The Living God

(In the New Testament)

The Name of the living God is found in the Old Testament as well as in the New, and it not only brings out the contrast between the true God and the idols of the heathen, but also presents God as the originator of all things and as livingly interested in His creation. In the New Testament there are fresh revelations connected with the Name of the living God, and some of these we shall consider; but it is the same God that spoke in times past to the fathers of Israel by the prophets who has been fully revealed in the Person of the Son.

“The Son of the living God”

When Jesus asked His disciples, “Whom do men say that I the Son of Man am?” (Matt. 16:13) there was the implied claim that He was the One spoken of in Psalm 8 and other Old Testament Scriptures; but the reply of Peter, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God,” was not what he had learned from Psalm 2, even though Jesus is seen there as God’s anointed and God’s Son. Peter’s knowledge had been received by revelation from the Father who sent the Son, and it implied something more than the relationship of Jesus as God’s Son to His people Israel. The Father had clearly revealed to Peter that His own Son was upon the earth, and He was the promised Messiah.

Jesus then said to Peter, “Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood has not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven” (verse 17). Now the Son of God tells Peter that the living God, of whom he had spoken, was none other than His Father which is in heaven. In the Son upon earth there was the revelation of the Father, even as the Lord had said in chapter 11, “Neither knows any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him” (verse 27). The living God in the Old Testament had been known to Abraham as the Almighty, and to Israel as Jehovah; now He is made known by and in the Son as Father.

As the Christ, the Son of the living God, Jesus would build His assembly, a divine structure against which the gates of hell would have no power. It is of this building that Peter speaks in the second chapter of his First Epistle. It is a spiritual house, composed of living stones, and these are “an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ,” and “a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people” (verses 5–9). This building has Christ as the Chief Corner Stone, the One rejected by Israel, but who is chosen of God, and precious.

“The Spirit of the living God”

“My assembly” of which the Lord speaks in Matthew 16 is spoken of the church in its completeness, but in 2 Corinthians 3, it is the local assembly that is addressed. The Son of the living God was forming a spiritual house of living stones; the Spirit of the living God was writing upon the hearts of living men to produce a testimony for God in the lives of His people. The saints at Corinth were Christ’s epistle, known and read of all men, for Christ had been written upon their hearts, and what is written on the heart is what is manifest in the life.

Paul and his companions were the instruments used to speak God’s word at Corinth, but the work in the heart was that of the Spirit of God, and what He wrote could never be erased. Every true believer has Christ written on his heart by the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit of God delights to deepen in the heart what He has impressed of Christ there. Many things may be allowed into the heart to obscure the Spirit’s writing, and so weaken our testimony to Christ; but the work of the Holy Spirit in the heart is an eternal work that nothing can eradicate.

Men write their epistles with ink, but God writes by His Spirit. The law was written on tables of stone by the finger of God, but there is no response from a stone. God, the living God, has been writing on our hearts that there might be a living response to Himself in our lives, that which sets forth Christ to men, and that which brings pleasure and praise to God. What is written in ink fades with time, what is written by the Spirit is eternal.

“The church of the living God”

The view that we have of the church in 1 Timothy 3:15 is quite different from that of Matthew 16 and 1 Peter 2, for “the pillar and ground of the truth” where we should know to behave ourselves in the church in its responsible character. God has set up the church in this world to be a testimony to the truth that is seen in Christ, and each believer in the Lord Jesus, indeed, every one who professes faith in Him, is called upon to answer to the behaviour consistent with the profession of His Name. Men are to pray everywhere, women are to manifest by their dress the piety they profess, bishops are to be blameless, and deacons are to rule their children and their own houses well.

In the temple there had been two pillars, Jachin and Boaz, testifying “He will establish,” and “In Him is strength” (1 Kings 7:21). The church of the living God is to be a testimony to God and His truth, what Christ is written clearly in the lives of His people in all their ways. This is a testimony not only in words, but supported by the practical life in contact with the men of this world.

The secret of the piety that belongs to the true church of God is found in the Person of Christ, who “was manifest in the flesh…believed on in the world, received up into glory” (verse 16). There could never have been a living testimony to God in this world had not the Son of God come into manhood, revealing what the living God is. The life of Jesus was constantly energised by the Spirit of God, and witnessed by the heavenly hosts. Preaching has brought the Gentiles who have believed the Gospel into richest divine blessing, and they with believing Jews now form “the house of God, which is the church of the living God.”

