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Very gracious and warm-hearted words of welcome, and thank you all for your invitation to me to come and be present with you here this week. It is altogether my fault that I have not been here before, for I give public testimony to the persistence of Mr. Wise. I know not where he found the patience to continue, but in your name he persisted for many years, inviting me, nay, urging me, and he is a pathmaster, I may say, at diplomatic pressure, uh, putting the pressure upon me to come and visit you here. It is altogether my fault.
It is true that in years gone by in the post-Victorian era, I did come to Scotland many times, much to my profit, in my student and subsequent days. But there I discovered that Scotland was a land of many and very able preachers, and I decided that the best place for the lesser preachers like myself was perhaps in countries where the need was greater and the preachers were fewer. And hence I have wandered the earth in many parts in these intervening years. And now I am an apprentice old age pensioner.
Uh, Dulce, it is very kind of you still to welcome me here. I thank you both for your invitation and for your welcome. Customs, of course, differ in different countries. In most places where I go to speak, people are given a cup of tea after I have spoken to help them recover. I noticed a slightly different assessment of myself here in Brisbane Hall. They thought it necessary to give you a cup of tea before I speak, so as to fortify you for the experience. In this coming week, God willing, under the general title of Man Shall Sit on the Throne of the Lord, we are to spend five sessions together drawing some basic and elementary lessons from the first book of Chronicles.
So shall we begin by reading three short passages from First Chronicles, beginning in chapter one and verse one. First Book of Chronicles, chapter one and verse one. One. First Chronicles, chapter one verse one reads as follows: Adam, Seth, Enos, Kenan, Mahalalel, and Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
And then, please, from chapter twenty nine of First Chronicles. 1 Chronicles 29 and verse 22. And they did eat and drink before the Lord on that day with great gladness, and they made Solomon the son of David king the second time, and anointed him unto the Lord to be prince, and Zadok to be priest.
Then Solomon sat on the throne of the Lord as king instead of David, his father, and prospered, and all Israel obeyed him. And finally, for the moment, the second book of Chronicles and the very last chapter, chapter thirty six. And verse twenty two.
Now, in the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia, that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be accomplished, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus, king of Persia, that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and put it also in writing, saying, Thus says Cyrus, king of Persia, all the kingdoms of the earth has the Lord, the God of heaven, given me, and he has charged me to build him an house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever there is among you of all his people, the Lord his God be with him, and let him go up.
And may the Lord guide our studies and give us good understanding of his words. I have to confess to you that in the days preceding this evening, I have debated with myself more than once whether I have been altogether too daring in suggesting that this week we study the first book of Chronicles. There are, you see, but there's nobody like that here this evening, of course, but there are people that would say to me, but my dear good sir, we can get to heaven without understanding the book of First Chronicles, can we not? Why, of course you can. Then why on earth should we read First Chronicles, say they?
But then, since there's none of them here this evening, I need not answer their objection. But it is not telling tales out of school, is it? To say that First Chronicles is not necessarily every believer's favorite book in the Bible. And there are various reasons for that, and notably one of them, it's those names, those interminable lists of names. No less than nine whole chapters at the beginning of book, names, names, names. And little better, when you come to the end of the book, there are five chapters solid of names.
And nor content with that either, the writer has filled many a paragraph throughout the whole of the book with more names, names of David's sons, and if they don't suffice to fill the space, then there's names of his wives, if you please, he had a lot. And then there are names of his army generals and of his priests and his Levites and the singers, names, names, names to thee. And it's why, perhaps, the book is not every believer's favorite book for their study. Trouble with the names, of course, in the first place, is that so many of them are unpronounceable. Some people have not been known to say wheelbarrow instead of the real names that they've been reading through.
And some people there are that have been tempted to, um, whensoever their daily reading brings them to Chronicles, to skip the chapters, pass on to something more interesting. But again, that's not you, is it? Well, see, the trouble with them is perhaps that they're not just unpronounceable, many of them, but apart from the very few and well-known names that we recognize with glee amidst this ocean of unknown people, is that very fact that most of them are just names to us. They don't mean anything. Just names on a piece of paper. Of course, if your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandmother had been around and she was named here, we should never hear the end of it, should we?
Every guest that came to your house, you would say, did you know my great, great, great, great, great, great grandmother's name is in the Bible? And you would point to it, wouldn't you, with great glee. But my grandmother's name is not there, nor yours either. So what do we make of them? Hundreds of names on a bit of paper. And it is perhaps a melancholy thought when you come to prepare, think about it, that every one of those names represented a person. When he and she was born, it was mother's delight, of course.
