Ephesians 2:18-22
This great work, this great business of salvation, has been divided up between the three Persons. The Father conceived and planned salvation. He thought it out, He purposed it, He decided on it, He determined it. The everlasting and eternal God! It is His plan and purpose. Let us never represent the Christian faith and the Christian position with regard to salvation as if it were something that the Son has to extort from the Father. It is the Father who sent the Son. You notice in the high priestly prayer, in the seventeenth chapter of John’s Gospel, how plainly our Lord says, ‘I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do; I have glorified thee on the earth’; He came ‘to give eternal life to as many as God has given him’; ‘Thine they were, thou gavest them me’. All His references are to the Father. The Father is the One who conceives and initiates, and sets moving this great and glorious plan and way of salvation.
Then the Son volunteered to do the work. There is no question but that a great council was held in eternity before time began, as the Scriptures tell us: ‘before the foundation of the world’. All that has happened was foreknown and foreseen. The Father conceived the plan and the Son offered and volunteered to come to execute the plan. The Father gave Him the people, the Father gave Him the work to do, and He came and He did it. And there, just before the cross, He was able to say that He had done it. We are familiar with the great facts; but let us never forget them. Let us remind ourselves constantly of what it involved for the Son, who though He was ‘equal with God’ and ‘counted it not robbery to be equal with God’, yet ‘humbled himself, and made himself of no reputation’. He came in such a lowly manner; He knew what it was to be poor and to suffer the privations of poverty; He mixed with ordinary people and lived an ordinary life. Can we conceive what it meant to Him? He suffered against Himself ‘the contradiction of sinners’; He bore their malice and their spite and their envy. But above and beyond it all, He took upon Himself our sins, suffered Himself to be made sin by the Father for us, though He Himself knew no sin; suffered to have laid upon Him the iniquity of us all; went there to the cross ‘to bear our sins in his own body on the tree’. That is what He did. He kept the law actively, He lived under it as a man, ‘made of a woman, made under the law’, put Himself deliberately under it, went to be baptised by John the Baptist, identifying Himself with the sinner, and all that is involved in that, and died and was buried. The Prince, the Author of life, died and was buried in a grave; but rose again. There are the mighty facts. That is the part of the Son—coming out of the bosom of the Father, coming out of eternity. He was in the beginning with God, nothing was made without Him; but He leaves that glory, He lays it aside—‘Mild, He lays His glory by’—and goes through with His great task. Through Him, this blessed Son! That is the work of the Son.
Then there is the work of the Holy Spirit. It is He who works out the salvation in us, one by one. That is His work. You notice that the Son voluntarily subordinates Himself to the Father. And the Holy Spirit subordinates Himself to the Son and to the Father. They are co-equal, they are co-eternal, they are equal in every respect; and yet for the sake of our salvation there is this subordination of Son to Father, and Spirit to Son and Father together. And the Spirit comes and He applies the work. He applies it to me, applies it to you. It is He who mediates Christ to us, it is He who brings us to see our need and all the other things that we hope to consider later; it is He who applies the grand redemption that has been worked out by the Son. And not only does He do it in the individual. He does it in the Church. He builds up the Church, He fills the Church with His life and with His presence. That is the work of the Holy Spirit. ‘He shall not speak of himself’. He simply speaks of Christ. ‘He shall glorify me,’ says our Lord; and He has done so, and still does.
In the Old Testament, we read in great detail, about the kinds of vestments and clothing that were to be worn by the priests and the high priest; and you will find in the case of the high priest that round the hem of his great robe bells were to be placed. Have you ever asked yourself what was the purpose of the bells, the pomegranates and the bells? What was the object? It was just this. The people knew that it was a tremendous thing and a staggering thing for anybody to go into the ‘holiest of all’, into the presence of God. ‘Who shall dwell with the devouring fire? asks Isaiah. ‘God is a consuming fire,’ His holiness is such that everything tends to shrivel out of His presence. The high priest goes in once a year to represent the people and make an offering for their sins. The question is, Will he come out alive? And how delighted the people were to hear the jingling of the bells on the hem of his vestment! They knew then that he was still alive, that his sacrifice, the offering that he had presented, the blood that he had taken, was sufficient, that God had accepted it and that their sins were forgiven. As he came out they heard the jingling of the bells louder and louder. He had been into the ‘holiest of all’.
