WITH CHRIST IN HIS THRONE

WITH CHRIST IN HIS THRONE

Harry Foster

"To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne,
even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne. " Revelation 3:21

WHEN a man of Laodicea opened his heart's door to let the Saviour in, he had every reason to expect a thrilling session of glad fellowship with his Lord. What, perhaps, he did not expect was that Christ should immediately introduce the subject of conflict, making an earnest appeal to him not only to enjoy sweet interchange around the supper table but to put on his spiritual armour and throw himself into the battle for the throne.

Perhaps we are right in using Revelation 3:21 as a gospel appeal. Certainly we are correct in affirming that when Christ is truly welcomed into a heart or a situation, the result is a rich feast of personal, satisfying fellowship. Our mistake, however, has been to make the feast the sole end and object of the operation, when it is clear that the Lord Jesus has higher and more important issues in mind. He desires to see the satisfied saint become a warrior. He wants not only to come into a believer's life to transform it, but He also wants that believer to come into His life, to share in the joys and responsibilities of His destiny, to sit down with Him in His throne.

"... as I ... overcame ..."

Now no preacher has the right to demand of others what he himself has not experienced -- through many do! Paul would not have done so, and nor would John. In this case, though, it was not Paul who was speaking, and although John was acting as intermediary, it was not he who was making the appeal. No, this rallying call to battle and this promise of the throne came from none other than the Son of God himself. He was able to back it up by the reminder that in His own case He had reached the Father's throne by the hard way; He had had to fight and win through. He, of all people then, has the right to preach to us, because He is the very embodiment of His message.

Now it is true that at the start He was protected and spared responsibility. There were satanic attacks on Him from His birth -- as there are upon us from our new birth -- but in His early days here on earth He was cared for in Bethlehem, in Egypt and in Nazareth, by Joseph, who had been provided by God as His human protector. It is equally true that in the early stages of our faith we have human helpers to protect us and special providential acts of God to deliver us. God knows how much we need such fatherly care, and He never fails to provide it.

The time came, however, when once the Son had received the special enduement of the Spirit at His baptism, that He had to face the full fury of Satan, and from that time onwards until in death He finally committed His spirit to the Father, there was daily, hourly conflict. Life for Him was a battlefield, and in a thousand matters great and small, the destiny of the throne had to be decided by victory or defeat. In His case there were no defeats; it was victory all the way. There never could be any question as to His right to sit down with the Father in His throne, for He was able to claim that by overcoming, He had won the right to the place which He now occupies. [68/69]


"... sup ... with me ..."

This was apparently what they discussed over the supper table of the Laodicean believer, and it is a relevant subject for each of us who has gladly received the Lord into his heart and is enjoying the perpetual feast of His presence and love. When Christ made the comparison that we should overcome as He has overcome, He did not intend that we should just try to copy His behaviour -- we should never succeed if we tried -- but rather that we should rely on His victory as the basis for our own. He did not make use of resources which are not available to us as human beings. Though truly God, He never availed Himself of the prerogatives of His deity to get the better of the enemy. This we can well understand, for God never has to wrestle with anyone, not even with Lucifer himself. For Him there can be no need for conflict, since one word from His mouth would utterly and finally crush the whole kingdom of darkness.

He has never uttered this word -- not yet -- and when it is uttered it will come through a Man. This is the higher purpose of God's heart which makes the conflict necessary and underlines its supreme importance, this desire and plan to have sons who can share His rule with Him, men who can sit down with Christ in His throne. For this very reason God came to earth in the person of Jesus Christ, so that the battle for the throne could be fought out and decisively won in human experience. The Lord Jesus, the representative Man, exposed Himself to the battle, fought and overcame, and then, as Man, returned to take His place in the partnership of the throne.



When Christ had His initial head-on encounter with the tempter in the wilderness, He insisted on keeping the record straight by refusing to move from His self-adopted condition of manhood. "But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live ..." (Matthew 4:4). Within the realm of human experience He won a victory -- and He did it for us. Having purged our sins and given us a standing with God as redeemed men, He now offers His own moral and spiritual victory to us, making it plain that He is prepared to face our circumstances and our problems with us and in us, and that victory is possible, by His grace.


"He that hath an ear ..."

