The year
which is now ended has seen a series of human tragedies.
Wouldn't it
be useful to ask why?
There is a great
principle of God, revealed in His Word, the Bible: when we do not listen to
what God says in His Word, in His goodness, He speaks in fine by circumstances!
Whether we
are talking about pandemics, global warming, tornadoes, tragic floods, etc. ...
God reminds mankind that, although many want to deny His existence, He is the
Creator and that "for this thing is from Him"!
The
quotation at the beginning "Remember your creator ..." reminds us
first of all that there is a God who created all things, and also man to whom
he gave a living soul, which means that it cannot be annihilated! If the body
can be reduced to ashes, the living soul does not die! It is eternal!
It is important to ask the following questions: where, in what
circumstances, in what company, will you spend eternity? God answers these
questions very clearly in his Word (the Bible):
● Either
in the second death! That is, dead as far as God is concerned, but alive, far
from God in the company of Satan and his angels. This is the sentence that will
be pronounced on every man because of the acts that God calls "sins",
acts that man produces by opposing the will of his Creator!
● Either
in eternal life! This is the case with all those who have seen themselves in
their sins, lost, in anguish of having to appear before this Judge, who can
only pronounce the sentence of the second death! But God has come to them,
showing them what He has done in the person of Jesus! And He freely offers
life, eternal life (in the presence of God and the Lord Jesus) to those who
recognise themselves as lost and believe what God says about the work of the
cross!
God's goal
is that "all men be saved"! Saved from the second death!
Because the
circumstances are so important, I will not be making greetings in the traditional
form found on cards sold at the turn of the year.
In general,
I would like to express my wish that you, who are reading these lines and who
possess the divine and eternal life, may live hours of gladness in the
fellowship with your Lord, going through with Him the inevitably difficult
circumstances that will arise in the course of this new year! May you too,
following the example of the Thessalonians, who turned from idols to God, await
his Son, the Lord Jesus, from the heavens, whom God raised from among the dead,
and who delivers us from the coming wrath. (1
Thessalonians 1 v.9-10)
Most of the
readers of these pages have been baptised, and therefore profess to be
Christians, and are part of the "house of God", which has become a
"great house", in which there are souls who are born again and others
who are not, as is emphasised in the parable of the ten virgins: the five wise
ones represent those among the Christians who are born again, and the five
foolish ones those who are not. The 10 are Christians who all profess
Christianity.
Worried
about your eternal future, in case you have not been born again, or have the
false illusion of being born again, allow me to address this message of good
wishes to you by showing how I, as well as all authentic Christians, have been
able to receive this divine and eternal life from the hand of God! If you do
not have it, He wants to give it to you, for He says in His Word: "... God
our Saviour ... will have all men to be saved ..." (1
Timothy 2 v.3-4)! And
if you don't have the certainty of being saved, God wants to give you that
certainty too, if you are truly born again.
Since God will have all men to be saved, it
is obvious that no one can say that it is because God did not elect him that he
remains doubtful about God and His Word!
God does not request
anything from you, he wants to give
you everything!
The real
reason why you do not have this divine and eternal life is not that you are not
chosen, it is that you resist the work of the
Holy Spirit! You are resisting him, either in part or
completely!
No doubt
you are familiar with the parable of the Sower (Matthew 13
v.3-9 & 18-23),
which describes how the Holy Spirit works to ensure that you are in the
required and also sufficient condition to receive the Word which will then
produce divine and eternal life in you, as it has done for all authentic
Christians since the day of Pentecost (The Acts 2)!
The meaning
of the parable of the Sower may be summarised as follows. The Sower is the
person of the Lord Jesus, manifested through one of his servants. The Sower
encounters different kinds of ground. These fields represent the state of your
heart, not your emotions or your affections, God does not ask you to have
emotions towards him, it is what happens in the deepest secret of yourself,
where only God sees! The "ploughman" who
works the ground that is your heart is the Holy Spirit! The
different qualities of ground are described: very hard as this ground is, along
a path, hardened by many passages of things other than the plough of the
"ploughman", the next two grounds have let the plough pass through to
a certain extent, but there remain either stones or the roots of brambles and
thorns, and the last land is one where the "ploughman" has not
encountered any obstacle to do his work completely. Thus the different states
of the land encountered, the different states of the deepest secret of man, are
not natural states of the heart, one of which would be better than the other,
but the state of the heart following the passage of the ploughman's plough, according to whether that heart
resists the work of the
"Ploughman" or
not!
What is the
"Ploughman’s" work, the Holy Spirit’s work?
