"By Reason Of The Time"

by D. Smith, Lerwick | Category: General | Oct 1979

Although the judgements of God are unsearchable and His ways past tracing out, yet divinely inspired Scripture affords sustenance for the soul of man and also for his mind. The Holy Spirit is able to furnish him with the knowledge of God. The Lord Jesus said, "This is life eternal, that they should know Thee the only true God, and Him whom Thou didst send, even Jesus Christ" (John 17:3).

How physical matter came to be, and continues to exist, and how man is found in a world that, in comparison with his own brief life span seems unending, are profound questions. They provoke deep study by men of eminence. Many thoughts have been submitted and many reasons advanced, and indeed, all too often speculation has appeared in the guise of fact. Yet blind unbelief, replacing the due modesty of acknowledged ignorance, is sure to err.

The believer accepts the information which God has pleased to divulge through His word. He yields his reason to divine revelation and rejoices that by the word of His mouth God created the heaven and the earth and all matter that constitutes the universe. Although unable to fathom this divine action, faith in the Performer can satisfy the greatest of minds that "the worlds have been framed by the word of God, so that what is seen hath not been made out of things which do appear" (Heb. 11:3). "For He spake, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast" (Psa. 33:9). Not only did the inanimate universe come into existence by a divine act, but the Creator also brought forth by His word every living thing, each in its own order. The man whom He placed at the head of all His works He formed from the dust of the ground. Adam never knew childhood or youth. When God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life he became a living soul in a body of full adulthood.

The power of the divine word was further demonstrated when the Son of God, the Word become flesh, by His spoken word wrought in the presence of men such outstanding miracles as raising the dead, healing the sick and subduing the wind and the restless sea. Of His works He could say, "The very works that I do, bear witness of Me, that the Father hath sent Me" (John 5:36).

Following this original act, the perpetuation of all animal and vegetable life became subject to the gradual process of germination and development, a process involving time. "The husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth" (Jas. 5:7). In the process of time the expected harvest will come. The fruit of the fig tree comes in its season (see Luke 21:29,30) and whatever ripens prematurely will be found to be defective.

The principle of nature is equally applicable to spiritual life and development. The first essential in our relationship with God is the new birth. In bringing about this experience the striving of the Holy Spirit with us may extend over a considerable period of time, but the new birth itself is immediate upon the exercise of faith in Christ. The Lord said, "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the voice thereof, but knowest not whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is everyone that is born of the Spirit" (John 3:8). Many are the souls that have left this world praising God that they have not to work to become children of God. The transfer from death to life and from the power of Satan to God is instantly accomplished on the acceptance, through faith, of the Lord Jesus Christ. Creation "in Christ Jesus" (Eph. 2:10) is no more a prolonged process than was the material creation by Christ Jesus.

But the new life of the believer is subject to development, for as the branch of the vine in due season brings forth fruit, so the Christian by abiding in the word of the Lord Jesus and obeying from his heart His commands will, during the life allotted to him, bear spiritual fruit to the glory of God the Father. "Herein is My Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; and so shall ye be My disciples" (John 15:8).

About thirty years after the Lord Jesus left His disciples on the slopes

of Bethany and ascended to the right hand of God, the writer to the Hebrews took up his pen to address those who at various times during that period had acknowledged from their hearts that the despised Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God. At great personal cost they had left the Jewish faith and, in fellowship with the Gentiles in the early churches of God, had embraced the faith of the New Covenant. Bearing His reproach they had gone outside the camp to Him, recognizing that there yet remained a sabbath rest for the people of God (Heb. 4:9). This refers to the house of God which today is spiritual and not material. Their abiding in it depended on holding fast their boldness and the glorying of their hope firm unto the end (Heb. 3:6).

Their fathers had for generations occupied a divine position: God had dwelt in Jerusalem from the days of David. But now God had changed the order, the spiritual had taken the place of the material. The Old Covenant had been succeeded by the New, and the kingdom of God taken from Israel had been given to another nation: that little flock of disciples faithful to the Lord Jesus. Most poignant of all, the house of God which the elders and people so cherished had been forsaken of God, who no longer dwells in temples made with hands (Acts 7:48), but among a separated people sanctified by His truth (2 Cor. 6:14-7:1).

To occupy this new divine position was a privilege but also a solemn responsibility. Such a situation was conducive to spiritual growth. The house of God should ever be a place where development is in evidence, where the life of Christ is manifest, and the ministry of the Spirit fulfilled in those who compose it. But alas, those addressed were lacking in spiritual growth: "Ye are become dull of hearing. For when by reason of the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need again that someone teach you" (Heb. 5:11,12). Thirty years or so was sufficiently long to have enabled those saints to have reached a high standard of spiritual maturity. Now time testified against them. Hence the reproof in the piercing phrase: "by reason of the time ye ought to be. . .". Do not these words pierce our conscience too? Can we think of those Hebrews who had endured a great conflict of suffering, being made a gazing-stock, and who took joyfully the spoiling of their possessions, as being inferior to us? What is the testimony of the years as far as we are concerned and by reason of the time what ought we to be in spiritual strength and discernment? We may ask ourselves the question, How have we progressed since the day when "grace our sightless eyes received"? And for the time spent in the house of God, are we each "as a green olive tree, fair with goodly fruit" and developed "unto a fullgrown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ (Eph. 4:13)?

D. Smith, Lerwick | Oct 1979
General