If what is now so gloriously true for us in representation is to become actual and operative in experience, then the battle has to be continued in us and through us, so that we may satisfy the Father's heart by taking our place at Christ's side in His eternal kingdom. So it is that in the seven-fold variety of the experiences and conditions of the churches there is the identical call to men to pay heed as to what the Spirit is saying among them, and to understand that, irrespective of the location of believers, there is always this same issue of who will win and who will be defeated.

For although there were good churches and bad churches -- there always are -- the stark issue for each individual believer was his personal behavior in those very churches. Nobody was allowed to excuse himself for defeat by blaming his fellow church members, and no hint was given that victory would be easier, or even possible, by removal to another location. It could even be that our Laodicean friend had moved out of Smyrna because things were too hot there, and sought an easier life in Laodicea where the church was prosperous and free from persecution. If so, he would have found that by moving out he had not evaded the real spiritual issue, for in Laodicea just as much as in Smyrna or Philadelphia, every individual believer was faced with spiritual battle and the alternatives of conquering or being conquered. Open attacks, adversity, subtle schemings, prosperity, loneliness, selfish companions and even betrayal -- all this and much more was found in one or other of the churches, and all this Christ had Himself been obliged to endure and overcome. He met every temptation and emerged triumphant from every battlefield, so now He calls upon us, in whichever church He has placed us, to appropriate His sufficiency so that we too may overcome.

When the seventy disciples were sent out on their mission they had to confront evil, demonic powers, and when they joyfully returned to the Lord Jesus to report their success He gave them insight into the real secret of their victories. He let them know that there was no credit to them, for the secret was not in themselves but in His own comprehensive victory over the prince of all the demons -- "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven" (Luke 10:19). Their little triumphs were all the result of His great central victory. If Christ had not obtained the supreme victory over Satan, then there would have been little hope for the disciples in their lesser battles with more limited expressions of the kingdom or starkness. He has overcome! He has overcome for us! And now that He is risen and ascended He can do for us more [69/70] than ever was possible for the disciples before Pentecost, He can overcome in us and through us.

"These things saith the Amen ..."

This brings us to the various presentations of Christ to the seven churches. In each case He began His message to the church by putting Himself forward in one guise or another and inviting the angel and the church members to consider Him. They certainly had to consider their difficulties -- as we all do -- and they had to attend to His appeals and promises, but first of all they must pause to take note of who it was who was addressing them. It was not just a preacher; it was not an apostle; it was none other than the Lord of glory Himself. John had been confronted with the full-orbed vision of the glorious and victorious Lord and had fainted at its immensity. This vision was then divided up into its component parts for the benefit of each individual church, partly because they might not be able to bear the full presentation, and partly because there was a special aspect of Christ which was peculiarly appropriate and helpful in each different locality.

To the Laodiceans the special point was that their Lord is "the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God". Unlike us, Christ always put His "amens" at the beginning of His statements, though in our version the word is usually translated "verily". The man who opens the door for this divine Visitor can be assured that He does not come to bring in questions or uncertainty, but positive assurance that God's purposes can be fulfilled in Him. The claim to be "the beginning of the creation of God" means that He personifies the Father's original purpose in creating man, namely that he should have dominion and rule for God. "Thou madest him to have dominion" (Psalm 8:6), and Christ does not merely lament that Adam failed, but claims that He provides the means by which the sons of Adam may be redeemed and restored to God's original eternal purpose.

It all seems so long ago, and Adam's fall so far-reaching that the Laodicean -- and we -- might be tempted to despair of such a high destiny and opt for some lesser blessing. This is precisely what the Lord foresaw, and this is why He knocked at the door and brought in His heavenly provisions for the intimate fellowship of the supper table. He is tremendously concerned that we should not lose our crown (Revelation 3:11), and this not just for our sakes but because the whole universe is to receive divine blessing through a reigning Church. What a calamity it would have been for us all if the Son of God had failed to make good His vocation to share the Father's throne! It would have entailed unrelieved tragedy for the whole of God's creation. From that throne He now comes to urge us not to lose sight of our high calling and seeks permission to bring in fresh supplies of His living sufficiency so that we can press on to victory and the throne.

One must presume that what He laid out on the Laodicean supper table was the bread of His new nature and the wine of His powerful blood. When we have supped with Him in this way, then we are ready to respond to His loving call to fight as well as to feast, indeed to fight as we feast, to fight in the strength of our feast. It is no insignificant contest. It is the conflict of the ages. It is not for some small prize. The stake at issue is a place with Him, the Servant-King, in ministering to God and men from the vantage point of the throne.

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