J N Darby gave a series of eleven significant lectures in Geneva in 1840 on the Hope of the Church (L’attente actuelle de l’église). These established his reputation as a leading interpreter of biblical prophecy, and the basis of dispensational and premillennial and pre-trib teaching. The beliefs he disseminated then are still being propagated (in various forms) at such places as Dallas Theological Seminary and by authors and preachers such as Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye.
The Present Hope of the Church – An easy-to-read Summary
J N Darby gave a series of eleven significant lectures in Geneva in 1840 on the Present Hope of the Church (L’attente actuelle de l’église). These established his reputation as a leading interpreter of biblical prophecy, and the basis of dispensational and pre-millennial tribulation (or ‘pre-trib’) teaching. Central to this is the rapture – Chriist’s coming momentarily to call His own who are alive on the earth, when the dead in Christ are raised. This is clearly described in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 and 1 Corinthians 15:51-52 , and The beliefs he disseminated then are still being propagated (in various forms) at such places as Dallas Theological Seminary and by authors and preachers such as Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye.
JND said as to prophecy: “In going through the more general features of prophecy, we shall examine these three great subjects: the church; the nations; and the Jews.” (JN Darby Collected Writings vol 2 Prophetic 1 page 281). God made Himself known as Jehovah to the Jews. The prophets showed God’s character as Jehovah. Jesus is presented as the Messiah, the centre of God’s promises and blessings to the Jewish nation. To the Church, God presents Himself as ‘Father’ and Jesus as the ‘Son of God’. We are His brethren – children of God and members of His family. He, the Firstborn, is the expression of all the glory of the Father.
In the dispensation of the fullness of times, when God will gather together all things in Christ, that name under which He has been celebrated by Melchisedec (a type of the Royal Priest), God will be known as “the most high God, possessor of heaven and earth.” (Gen 14:19)
‘…We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts: knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.’ ( 2 Peter 1:19-21.)
Every Christian should not only be sure of his salvation in Christ, but also know its results. He should not only know he is in the Father’s house with all its privileges but be happy there too. In prophecy God treats us as His friends, and reveals the things He is occupied with. As our hearts are associated with Him, they realise His love and confidence. Our lives therefore are coloured by the expectation of what is to come. With this holy knowledge they would be strangers and pilgrims here. Being free of human objects, cares and distractions we can be dependent on the One who knows the end from the beginning.
We need to distinguish between that which applies to the Jews, relating to the earth, and that which applies to the Church.
Whilst prophecy proves the divine source of the Bible, that is not its main purpose. Prophecy belongs to the Church now and the Remnant in a future day, as a light or torch before things take place. God tells us the truth; Satan does not. Do we doubt God? Surely we do not need witnesses to persuade us that God is telling the truth.
Satan has deceived many by introducing the thought that partially fulfilled prophecies, were in fact complete. They miss — no scope of prophecy.
Most, if not all prophecy is to be fulfilled after the end of this dispensation. Then it will be too late to be convinced as to the truth. Those left will experience terrible judgment. But I read God’s word am restful. I am enlightened as I cleave to Him instead of my own understanding. As things unfold I seethe purposes of the most High, opening up His character – His faithfulness, justice, long-suffering. But He will certainly judge proud iniquity and execute vengeance on these who corrupt the earth, so that His government may be established in peace and blessing.
The judgment of God is to come upon the nations; the church is informed of this; and, thanks to the teaching of the Holy Spirit, understands it, believes it, and escapes the things which are coming.
The Skeptic as to Prophecy
The skeptic views prophecy as merely speculative, vague and uninfluential, the imaginations and vainglory of proud hearts. The skeptic’s own thoughts are the most speculative. How Satan deceives! But prophecy reveals God’s thoughts as to things to come. And the Christian rejoices that “the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea” (Hab 2:14). And God will show how.
Communion with God as to Prophecy
Through communion, which is eternal, God comforts and sanctifies us to prevent our hopes being vague. Thank God “we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received from God the Father honour and glory, when there came such a voice to him from the excellent glory, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. And this voice which came from heaven we heard, when we were with him in the holy mount.
