Intimacy
“The Lord is with you when you are with Him” (2 Chronicles 15:2).
Meditating on this beautiful truth that the Lord is with me when I am with Him brought to mind what our young Caleb said when I coaxed him out of the big white swing under the poplar tree. I wanted him to taste the blackberries and see the groundhog’s den on the other side of the yard. Eager for a new adventure, Caleb let the others know,‘Granna will hold my hand and walk with me and I will hold Granna’s hand and walk with her."
The Holy Spirit lets us in on the hand-holding, walking-together intimacy in a conversation we overhear between Azariah and Asa in 2 Chronicles 15:2. “Listen to me, Asa . . . the Lord is with you when you are with Him.” Then the Holy Spirit, speaking through Azariah, adds a key truth for you and me. “And if you seek Him, He will let you find Him; but if you forsake Him, He will forsake you.” As Matthew Henry said, “This is both a word of comfort, that those who keep close to God shall always have his presence with them; and also a word of caution, ‘He is with you while you be with him,’ but no longer. You have not a signal token of his favorable presence with you, but the continuance of it depends upon your perseverance in the way of your duty.”1 This is a precious truth with a promise as well as a dangerous consequence unless we quit our arguments, repent, and return to God in voluntary obedience.
Repentance and returning to God is more than admitting a sin, like the reprobate Judas did once he saw the end result of what appeared to him at first to be an ingenious plan. “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood,” he said (Matthew 27:4). Well, no joke! It was “big” of him to admit that one sin after refusing to repent and trust in the Lord Jesus all those years.
What about you and me? Can we be certain that the Lord Jesus will be with us once we have repented of not just one sin, but our continual sinning, our “natural atheism” as C.H Spurgeon called it?
Jesus demonstrated the uninterrupted intimacy of forgiveness and restoration to His disciples during the intervening weeks between His resurrection and His ascension. “After all he had done for them, and their own professions of attachment, when the hour of trial came, they all forsook him and fled. How much he felt their defection…. ‘I looked for some to take pity, and there was none; and for comforters and found none’ (Psalm 69:20). Had he gone away to heaven, and they had not seen him, they would have feared his resentment and displeasure. But he appeared to them again and again, and always with kindness in his looks, and peace on his lips; and at last, laying his hands on them, he was taken up to heaven in the very act of blessing them, thus telling them that he had the same heart as ever, and was more than pacified towards them after all that they had done.”2
The Lord’s presence with us when we are with Him carries with it all the means of grace, securing an ultimate happiness that no other relationship affords. His intimacies open “channels in the heart, through which His love reaches and control all our other powers. This love makes us new creatures, gives us new workings of the affections, and prompts a new language from our lips.”3
Our great Shepherd keeps us within His all encompassing providence, “like a man that will not let his servant go out of his sight. I cannot break away from thee.”4 “While we are with Him in a way of duty, he will be with us in a way of blessing.”5 As Samuel Rutherford said, “Christ hath put the Father and me in each other’s arms.”6
I have been reading the Story Of The Confederate States by Joseph T. Derry. Of course Mr. Derry is not with me while I am, so-to-speak, with him; not because he no longer lives, but because he never possessed that capability. Only the living Lord Jesus, our great Prophet is with us always, “revealing to us, by his word and Spirit the will of God for our salvation.”7
Because Jesus prayed, “Father, I desire that they also whom You have given Me, be with Me . . .” (John 17:24), we have the assurance that we shall be with Him through the eternity of the eternities (1 Thessalonians 4:17). “One day you will rejoice when Christ layeth down your head under his chin, and betwixt his breasts, and drieth your face, and welcometh you to glory and happiness.”8 Then, dear brothers and sisters, everything that hindered the full giving and receiving of love between you and Jesus will have been removed. Your redemption will be complete. On that day you and I will be with Him and He will be with us and we will go out from Him no more. And “it will make Satan’s court ring with the news . . . that the saints have arrived safe at the bosom of Christ, out of the reach of hell forever.”9
ENDNOTES
1. Henry, Matthew Henry’s Commentary, vol.1 (Wilmington, DE: Sovereign Grace, [1845] 1972), 1068.
2. William Jay, Morning Exercises for Every Day in the Year (Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, [circa 1828] 1998), 355.
3.George Burrowes, The Song of Solomon (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, [1853] 1977), 11.
4. Samuel Annesley, Puritan Sermons 1659-1689, vol.1 (Wheaton, ILL: Richard Owen Roberts, Publishers, [1661] 1981), 25.
5. Henry Wilkerson, Puritan Sermons 1659-1689, vol. 2 (Wheaton ILL.: Richard Owen Roberts, Publishers, [1674] 1981), 502.
6.Letters of Samuel Rutherford (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, [1664] 1973), 66.
7. The Shorter Catechism with Scripture Proofs (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, n.d.), 7.
8. Samuel Rutherford, Letters of Samuel Rutherford (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, [1664] 1973), 63, 64.
9. Richard Baxter, The Saint’s Everlasting Rest (Grand Rapids, MI.: Christian Classics, n.d.), 1.