Oh That God Would Come Down — Charles Leiter

Isaiah 63, and we'll begin reading with verse 15. Look down from heaven, and see from Thy holy and glorious habitation, where are Thy zeal and Thy mighty deeds? The stirrings of Thy heart and Thy compassion are restrained toward Me.

For Thou art our Father, though Abraham does not know us, and Israel does not recognize us. Thou, O Lord, art our Father, our Redeemer, from of old is Thy name. Why, O Lord, dost Thou cause us to stray from Thy ways, and harden our heart from fearing Thee?

Return, for the sake of Thy servants, the tribes of Thy heritage. Thy holy people possess Thy sanctuary. For a little while, our adversaries have frodden it down. We have become like those over whom Thou has never ruled, like those who were not called by Thy name.

O, that Thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains might quake at Thy presence, as fire kindles the brushwood, as fire causes water to boil. To make Thy name known to Thine adversaries, that the nations may tremble at Thy presence.

When Thou didst awesome things which we did not expect, Thou didst come down, the mountains quaked at Thy presence. For from of old they have not heard nor perceived by ear, neither has the eye seen a God besides Thee who acts in behalf of the one who waits for Him.

Thou dost meet Him who rejoices in doing righteousness, who remembers Thee in Thy ways. Behold, Thou wast angry, for we sinned. We continued in them a long time. And shall we be saved? For all of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment.

And all of us wither like a leaf, and our iniquities like the wind take us away. And there's no one who calls on Thy name who arouses himself to take hold of Thee. For Thou hast hidden Thy face from us and has delivered us into the power of our iniquities.

The verses that I would like for us to consider this evening are verses 1 to 4 of chapter 64. And they make up what is surely one of the most glorious prayers in all of Scripture. Oh, that Thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains might quake, that the mountains might flow down at Thy presence.

Isaiah’s Prayer for God to Come Down

So I want to speak this evening, Lord willing, on the subject of God coming down. And I've read a little bit of the larger context just to give you a feel for the original setting of this prayer. The prayer comes at a time when Israel has sinned and is under the judgment of God for its sins.

And the prophet says in verse 7 that God had hidden His face from them and had delivered them into the power of their iniquities. And back in verse 19 of chapter 63, says, We have become like those over whom Thou hast never ruled, like those who were not called by Thy name.

So Isaiah cries out for God to do once again what He has done in the past of Israel's history. And he says in verse 3 of chapter 64, When Thou didst awesome things, which we did not expect, Thou didst come down, the mountains quaked at Thy presence.

That was something that had happened. When did God do that? When did He do awesome things? Well, surely one time was back when He took the children of Israel out of Egypt, out from the power of Pharaoh and the power of Egypt.

He certainly did awesome things during that time. The God of the Hebrews, through these insignificant men, Moses and Aaron, came to the most powerful man in the world at that time with the most powerful empire.

And these two little men stood there before him and said, Thus says the God of Israel, let my people go. And so God laid claim on these people. They're my people. Think of this, saying this to the most powerful man in the world.

They're my people, let them go, that they might worship me. And as the Scripture says, He did this with a mighty arm and an outstretched hand. He did awesome things. You know, Pharaoh's first response was, Who is this Lord?

I don't know the Lord. Isn't that quite a statement? I don't know the Lord. Well, he didn't know the Lord. And he said, I'm not going to let the people go. But after all those plagues were over, he was glad to see them go out.

And God delivered his people with mighty signs and awesome wonders from the land of Egypt. And once the people were delivered, he came down on Mount Sinai. Hebrews 12, it says, He came in the midst of blazing fire and darkness and gloom and whirlwind and a sight so terrible that Moses said, I exceedingly fear and tremble.

Moses was quaking. And according to Exodus 19, it says there were thunder and lightning flashes and a thick cloud upon the mountain and a very loud trumpet sound so that all the people who were in the camp trembled.

Mount Sinai was all in smoke. What? Listen to this. Because the Lord descended, He came down upon it. The Lord descended upon it. In fire. And its smoke ascended like the smoke of a furnace and the whole mountain quaked violently.

