To Whom Has The Arm of the Lord Been Revealed?

Part 2

Gary L. Cox

8. Revelation comes through circumstances at hand, and those circumstances will not always be present.

The number one problem we have as humans is we are ready to get beyond the present circumstances and we are looking past it to better days, to happier times, to the significant future.  The immediate treasure of the present is often laid aside because we are anxious and we are pursuing tomorrow and tomorrow has a way of never hitting us. We are only ever guaranteed today, and the treasures of God are at hand; they are not far away.  If we skip today’s treasures, tomorrow we will have lost our way because we will have received something that is other than what God has for us to begin with.  John 12:35, “Jesus said to them, ‘Yet a little while is the light with you. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness comes upon you: for he that walks in darkness knows not whether he goeth.  While ye have the light, believe in the light, that ye may children of light.’  These things spake Jesus, and departed, and did hide Himself from them.” We have opportunity now but opportunity is not guaranteed at all tomorrow.  Be children of light and as Christians attempting to raise Christian families, raising up a Godly seed, we have present in our hands a tremendous opportunity to get the benefit that God has in and through our homes today.  Young people, do not cast aside your home.  Don’t cast aside the opportunities of today because you are troubled about tomorrow. As you grow up from the younger years, all the sudden you begin to have your eyes and your understanding open to some of the pleasures and opportunities this world has and it is such an easy case to want to agitate.  There are things today that will never come by you again.  Will you receive them?  Will you lay hold of them?  Will you take it with all your heart? 

9. Revelation comes to those who love God. 

If there is ever a condition for revelation, this is the condition. We need to recognize that God deals in revelation to those that love Him.  Do you love God?  This is a question valid for those who are not yet saved and those who claim to be Christians.  For indeed those who are not yet saved it is good to recognize that you have no love for God in your eyes; you do not care about God.  That recognition might be the first revelation that God might bring to you so that you might lay a hold of Him for that revelation that is for life to come.  But us believers have the same question.  We know the Lord but are we walking in revelation?  A believer who is not walking in love toward God cannot receive revelation.  We make ourselves the very enemy of God as Christians; God is not going to reveal Himself to His enemies.  He is going to reveal Himself to those who love Him.  It is important to understand that at any time when we are in prayer and we need a revelation of God, there is a qualifying condition of our love for God. The most important thing that the love for God does to our heart is it creates a yielded spirit. John 14:21, “He that hath My commandments, and keepth them, he it is that loveth Me: and he that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father, and I will love him, and will manifest Myself to him.”  If we love someone we treasure their words that are written to us personally.  It is special.  The question is do we love God? Are we walking in love to God?  We loved God because He first loved us.  It is that love that is the energy and the driving aspect of our daily life and it is out of that love for God that He is going to make Himself known to us. In any particular matter, if we so set our heart so that God’s purpose might be accomplished and that we will do and we will obey that which God has for us in that circumstance, God is going to give us the revelation of insight of what we should do.  Because we have predetermined a willingness to obey, now we are in the condition for being told what to do because we are going to do it.    The truth of God sets us free when we respond to it with obedience.  Do you love God?  Is His love real to you?  Is His purpose in our life the most significant purpose that we have in our life and are we willing to receive from His hand all that that good purpose has no matter whether it brings suffering or sorrow or some other aspect of life that is not necessarily readily desirable by the human flesh. 

10. Revelation comes not through wisdom of words, but by the preaching of the Gospel (The Good News): Christ crucified, risen and coming again.  It is important that we understand that we cannot make the truth of the Gospel appealing to the natural man.  And since it cannot be made appealing, then it is necessary that we recognize that the very preaching of it in its unappealing fashion is the means by which God is going to grant revelation.  He is going to bring home the truth that it is about us letting go of our lives, it is about us saying, “Yes”, to God unconditionally, whatever His terms, and recognizing that it is the power of the cross.  The cross separates us from our natural desires and transfers us over to the desires of God and God does a work that He desires to do; that only He can do through the power of the Gospel.  The message that we must preach to each other in every circumstance is the message of the cross.  Lift up the cross, Christ will draw all men unto Himself.  You cannot help me out when I am down by trying to soften the blow of the cross.  It is the embracing of the cross that brings life to our soul. Our duty and our need is not only to preach the cross in season and out of season but it is to embrace the cross, to embrace that message because from it comes the power of God to salvation.

