God's Sovereign Activities

God's Sovereign Activities  by T. Austin-Sparks "And it came to pass, when the ark set forward, that Moses said, Rise up, O Lord, and let thine enemies be scattered; and let them that hate thee flee before thee. And when it rested, he said, Return, O Lord, unto the ten thousands of the thousands of Israel" (Numbers 10:35,36). The book of Numbers is concerned with a militant movement on the part of God, in the midst of His ordered people, in relation to His testimony. The ark is called 'the ark of the testimony', and the place in which it was resident or deposited was the 'tabernacle of testimony'; and everything centred in, circled round and was governed by that testimony - the testimony of God concerning His Son, Jesus Christ. That has an abiding message for the Lord's people at all times and at all stages of spiritual progress. I would point out that this is not some peculiar testimony belonging to any one particular company of God's people. It is the testimony of Jesus. We will not stay to explain what it is, but we do know that, in the book of consummations - the book of the Revelation - where everything is brought out to its final fulness and dealt with in finality, "the testimony of Jesus" is the dominant factor from beginning to end. In the first chapter the testimony of Jesus is presented by Himself in His own Person. Then everything - the churches and the Church comprehensively, the nations, and ultimately the kingdom of darkness - is all dealt with and settled in the light of the testimony of Jesus; and finally that testimony of Jesus is brought out in glorious fulness in the symbol of the City, and everything about that City speaks of Him, and speaks of Him in glory in the saints. That is just by the way, lest we should think, when we use the phrase 'a testimony', that we are talking about something other than the testimony of Jesus in its fullest sense as in the Word of God. I do want to deliver minds from the idea that, shall I say, 'Honor Oak' has a 'testimony' of its own. 'This testimony' - how I hear that all over the world from people who are associated with the company and the Lord's work here in this place. Please strip your mind and your tongue of that phraseology. It is not some private testimony we are talking about. It is the testimony of Jesus in its fulness, and it is, as I have said, God's movements in connection with that that the whole of the Scriptures reveal. 1. Sovereign Selectiveness We start with Genesis. God's creative activity was there; we may deal with that more fully later. It brings us back to the whole outline of God's goings. But when things departed from the Divine intention, and that so early, God reacted in relation to His testimony, and we find that the whole book of Genesis is occupied with the sovereign selectiveness of God in this very connection. And here I am going to pass again to the key - to the whole Word of God, His Divine principle. If you get the Divine principle, you will understand the Scriptures. If you have not, you will do what has been done and is being done, that is, you will make theories and interpretations without number and without end. Take, for instance, all that has been produced on the book of Revelation. It is perfectly hopeless. Of all the multitudes who have sought to interpret it, you find hardly two that agree. The only sure key to the Scriptures as a whole or in any part is a Divine principle. When you have that, the whole thing opens up. I suggest that the Divine principle with which God reacted to the fall was this sovereign selectiveness. It begins with the seed of the woman, and then it moves on along a thin line of witnesses, reaching to Abraham, and then, through Abraham, to Isaac and Jacob and then through them to the nation. There is a movement of God within the world of men, sovereignly laying hold of people in relation to that testimony which He in His eternal counsels had determined to realise. The testimony of Jesus began before this world began. It has been taken up along this line by the sovereign act of God, and it is there that we must find our strength. There are, of course, always the two sides to any Divine movement - the Divine initiative, and man's responsibility - but the Divine initiative always comes first - and that is our comfort, consolation and strength. "Ye did not choose me, but I chose you." (John 15:16). "He chose us in him before the foundation of the world". (Eph. 1:4). That word 'chose' is a marvellous key to God's goings right down through the ages. The goings of God are seen along this line of sovereign selectiveness - and how much we owe to that! The very holding on our way, our very being kept by the power of God to the end, is simply because in the first place God chose us; God, if I may use the word, selected us. God looked and saw us and laid His hand upon us, and that, we are told in this marvellous revelation of the eternal goings of God, happened before ever we had a being. We were foreknown. All sorts of difficulties are gathered into that, but let me say here that it is not so much the individual, as that elect company for a Divine purpose, which is the occasion of this sovereign selectiveness. You can see God moving in this way right through the Word. You cannot explain it. We shall come on to the mystery of God's ways sooner or later, but there is no ground of explanation outside of God Himself. The Lord Jesus chose His twelve disciples. There is no ground of explanation, none whatever, outside of Himself. "Did not I choose you the twelve?" (John 6:70) - and that is all there is to it. 'I chose you'. He never explained why; none of us could explain why. But He has done it; and what we know, immediately we come under the government, the control, of the Holy Spirit, is that we have come into line with something which is not incidental in life, something which has a very long history; we have become a part of something that reaches beyond time, both backward and forward, something beyond the limits of this world and this life. We are conscious of being related to some immense purpose. I say again, we are not always able to explain or define it; but a consciousness comes to us that after all, whatever we may have felt or thought about it before, our birth is not just an incident, we have not come on the scene by chance - there is something more in it than that. No one knows that until they become linked with the Lord Jesus and thus become a part of God's testimony concerning His Son, which is the ground of all God's movements from eternity to eternity. We have come into something that is very near to the heart of God, and the more utterly you come into line with that, the more God stands by you, the more God is going to vindicate Himself and His wisdom. It is a tremendous thing to be wholly and fully in the mid-thoroughfare of those eternal goings of God. So Genesis sees the beginning of this principle, which continues all the way through the Old Testament and New Testament - the principle of sovereign selectiveness in relation to God's testimony concerning His Son, the testimony of Jesus. 2. Sovereign Separation We come to Exodus for the next phase in the goings of God, and here it is a matter of sovereign separation. There is the elect people, but the elect has got rather entangled in things, mixed up in things; the elect is in bondage, the elect, is in the world; and God must move sovereignly again. And God retains that sovereignty in His own hands. Moses tried to assume the sovereignty of God in separating the people from Egypt, and it was a terrible disaster. God retains the sovereignty in relation to His purpose. When God's time came, when the hour came for God to move, He did it from Himself, on His own account, right out from Heaven. You find God saying all the time, in relation to that emancipation:"I...", "I...", "I...", "Now, thou shalt see what I will do..." (Ex. 6:1). "Come now therefore, and I will send thee..."(Ex. 3:10). "Thus shalt thou say... I AM hath sent me unto you" (Ex. 3:14). God in sovereignty, the great I, is taking charge of this matter.