A mother had every ambition for her son or daughter, whether their hair was black, gray, uh, brown or yellow or whatever. And they grew up and there were all the teenage years of potential, and then, of course, their career, and then they got married. Oh, wasn't it wonderful? Up and up and up and up. And they rose to dizzy heights or not in their careers, and saw their children and their grandchildren. It meant so much to each one of them. And now, as far as the world is concerned, perhaps as far as you're concerned, there are only so many names on a bit of paper.
Of course, one of these days it might be said about the same about you, mightn't it? Well, not now, of course. You're married, and you've got your children, you've got your great-grandchildren, and they come and see you. Aren't you loved of them? And you mean so much of them. And for a generation or two, maybe after you've gone, they'll know you are who you were and what you stood for. But a hundred years from now, two hundred years from now, what will you be? The pe- to the people that walk the streets of Lahr. A name on a bit of paper. A name that nobody heard of.
On a gravestone. What's it all about? These great ways. waves of humanity, generation after generation, generation after generation, that life pours out onto the shores of our little planet, and they come a while. And the next generation comes and pushes them aside, and after them yet another. That is all about. When I was young, you know, I could see that the old folks were a little bit...
well, they were good people, they're marvelous people. I've grown to appreciate them more as I've grown older, you'll see. In those days, I thought they were a bit fussy, and give me my turn and I would put the world right. And I equipped myself so to do, and was in preparation for doing it when, lo and behold, there came another generation, and they thought the same about me as I thought about my, my uh, elder folks, and they pushed me aside, of course. And now I see there's another generation coming on behind them. Is it getting anywhere? What do we make of the phenomenon? Thousands, at least hundreds of generations down the centuries, each launching millions of names on the shores of time, only to be succeeded by others, and the earlier ones forgotten.
Of course, we who live in this modern age have been somewhat dazzled, haven't we, by the extraordinary progress in science and technology that has taken place in this last one hundred and fifty years. Burned into our hearts and imaginations the idea that, yes, we're getting somewhere. Why, grandmother, she had her copper or dolly to wash with on a Monday morning. Now we have our push button, uh, washing machines, do we not? And as for our modern cars and our modern airplanes, our computers, yes, it's burned into our hearts, is it not, that we are really getting somewhere after all.
We're making progress. And of course, all of us enjoy it for the most part, don't we? And profit from it. But we shouldn't be deceived by the externals of technology. You go and ask the scientists whose fundamental concepts and insights into the nature of the universe have led to the technology, and ask them what they think about our planet and the progress it's making. The great majority of them, if they are honest, will tell you that far from the progress being permanent, the very planet we live on is but a temporary phenomenon.
The atheist scientists and many more predict that within some million years, the planet will be no more, and human life as we have known it, a thing of the past. The fact they assure us it won't happen for another fifty million years, or two hundred and fifty million years, or a thousand million years, doesn't take away from the logic of the point they're making, does it? That according to them, the whole phenomenon of life on our planet is but a temporary thing. Is there then no hope?
Shall it be one day that all of our generations of mankind on the earth, if they could have been written down, will literally be no more than names on a bit of paper that got burned up in the final catastrophe. Oh, my dear brothers and sisters in Christ, it is here, if you have a feeling for the plight of men and women in our modern world who dare to think and ask themselves what is the significance of life, it is here that this inspired historian who writes this book of First Chronicles has a glorious message of hope for mankind.
And this be said at once, that not one single individual that's ever been born is simply a name on a bit of paper. There is hope. The book of First Chronicles, as you probably know, comes somewhere about the middle in our English Bibles, but in the Hebrew Bibles, the books of First and Second Chronicles stand at the end of the Old Testament. And very fittingly so do they stand there, because the first and second books of Chronicles sum up for us practically the whole of history as covered by the Old Testament.
It is true that the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, and then some of the prophets of the return, like, uh, Zechariah, Malachi, and Haggai, take the story a bit further. The First and Second Chronicles stand as the final volumes of the Hebrew Old Testament, because very fittingly they sum up the history covered by the Old Testament. And under inspiration of God, the historian is setting out to show us this glorious fact, that there is discernible in history a purpose and a goal. It is not as the Hindu religions would tell you, that human life is a mere going around in circles, getting nowhere.