This work consists in convincing man, in the deepest and most secret
part of himself, that in the moral state in which he naturally finds himself,
he has no other perspective than, not only to die physically, but also to know
the second death, following the judgement which will be pronounced, at
the great white throne, at the time of the resurrection of the dead, because
contrary to what your natural heart may be telling you even now, there is
indeed a resurrection for all! The
second death consists in living far from God, in hell with the
Devil and his angels, in eternal regret for having
resisted God, in the person of the Holy Spirit and here is this passage from
the Word:
"... I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, ...
… I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books
were opened; and another book was opened, which is that of life. And the
dead were judged out of the things written in the books according to their
works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it, and death and hades
gave up the dead which were in them; and they were judged each according to
their works: and death and hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the
second death, even the lake of fire. And if anyone was
not found written in the book of life, he was cast into the lake of fire. (Revelation 20 v.11-15)
Good ground has the necessary qualities so that when
the "Sower" places the "Seed", i.e. the Word of God, on it,
it will produce divine and eternal life!
The apparent 'life'
produced in grounds 2 & 3!
In the
ground that has remained rocky (2) and where the roots of the brambles and
thorns have not been removed (3), we see a certain effect, a certain influence of
the Word, but this apparent life is not the life that God gives,
it is not divine and eternal.
It is a
"religious joy" that the natural religious heart loves! A "God
of love" is sung of, but not known in his holiness, the conviction of
being eternally lost, as found in the "good ground" is absent. This
is the case of the 2nd ground.
It is the
same for the 3rd one, there is
such an attachment to the world, that what looks like life, is quickly choked
as soon as roots produce stems, which choke this appearance of life (it is
neither eternal, nor divine)!
In this
state, the final result is the same as for the 1st ground.
If you are
in this state, do not resist the "ploughing" of the Holy Spirit any
longer, and understand that it ends also into this second death described in
Revelation 20!
The anguish of the
heart that has become good ground
The soul
that no longer resists the "ploughing" of the Holy Spirit, in front
of this future that is this second death, is then in extreme distress!
The Holy
Spirit shows her that God does not want and cannot receive anything from her!
Anything she can do, has no entry with God!
All prayers
formulated with the best intentions are not received from God. No apparent
"confession", no apparent "repentance" which is basically
just a simple regret for having done wrong, thus leading to the second death,
while imagining that one could have avoided this second death, by doing things
to please God. This is impossible for man in his natural state!
God does not ask you to repent, He
knows you are incapable of doing so, but He
Himself will give you the means to do so, because there must be repentance!
You would
like to go to God, but your conscience shows you that this is impossible, and God
does not let you come to him in this state. He acts towards you as he
did towards Adam in Eden:
“... Jehovah Elohim … And he drove out Man; and he set the
Cherubim, and the flame of the flashing sword, toward the
east of the garden of Eden, to guard the way to the tree of life.” (Genesis 3 v.23-24)
Perhaps you are in this distress?
So don't resist any longer, don't
try anything, because you can't get out of this distress! God Himself, seeing that the ground
"ploughed" by the Holy Spirit is good ground, then comes to you, requesting nothing from you, He shows you what He has
done in the Person of Christ on the cross!
It is God who comes to you by making you read John 3
“Jesus answered and said to him, Verily,
verily, I say unto thee, Except anyone be born anew he cannot see
the kingdom of God. Nicodemus says to him, How can a man be born being old? …
Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except anyone be born of water
and of Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. … ye should be
born anew. …
… as Moses lifted up the serpent in
the wilderness, thus must the Son of man be
lifted up, that everyone
who believes on him
may not perish, but have life eternal. For God so loved
the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believes on him may not perish, but have life eternal.” (John
3 v.3-16)
So God Himself comes to you, and in this
passage from John 3, He tells you not what you should do, but
what He did in
the Person of the Lord Jesus: "... as Moses lifted up the serpent ..." image of the need for Jesus, “the Son of man” to be “lifted up ”, on the cross, to be forsaken by God
as He bore your sins and entered death in your place!
So there is nothing to do but
BELIEVE, to have FAITH in
what God says and has
done!
He wants to save you, to give you life, and this without doing anything other than believing
that He gave His only Son, to give you divine and eternal life!
How to does this life manifest itself?
As a new born child, if it lives, must
breathe (for if it does not breathe, it shows that it does not have life). The
same is true for who just born again, the divine life in him is
manifested first of all, without
which life is not present, through
repentance, and the object of
repentance is the confession of sins!
This is how God gives you the means to do what
He requires and commands, namely, "all
men … to repent" (Acts 17 v.30)!
When there
is no repentance according to God, it is because the soul is in
the state of rocky ground or containing the roots of
brambles and thorns. Then there is no life, and without divine life, it is not possible to repent!
