Man’s Revolt Against God’s Presence
Now of the things which we have spoken this is the sum: We have such a high priest, who is set on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens.
Hebrews 8:1
Certain things are fundamental to human morality. That is, wherever you find man you will find a basic agreement on certain aspects we call morality—honesty, courtesy, neighborliness.
Although humanity is sliding down a slippery slope, there are still things, from the human standpoint, that are considered moral—not necessarily things that God can approve as moral, but things that are common among humanity.
Perhaps the most basic agreement that can unite us is the idea that God exists and that He is the sovereign Majesty in the heavens.
Read and Learn More Bible Verses about the Presence of God
Along with that basic belief is the belief that we must go back again to God for the final judgment of the deeds done in the body. An old hymn by Charles Wesley, “A Charge to Keep1 Have,” reminds us of this:
A charge to keep I have, a God to glorify, a never-dying soul to save, and fit it for the sky.
In Ecclesiastes, we read, “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.
For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil” (Eccles. 12:13-14).
For if we believe that we must fear God, that this is our whole duty, and that God shall bring every work into judgment, whether it is good or evil, there is going to be a difference in the way we view God’s moral law.
Majesty In The Heavens
Human morality rests upon this belief: There is a Majesty in the heavens. I believe also that human decency is fundamental.
And human decency depends upon an adequate conception of God and of human nature. Accordingly, the atheist could not possibly have an adequate view of human nature.
Any view that excludes the possibility that we come from God and that we shall return to God will have a detrimental effect on human morality.
So we have faith in God, and we build on this rock. Saint Patrick himself prayed that prayer every day:
I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the threeness,
Through confession of the oneness
Of the Creator of Creation.
I believe that when we arise in the morning, it ought to be in a mighty strength, believing in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.
Throne And A Kingdom
The Bible teaches that creation is a universe. That is, all that we see about us, from the farthest star that can be picked out by the most powerful telescope down to the tiniest cell seen through a microscope.
And all things living and inorganic makeup what we call the world, this is a universe.
It is one vast, single system embracing matter in spirit and life and mind and time and space, and all beings that are in it.
The Bible teaches that these are not separated—they are not independent of each other —but are united and working harmoniously.
According to medical research, cancer is simply a condition in which cells no longer take orders from the rest of the body.
Cancer is composed of free cells, and anarchic cells; they are not subject to the balance and order of the rest of the cells of the body. They go wild, and soon they have brought the victim to death.
If everything in the world were independent of everything else, you would have a universal cancer throughout the vast universe. So God brings everything together, interlocks them, and makes them interdependent.
A stone could not be moved on the seashore but it would change in some manner the balance of the world. A leaf could not fall from a tree but it changes the order of nature a little bit… just that much.
There is not a baby born into the world but makes the world a little different. The man or woman who dies and goes out of the world changes the world just a little bit, for all things interlock and depend upon each other.
The Bible further teaches that this universe, this “uni” (meaning “one”), this one great interlocking system has a central control. And that control is called the throne of God.
The universe is controlled from that center. This seems logical to me. Do you know what would happen to the human body if it had no central control?
There have been many fables and stories made up and told about the body that would not obey the head.
And you can imagine what it would be like. There must be a head on every organism or else there could be no harmony, no coordination, no cooperation, no life.
Every organization has to have a head. If you organize anything, even a simple literary guild consisting of half a dozen women, they will always have a president. And the president must preside.
It goes right on up to the largest empire that ever touched the world. Right on up to the great nations of the world. Every organization must have a head. That is logical.
So, if any organism has to have a head, if a machine has to have a head, or an organization has to have a head, is it not logical to believe that somewhere in this vast universe, there is a throne where somebody runs it? I believe that is true.
And I believe that the one on the throne is God, the Majesty in the heavens. The Bible refers to this center of control as the throne of God.
And from that throne, God governs His universe according to an eternal purpose. That eternal purpose embraces’ all things.
“All things” are two little words used often in the Scriptures, yet they are bigger than the sky above. They are bigger than the entire world. They are big because they take in all things.
So, we have the Majesty in the heavens, sitting upon Elis’s throne. Then someone is sitting on the right hand of that throne.
Why? And who is He? He is Jesus Christ, the minister of the sanctuary, which God made, not man.
The reason for His being there, in brief, is this: A province revolted in what we call the universe. In all this interrelated, interdependent, interlocking universe, one province revolted and said, ‘We don’t want to be ruled by the head.
We will not be ruled from the throne. We will rule ourselves. We will build this great Babylon up to heaven. We will not have God rule over us.
” That province we call “mankind.” And mankind inhabits the little rolling sphere we call “the earth.”
Some inquire if man exists anywhere else in the universe, and astronauts go up to find out. I do not think he exists elsewhere, because the Scripture says the earth has been given to the sons of men.
I think the earth belongs to man. They have not done much with it, and they have not done a very good job, but it belongs to the sons of men.
That province is now in revolt against the Majesty of the heavens. What is God going to do? God could, with a wave of His hand, sweep that province out of existence.