This Hebrew inspired in historian will say there is visible in earth history a very definite purpose that has been moving forward to a glorious goal. And on that basis, he holds out hope. He held it out for the men and women that belong to his own generation, and his words hold out that hope to us still. Very soon, as we begin to read his book, if we will attend to it, we find how it is and where exactly he looks in history to find this beacon light of purpose and hope.
You noticed in our reading how he dismissed Adam and Adam's sons right up to the flood in a very, very few verses. And had we read on, we should find he dismisses the rest of his descendants from Noah onwards in very few verses, until he comes to the name that begins to interest him above all other names. It's the name of Abraham the Hebrew and of the race that sprang from Abraham, the nation that we know now as Israel. He spends the greater part of his genealogies tracing the rise of that nation, and two things in particular about them.
Israel, of course, was a very late comer among the nations, but to the very present day, as the centuries have taught us, Israel stands out distinct among the nations of men. I have an elderly Jewish friend in Belfast who managed to escape from Vienna just before Hitler finally clamped down upon the Jews there. Many times he has sat with me, arguing about Christianity, about God, about his very existence. Tell me, he says, you believe in God? Is there a God? Where was God when Hitler was gassing six million of my fellow countrymen?
He said, I don't know if I believe whether there's a God or not. And then he says, and he says, I'm sitting there i- i- i- in my room, and I see a man going along the street, and I say to myself, he's a Jew. Tell me, he says, how is it? How have we Jews survived? After all the years and the terrible persecutions, pogroms, holocausts, and the rest, and are still distinguishable for the race of Abraham? Yet how? It is upon the rise of this peculiar and in some sense unique nation that the chronicler captures our attention in his early genealogies.
And not merely on the nation as a whole, but on two particular parts of that nation. For if we will look to the proportions that he gives to the various groupings within the nation, we shall find as follows. Some sides get very few verses. One side gets, I think, one verse. Other tribes get more than a whole long chapter. And the ones that presumably get the most space and the most detail are the ones he is interested in. By that standard of judgment, we notice that the chronicler was interested particularly in two parts of the nation of the Hebrews.
The first was on their priesthood, and the second on their king. Let's think about their priesthood first. Why should he call our attention to them? Because they worshipped in a temple, and they maintained a temple that, at the time when the chronicle wrote, was utterly unique in the whole of the Middle East. There were, of course, thousands of temples in the ancient world. And you may wonder why we in our modern day should po- want to be interested in some ancient temple in the Middle East.
But the fact is, for many long centuries until that temple was destroyed in AD seventy, the temple of Jerusalem, its early forms and its later, stood unique among the nations of men. Its uniqueness summed up in the tables of the law that were deposited in the Ark of the Covenant that lay in the central shrine that formed the heart of Israel's temple. Those two tables of the law proclaimed in the first place, proclaimed God as the transcendent creator of the whole universe. There was, of course, no image, no statue to God in that ancient temple built by the sons of Abraham.
In that, their temple was unique too. But even more importantly, they stood unique, for all the other nations of around worshipped a whole multitude of gods. Israel worshipped one god. And then there was this exceedingly important difference. If you had gone to the ancient nations surrounding Israel and inquired about their gods, you would have found that some of their gods were said to, uh, have created the great world. They were created. But if you had probed a little bit more deeply, you would have found that their supposed creators were themselves part of the stuff of the universe.
And by and large, they worshipped gods that were deifications of the forces of nature. The sun god and the moon god, the god of the storm, the god of fertility, and such like things. They worshipped these forces of nature as the ultimate forces of the universe. And those gods were under the domination of a vague, dark power called fate. And it was, in the end, a cruel universe, arbitrary in the domination of men and of gods.
Israel stood out unique, didn't they? They said, no, we don't, uh, acknowledge that the sun and the moon are gods, nor yet the processes of fertility either. There is one true God who existed before the universe came into being, independent of that universe, and he made mankind in his image. And the importance of that and its implication will dawn upon us if for a moment we reflect about it.
What difference does it make to us? Well, if it be true that there's one God, he existed independent of the universe and the stuff of the universe. There was a time when the universe didn't exist. He always existed. And made the universe out of nothing. Now listen, if that be true, changing storms and patterns of life here on Earth mean no decay for him. He is the eternal. Ah, but secondly, the Old Testament, the Hebrew Old Testament says at that time sentence, God made us in his image and has given to man a status that is infinitely superior to the universe that lies around us.
