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Hello, and a very good morning to you. It is a delight to see you here early, bright and breezy, for the studies that today commence. Being asked to read, to lead the Bible sessions of this particular week, I have chosen the book of Chronicles. It hasn't altogether escaped me that Chronicles is not every believer's favorite book in the Bible, and there are certain reasons for that. Don't get me wrong, believers, true believers of all ages, have believed Chronicles to be the inspired word of God. In recent times, comparatively, if you were caught with a Bible in the Soviet Union or other Eastern European countries, that have c- could have spelled for you long terms of imprisonment or even death itself.
And our dear fellow believers in those countries, uh, would dare to possess a Bible, knowing that they ran the risk of giving their lives for it. And I suspect that most of the Lord's people, if it were necessary, would go to the stake for their belief that the Bible is the word of God, and that would mean going to the stake for the belief that Chronicles is the word of God. But going to stake for faith in the inspiration of the Book of Chronicles is one thing. That's a comparatively easy thing. Actually reading it, well, that's another thing altogether, isn't it?
You'll see. Those impossibly long lists of names and other such things, and the fact that it seems to us to be very ancient history, disincline us sometimes to put our faith into practice and actually read the books of Chronicles. I have chosen them in this conviction that not only is the word of God inspired, all scripture is given by inspiration of God. I have chosen it in the extra conviction that all scripture is profitable for teaching and instruction and guidance in the way of holiness.
The Book of Chronicles in our English Bible comes somewhere about the middle of Old Testament. But in Tanakh, that is the Old Testament in Hebrew, it comes at the end of the Old Testament, and it is remarkable and famous for its tremendous summing up of history. Its vista of history and of the purposes of God in history is breathtaking. It starts from Adam in First Chronicles chapter one and verse one, and it takes history through until the return of the Jewish nation from exile under the command of Cyrus.
And probably it takes us a little bit beyond that through its genealogical lists, down to somewhere about the fourth century before Christ. We shall not have time to consider the whole two books of Chronicles. We must content ourselves with a bird's eye view of First Chronicles, but even there, its sense of the sweep of history and the purpose of God in history is, I say, absolutely astounding and breathtaking. It tells us of the rise of Israel out of the nations and God's ways with Israel until there came a time of unparalleled blessing and glory and peace and wonder.
The golden age of the reign of a king called Solomon. It was the reign that all Israel remembered, to which they looked backward, as they looked back through history, the very dawning, as they felt it, of the promised age of bliss. And in the course of his description, we shall now read how the writer of Chronicles pinpoints the wonder of the age to which they came under Solomon by how he describes Solomon and his reign.
Let us read, therefore, two scriptures, one from the Old Testament, one Chronicles chapter twenty nine, and then one from the New, which will tell us of the relevance of this study to ourselves who live in this advanced age. 1 Chronicles, therefore, 29. One Chronicles twenty nine, and we shall read verse twenty two following. 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. Thus says the chronicler. And now a verse from the New Testament to show us the relevance of these things to ourselves. This is the last book of the New Testament. Chronicles, the two books, are the last of the old in the Jewish Bible. Here we read from the last book of the New Testament, and this time it is chapter three. Chapter three, verse twenty one, the words of our risen, glorious Lord Jesus Christ.
He that overcometh, I will give to him to sit down with me in my throne, as I also overcame and sat down with my father on his throne. God give us good understanding of his holy word. When I would morning for igniting in our hearts a hope. They normally went by train, because in those far distant days there were very few people that had motor cars.
And because they traveled by train very extensively, they became experts in their fashion on the way anybody ought to seat himself or herself in a railway carriage. In those days, the carriages had benches going across, you see, the width of the carriage, one looking one way and one looking the other. Uncles said, uncles that were renowned for their wisdom, that the proper and best way to sit in a railway carriage was to sit facing the engine, you see. Then when you looked out of the window, you could meet the landscape coming towards you.
