you have the word
God chose, and you could easily substitute the
word God elected.
And you read in that chapter that God
chose, or elected, people that had no strength.
They were weak.
They were foolish.
They came for the honor.
I said, you see, ladies, it's a question
of qualifying.
Are you dumb enough?
Are you weak enough?
Are you poor enough?
Do you want to be that?
That's all it takes.
And so, here in this passage that took
you this morning, notice that God gives His
power not to those who claim that they've
already got some, and all they need is
a little bit more in order to get
over the top.
He gives power to the faint.
And to them that have no life, He
increases strength.
Do you feel of it what it takes
to qualify for this gift?
To come into the presence of the Lord
as one has to come again and again
and say to Him, Lord, I can't go
on.
I just can't do this in my own
strength.
Lord, I'm nothing but a defeat weakling.
I come to Him, and He loves to
have me just leaned on the arm of
His head.
So, exactly how simple it is, isn't it?
If you would omit those words which are
in italics in my Bible, at any rate,
in verse 29, it would read like this.
He gives power to the faint and to
no life.
To no life, He increases strength.
I grant you that the pronouns should be
there if you want to fully translate the
Hebrew, but I thought it was rather interesting
to drop out those words in italics there
and to see that it's to no life.
I remember some years ago I was standing
alongside of an old medicine man out on
the Navajo field.
He is now a Christian, and his name
in the Navajo meant many folks, Abraham Manyfolks.
We were having our picture taken, and somebody
said to me, What are you going to
call this picture, Armandine?
Well, I said, we'll call this picture Many
Folks and Few Folks.
So, this medicine man, this converted medicine man,
wanted to know what had just been said,
and they told him that they were looking
for a title to this picture, and that
I had suggested we call it Many Folks
and Few Folks.
I was clearly using the word few as
an acronym for many, you see.
So, he said, Abraham, what would you call
it?
He said, they call it Many Folks and
No Folks.
He said, we have not folks.
You see out there, a man's wealth is
measured in the number of folks he has.
I didn't have any of that, for I
was a man with no folks.
And, friends, when it comes to the presence
of God, I'm a man with no friends,
no money, but it's to that kind of
people that we give props.
We give props.
But you say, how do you get it?
Well, in the first place, let's notice that
God eliminates all human strength.
In that courteous verse, he says, even the
youth, that man of his age, shall faint
and be weary, and the young men shall
utterly fall, or as it is in the
Hebrews, stumbling they shall stumble.
In other words, it isn't a question of
serving the Lord in your own physical strength.
Are there many of us who wish we
had more physical strength?
I can remember the first day the doctor
told me, you're not running for any more
training.
He said, you're taking it easier from now
on.
And I didn't like that, because I was
a man, and still am, who likes work.
I love work.
He said to me, now you can't do
as much as you used to do, and
that is hard to take.
But maybe, dear friends, that's the way the
Lord has it teaching me, that it's not
by my small power, but by my privilege
that the Lord.
So, he rules out even young men with
all their strength in the flower of their
youth.
He rules them out.
But in the last verse, he tells us
how we get it.
He says, but say that word upon the
Lord, shall we use their strength?
Not only does he give it and give
it in greater measure, but he also renews
it.
He says, but say that word upon the
Lord, shall we use their strength?
Now, this is an interesting expression, but say
that word upon the Lord.
This might have been translated, but say that
word for the Lord.
Or, we could take the English word upon
and just separate it into a syllable, and
I think we'd have a pretty good colloquial
way of expressing this.
Say that word up on the Lord.
You ever wait up on somebody?
Saint Paul uses exactly that word in the
first chapter of 1 Thessalonians, where he's speaking
to the Thessalonians how they turn to God
for might, or to serve the living and
true God, and to wait.
The word in the Greek really means to
wait up for the Lord, like somebody waiting
up at night for a loved one to
come back.
Oh, how one's own heart has thrilled at
this when he's been off on some ticket,
ticketing a sick person late at night, and
you come back in the wee small hours
of the morning weary and body and mind.
Perhaps you've already helped to close the eyes
of this one who has closed his eyes
for the last time upon this world, Carl.
Now, you come back weary, and you get
right into the backyard and you see the
light is still on in the kitchen, and
you say, isn't it wonderful she left on
a light for me?
But when you put your feet in the
door to unlock it, you found the door
opening of itself on the inside, and there
she was.
Looking at you tired as you were, you
said, would you like a cup of tea
before you came?
Friends, that's what I mean by waiting up.
You know, waiting up for our blessed Lord
to have our home on the last day
of his sleep when he comes back again.
And I don't know of anything that totally
means my friend has to be engaged with
the truth, the glorious truth, that he's coming
back again.
While a lot of Christians are wasting time
these days arguing about this and that particular
point, some of the dear brethren actually getting
into the darkness of waiting for the tribulation
instead of the Son of God.
I just go on my simple way, waiting
for God's Son from heaven.
I ain't waiting for the tribulation, friends, I'm
waiting for God's Son from heaven.
Amen?
Just for you.
I'm waiting up on the Lord, and it
is that that is the secret of the
renewal of one's son.
Now I want you to notice three ways
in which this is manifested in the close
of this chapter.
You know, some of the commentators, at least
one of them I should say, tells us
that what we have here is a descending
climax.
A descending climax?
In other words, the thing goes slower and
slower and finally peepers out at the end,
as though there was any comfort in that.
No, friends.
What we have here is not a descending
climax.
What we have here is three different modes
of action.
Three different modes of action.
It's not a question of pace.
The question is place.
I'll show it to you.
The first thing it says here about these
people of great upon the Lord who are
waiting for him to come is that they
live on a higher plane than other folks.