I don't worship the sun. I don't know about you. I'm not given to worshiping the sun. I'd like to see a bit more of you, but, uh, I don't worship you. Because, you see, I come to see, I think you have, that I'm vastly more important than the sun. I know my brain is tiny, you'll see, it doesn't always function too well. My brain, my human personality is infinitely more significant than the sun. Oh, I know I depend upon the sun for my life. I couldn't get my tomatoes and my carrots without the sun. I need the sun to keep me, my body warm and to keep me alive, and in spite of that, I'm infinitely more significant than the sun in the sky.
You see, I know the sun is there. Sun doesn't know I'm here. If it did, it would shine a bit more, I think. And thanks to the scientists, I know how the sun works. Sun doesn't know how I work, nor what I think of it. As big I know, there's so much gas and stuff. An atomic furnace or something. Doomed one day to extinction. Why, a little baby's brain is more significant than that. Made in the image of God.
Made for fellowship with the eternal. Made to have dominion over God's universe. That is the message that these Old Testament prophets and priests preached, and that is the message that they stood for in that ancient world. And on its basis said there was hope for mankind. Granted human sin sometimes waves like great torrents of the sea. So long as there was a God in heaven, there was hope for mankind, for God would adhere to the purpose for which he created us.
And you know the ancient message of the first book of Chronicles, as it points us in its genealogies to the significance not only of Israel, but to Israel's priests and what they stood for in their temple, that message still has a meaning for us today, doesn't it? When I'm talking to atheists, I love to begin by pointing out that the, uh, when I was a youth in the fifties, the scientists confidently said that they very soon were going to prove that matter was eternal, the universe is eternal, what they called the steady state theory.
Matter is constantly being created, and the universe has always been and will always go on forever. They were confidently asserting it would be proved within a year or two, but they didn't prove it, did they? And now, of course, as you are aware, the vast majority of cosmologists believe that the universe had a beginning. And I smile at my atheist scientific friends and said, did you know that the Hebrew scriptures have been saying that for centuries, that the universe had a beginning? It may be infinite in space, it's not infinite in time. And then, you know, your atheist friends, if you, if you actually probe them and prick them under the surface and make them talk, actually hold the same old pagan views as the ancient people did.
Of course, they don't bow down to gods. They don't have a shelf of gods in their dining room, nor, nor a bevy of statues o- o- o- o- on the mantelpiece in their loft. No. But if you ask a modern humanist and atheist, now tell me, what are the ultimate forces that control our great universe? What are the ultimate forces that control me as an individual? What forces were responsible for bringing me here and and giving me life and bringing me in onto this planet? And what forces will control my exit and the uh the exit of the planet itself? And the modern humanist and and atheist, in spite of that he may be a very great scientist, will end up with the same interpretation as the old idol idol worshippers of the ancient Middle East.
He will say the ultimate forces are simply the great physical forces of the universe. Energy. The weak atomic power, the strong atomic power. Electromagnetism. Gravity and the biological processes. And all of them? Absolutely mindless. Completely purposeless. And according to your atheists and humanists, they brought us here to these vast physical powers without any purpose, without any plan, certainly without any heart, love or affection.
They had no goal in view. They don't know they've created us. And one day, they'll destroy us. The virus one day, sir, without cup and satiny worth, a cent in its head will get into your body, tear it to pieces, and your brain, and your aesthetic sense, and your emotions, and the whole lot. And when it's done it, it won't even know it's done it.
Quite oblivious of the beautiful thing it has destroyed. Also, your modern humanist and atheist is in the same position. He worships, that is, he acknowledges as the ultimate powers, simply the physical powers and forces of the universe. And in consequence, he has utterly no hope. All you who know the Lord and know his word, all pray have a little compassion, if you will.
The multi-millions of men and women of this un- of this world, who are deceived by these materialistic philosophies, live without any hope. Oh, but there is hope. I say to my atheist friends sometimes, I say, come on, please, here there's a young, young woman, mother of three children, age thirty three. She's just been diagnosed as having terminal cancer.
Shall we go and speak to her? I say, I'll go first. And when I'm done, you speak to her, to her. And I say, my dear, I'm so very sorry to hear what the doctors have said. But there is hope for you. You know, like the rest of us, you are a sinner, but you were made in the image of God. And there is forgiveness through Jesus Christ. And if you will accept God's son, a glorious future.