It was a view of the future with all its potentials. It was where you were going to that would be the important and valuable thing. So these uncles of known wisdom held that you should always sit facing the engine in your travels. Some aunts, likewise of notable sagacity, held that it was far better to sit with your back to the engine, you'll see, watching the landscape gradually recede from you, you'll see, and looking back to where you'd come from as you journeyed, you knew not where. Preferable, perhaps, to shut your eyes to what you might meet when you eventually got to Blackpool or wherever it was that you were going to, and looking at the wonderful past that you had enjoyed and was now flowing from you.
And so the argument raised, raged and became eventually a kind of a metaphor in the English language. The younger generation held it very strongly that as you journey through life, it's no sense journeying through your life with the back to the engine, just looking to the past. You want, they say, to look to the future, to go the way the engine is going, and to anticipate all the wonderful novelties and glories and developments that await you in the future. And there's a lot to be said for the view, isn't it? But we cannot relive the past. No good raking over the old ashes of what's gone by.
We have to travel with our eyes to the future and our eyes to the coming glory. And yet, you know, there do come times, don't there, when it is good for our souls and our spirits to sit down and look back to the past, to ask ourselves, where exactly am I now in my spiritual experience? And how did I come to be here anyway? And what were the influences that first set me on the Christian pathway?
What were the visions of the men and women that went before me, that I imbibed in my youth and held sacred and dear, and for which I enlisted, so to speak, in the army of God? And how well have I held on to those early visions? And how well am I doing now? Am I still traveling on the main line? Or have I gone down one of the many forks in the road and got myself lost? Or is it so that I've, these last year or two, run out of steam and I'm fast going nowhere particular at all.
On those occasions, it is profitable indeed if under the Lord's gracious shepherd guiding we sit down, and for a moment we look to the past. That's why I have chosen Chronicles. We're going to look deep into the past, and you who fear what's coming is going to be all dull history, listen to the voice of the shepherd himself as he comes to sit beside you this very week in Northfield. Whatsoever things, says he, were written aforetime, were written for our learning, that we, through persistence and endurance, might have, through the encouragement of the scripture, might have hope.
I pray God in my heart that this week in Northfield will be precisely that. As we look back to the past and retrace those decisions, those wonderful visions, those wonderful goals that once we had. And through the comfort of God's Holy Scripture written in the past for our learning, we might receive a tremendous access of hope in our hearts, a renewed sense of the goal to which God's spirit is leading us, with a greater conviction that our goals and visions are not based on mere fancy or theological eccentricities.
These are the great deep-laid purposes of God, and by God's grace we shall gird up our lines and go loins and go forth in his grace to walk more deliberately towards the goal that God has set for us. I think, you know, it was so for the people for whom the Book of Chronicles was first written. We don't know exactly when it was written, but we know something of the conditions. The people in whose time these books were written, their grandfathers, their grandfathers at least, perhaps even their great-grandfathers, had rediscovered the Bible, rediscovered the Old Testament prophet.
You see, it happened like this, that for many centuries after the reign of great King David, the nation of Israel had gone down, steadily down, down, down, down. Yes, there had been one or two revivals, but on the whole they had gone downhill and compromised with the old idolatrous interpretations of the universe that were around them, compromising the truth of the one true God and salvation only in him. And as a result, God had had enough of them and turfed them out of Jerusalem, and they lost their city, and they lost their temple, and were taking, taken down to Babylon, there to spend an exile of seventy years.
But as that exile period began to come to its end, there arose a new generation of men, inspired by prophets like Daniel, and they rediscovered the Old Testament Bible, and it began to work in them a tremendous hope. They discovered Isaiah, who said that one day, yes, though the throne of David was destroyed and the temple in ruins, God would send the Messiah to them. And it was a new thing going round the homes and tables as they met for meal, way back in Babylon those days, when these men caught sight again of the vision of the prophets and said to one another, it's true, the Messiah is coming.
