Online Resource Library
Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadQuiet Talks by Samuel Dickey: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks About Our Lord's Return: 80. The Process
TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks About Our Lord's Return (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 80. The Process
Other Subjects in this Topic:
The Process
The process in judgment is immensely significant and instructive. We must remember that the Oriental language of the Bible gives results rather than processes. It catches the picture at some one stage and so presents it. Yet even so, the process is clearly pointed out in this Book. The process in judgment is by withdrawal. It is not by God doing something, but by His ceasing to do something, and ceasing at the urgent plea of the one who suffers the judgment.
All creation and all life began through the touch of God. He breathed His own life into man. And He did not leave him. "In Him we live and move and have our being," was as true of the heathen Athenian listeners on Mars Hill as of the Christian Hebrew who was preaching it. [Note: Act_17:28 God has never left His world. All things, are held together by the continual, direct action of our Lord Jesus. [Note: Col_1:17.] His very presence in the world, and in man creatively, is a most intense pleading.
Man's defiance and blaspheming and ignoring are likewise a most intense pleading, a pleading to be left alone; so great is man's wilful, foolish ignorance. His very attitude is a shutting of God out, so far as he can. Man's shutting of God out so far as possible always goes before God's withdrawal. There's a bit of light incidentally on prayer here. Prayer is a coming over voluntarily, and more fully, into the atmosphere of God's presence. Every faculty works better in that presence, for it is our native air.
Now judgment, when it comes, is merely God's granting of man's prayer by withdrawal. In his terrible arraignment of man's sin in the beginning of his Romans letter Paul tells us three times that "God gave them up." [Note: Rom_1:24, Rom_1:26, Rom_1:28.] Yet here clearly the withdrawal was only partial at this point. The ultimate had not yet come. The same or similar language is used by Asaph in reviewing Israel's history, [Note: Psa_78:62.] by Stephen in his sermon before the Jewish Senate, [Note: Act_7:42.] and by Jesus in His heartbroken farewell to Jerusalem. [Note: Mat_23:38.] The withdrawal is gradual, very gradual, practically imperceptibly so. In actual completed judgment it becomes complete. Its completion makes the full judgment.
The result of the withdrawal is a hardening of the heart against God. But there are always two hardenings, first by the man in resisting God's gracious pleading; then a harder hardening through God's gradual withdrawal of His grace. The great illustration of this is Pharaoh, to be touched more fully in a few moments. It was in this way that the hindering of God's plan for Israel by the King of Heshbon, was removed, [Note: Deu_2:30.]and the opposition of the inhabitants of Canaan to Israel overcome. [Note: Jos_11:20.]
There's the touch of a gentle irony in the words spoken to Isaiah about the fruitless ministry appointed him. "Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy and shut their eyes," and so on. It sounds as though Isaiah was to make their hearts hard. And he did, but not directly. It was their continual refusal to hear the message he was continually to give that made dull ears, shut eyes, and slow heart-action. [Note: Isa_6:9-10.] The same thing took place with their descendants through Jesus' preaching, [Note: Mat_13:10-15 with parallels. Joh_12:39-40.] and through Paul's. [Note: Act_28:25-28.] It is the method of procedure underlying the treatment of David's enemies. [Note: Psa_69:23.]
The steps down, in the first hardening by the man himself, are traced by Paul in his Ephesian letter. The hardening of the heart against God leads to ignorance of God, a cutting of one's self off from Him, a darkening of the understanding of Him, a being filled with vain, foolish thoughts about one's self, then hardening one's self past feeling, then giving one's self up to the worst. [Note: Eph_4:17-19.] This is the process in judgment. Man's withdrawal from God, so far as he can, is at length—at great length, when God's measureless patience has run its full course, followed by God's withdrawal, very gradual until at length complete. The man's urgent persistent plea is granted.