“The city of the living God”

We have seen the church as that which Christ builds, which all the power of Satan cannot harm, and the church in its responsible witness as the pillar and base of the truth; now in Hebrews 12 we view it as God’s city, a city not composed of dead material, but where every one who forms part of it has the life of God. It is a living city, the heavenly Jerusalem, and it is the divine centre from which the living God, the Judge of all, administers the world to come.

While on earth the saints had been “the temple of the living God” (2 Cor. 6:16), God’s dwelling place, where there was the light of the knowledge of the glory of God that shone in the face of Jesus Christ; but now the church, having been rapt to heaven, displays the light of the divine glory it had known on earth. While on earth, the saints had been brought into relationship with God, according to the prophecy of Hosea, and were “the sons of the living God,” while retaining this relationship (Rom. 9:24-26), they would be as a city from which their God would rule publicly among the nations of the earth in the Millennium.

“We trust in the living God”

Paul had been telling Timothy that “godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come” (1 Tim. 4:8), then says that this is a saying to be relied on, and worthy to be accepted in its every part. Because we live in view of our coming life with Christ in glory we are prepared to “labour and suffer reproach,” and how much labour and reproach came to Paul and his companions in their testimony for Christ.

Then Paul added, “Because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour (or Preserver) of all men, specially of those that believe.” In labour and conflict for Christ, with the future in view, the saint and servant of the Lord trusts in a God who is intensely interested in all that is taking place in this world. God is not indifferent to what men are and are doing in the world He has brought into being. There are great spiritual forces working that would fain destroy all that God has brought into being in this world; but God will not allow His enemy and ours to go beyond the limits of His permission, which are set in His infinite wisdom, and controlled by His infinite power.

All men are preserved by a beneficent creator, but the preserving hand of the living God, or our God and Father, guards in a special way those who believe in Him and in His dear Son. From the beginning of time, God has watched over this world, for it was here He was to work out His eternal counsels to secure His eternal glory and purposes of love. But, as Scripture shows, those who have had faith in Him have been the special objects of His care, and knowing this, our confidence and trust is in Him at all times. When dark clouds hover over this poor world, how good it is for Christians to be in the good of the truth brought before us in 1 Timothy 4:10.

“To serve the living God”

The saints at Thessalonica “turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God,” and while serving, to wait for His Son from heaven, who would deliver them from the wrath of God that is to be poured upon a guilty world that crucified His Son, and still rejects Him (1 Thess. 1:9-10). How great is this privilege! The Christian serves a God who takes the fullest account of all that is transpiring, being acquainted with all our thoughts, words and deeds, and with all we have to meet in this path of service. The resources of the living God are ever available to those who serve Him, which makes us altogether independent of the hostile world through which we pass.

In Hebrews 9 we learn that the great work accomplished by the Lord Jesus Christ had in view our service to God. The sacrifices of the old covenant could never take our sins away, but the precious blood of Christ, foreshadowed in these sacrifices has purged our consciences from “dead works to serve the living God” (verses 12–14). The service specially in view here is the worship of God, worship in spirit and in truth, that could only be procured by the work of the Lord Jesus on the cross, and the gift of the Holy Spirit who dwells in those who believe in Christ, and who indwells the house of God.

The writer to the Hebrews warned those to whom he wrote, “Take heed brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God” (3:12), for “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (10:31). Paul and Barnabas exhorted the men of Lystra, who would have sacrificed to them, to turn from their “vanities unto the living God” (Acts 14:15), and this is what the Thessalonians did.

“I adjure thee by the living God”

How very solemn it was to hear the rulers of Israel adjure Jesus by the living God to tell them whether He was “the Christ, the Son of God,” then to spitefully ill use Him, spitting on Him, and condemning Him as guilty of death for having answered the voice of adjuration. The leaders of Israel were blind in their unbelief, refusing the confession of Jesus and His solemn warning, “Hereafter shall ye see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven” (Matt. 26:63-64). The divine revelations concerning the Son and the Father were hid from the wise and prudent, the leaders of Israel, but made known unto babes, the disciples of the Lord, for so was the Father’s good pleasure.

“The seal of the living God”

If the sentence “Lo-ammi,” not my people, rests on Israel now, the day is surely coming, according to Hosea, when they shall be called the children of the living God. With this is view, a remnant of Israel is sealed with “the seal of the living God” (Rev. 7:2). Twelve thousand of each tribe are sealed, claimed by God, to be preserved for Him, as His righteous judgments fall on the guilty nations of the earth and on those who follow antichrist. The living God will have His elect in heaven, praising God and the Lamb there, but He will also have His elect on earth, waiting for the coming Messiah.

R. 4.7.66.