The prophecies are going to be fulfilled. God will take us back to Jerusalem, discovering the glorious affirmation of the prophets that the Messiah would come of the seed of David according to the flesh. A root, a shoot should grow out of his roots, and the great house of David be restored. They plucked up courage in both hands, and they left their prosperous homes in Babylon and did the trek, a long, long trek across the wilderness, and came at last to desolate Palestine, believing the promises of God. And they started to build, and they built the temple, and then eventually they built the city.
The times are difficult. And the Messiah didn't come. Some of them began to lose hope. You see, there were all sorts of practical difficulties. All the little nations were against them all around, dogging their steps every time they tried to build anything. And then very often the imperial government was against them. And then there were the sheer practicalities. Marvelous to have an old fellow like Nehemiah come along with tremendous enthusiasm and say, let's build the old city of Jerusalem and build it again.
But when you built it, what did you do with it? You've got to earn your living, haven't you? And earning a living meant being a farmer, and you couldn't farm in the middle of Jerusalem, and you had to be on your farm looking after the cows and the, and the milk and the grass and things. And this business of Jerusalem, who was going to live in it and maintain it? And taking your share of going camping in Jerusalem, away from your business. Well, it got a bit, it got a bit tiresome in the end. You know how things are, don't you? With the pressures of life. There were some who said, you know, that was a tremendous burst of enthusiasm, all that talk about the coming of Messiah, but he's not here yet, and you've got to be practical, and you can't always sit with your back to the engine looking back to those prophets and, uh, imagining the Lord's coming.
You've got to get on with life as it is. Why don't we be realists and abandon all those promises? My brothers, my sisters, when I came first to live in Ireland, I came first in nineteen forty eight, and then I came to live here for my betterment and good in nineteen fifty nine. And in those days, I constantly heard people talking about the wonders of the eighteen fifty nine revival. I even met one man whose grandfather had been in it and blessed by it. I heard them talk about W.
P. Nicholson and the wonderful mini revival then, and it was the habit of preachers to get the congregation awake and stop them falling to sleep, to ask people who had been saved through W. P. Nicholson to put up their hands. And when they did that, a whole forest of hands went up. What marvelous memories they were to look back upon to that, uh, uh nineteenth century, weren't they, and to the beginnings of this one. And the marvelous evangelical awakening that happened as people discovered the glory of salvation and discovered the personal savior as distinct from mere formal religion, and discovered the glory of his word, and discovered the wonder of the doctrine of the second coming of Christ.
What an explosion there was of evangelism, an explosion that sent missionaries by the score out to the furthest parts of the Well. world. I only don't have hear so much about the nineteen fifty— eighteen fifty nine revival now. You don't hear so much about W. P. Nicholson. Of course you don't. The boys that remembered him are gone, aren't they? Gone to glory. And we're a different generation. We got the same vision. The glorious prophecies, not only of the New Testament but the Old, grip our hearts and strengthen our spirits and open our eyes ever more clearly to the glories that God has designed for us and to wait for us in the future.
Eternal glories gleam afar, says the hymn writer, and nerve my faint endeavor. So now to work, to watch, to war, and then to rest forever. Sometimes it is difficult, isn't it, to maintain the vividness of our Christian hope. Life and its necessary toil in our busy world brings us down to the bare grinding facts of life, doesn't it?
Here this week we have an opportunity to sit down and ask ourselves, how, just where am I? And how did I get here? And what were the visions and the enthusiasms that I inherited from my spiritual forebears? And we shall look back to the Old Testament. We shall feel a certain kindredship with the people for whom this book was written. For as they perhaps were beginning to lose hope, and telling themselves that they were a modern generation and the old ideas could no longer work in theirs, God sent them a book that in the first instance wasn't about the future, it was about the past.