You shall one day shine as the very stars and beyond them, and you shall reign with the creator of the universe. You will not be its slave nor its victim. And moreover, even your present sufferings, hard as they are, are not valueless. For the Bible says that to those who know and love the Lord and are called according to his purpose, then are like afflictions workers far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. There's hope.
I say, come on, Atheus. You come and talk. What can you say? Well, I'm sorry, my dear. You know, put a brave face on it, it comes to us all in the end, doesn't it? And, uh, you'll see. Your sufferings will soon be over. For pity, your sufferings are so valueless and meaningless. You might as well shoot your brains out. There is no hope. Oh, thank God for this ancient prophetic historian, reading the plan of God as it becomes visible in history, in the rise of this singular and unique nation, and particularly in their priests and what their tabernacle and temple stood for.
And then there was another thing. He's interested according to the proportions of the genealogies. He is interested in their kings. And interested for the very good reason that two of their kings, two of their early kings, the one David and the other Solomon, introduced into Israel an age of peace and bliss and glory that Israel had never experienced before. They look back in their history to the time of the first man, through the varied experiences of mankind, the flood and the deliverance from Egypt, and on and on and on.
And they say, eventually it came to its great climax. There dawned an age of peace and splendor and glory and bliss and satisfaction, the like of which Israel had never known before. And you must pardon the historian, his excitement gets hold of him as he describes this glorious age of peace and wonder, particularly in the early chapters of the second book. There was no war, he says, or evil concurrent. Ah yes, he's talking about that little part of the Middle East, tiny handkerchief state it was, handkerchief sized state, but there was no evil or war occurrence, and for a while there reigned peace and security.
And then there came this king of superb wisdom. Wisdom, first of all, in the realm of justice, he had an almost divine wisdom for settling the disputes that arose among the people of that day. Such wisdom as the kings of the earth came from Timbuktu to hear his wisdom, and people trusted his judgments, and there was justice in the affairs of life, and people were contented. And then there was prosperity. There was gold, and there was silver. There was so much gold that if you saw a lump of silver in the street, you kicked it down the drain. You didn't even bother to pick it up. There was so much gold. And everybody had enough to eat. And not only material prosperity, but there being so peace and material prosperity, then the arts flourished.
They've never known a day like that. For Solomon, he had, he was mad keen on botany, you know, and on poetry, and the reams of poetry, some of it's still read today, you know, Song of Solomon and things like that, beautiful poetry. And if you were at dinner with Solomon the king, you know, he had a disconcerting habit. He'd turn around one that night, one, you know, after the soup course or at the desserts and said, have you ever considered hyssop? And you say, well, I- I- I think I know what it is, Your Majesty, but you haven't studied hyssop. No? Oh, no, you ought to study hyssop. Why ought I to study hyssop? I'm not interested in botany. Oh, but it's that is so superb, you see, and it bring out all the glories of the hyssop until you felt really an ingrainness, and how had I not seen it before?
And you became aware that even the humble plants around you were blazing the wonder of the creator. It was something to have dinner with someone. And then there was the music. Oh, there was music. You know, there was indeed, you see, uh, particular one of the queens that came to hear his wisdom, she came from, uh, Ethiopia, you see, and, uh, amongst the presents she brought for Solomon were almond trees, if you please. And the musicians, uh, and the woodmen, they they advised His Majesty and said, you know, Your Majesty, we don't have wood like this around here, you see, but, um, we our advice is it would make they would make superb musical instruments.
Oh, you go ahead, said Solomon, you you make the instrument. And they made them. And the music, oh, what music there was in Solomon's day. Material prosperity and the arts and music and the wonders of creation, and supremely above it all, with bated and awed breath, the writer tells how Solomon built a house for the Lord, and men saw it. Men saw it with their own eyes. They saw the very glory of the transcendent creator come and lodge in that house.
So overpowering was the sight of his glory that the very priest could not enter for a while into the midst of the glory of the transcendent God. Oh, what life was then. Not only to enjoy the things of life, the material things and the aesthetic things, and music and art and botany and the rest, but to enjoy it with the Creator himself living round the corner, dwelling in his temple. Then men felt they had discovered the end, the purpose of life. A purpose big enough to give satisfying meaning to human endeavor.