We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts: Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” (2 Peter 1:16-21)
The Bible says that Jesus has “made peace by the blood of the cross”, (Col 1:20) but I have not got peace in myself. How can I have it? I sometimes think I do not believe at all. You are happy; how can I be? A few who enjoy divine favour, but I don’t know how to get it. I’m distressed; I get on from day to day as other Christians do, but I know that I am not at peace. That is a serious thing, because it says “being justified by faith, we have peace with God,” (Rom 5:1). Now, if I have not got peace with God, I am probably not justified either.
You clearly do not then think it presumptuous to be at peace with God. But, although you are in earnest, you do not have the true knowledge of justification by faith. I do not say you are not justified in God’s sight, but in your conscience you do not possess of it. In God’s sight, whoever believes in the Son of God is justified from all things. But till he appreciates the value of Christ’s work, he does not have the consciousness of it in his own soul. Sadly, Christian activity has deteriorated and become a kind of business of getting happy, so souls are not energised in the power of the Spirit. Therefore they are not at peace.
If a person is really serious, he cannot rest in spirit until he is at peace with God. Christ’s work is finished. He “appeared once in the end of the world to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself;” (Heb 9:26) and He finished the work which his Father gave him to do. (See John 17:4). His work put away our sin, and is completely and for ever and accepted by God.
I recognise that, but I still sin. I feel I am in an ungodly state and I should be holy.
Of course you need to be holy, “without holiness no man shall see the Lord.” (Heb 12:14) But in your instinctive self-righteousness, you turn from Christ’s work to your own holiness. That is natural. Some people are indifferent: they have a false peace.
Are you looking for an improved state of soul to find peace?
I am indifferent sometimes, and that troubles me. I have not peace, and I would give anything for it. Yes, I need a better state of soul.
Then you are on the wrong road. Christ’s “having made peace” applies to your ungodliness. Your desire is right, but you are putting the cart before the horse – you are looking for holiness to get Christ, instead of looking to Christ to get holiness.
Are you lost?
I hope not. Of course we are lost by nature; but I hope there is a work of grace in me, though I sometimes doubt it. If I were to stand before God now, where would I be? I hope everything would be alright. I believe that there is a work of grace in me, but I cannot think of judgment without fear.
I do not doubt that there is a work of grace in you. You should have no fear how you will be judged at the judgment seat of Christ. What really plagues an upright soul is his actual sins and his sinful nature — in short, the discovery of what he is.
Here is the turning-point of our inquiry: What you need is to be in God’s presence, knowing that you are simply lost! A sinner cannot subsist before God in judgment. Nothing can help you. You don’t need help; you need righteousness, and that you have not got, at lest in your own faith and conscience.
The case of the prodigal son (Luke 15) will illustrate this. There was a work of God in him; he came to himself, found himself perishing, and set out to return to his father. He acknowledges his sins, adding “make me as one of thy hired servants.” That looked good: there was uprightness, a sense of divine goodness, and a sense of sin, and he was thinking of what he could hope for when returning to his father. You could call it a humble hope. But he didn’t really know his father! It is as if he had never met God, though God had worked in him. When he did meet his father there is no word of his being like the hired servants. He confessed his sins, and came in rags (the effect of his sins) to his father. But the effect was that he met God. As to his conscience, in his sins, everything was settled; his father fell on his neck — grace reigned — and he was given the best robe. He had nothing before; he now had the righteousness of God conferred on him..
When in God’s presence, we need Christ, righteousness and justification through Him. We do not need progress, help or improvement. The only progress was to bring us into God’s presence. We find Christ, who bore our sins, to be our perfect, absolute, and eternal righteousness. And we have peace.
God condemned sin in the flesh, when Christ was made an offering for it (Rom. 8:3). We are therefore, not “in the flesh,” but “in Christ.” Instead of Adam and his sins, we have Christ and the value of His work. Things have been settled once and for all, for ever, on the cross.
How then should I approach God?
Come to God like Abel, with the sacrifice in your hand. God assesses its value; you will have the testimony that you are righteous: your offering is a witness to that. Your acceptance before God is according to the value of Christ’s sacrifice in God’s sight. It has nothing to do with or of any improvement in your state. You come with your slain lamb – that is Christ. God looks at that; He does not look at your state, because you are a sinner, and being such, otherwise shut out from God.
But must I not accept Christ?