Why would God talk to them about the past? Because there lie the springs of our hope. They found that this glorious hope that their fathers and grandfathers had put before them as they discovered the true meaning of the prophets was not something recently invented in the last century or so. It was a great purpose of God that had gone through the whole of history. And as they traced it to its roots and watched its development from its earliest time, they would see, yeah, this hope is no invention of man. This isn't some religious fairy story.
This is real. This is a purpose that God has been working at ever since he created Adam upon the earth. From all the glorious ages that were before the time of Abraham, the time of Joshua, the time of Abraham, the time of Joshua, the time of David and Solomon. That star-studded here, uh, history of heroes of the faith. They were glorious in themselves, but prototypes, early stages of the great universal purpose of God, and as sure as he fulfilled it then, so sure he would be to fulfill it in the future. And reading of those times and catching those visions, they came away with renewed hope to wait for the coming of Messiah.
And so shall we. We delve back into Old Testament history, we shall find our hope of the Lord's second coming, and not of something that was invented by eccentric theologians in the eighteenth century. We shall find ourselves going back, back even beyond the Reformers, back to the apostles, back to the Lord Jesus Christ himself, and if you Christians won't be offended, back to the Old Testament. The purposes and plans that God had in his mind ever since he created Adam upon the face of the earth. So that's our diet this week, looking back to the past to find hope for the future.
Now the chronicler is notorious for his sense of proportion. If you dare one of these days to read the early chapters, the first nine chapters of the Book of Chronicles, and wade through all those long lists of names, you will find this, that the chronicler is interested particularly in certain events. Certain things strike him as he looks back over the years, over the centuries, as standing out, tremendously significant. We ask the question, therefore, of the chronicler, well, how did we get here, my good fellow? Tell us. How did we get here sitting in Palestine with a temple that we've done our best to rebuild and a city and, uh, running out of steam anyway?
How did we get here? Do tell us. Well, the chronicler will say, well, you got here because of Adam, actually, you see. Goes a long way back, actually. This our, our hope goes back to Adam when God created him, and created him with magnificent prospects and purpose in mind. As the psalmist in Psalm eight put it, what is man that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that thou visitest him, thou didst set him over the works of thy hands. Thou hast put all things under his feet. This was God's intention. The role for mankind that he made to be his viceroy in the universe, set over all the creation of God, to be God's representative, his kingly man.
It went wrong, you say, and Adam fell. Yes, we know that. Genesis told us that long since. It didn't mean that God gave up his purpose. And so, skating very rapidly over the centuries, the chronicler comes to chapter two. He's told us about, uh, Abraham, he's told us about Jacob, and now as he comes to tell us about the sons of Israel, then look how he expands himself. Chapter two, it begins in verse three, the sons of Judah, and all the rest of chapter two are the sons of Judah. And then when he comes to chapter three, these are the sons of David, he said, who of course was the king of Judah.
And then when he comes to chapter four, if you please, he still talks to us about the sons of Judah, coming right down to chapter twenty three. He concentrates these many, many, many verses on Judah and its king. This is what interests him. And of course, even the most cynical and heart-baked Jew back in Palestine, who's lost all his hope, if he knew anything at all, couldn't he- help finding his heart moved by David. Yes, ah yes, yes, Judah, David. Oh, he was a favorite of Israel in his day, wasn't he? From the time he went out, that uh young youth with his sling and his staff to meet the uttering great tyrant and uh champion Goliath, and felled him with a stone and cut off his head with his sword.
And from that very moment, David was a darling of Israel. All the young ladies, you know, well, I'd better not say any more about that. But they, they, they, they sang, you know, they sang the local lyrics that were composed about David. Oh, Saul, they said, has slain his thousands, but David is ten thousands. Everybody was agog, thought the girl that got David had got a marvelous prize, do you see? And he did write a lot of lyrics himself, didn't he? Uh, you can tell his influence. We sing them still. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. Oh, what a sense he had of God. And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
This is young David, tending his sheep, and eventually king of the nation, knowing God as his shepherd, and life not leading to a dead end. Mercy shall follow him all his days, and when life here is done, there's the glorious future of a house of the Lord forever. David as king had united the nation. David had not only united the nation, but David had extended the empire out through the Gentiles. Until at last, when he died, David bequeathed to Solomon, his son, a vast empire that could have developed, had God so willed, to come to rival the empires of Babylon and Egypt.