They found him who made it all, and him for whom it was made. And to know him, and to stand in relation to him. Why, that was eternal life begun. And as I say, the historian gets excited about it. Tell us of that great golden age. Says he, when David, who had prepared it all, finally handed over to his son Solomon.
And Solomon, ceasing to be co-regent but king in his own right, they made him king the second time, and Solomon sat on the throne of the Lord. Meaning, I suppose, Solomon sat on the throne that God had designed for his anointed king. Sat there by God's authority. Sat there as God's viceroy. How what days they were.
And the writer, having seen in the history books the record of that great and glorious age, rightly claims that history, that far anyway, was not just wandering and meandering, it was following a plan that eventuated by God's determination in the age of glory. Mm. Oh, I know what you're saying. Marvelous, isn't it? It didn't last. That, that is absolutely true. Didn't last. It didn't wait for us to say so either. The chronicler himself tells us it didn't last. And why didn't it last?
And why didn't things go on getting better and better and better and better? In his second volume, the historian has analyzed the reasons why it didn't last. And not for the sheer joy of finding fault, but he's perfectly conscious of this, that there will never be a final paradise here on earth or in heaven beyond, unless answers can be found to certain fundamental problems that we human beings have. Put it crudely, man is a sinner, and a political theorists forget it at their peril.
Why, even Marx saw it, didn't he? Or if he didn't see it, his successors did. And somewhere in the sixties, uh at one of their great congresses, they announced the fact that, uh, their theories were marvelous, but really what they needed was somehow to create a new man. That's it, isn't it? You can have the very best theories in the world, and you don't reach your paradise. Why not? Well, to reach the paradise, you've got to create a new man to carry out the rules. And it's not a question of just throwing stones at Marxism, is it, is it? Capitalism is the same, and socialism too.
The chronicler is being exceedingly realist when he not only points out that this great age of glory didn't last, but troubles to spend chapter after chapter analyzing why it didn't last. And pointing out to us what's got to be done. And what God will have to do, is one day God will bring in a great age of peace and glory. Uh, you'll say, Aiya, but you're making a big fuss about a very little thing. Yes, under David and Solomon, Israel rose to a point where they were on the verge of becoming a world empire, like Egypt had been and Babylon eventually became.
But you say they didn't succeed. There had been bigger, greater, more glorious empires before Israel, and after Israel there were even still bigger and more glorious empires. So what are you making a fuss about Israel for? Well, you're perfectly true. There were bigger empires, Egypt, Syria, early Babylon, Assyria, and after Israel there was Neo-Babylon and Medo-Persia and the Greek great empire of Alexander and Rome, all of them perhaps more glorious than Israel. Well, you say they are, so why are you making a big fuss about Israel's age of glory? We Engli- uh, we British, sorry.
We British had our age of glory, didn't we? Uh, in common with the rest, they didn't last either. The glory of Babylon and Persia, of Greece and of Rome, of Spain, of Britain, and now the Soviet Union. Past, haven't they? Where lies hope? You ask the chronicler, now where lies your hope now, my man? You chronicler, ha! You're living yourself in times when the throne of David has been destroyed, hasn't it?
And the whole nation thrown into exile. So where's your hope now, chronicler? Tell us do. And the chronicler would say, ah, but my good sir, yes, I have hope and reasonable grounds for hope. But I tell you this, that Jeremiah, should you have heard of him, he was one of our prophets, you know, rather later than Isaiah, he came a bit before Ezekiel. But those three great prophets, they told us before our nation went into exile that the mark of the truth that there is a true God in heaven was this. The mark that it was true that he had chosen Israel was this, that he wouldn't put up with sin, not even with our sin.
And he said if we kept on sinning as we did, he'd throw us out into exile. And we kept on singing, sinning, and he threw us into exile. Then he said through those selfsame prophets that one day he would restore us. He said it to our great prophet Daniel. And look, would say the chronicler, have you read my genealogies? Oh, sorry, we hadn't actually, you know, those names and things. Uh, what, what, what ought we to have read? Well, she said, haven't you read far enough to find that now I'm, I, I'm, I'm part of the fulfillment of the prophecy.
Truthy, I live in the times when Israel has been restored to the land. And look at this, God raised up an old Gentile by the name of Cyrus, head of the Medo-Persians, and under God he restored us Israelites to the land, and Jeremiah has come through. Oh, the temple, we, we've rebuilt the temple. I can tell you the names of the priests who serve in it. And though we haven't got our kingship back yet, those sons of David. I can tell you the names, the successors are still there, the line is still there. I can tell you the names of the successors of David that are still with us. And one day of the tribe of David, God will raise up our great Messiah.