When thou didst come down, the mountains quaked, the mountains flowed down. So God had come down before in the history of Israel, and Isaiah was asking Him to do it again. Now, beloved, God answered Isaiah's prayer, but He did it in a way that they looked not for.

Thou didst awesome things which we did not expect in the past. Nobody had any idea what God was going to do to deliver the people out of Egypt. And nobody had any idea how God was going to ultimately answer this prayer of Isaiah.

The Incarnation and Pentecost as God’s Answer

He's asking God to come down. God came down. He came down in the person of His Son. He came down from above into this fallen world and invaded human history in the person of His Son. And Malachi 3 .1 says, The Lord whom you seek shall suddenly come to His temple, even the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, but who can abide the day of His coming?

He's like a refiner's fire. And when the Lord Jesus came, He was like that. But He didn't stay in this world. He ascended to heaven and a few weeks later, God came down in a more abiding way when He came down in the person of the Holy Spirit.

God came down. Who is the Holy Spirit? He's God. God came down on the day of Pentecost to abide with the church forever. Acts 2, Peter's quoting from Joel. He says, It shall be in the last days, God says, that I will pour forth of My Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.

And even upon My bondservants and My handmaidens will I pour out of My Spirit in those days, and they shall prophesy. And He says, I will grant wonders in the sky above and signs on the earth beneath, blood and fire and vapor of smoke.

The sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood before the great and glorious day of the Lord shall come. And it shall be that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. Now that's God doing great and awesome things which they looked not for and did not expect.

And it's God coming down and the mountains quaking and flowing down in His presence. Beloved, the new covenant coming of the Holy Spirit was God's answer to Isaiah's prayer for God to come down. He came down in a far more powerful and more wonderful way.

On the day of Pentecost, He came down in a far more wonderful way than He ever came down when He came down with a bunch of fire and lightning and all those things on Mount Sinai. In the new covenant, God comes and puts His Spirit within people.

He regenerates their hearts. He writes His law on the inside instead of on the outside. And He pours out His Spirit upon them to empower them to do impossible things. Think of the words of the Lord Jesus.

He said, In that day you shall know that I am in you and you in me and I am the Father. He says, He that believes in Me, the works that I do, shall he do also in greater works than these shall he do. Why?

Because I go to the Father. God doesn't come down on the physical mountains anymore, but He does still come down. And when He does, the mountains flow down at His presence. It's the coming of the Holy Spirit by which God answers Isaiah's prayer and solves the problems of backsliding and backslidden Israel and puts His law on the inside and has a new covenant people who won't turn away from Him.

Well, I want to speak to you then on verses 1 -4 on the subject of God coming down. Oh, that thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down that the mountains might quake at your presence. And the first thing that I want you to notice is this.

God’s Sovereign Activity in the Outpouring of the Spirit

Very simple, but very profound. And that is that when God comes down, God is the one who is acting. God is the one who is coming down. Well, that's pretty simple. Isaiah is asking God to do something.

He's asking God to intervene. He's asking God to rend the heavens and come down. Now, this prayer has to do with God's activity, not man's. It has to do with God's presence and person, not man's. We're dealing with something objective here, and I want to belabor this some because it will help you to understand there's so much confusion in relation to the work of the Holy Spirit.

If we can lay hold of this, this has to do with God doing something from the outside, objective to ourselves. God comes to us from the outside, and all this is a result of God's activity. When God comes down, God's the one coming down.

He's the one acting. And we see this so clearly on the day of Pentecost. I don't know if you want to turn to it or not, but I'll read it to you. In Acts chapter 2, it said, now we're talking about the activity of God.

In Acts chapter 2 and verse 1, it says, "...when the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place, and suddenly there came from heaven a noise like a violent rushing wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting.

And there appeared to them tongues as of fire distributing themselves, and they rested on each one of them, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit was giving them utterance.".

Notice the activity of God here. It's everywhere in this. This is not man reaching up to God. This is God coming down to man. This is not man giving himself more fully to God. This is God giving himself more fully to man.