You keep saying, “But must not I?” I am not surprised; I am not criticising you; it is human nature, but you have to see that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: (Rom 7:18). The real question is not about accepting Him, but whether God has really presented Christ to you, and you have eternal life in Him. A simple soul would say, “Accept! I am only too thankful to have Him!” but unfortunately we are not all that simple. God has done everything for you in grace. God has been satisfied with the offering. Aren’t you?
Oh! I see it now. Christ has done the whole work, and God has accepted it, and there can be no more question as to my guilt or righteousness. He is the righteousness for me before God. That is wonderful, and yet so simple! But why did I not see it? How stupid I have been!
You say you have been stupid. But what you were looking for? — Christ, or holiness in yourself and a better state of soul?
Holiness and a better state of soul.
No wonder you did not see Christ. You were not submitting to God’s righteousness. Instead, in pride, you were seeking to be satisfied with your own state and find peace there. You were just asking Christ to help you in your own self-righteousness! Christ has not only borne our sins, He has closed the whole history of the old man in death for those who believe: they having been crucified with Him. Furthermore, He has glorified God in this work (John 12: 31, 33; 17:4, 5), and so obtained a place of present acceptance for man in the glory of God. That is our place before God. We are sanctified, or set apart, to God by His blood. We possess His life, or have Him as our life, and we have the Holy Spirit. We are not our own, but bought with a price, and nothing inconsistent with His blood, and the price of it, and the power of it in our hearts, marks us as Christians.
In the Old Testament, when a leper was cleansed, in addition to the sacrifice, the blood was put on the tips of his ear, his thumb, and his great toe. Every thought and action which cannot pass the test of that blood, is excluded from the Christian’s walk. So the precious blood, and the love Christ showed in shedding His blood, is the motive, and the Holy Spirit is the power for our walking in devotion, as Christ walked. If we are in Christ, Christ is in us; and we know it by the Comforter (John 14), the life of Jesus is to be manifested in our mortal body.
That is a very high standard!
But that is what scripture says, “He that saith he abideth in him ought to . . . walk even as he walked.” (1 John 2:6). God has Christ as the model. He is the expression of what is divine in a man. Otherwise one might say that complete grace and assurance leaves us liberty to do as we like. If we are completely saved, what is the use of works? That is a dreadful principle: it is as if we have no motive but “getting saved”. Say somebody told us that a man’s children were exempt from obligation because they were his children? I should say that they were under obligation, because they were his children.
Before we were Christians we were not under the obligation of living as Christians. We were under the obligation to live as men ought to live, according to the law. Now we are children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. And our duties are the duties in love of God’s children. We may fail, but here the advocacy of Christ comes in. Advocacy is not the means of our obtaining righteousness; Christ’s has already made the propitiation for our sins. We don’t go to Him in order for Him to advocate, because he will already have interceded for us. Christ prayed for Peter, even before he had even committed the sin.
Let’s go further. We know God in love, and are reconciled to Him We have communion with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ.
Does that mean we have common thoughts and joys and feelings with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ?
That is communion. We have to seek that Christ may dwell in our hearts by faith, being rooted and grounded in love. (Eph 3:17). Even though we may be poor feeble creatures, the Holy Spirit dwells in us, so our thoughts, joys and feelings, cannot be discordant with those of the Father and the Son.
All this is new to me; I am brought into such a different world! If this is true, where are we all? But there is a passage which I don’t understand. We are told to ‘Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith” (2 Cor 13:5) . What you have said, it seems to me, sets this aside.
We are told to do no such thing, though many a sincere soul is honestly doing it. The words are part of a sentence The sentence starts: “Since ye seek a proof of Christ speaking in me,” . . . then a parenthesis . . . “examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith.” It is a taunt. The Corinthians had called in question Christ’s speaking in Paul, and the reality of his apostleship, so he really says “You had better examine yourselves; how did you become Christians?
