Need is the Evidence of Supply

From Norman Grubb's book The Deep Things of God:

"These are the ways by which God makes the evil handmaid to the good, and conditions us for His grace. But He does it, not only by confronting us with the plain facts of the needs and corruption, the miseries and confusion of our fallen estate: He does it also by the chastisements and judgments which 'must begin with the house of God'.

"Examples of these are obvious throughout the Scriptures. Against apostate Israel He sends an agent of the devil, yet calls him 'Nebuchadnezzar, My servant'. Israel is beguiled into the negative kingdom, 'the power of darkness', and worships idols (not-gods) and does evil (not-good) works; she must receive the just recompense of her false (not-true) way of life in misery (not-happiness), slavery (not-freedom), and corruption (not-purity), and learn her hard lesson. At other times the prophets speak of God sending on them His hornets, His army of destroyers (the locusts, caterpillars, etc.), His drought, the Assyrians, rod of His anger. But the prophets always also make clear that God sends them for redemptive, not punitive reasons. By these means Israel will learn, or some of them anyhow, to discern between the false and the true, and the devil's agents will be God's agents in directing the wanderer home with the prodigal's cry: 'How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger.' Often we try to escape the issue by regarding chastisement and judgment as a 'permissive will' of God, as if God was passively allowing the devil to have some of his way, or as if the consequences of disobedience were the outworking of an impersonal law. But the Bible never speaks of it like that. It speaks directly of God saying and doing things which the natural mind roundly condemns as impossible harshness and cruelty in a God who is love, and even the spiritual mind, which has not understanding on this point, will seek to excuse or sidestep. No. It is God, the God of mercy, who hardens the heart of the persistent sinner, who dulls the ear and blinds the eye of the disobedient. The same God who says yes to righteousness must say no to sin. It is God's inevitable dealings with nature in reverse. It is God's grace at work in reverse.

"But it is God's grace. That is the important point. God, being positive love, positive life, positive goodness, can work in no other way than according to His own nature, in determined and unceasing works of grace. He must restore rebel negatives to their predestined estate of submission to their positives: He must overcome evil by good, clothe the corruptible with incorruption, and swallow up mortality in life. This He did, in His 'determinate counsel and foreknowledge', by the One who died to that negative spirit in His death for all who receive Him; replaced it by His own positive Spirit in His resurrection; and in His ascension awaits the day when the last negative (death: not-life) will be put under His feet.

"This means, then, that all the consequences of our wrong ways, which are His deliberate judgments on us, are determined acts of pure grace. They are to open our eyes, teach us our lesson of the goodness of God leading us to repentance, and then to give us the glorious revelation of a life which has already swallowed up death, a goodness which has overcome evil, a sweetness which has dissolved bitterness--in our Lord Jesus Christ. In other words, judgments are pointers to grace, signposts: and not to a grace which has to be sought somewhere or manufactured; but which was there long before the judgments, and the judgments are only the necessary way of getting the grace through to us, conditioning us to accept it.

"Long before there was a condition of need God had completed His work of perfect creation. The fall and its consequences have been an apparently tragic interlude, but that was foreseen and provided for in 'the Lamb without blemish and without spot; who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world'. Therefore, as we have already said, God has always had His fulness in readiness to replace our emptiness, His perfection our imperfections, His light our darkness, His life our death. He has always intended, planned and provided total supply for every human need, and the supply has always been there. It is not that our need initiates the demand for its supply and must somehow call the attention of the Father to it and persuade Him to supply. No indeed. HE initiated the need so that we might find all our supply already there in His and our Christ! The need is the proof that the supply is there, and is merely God's means of conditioning us to be agents of faith. It is God who confronts us with every kind of problem, inability, difficulty, that, in our weakness He may flash the spark of faith into our hearts, His faith, that His supply for exactly that situation was there long before. 'Eat, o friends; drink, yea drink abundantly, o beloved.'

"That is the meaning of parable, and all life is a parable, if we understand it; for a parable is an earthly representation of a heavenly fact. But what fact? It is the story of some human need picturing a spiritual need--the man who fell among thieves, the lost sheep, the prodigal son. But is that all? No, the story always points on to the supply of that need, the provision of grace, of the kingdom of heaven. Parables underline human need as pointers to the One who from eternity has been Supplier of all need. Parables, therefore, are signposts, not to the need which is obvious, but to the One who has brought the need to our attention because He intends to supply it. In this sense, the whole of our human existence is one continuous parable. It is one vast imperfection pointing to the invisible perfection already ours in Christ; one vast confusion pointing to the eternal order in Him. It stirs in all who have eyes to see the longing for that final perfection at His coming, but at the same time it is God's summons to us to receive by faith in the here and now the supplies of so many needs.

"To repeat once more. Can we catch a glimpse of this truth and its effects on our whole outlook? All evil, sin, and their consequences are negatives which have got out of place and made their unlawful appearance in God's universe. The Bible gives them positive names because they are positive facts--the kingdom or power of darkness. But their basic reality is not positive; they are the negatives of their true positives which they have blatantly tried to dethrone and called themselves the positives: thus the creature is in reality the not-Creator, rebellion not-obedience, unbelief not-faith, pain not-pleasure, and so on. God, the eternal positive, the eternal yes, is in process of restoring all to their proper place, the negatives in rightful submission to and union with their positives, their interaction being the basis of the manifestation of the glory of God.

"To bring about His eternal purpose, God gives us to taste and know the bitter fruits of our false negatives by His judgments on all that is the not-good, not-sweet, not-loving, not-selfgiving, not-humble, in our lives, and in the life of the church and the world; but He gives this not for judgment, but to shut us up to His grace, to the salvation and consequent restoration planned in Christ before the false kingdom of negation was in existence. It was fulfilled by Him when He gathered the great negation of humanity, its not-righteousness, into Himself on the cross and took it into His death, and when He arose to be the first-born of the new creation, where the positive and negative are joined in eternal fruitfulness by the union of Christ and the redeemed sinner. This fulfillment is in process of realization by the Spirit working in the world of men, and joining the negatives to their one Positive. Wherever, therefore, the Spirit confronts us with the tragedy and destitution of the not-righteous (the sinners), having first confronted us with our own need, He does it with the express purpose of saying to us with as loud a voice as possible: 'I am come to redeem these falsely opposing negatives and rejoin them to their Positive: the not-righteous (the sinner) to be clothed with righteousness: the not-full (the empty) to be filled. I point out the false negatives to you, just so that you should immediately combine with your outlook which sees the negative, the not-full, not-happy, not-righteous, not-true side of things, the positive outlook of faith which sees ME present to fulfil all need; and the fact that I have shown you the need is my assurance to you that I have come with the supply already in My hands. See Me, believe Me, co-operate with Me, and I will work this work of salvation through the faith I put into you, and your labours of love that go with it.'"