That wasn't God's intention at the time, but it was such a great empire that when at last they made King, uh, Solomon king in his own right, as distinct from being vice regent, and sat him on the throne, the historian says, did you notice what we read? Then Solomon sat on the throne of the Lord. Perhaps you say, come, come, uh, you're like some preachers we know, they get a little bit warmed up and excited beyond what they should say. Did you really mean that? Come, come. Solomon sat on the, uh, throne of the Lord. What can he mean? Well, presumably he sat on the throne that God had ordained.
Solomon was anointed Messiah, anointed in the name of God, and God had set up his throne. God had set Solomon upon it. It was a wonderful age of peace and prosperity. I can imagine, I don't know about you, I can imagine as the people got First Chronicles, and the writer took their vision back to the past, they just said, yeah, yeah, ha ha, marvelous. Sounds a bit like a fairy story now.
We haven't got any king now, have we? We were promised, we were promised by Isaiah and Ezekiel and Jeremiah and Daniel. We were promised that one day God would renew the house of Ja- of David. Hasn't done it yet, has he? And the centuries are ticking by. Can we still believe it? Ah, pity they didn't know what we now know, isn't it what? They could have known it. Isaiah had said one day God would raise up to David to sit upon his throne, Messiah himself, the Messiah.
And when he did that, he not would not only unite Israel, but he would have an empire over the Gentile nations that stretched from shore to shore. In his day, the nations would wa- learn war no more. There should be nothing but peace. If they lost their faith in that glorious, glowing hope, then remember this. It was little more than three centuries. But there came a man born of the line of David according to the flesh. And, my dear brethren and sisters, that man who worked as a youth in a carpenter's shop, whose hands were horny with the use of the saw and the plane, that man sits this very moment, as you and I sit here, sits upon the very throne of the majesty on high.
That is the wonder of it. Not just sits on the throne ordained of God. Not sits on a throne carved with ivory and a few, uh, lines on its steps. This man of the seed of David according to the flesh came to his own, and his own received him not, and put him to a tree, and they wrote his accusation across his head. This is Jesus, the king of the Jews. The Jewish leaders came to Pilate, and they said, look here, sir, this is an insult to us. Don't write that he is the king of the Jews, write that he said I'm the king of the Jews.
Pilate grew tired of all their maneuverings and said, what I have written, I have written. And he died with the title across his head. This is Jesus, the King of the Jews. On the third day, God vindicated his claim and raised him from the dead. He is now seated at the right hand of the majesty on high. Oh, my brothers, my sisters, get hold of it. This is God, true to his plan. He had it in mind ever since he created Adam and before. And if Solomon sat on the throne of the Lord in his day, in his sense, it was but a prototype of this infinitely more glorious thing.
The man Jesus Christ sat on the right hand of the majesty on high. I'll tell you something more. Isaiah had said, and Paul quotes what he says in his epistle to the Romans. He says, you'll see, that one day, Isaiah says, there shall be the rod of Jesse, and he that ariseth to rule over the Gentiles, on him shall the Gentiles come to. And Paul, in his enthusiasm, calls upon the Gentiles.
He says, therefore, rejoice, ye Gentiles, with the people of Israel, and again, praise the Lord, all ye Gentiles, and let all the peoples praise him. That's what Isaiah said, that when this, this shoot out of David's roots should come, and God should raise him from the dead, then the Gentiles would come to him, and he would rule over multi-millions of Gentiles. Tell me, has it happened? Well, sometimes when I talk to my Jewish friends, I beg leave to remind them that while I began life as an old Gentile, um, I don't believe in just any old God.