Now for something else. We read in 1 John 5:11 “that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath life.” Between this life and the flesh there is no common ground. “The flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh;” (Gal 5:17) – they are totally contrary to one another. The scripture continues, “But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law”. You had been trying to find signs of life in yourself with only a general apprehension of the goodness of God, strengthened by the knowledge that Christ died. It left you with a better hope; at least, when you looked at the cross you saw what you needed as a sinner. Still you looked for something better in yourself: you could not say you possessed everything you needed in the cross. You were fearful of judgement because of your state. You did not really know redemption. Life is not redemption. Both belong to the believer, but they are different things. What unites these two truths is in the resurrection of Christ. We are dead with Him. Then we are raised, and then quickened. The full power of life is seen in resurrection. We do not have just eternal life, but deliverance out of the state we were in, and entrance into another. The price was in redemption.
Before our conversation, you were redeemed, of course. And God had wrought in you in grace, but you were looking at this in view of a God of judgment, with glimpses of divine love, but you had not faith in accomplished redemption.
Well, while the old foundation remains, what you have said has put Christianity in quite a different way. I am now clear as to the ground of my peace. But you would make us out-and-out Christians, dead, as you say, to the world and everything.
The truth is, the great body of true sincere Christians are as those without, hoping it will be all right when they get in; instead of being within and showing what is there to the world, as the epistle of Christ. The new man cannot have his objects here. We are crucified to the world, and the world to us; and so we have crucified the flesh with its affections and lusts.
But we still have to remember that the flesh lusts against the Spirit, so we need vigilance. We are told to work out our salvation with fear and trembling (Phil 2:12). That is not because our place is uncertain, but because God works in us. It is a serious thing to maintain God’s cause when the flesh is in us. Satan uses all the resources of the world to hinder and deceive us. But do not be discouraged, for God works in you; greater is He that is in us than he that is in the world. (1 John 4:4). The secret is lowliness of heart and the sense of dependence, and looking to Christ with confidence. He has saved us and called us with a holy calling. You cannot trust yourself too little, and you cannot trust God too much. The true knowledge of redemption brings us into perfect peace, and a true and constant dependence on the Redeemer.
We have been taught to rely on God’s promises and trust them for our salvation.
Trusting God’s promises is right: and there are most precious promises too. But tell me, is it a promise that Christ shall come and die and rise again?
No: He came; He died, and is now risen at God’s right hand.
So it cannot be a promise, because it is an accomplished fact.
To help us on our journey onward, there are many and cherished promises. “I will never leave thee nor forsake thee.” (Heb 13:5) “God… will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able.” (1 Cor 10:13) “No man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand.” (John 10:29) “Who will also confirm you unto the end, that ye may be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Cor 1:8). I could cite others.
We know God Himself only through Christ. If I know Him, I know Him as God our Saviour; as one who has not spared His Son, as one who raised Christ from the dead after He had had taken our sins. In a word, I not only believe in Christ, but in Him who has given Christ and owned His work; who has given glory to man in Him; as a God who has come to save, not to judge me. I believe in Him, by Christ. I know no other God but that. I do wait for a promise, the redemption of the body. That will be the full result of His work.
Christianity gives us a known relationship, in peace and love. Love is the spring of all. He first loved us. We find our joy in Him; we love others, as partaking of God’s nature, for Christ is dwelling in our hearts, and love constrains us.
You make a Christian a wonderful person in the world; but we are very weak for such a place.
I could never make him in my words what God has made him in His. As to weakness, the more we feel it, the better. Christ’s strength is made perfect in our weakness.
1. All through this desert dry
My path His footsteps trace,
And He doth all my need supply
In this sad, empty place.
Up to the Father there
Doth He attract my heart –
Doth make this earth a desert drear,
And draw me quite apart.
2 In Christ I find repose,
Nor follow Him in vain;
My soul no loss nor sorrow knows
When He Himself’s my gain.
Though long and hard the road,
Faith’s eyes are on the goal;
He uses trials for my good,
And thus preserves my soul.
3 Thus joyful, bright and free,
I take the heav’nly road;
My soul vibrates with melody,
My song is ever – God!
To Thee I have recourse
When sorrow fills my soul;
Thy staff and rod are my resource,
To comfort and console.
4 O what amazing grace
To know Thee here below!
To this great end my steps I trace,
And onward, upward go.
Thy face I soon shall see,
O mighty Saviour, there;
I have in Thee full victory,
And shall Thy glory share.
Little Flock Hymnbook 1962/1973 No 228
Thought to have been written by John Nelson Darby in French and translated.