That's my hope. And I can preach my hope while we're a tiny little remnant of a nation back here in Palestine against the gigantic world empires of the day, but I stick to my hope, he says. And what happened? Well, he was living under the Medo-Persians. Their great empire passed. It was succeeded by the great world empire of Alexander's Greeks. That passed too. And then came Rome. And under Augustus Caesar, they went out to decree that all the world should be taxed, and of the line of David in the city of Bethlehem.
There was born to the Virgin Mary a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. Oh, hear the Christian gospel and its basis. The gospel is about God's son, Jesus Christ, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh. The gospel, we believe, is not some philosophy concocted by some specially brilliant man. Anybody can invent a philosophy, can they not, given a suitable amount of IQ? And it doesn't matter if the philosophy is true, who invented it.
Christianity, in that sense, is not a philosophy. It's the product of a centuries-old movement down the course of history, started by God himself in the preliminaries of his plans for the redemption of mankind, coming through Israel, through their temple, through their kings, coming at last to Jesus Christ of the seed of David, according to the flesh. Now let me tell you, let me tell you the wonderful news, that though he was crucified, yet the third day he rose from the dead, and on the fourth day he ascended into heaven.
And as you sit there, my good friend, this very night, there sits a man on the throne of the Lord. This is fact. This is not legend nor fantasy. One of the reasons you may know it is not mere fantasy is by taking your Old Testament histories and tracing the purpose all down the years and the prototypes God set in place, all preparing man's mind and preparing the course of history that in the end his divine purpose should be fulfilled, and there should sit a man on the throne of the Lord.
We do well to re-echo the sentiments of the Hebrew psalmist, O Lord, when I consider the heavens, the works of thine hands, and I say, Lord, what is man? Who madeth him a little lower than the angels, who crowneth him with glory and honor, and set him above the works of thy hands, and has put all things under his feet. Well, we do not yet see all things under his feet, but we see Jesus. For God has continued with his glorious purpose for mankind. We see Jesus, the man, son of Adam, and the man Jesus. The suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, and sits this very night on the throne of the Lord.
Oh, my brother, let the vision catch your soul again. This is God, not with a mere recital of laws, morals to keep, important though that is. This is God with a concept worthy of God, that his creature man shall sit on the very throne of the universe and share the government of the universe with God. And if I could tell you and somehow make you believe it, I can tell you one wonder more than that. Not only does the blessed Lord Jesus sit on the throne of the Lord, but he has put it this way to him that overcometh, that I grant to sit down with me on my throne, even as I also overcame and hence sat down on my father's throne.
Would you believe it? Takes a lot of believing, doesn't it? Surely you starting up in Largs or where it is you started, well, it's a good place to start, I suppose, but wandered off into sin and now forgive. Don't you say some low place within his mansion would do me, but I wouldn't do God. All to him that overcometh. Be you one of them, and you shall sit on the very throne of the Lord. That is the chronicler's me- message of hope. And how can I know it's all true?
Why, because God, in his mercy, has given us in history what you may call prototypes. They are first running through of the scheme at a lowly level, to prepare our minds for the eventual accomplishment at the higher level. So now, when I was a boy, airplanes were so modern, you'll know how old I am, that when one passed over the school, we all ran out to see it. Marvelous machines they were, made up of brown paper and wood, elastic bands, and stuck together with a little slip.
But they flew, well, at least they flew a few yards anyway. Now and again they flew, do they? Because in them, poor contraptions though they were, were expressed some of the basic principles of aeronautics. Now see the great jumbo jet go overhead. It isn't put together, at least we hope so, with spring and slip. It doesn't break down like those others broke down, not normally anyway. But you know, there is a connection between the two. The principles of aeronautics that were in the early biplanes are now expressed at the higher level in the jumbo jet.
And this week, if God spare us, we're going to look at the prototype of this glorious scheme and ask ourselves the question, how did man get from Adam to Solomon, to that peak of glory then when man sat on the throne of the Lord here on earth? And we shall find, as we study that in its stages, it forms a prototype of that bigger scheme, how that men and women, starting in Adam and right down to the present, through Christ one day shall sit upon the very throne of God in heaven. So may God use his word to rekindle hope in our hearts, for we are saved by hope.