11. Revelation comes through the creation and a reprobate mind.  No one will go and stand before God and say, “You never told me anything, I never knew You and that You wanted anything out of my life.”  No one will ever have that occasion.  There are two un-fordable rivers that God has erected by which He separates men from their folly and by which He verifies the truth that He has revealed Himself to all men.  Number one, the creation.  God has so presented Himself in creation that it is inconceivable that He cannot be seen in it. We have no excuse for not surrendering to God. Everything that is in us speaks and testifies that there is a greater one than us, to whom we must give an account.  God in His kindness has given us another irrefutable revelation of Himself in our sinful condition and that is the unhappiness of our soul when we do not yet know Him.  And it is by that unhappiness of our soul that we press and we pursue and we demand to have pleasure heaped upon pleasure.  We demand our own understanding.  God is not going to let us be happy because He has designed our soul for eternal happiness and that can only be found in Him and He will not allow us to fasten ourselves to something less than Him and ever find a moment of satisfaction.  But on the contrary, if we are willing to release this life and lay a hold of Him alone who is worthy of all our praise, He will fill us up even if we are absolutely immobile. When you get a hold of that which you think makes you happy, how many times in God’s mercy does He ruin it for us. To Him will be all the glory and praise and honor. 

12. Revelation comes through the law and the prophets.  The revelation of God has been recorded in a written message.  The revelation of the Law tells us that we’re powerless to do good, we’re powerless to please God, that by our own instinct all our efforts are sin. We have no capacity, by our own strength, to do good.  The message from the prophets is an overriding message of promise.  ‘But God, who is rich in mercy, for the great love wherewith He has loved us, by grace you are saved.’  The law and the prophets give us that concluding edge, pointing us to the perilousness of our own nature.  We are sinners.  Prophets and prophecies tell us that we transfer our hope to God, who yet will make the fullness of His will known, and who yet will incorporate us who believe into the riches of His glory. 

13. Revelation comes in a spiritual package as a mystery, and it must be unlocked to the hearer by the Holy Spirit alone.  The understanding of revelation is unlocked by the Holy Spirit; it is not something that you or I can do. Here is where that qualification of love is clarified all the more in a practical sense; we must love God on His terms by the means that He has revealed Himself to us.  It is not possible for us to get a hold of His understanding without first getting a hold of Him in love.  God is the one who reveals to us and He reveals it in His due time, but there needs to be an understanding that there is a leaning towards that understanding; there is a leaning towards that redemption. What do we do when we are waiting for that revelation?  We keep showing up to be served. If your heart is sorrowful, if your understanding is weak, if your perspective is confused, don’t quit just because you are confused.  Keep coming, there is only one place.  If we know where the words are found, let’s show up at God’s door, let’s just keep knocking, let’s be persistent, let us wait on the Lord.  The most significant thing that God raises in His people until heaven comes is learning how to endure the time frame when we don’t have an answer, when we don’t have understanding, and He wants us to endure patiently to the end.  Revelation will come in God’s time.

14. Revelation comes by degrees of growth.  First as milk and later as meat as growth occurs.  There is a need for us to receive a little bit of revelation before we receive a lot.  1 Peter says in chapter 2, “Desire the sincere milk of the Word, that you can grow thereby.’  Sometimes our lack of receiving revelation is our own fault, because we are demanding that we understand it after the carnal mind, after the natural man, and we refuse stubbornly to receive it on any other basis, and so we keep knocking ourselves out of the place of the secrets.  How true it is that the revelation of God that brings us understanding and the very life for our souls, is right at hand and the block to that revelation is the proud, stubborn, insistence that God present Himself to us on our terms according to our understanding on a platter that we approve.  How many of us will stand before God and be pitched into Hell because all of the treasures and all of the opportunities of revelation that have been brought to you because of God’s kindness to you in bringing you into a Christian family, bringing you into a nation where the wealth of the Gospel has been so pronounced for so many years, and yet in the pride and the stubbornness of your heart you have insisted that it be according to your own understanding, and you have rejected the Holy One, and you have cast away the means of understanding because you will not come, you would not come on His terms.  That is the accountability of our soul before God.