But what did He do? God sent His only begotten Son that He might redeem that province and bring it back into the sphere of the throne again, back into the sphere of the Kingdom. And that Kingdom is called “the kingdom of God.”
When a man is converted, he is born again into the kingdom of God. What does that mean? It means that he is born out of the old rebellious province into a new Kingdom, and admits that there is a throne, which he did not admit before.
No sinner admits to the throne of God as being valid and the right of God to rule over him. He can talk about God, and he will appeal to God, and he will use the name of God, but he will not obey God.
That is why he is what he is. That is why he is a sinner and why he is called a sinner. That is why it is said that he will perish unless he repents and is born again.
When he repents and is born again, he leaves the old world, the old province that revolted, and moves into the kingdom of God and comes under the rulership of the triune God again. That is how simple it all is.
You cannot get there by being baptized, though we all ought to be baptized, according to the teaching of Jesus. We do not get there by joining a church, although we all ought to join a church.
You do not get there by praying; you can pray to the end of your life, 24 hours a day, and not get there. It is coming into the Kingdom by an act of the will, through Jesus Christ the Lord, that gets me out of the old, revolted province and into the Kingdom of God and under the rule of the throne of God again.
The One Who Returns Us To The Kingdom
God became man to rescue the sinful man. This He did by forfeiting His own life so that He might bring back to God again those who had revolted.
This, Jesus Christ our Lord did, and now we have Him sitting on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens.
We have Christianity now intermixing everywhere, and everybody trying to do a little bit of good. But the essence of Christianity is this:
Ye men of Israel, hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you.
As ye yourselves also know: Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain: Whom God hath raised.
Having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be held of it (Acts 2:22-24).
And, of course, “This Jesus hath God raised, whereof we all are witnesses. Therefore being by the right hand of God exalted.
And having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear” (Acts 2:32-33).
There is a throne. And the one who sits on the throne is one of us—Jesus Christ—and the world has revolted against that throne. Christianity says to the world that they can come back to the throne through Jesus Christ the Lord.
This is what excited and thrilled the Early Church. They were not excited about the politico-industrial questions that excite so many religious leaders today.
Everybody seems to jump on the political bandwagon, believing that the church should control the government.
But in the Early Church, those men and women baptized with the Holy Ghost, as recorded in the second chapter of Acts, were excited about other things.
They were excited about God on the throne. They were thrilled about Christ on the right hand of God the Father and His coming again in clouds of glory.
They talked about the consummation of all things, the downfall of iniquity, the purgation of the world, and the cleansing of the starry heavens above.
They were intoxicated with thoughts about the glorified Christ who would soon return. Above all things, they talked about that man who sat on the throne.
“This man whom you crucified,” they said, “He is at God’s hand, alive forevermore and He is one of us.” And they went out ablaze with that.
These converted people, this discipleÿ said, “Did you know that one of us is in a position equal to God, next to God in power and authority with all power given unto Him in heaven and earth?” (see Acts 4:10- 12).
They went everywhere saying that this God was the man Jesus and that one of our numbers had been exalted to deity.
The God-Man Question
I read once of a man explaining that Christ was a man but not a man. I wonder how that could be. How could a thing be a “horse” but not a “horse”?
Do you ever see “horse nature” floating around somewhere like a glutinous, ill-formed mass of clouds? Human nature can only be where a human being is.
So instead of saying Christ is man but not a man, we must say that Christ is a man. “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5). Jesus is a man, He is at God’s right hand and He sits on the throne.
Therefore, we worship this man as God. We worship no other man, but we worship this man as God. And this man was believed to be God by the Early Church, and they worshiped Him as God.
They said, “Now this man here, Jesus, is God.” Then, of course, as they began to refine it metaphysically, people said, “But He’s a human being, and how can you get on your knees to a human being? That would be idolatry.”
The NewTestament Christians said, “This human being is different. He has union with the eternal Godhead so that when you’re worshiping Him, you’re not worshiping idolatrously; you’re worshiping God.”
After they had gone on joyously worshiping for a century or two, the old theologians thought out a name for it. They called it the “hypostatic union.” And because they had found a name, they thought they had explained it.
Hypostatic Union
If you saw a strange-looking creature with feathers in front and hair behind and two tails and three horns it was an odd-looking thing that was part duck, and somewhat like a cat.
And it was waddling about, you would have all the scientists confess that they never saw anything like it. And then some scientist comes along with a name for it.
And so he names it, and everybody says, “Now we know what it is.” No, you do not. You just named it; that is all.
So it is with the hypostatic union. The question was, “How can God and man be one?” Nobody knew how, so they called it the hypostatic union, which means that the substance of God and the substance of man are united in one.
So that when you are worshiping that man, Jesus, you are worshiping God. That has satisfied everybody ever since, except the liberals, and you cannot satisfy them anyway.
I heard another name for it that I also like. I think this is a good one, maybe better than the “hypostatic union.” They call it a “Theanthropic Conjoinment.”
“Theanthropic” is such a beautiful little word. “Theo” is God, and “thrope” is man. Therefore, you have a man and God in conjoined.
God and man united. Although I still do not understand it, I can kneel before Him and cry, “My Lord and my God,” for there is a man at the right hand of God.