They shall mount up with wings as eagles.
And that's exactly what St. Paul is exhorting
us to be with.
For example, in 2 Thessalonians, he's a typical
to the Colossians.
Set your mind on things above where Christ
is at the right hand of God.
That's how you mount up with wings as
eagles.
And dear friend, unless that has been your
experience this morning, unless it is one of
the results of being here at Maranatha Conference,
that you and I will learn to live
on a higher plane and to breathe a
heavenly atmosphere.
That's it.
The reason why some of us never seem
to enjoy good physical health, spiritual health, is
because we're constantly breathing the vitiated atmosphere of
this wicked, sinful world through which we move.
You can't expect to prosper spiritually if you're
breathing the vitiated atmosphere of the things that
come over the radio and the television and
through the magazines and the newspapers.
That's not the way to enjoy good physical
health.
Granted that we have to have a certain
amount of that in order to keep up,
as it were, keep abreast of the times,
but don't let that be your breakfast in
the morning.
I well remember the remark of a young
man down in New Zealand, a very fine
Christian young fellow, who was looking over my
shoulder one morning as I was reading the
newspaper.
The chief newspaper there was printed like they
are the chief newspapers in England.
The advertisements, the advertisements, are on the front
page.
The news is inside.
You have to buy the paper to see.
They don't put these big, flashing headlines on
the better papers in England, nor do they
in New Zealand.
And I had opened my newspaper, and this
young fellow was leaning over my shoulder to
share the news with me, and this is
what he said.
He said, what's the devil been up to
overnight?
And I never heard a better summary of
the news than that.
You know, that's just about it, isn't it?
Whether you have it in the headlines on
the front page, or whether you have it
inside as the British do, nevertheless, it's pretty
much what the devil's been up to overnight.
That's a poor spiritual practice, that.
If you and I are going to mount
up with wings as easily, dear friends, as
those who are like men and women waiting
for our blessed Lord to come back again,
we're going to have to be occupied with
things above for Christ's sake.
And there is no better way of doing
that than to read the Holy Word of
God, and have your mind framed, as it
were, to think again about things above the
store that you see through which you move.
Oh, how refreshing it is, isn't it?
To get occupied with those things which abide
and those things which are pure, as St.
Paul puts it in the last chapter of
the disciple to the Philippians.
Then notice what comes next.
Faith shall rung and not be weary.
You see, having mounted up with these wings
as eagles, and having spent time in the
presence of God, now they're ready to go
out and run and do his bidding.
You can't run from your banner.
There's no descending climax or a peak.
These things are in their proper dependency, dear
friends.
If we are going to run to do
the Lord's work, and run without weariness, without
just thinking, as it were, we're going to
have to spend time in the Holy Spirit.
That's it.
These things are in their proper order here,
in their proper sequence.
And then, lastly, we say they shall walk
and not walk.
And this, probably, is the most difficult of
all three of these things, is this matter
of walking.
It so happens, in the original language of
the New Testament, we have two words for
walking.
We have one word, St. Pateo, which means
to walk around.
That's the daily round of things.
But, we have another word, Sorteho, which means
to keep step with somebody else, and probably
that's the more difficult of the two.
Or, it's easy enough to keep running around
and walking around, but to keep step with
the children of God, that's something else of
an ignorance.
How much discord there is among the people
of God, simply because they're not in step
with each other.
He's a man who's never in step with
anybody.
But, when you call your attention to it,
why, he says, they're all out of step
with me.
And, I think that's what the trouble with
most of these people who have not become
adjusted, who don't know what it means to
have real fellowship in the things of God.
Friends, these, I believe, are the results of
breathing on the Lord.
That we shall renew our strength as we
mount up with wings as eagles to spend
time in his holy presence.
To be occupied with the things that he
has provided for us.
To express it with all spiritual blessings in
heavenly places in Christ.
So, run and not be weary.
Oh, to be energetic in the service of
the Lord.
And, that leads me to make this remark.
Sometimes people say that we who are waiting
for God's sons in heaven, that it kills
all missionary enterprise and endeavor.
Nothing is further than the truth.
I've been around the world.
Not as often as Bob Jones, either.
But, I've been around.
But, friends, I'll tell you this.
I've been around the world, and my observation
has been that the most energetic people that
I know anything about are those who are
waiting for God's sons in heaven.
And, when it is a civic matter of
walking, how many exhortations we find connected with
that in the epistles, especially in the epistles
we receive them.
You've got to read through that epistle and
underline the word walk, and you'll see how
important this stuff is here.
But, to say it isn't a rather difficult
task.
You started out by telling us that the
task of the child of God was a
difficult one.
Yes, but the beauty of it is, dear
friends, that it gets brighter as you go
along.
Proverbs 418, the path of the just is
as a shining light.
It shines us more and more unto the
perfect day.
And, the perfect day is not what Harry
Jacobs Bond said it was.
His son said it.
The end of a perfect day is high
noon.
It's evening.
That's what the Lord is leading you and
me on today.
He says, You want the light of God
shining on your path.
Wait for him.
Spend time in his presence.
Run unto him and walk and step with
his spirit.
I believe you have discovered that your path,
even though it is a difficult one, is
brighter every day.
Let it shine.
Our Heavenly Father, we thank you that it
is possible for us to encourage each other's
thoughts as we move along this upward climb.
Up, up, up, and still up.
Higher and higher yet.
Leading that same life flood.
Knowing that grace that knows no limits.
We thank you, Our Father, for such resources.
Now we pray that you would let us
in the further part of this service.
Through Jesus Christ, Our Lord.
Amen.