Perhaps you are not sure that you are born again
You have
allowed yourself to be ploughed by the Holy Spirit, and you have realised your
state of perdition, as described above for the "good ground", you
believe what God says in John 3, but you do not feel that you have this life,
and you hear many preachers who preach these emotions! These preachers preach
an adulterated gospel, a gospel that has the effect of leaving souls on rocky
ground or containing the roots of briers and thorns! The effects are great
external demonstrations impressive to the human senses, namely the promise of
material prosperity, as the "prosperity gospel"! What God abhors!
But the Lord Jesus asks you the
following question: "Would it be
insufficient in your eyes, what
I have done for you on the cross, that you would want to feel things
in you? I hope you will say with me: "No, Lord, I don't want to feel
anything, I believe without reservation that what you have done for me,
offering yourself to God, is perfectly sufficient! For it is precisely because
of my search for feelings, and to deliver me from them and from the yoke of
many other bondages of my natural heart, that you have done this redemption
work"!
Do not
look for these feelings, what your "I" produces, but look for
the blessed relationship, the fellowship with the Lord Jesus
and with your heavenly Father, in this you will find true
gladness! Then you will not remain insensitive, but
this sensitivity is not the object of gladness!
God created
time, as he created space.
If God is
infinite and timeless, the sphere in which we live as creatures is limited in
both time and space.
It is the
mind of man that wants to imagine that space is infinite and that time has no
beginning and no end. And he tries to demonstrate this and convince himself and
others of this! But what can a fish in a bowl know about the oceans? Man refuses to believe in this limit, because
he knows that if there is a limit, there is
also a God outside this limit, and that in this case he will
have to appear before this great white throne, to
then know eternity, but that
of the second death!
God's grace also has a limit, time
is running out, and soon it will be too late for anyone who has
known what God has done in the person of the Lord Jesus and has not believed, having
resisted the "ploughing" of the
Holy Spirit!
If you were
not born again, my wishes for you are that you stop resisting the Holy
Spirit, and, realising your state deserving to the second
death, you accept, by simply
believing, what God gives
you, without requesting anything from you! And so may the wishes I express to those who
possess this divine and eternal life, also be for you.
Dear friend, brother or sister in
Christ, you who possess that life which is both divine and eternal,
whose sphere of existence is no longer the first creation, but the new one,
whose foundations are those laid by the cross, the death and the resurrection
of the Lord Jesus, where everything is of God, I wish you precious
moments of fellowship with the Lord Jesus.
You may be
wondering how to be in fellowship with the Lord, because you find many
obstacles in yourself or in what surrounds you that you cannot overcome.
The Lord
Jesus gives the answer in the Gospel according to John, where He says "He
that eateth my flesh, and drinketh
my blood, dwelleth in me and I in him.” (John 6 v.56). Did you notice that the Lord uses
the same expression as for the new birth, "Who so eateth
my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal
life" (John 6 v.54)? This means that we must constantly return to the moral place where we
received divine life, so that we can have fellowship with the Lord Jesus, and
so be kept from all that the flesh produces in us and from all the
attractiveness of what surrounds us in this world! It is therefore by returning
to the moral place where, at the time of our conversion, the effect on us was,
that we have crucified the flesh: "... they that are of the Christ have
crucified the flesh with the passions and the lusts." (Galatians
5 v.24). It will
follow: " If we live by the Spirit, let us walk also by the Spirit." (Galatians
5 v.25)! If "the
flesh" is the power of the "old man", "the Spirit" is
the power of the "new man"!
The
year which just starts will not be free of difficulties and trials, for this
moral world in which we live bodily will remain what it is, the domain of
Satan! I would not wish that we be spared
these trials, but rather that we go through them with the Lord Jesus,
as He Himself went through this earth! His gladness lay in His fellowship with
the Father, so He enjoyed the peace of God, His peace!
May our true gladness be thus in the enjoyment of the peace of God,
which was His peace: “I give my peace to you...” (John 14 v.27). May His joy also be fulfilled in us,
as the Lord said of us to His Father: "... that they may have my joy
fulfilled in them." (John 17:13). This
peace and joy, which was His,
do not depend on the difficulties we face, however painful they may be, but
on our fellowship with Him, because Jesus, seated in heaven, in
His office as High Priest, invites us to approach us
"to the throne of grace, that
we may receive mercy, and find grace for seasonable help."
(Hebrews
4:16).
I wish you
all the best in this new year, which has just begun with an accent of grace.
“For
yet a very little while he that comes will come, and will not delay.” (Hebrews 10 v.37)
“...
I come quickly. Amen; come, Lord Jesus.” (Revelation 22 v.20)
Brussels, 01/01/2022
Claude
BEAUPORT