Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation | Page 2

a Christ sent to save them.
"O love of the sheep, O watch in the night, And the glory, the message, the choir; 'Twas shepherds who saw their King in the straw, And returned with their hearts all on fire.
"When Christ thought to tell of His love to the world He said to the throng before him, 'The Good Shepherd giveth His life for the sheep--' And away to the cross they bore Him.
"O love of the sheep, O blood sweat of prayer, O man on the cross, God-forsaken; A shepherd has gone to defend all alone The sheepfold by death overtaken.
"When God sought a King for His people, for aye, He went to the grave to find him; And a shepherd came back, Death dead in His grasp, And a following flock behind Him.
"O love of the sheep, O life from the dead, O strength of the faint and the fearing; A shepherd is King, and His Kingdom will come. And the day of His coming is nearing."[1]
Coronation Gift.
Christ is crowned. Not in any vague far-fetched meaning, but in the plain common-sense meaning of the word, He is crowned.
For crowned means put in the place of highest power, with full right to exercise that power at will. And when the crucified Jesus went up that Olivet day, before the astonished eyes of the disciples, into the sightless blue, on the cloud, He was received in the upper world by the Father. And He was lifted up into the place of highest honour and greatest power. He sat down at the right hand of the Father.[2]
He had said it would be so. Breathing the air thick with bitter hate on the night of His trial, He had quietly said to the Jewish rulers that even so it would be, bringing at once about His person the bursting of the storm of hate.[3] Now His unfaltering trust in His Father has its sweet reward.
The Holy Spirit poured out on Pentecost, the birthday of the Church, was the gift of the crowned Christ. The rushing sound as of a mighty wind that filled all the house, the tongues of flame plainly seen, the bold talking to the crowds of foreign Jews of God's mighty power, the faithful witnessing about the crucified Jesus in the city that hounded Him to death, the convinced crowds openly declaring at the peril of their lives their belief in the despised Jesus, the strangely rare unselfishness even in money matters, and the winsome graciousness of spirit that marked, not only the inner circle, but these greatly increased crowds,--all this said one thing in clear unanswerable tones of unmistakable power, Christ is crowned.[4] For the sending down of the Holy Spirit was the act of the crowned Christ.
And every touch of the Holy Spirit's presence within trusting hearts,--the sweet peace, the quiet assurance, the longing for purity, the drawing away to prayer, the hunger for God's Word, the intense desire to have others saved, the passion to please this wondrous God of ours,--all these simple marks of the Holy Spirit's presence in our hearts, all tell us, and each tells us, in unmistakable tones, that Christ is crowned. For this wondrous Spirit within is the gift of the crowned Christ.
When Jesus went up from the earth, holding as His sure captive the captivity of suffering and death to which He had with such great strength yielded, He received gifts, coronation gifts. The Father gave Him all. He gave Him the disposal and control of all. This was the crowning.
And in His great out-reaching love Christ received these gifts on behalf of men, His blood brothers. And at once He gave to men, to His trusting disciples, the all-inclusive gift, the Holy Spirit, His coronation gift.[5] So God came anew to dwell with men as originally planned.
This blessed Presence within tells me, by His mere presence, that Christ is crowned.
The writers of the New Testament make a chorus of sweet music on this chord, ringing out in clear tones the full notes of delight and joy. Luke's simple narrative sounds the note four times. Paul swells it out with a joyous fulness that grows in volume and intensity as his narrowing prison walls shut out more and more the lower lights, and centres his upward gaze upon Jesus, "far above all rule, and authority, and power, and dominion, and every name that is named," with "all things in subjection under His feet."[6] John's special companion and working partner, Peter, makes this note blend with and dominate the minor chord of suffering for Christ's sake.[7]
The Christian Hebrew who wrote so eloquently to his fellow-countrymen of the immense superiority of Jesus and so modestly withheld his own name, strikes this note five times with strong, clear touch.[8] He quotes that Eighth Psalm,