If we could look into heaven now, we would be introduced to creatures that would exhaust all human explanations. There would be six-winged creatures when two wings were all we were used to.
And we would see creatures with wheels in the middle of wheels, coming out of the fire. We would see broad-winged angels and seraphim that burn.
We would see strange creatures! and we would not understand them. All of these things would defy everything that man knows about this side of glory.
Then somebody would say, “Now, wait! Look there. I see something that looks like the form of a man.” Sure enough, you would recognize Him. It would be Jesus. He would be one of us.
Moreover, we would step up to Him and say, “We’re brothers. I know you. You’re of my race. You belong to me.” Don’t you feel good, for example, when you’re traveling in South America or Germany or Asia?
And a fellow walks up to you, and you look at each other and he speaks, and you say, “You’re an American.” He replies, ‘Yeah. I’m an American. I live in Chicago.”
You smile. In the little traveling, I have done around the world, I cannot get over wanting to turn a flip-flop handspring backward when I see the American flag or when I see somebody that I know is an old Yankee.
I like them not because they are any better, but because there is something in you that knows your people.
Suppose that I were wandering through heaven and saw an archangel but could not speak his language. Suppose that I saw a cherubim and could not speak his language, or a seraphim.
I would be bashful around him. I would say he burns… I cannot go near him. Then, suddenly, I see a man. I would say, “Wait! Don’t I know you?”
“Yes, I’m Jesus, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead. And I am here for you, pleading your cause before the Father’s throne.”
There before the throne is the man, Jesus Christ the Lord. Not the victorious God, which would have been no news to herald to the world. The good news is not that God is victorious.
How could the sovereign Lord God be anything else but victorious? But what the Early Church said was there is a man victorious, a man who is joined to God.
And that man is victorious, and we are blessed in Him. And so if we are in Him, we can be victorious too.
Reunited With God In Christ Jesus
I think that we are living on the very outskirts, the far margin of the kingdom of God. We are in it, but we are just barely inside the door.
Christians ought to recognize that our nature has been joined to God’s nature in the mystery of the Incarnation. And when Christ died on the cross and rose again.
And began to join individual Christians to His body, He meant that we were to have the same victory He had. He meant that we were to have the same high privilege He had at God’s right hand.
He said, “I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me” (John 17:23).
One of the primary missions of our Lord was to convey to unbelieving people that they occupy the same place as He does in the heart of God. We are there because of the absolute worthiness of the Lord Jesus Christ who is our head.
He is the representative of us before God. And as the sample man, He is showing what kind of man He can make. He is the model man after whom you and I are patterned. That is why the Lord will not- let you alone.
We get used to a little viewpoint. We look at the world and God and the kingdom of heaven from one tiny, dim crack. It is a crevice that we are peeking through, forgetting that if we would only dare to rise and have faith.
That man at the right hand of God, sitting at the right hand of the throne, belongs to us and we belong to Him, and whatever He is, we can be in Him. I tell you, it might change our whole lives. But here we are, the same as before.
I do not believe in change for change’s sake. I recommend that we raise our eyes to God.
The Majesty in the heavens, and that we look long and hard and reverently at Him in faith, and see at His right hand one of us, and say.
“If he can be there, I can be there. If He is accepted by God, I am accepted in Him, in the Beloved.
If God loves Him, He loves me. If He is safe, I am safe. And if He has conquered, I can conquer. And if He’s victorious, I can be victorious.”
Some morning, get up and allow the power of God to come on you, and allow Him to bless you. It would be quite a different change from what you used to be.
Nevertheless, it would be wonderful. Why not let us seek the faith of God in Jesus Christ? Never go to God as some poet of paganism might go: from the outside.
Always remember, “No man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). Any man can come unto the Father by Him.
So let us come. Let us practice it. Begin now. Let us move into the heart of God and live in that heart of God victoriously.
Of all the things I have been saying, this is the sum: We have a great high priest who has sat down at the right hand of the Majesty of the throne, of the Majesty in the heaven, being a minister of the sanctuary, which God built, and not man.
From our human point of view, man has always revolted against the presence of God, starting in the Garden of Eden.
The first Adam took us away from the presence of God, while the second Adam, Christ, led us straight into God’s presence.
The revolt of man is overturned by the redemptive action from the throne on high. God has paved the way into His presence and never winces in the face of man’s revolt.
Now To The Lord A Noble Song By Isaac Watts (1674-1748)
Now to the Lord a noble song!
Awake, my soul, awake, my tongue,
Hosanna to the eternal name,
And all his boundless love proclaims.
See where it shines in Jesus’ face,—
The brightest image of his grace;
God, in the person of his Son,
Has all his mightiest works outdone. Grace!
’Tis a sweet, a charming theme;
My thoughts rejoice at Jesus’ name;
Ye angels, dwell upon the sound;
Ye heavens, reflect it to the ground.
Oh, may I reach the happy place,
Where he unveils his lovely face,
His beauties there may I behold,
And sing his name to harps of gold.
From The Lorica (The Deer’s Cry), Breastplate of St. Patrick, A.D. 433.