I believe in the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. And who brought me, an old uncircumcised Gentile, to believe in the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, none other than Jesus of Nazareth. Paul saw the movement start in his day as hundreds and then thousands of Gentiles began to come to hear the glorious message of the gospel, that God at last had sent David's son, who died as our savior, and now was seated at the right hand of God. And since that day, multi-millions have come to own his sway.
All rejoice, I command you, in the name of holy and inspired scripture. Uh, you be a Gentile. Scripture for commanding you this morning to start rejoicing if you never rejoiced before. Rejoice, you Gentiles, with the Jewish people, brothers and sisters in Christ, if they share the same Messiah. Rejoice with them. This world isn't going pop. It's not going to end in some cataclysmic disaster with God defeated. The plans that God laid deep in eternity and began them in history have come to their first great fruition in our blessed Lord Jesus Christ, risen from the dead and seated on the right hand of God.
And now I've got to say something, and I don't know that you're going to believe. Not if you take it literally. And it's this. That not only is our blessed Lord risen and ascended and seated on the throne of God. But if you are a believer, one of these days you shall sit with him on his throne. Sounds fantastic, doesn't it? You should need God's Holy Spirit's help to take it in, to grasp it.
Here sits the blessed Lord Jesus at the right hand of God, sat upon his Father's throne, heir to the universe, son of the maker, destined to rule eternally. That, in a way, is conceivable. But this? You reign. You sit on the throne of God. But then the clear statement of Holy Scripture comes, doesn't it? Listen once more to our blessed Lord speaking to his people. To him that overcomes, I will give to sit with me on my throne, even as I also overcame and am sat down on my father's throne.
Nor is that a once-off promise that we could possibly misinterpret it by getting it, reading it all out of proportion. A whole string of scriptures will come to our minds, will it not? If we endure, says Paul, then we shall reign with him. The choirs of heaven, as they hymn the praises of the Lamb, they say, worthy art thou to take the book and to loose the seals thereof, for thou wast slain and hast made us a kingdom to our God, a kingdom of priests, and we shall reign on the earth.
The reverex- uh, the Revelation chapter that talks about the millennial glory of our blessed Lord repeats it. These martyrs for the faith, they were raised, and they reigned with Christ a thousand years. And among the last promises of Holy Writ are these, in describing the eternal state with all its never-ending glories. They shall see his face. They shall serve him in his temple, and they shall reign forever and ever.
Look twice at the dear believers, the dear sister that's sitting by your side, just before you go out, won't you? And when you've taken her face in, say to yourself, there goes a princess of God, one day destined to sit with Christ on his throne. I say it again, that this hope is not some eccentricity thought up by nineteenth century theologians.
This is a hope rooted, rooted deep in the counsel of God, brought to fruition in early prototypes in the Old Testament, already now begun the beginnings of its major stage with our Lord seated at the right hand of God, and thank God, soon to be translated into actuality for all his people when the Lord shall come and take us home to share his eternity. You say to me, is it as easy as that?
How actually, and in practicality, shall we arrive at such tremendous exaltation and glory? We could begin to answer that question, couldn't we? If we read... Well, what better could we read than the first book of Chronicles? For David and then Solomon were the first kings that brought Israel to the peak of their bliss, peace, and glory. And the book of First Chronicles will trace for us the steps by which God took King David from his early beginning, put him on the throne, extended his empire, and eventually gave him a son that sat upon the throne of the Lord.
The program was not automatic. At every stage in the advance, there were big moral and spiritual questions to be faced. As we read those lessons, we shall find that God has mapped out for us too. What is the pathway that we must follow? If we would overcome, as the Lord Jesus overcame, to sit with him one day upon his throne in glory. That then shall be the general drift of our study.
May God in his grace attend them, and by his Holy Spirit's power bring to our hearts the conviction that these are no fairy tales, these are no myths, these are the true sayings of God.
