63 - Revelation 3:14

’These things saith the Amen.’ -Revelation 3:14.

We have now considered the Amens of Christ, sixty-two in number; and may appropriately, in conclusion, contemplate him as the Amen. Thus does he designate himself in the last of the epistles to the seven churches: "To the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write, These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true Witness, the beginning of the creation of God."

Christ himself is the Confirmation and the Guarantee not only of all his own words, but of all the words of God. He himself is the faithful and true Witness of God to us, and of God in us. And he himself is (as it should be rendered) the head of the creation of God, supreme over all things. The first expression regards especially the past; the second regards the present; the third the future, looking forward to the time when "all enemies shall be put under his feet," when God "shall put all things in subjection under his feet." But in an important sense, the three ideas are comprehended in the word Amen, since the word by which all the glories of the future are to be spoken into being is already uttered and sealed with the Amens of God.

Christ is the Amen with reference to the Mosaic law. He cheerfully and thoroughly fulfilled the law which the Jews found so burdensome, and which weighed so heavily upon their consciences; not according to the exposition of the Pharisees, but according to the requirements of God. And in his death-hour, on the cross, we hear him exclaim, ’It is finished’. It had waited fifteen centuries for one who should honour it, and magnify it, and conclude it, and it found that one crucified at Calvary. He was the Amen to it; it found its satisfaction in him; and gave way for the higher dispensation of the will of God which regards all people and all ages.

Christ is the Amen with regard to the moral law broken by all mankind; the law that demands whole-hearted, unswerving, self-abnegating love to God and man. We have all sinned and come short of the glory of God; far, very far short of it. But the god of this world failed to interrupt Christ in his divine progress through life, to make him stumble, or to turn him aside. He was in all things all that God required man to be; God’s ideal of humanity was fulfilled in him; "this is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased;" he was "without sin, neither was guile found in his mouth;" thus he is the Amen, the consummation of that holy will of God which Adam violated.

Jesus is the Amen of all the prophecies given of old concerning the blessings to come upon the world through the seed of the woman. He is the Amen of all the prayers breathed by holy men of old, of all their aspirations for the coming of the promised kingdom. But Christ is no more to the world than he is to the individual soul. He does not deal with men in masses. He knocks at the door of every man. And whosoever opens to him, whosoever receives this Saviour, Christ becomes the Amen of that soul: "Know ye not that Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?"

Well, let us look at this. How is Christ my Amen? or God’s Amen to me?

He is the solution of all doubts. How many things seem strange in the word of God to the heart that has not been trained and nurtured in the school of God! How many things are contrary to all our experiences and to all that we have observed in the world! And how many things in the Scriptures seem not reconcilable with each other! How staggering it is to find that God is of such holiness that he cannot look upon iniquity without abhorrence, that heaven is a holy place where sin may not enter, that we are sinners, bound and fettered by sin, and incapable of delivering ourselves, and yet that God would not have us perish! We are utterly without righteousness, and yet without righteousness God will not receive us. Wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God, that through Jesus Christ our Lord there is deliverance. The Amen comes to my heart, there to abide by faith. I have as it were a new white stone given me from heaven, with the ineffable name of God upon it. My doubts are dissolved; my fears are banished; the mystery is cleared up; the paralysis of sin no longer keeps me back from the throne of God. "What the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit."

What if Christ in the believer should be found the Amen of God to the world, the solution of the world’s doubts? "I in them, and thou in me, that the world may believe that thou hast sent me." What is the meaning of the marvellous promises and exhortations addressed to the believer in these seven epistles of the glorified Redeemer? What are we to make of such words as these: He that overcometh and keepeth my words unto the end, to him will I give power over the nations, and he shall rule them with a rod of iron, even the inflexible rod of God’s truth? What is it to overcome in the sense here intended? This is nothing less than the Apocalypse, the revelation of Christ in the believer, when he shall come to be glorified in his saints, and admired in all them that believe. Well, are we competing for this prize?

Let me affectionately ask the reader of these meditations upon the Amens of Christ, whether he knows Christ as the Amen? What will it avail him to have heard and pondered the verily, verily of Christ, if Christ is not the Amen of God in his soul, the Confirmation and the Witness within him, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, by whom he has daily fellowship with the Father, in and through whom his prayers are answered, and who is to him the earnest of the inheritance to which he is looking and pressing forward?

He that receiveth him hath set-to his seal that God is true; and. Christ is thus not only the Amen of God, but the Amen of the believer. The verily of God is met in him by the verily of the believer. Verily, says God in Christ; verily, says the believer in Christ; and thus we reach the full significance of the VERILY, VERILY of Christ.