Now, I'm going to develop this a little as we go along, but just listen to these things, this thought. This is not man taking something, quote, taking something by faith. This is God giving something that man does not expect and does not look for.

Notice how objective, how given, how outside of man this all is. It happens suddenly. Suddenly there came, all right? They're here. They're waiting. Suddenly there comes from the outside, from heaven, a noise, a sound like a violent rushing wind.

Objective, and it fills the whole house and there appears these tongues of fire. We're dealing with something objective that comes from the outside that God has initiated. And if we're looking for terminology for this, it's what the Bible calls an outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit comes down. He's poured out upon us. And Peter quotes from Joel and he quotes this prophecy. He says, what's happening here on the day of Pentecost? He says, this is what was spoken of by Joel.

It will come about in the last days, saith the Lord, that I'll pour out my Spirit upon all flesh. And your sons and your daughters shall prosper. Not just prophets, but God has things for bond servants and handmaidens and housewives doing the dishes.

What a promise this is. I'll pour out my Spirit upon all flesh. Your sons and daughters shall prophesy. Your young men shall see visions. Your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my bond servants and my handmaid.

That's talking about you and me. Not just those guys. An outpouring of the Spirit of God. This is something that God does. Now, there is a great deal of emphasis in the New Testament on our responsibility.

And there are a lot of things that we're commanded to do. We're commanded to believe God. We're commanded to obey God. And in relation to the Holy Spirit, one of the things that we're commanded is, we're commanded to be filled with the Spirit.

Be being filled with the Spirit. That's a commandment. And you understand when the Bible talks about being filled with something, we have this idea of taking a cup and filling it up with water. But to be filled with something, means to be utterly under the control of, and possessed by, you might say, that thing.

So you'll read, there's a lot of examples of this in the New Testament. But if you look around, you'll read it says, they were all filled with rage. Well, that doesn't mean that somebody poured rage into them.

It means that they were under the control of rage. They were filled with it. Just possessed them. And so when he says be filled with the Spirit, it's a commandment. You are commanded to come to God and give yourself over to Him for His control.

And so we're to come to God. We're responsible to come to God and repent of known sin and believe what He has said about our ability in Christ to walk by faith. And it's life changing. I've been in meetings like this before, where God would put His finger on some area of sin.

And you get alone before God and you ask His forgiveness and you see, you know, by the grace of God, I have power in Christ. I don't have to be defeated by this anymore. You see, that's repentance and faith.

That's our responsibility. And you give yourself afresh to God and lo and behold, you're different after that. Haven't you seen this? I've seen meetings where one meeting changed my life. As brother Don said this morning, it's far away from perfection, but there's a difference.

You're different from then on. God brought you into an area of victory that you never had before. And you're on a different plane and you never go back to the way you were. That has to do with deep repentance before God and believing and having your mind renewed to see who you are in Christ and the power that you have in Christ.

That all has to do with our responsibility. You're commanded to be filled with the Spirit. But beloved, you cannot make God come down. That's something different. You can ask God to come down like Isaiah did, but you can't make Him come down.

When we talk about God coming down, we're talking about God's activity. If you could just get this clear, because there's a lot of things you'll read in the book of Acts, and sometimes you can see as you read it, you say, wait a minute, this has to do with them giving themselves more fully to God.

But other times you're reading, you say, that's God coming down. And if you can get the picture of the total thing that's happening, it helps you regardless of the terminology that's used. Now, a lot of times the terminology is pretty clear.

The Spirit had not yet fallen upon them. That's God coming down. And it'll help you to sort some of these things out. But there's a lot of things that we're responsible for. And in a word, we're responsible to walk in the Spirit.

And that has to do with our activity. But again, these passages have to do not with our activity, but with God's activity. And this is what happened in Acts chapter 2. But here's what we need to get. This didn't just happen in Acts chapter 2.

A Fresh Outpouring in Acts 4

It happened again a couple chapters later. God came down again. And this is the big encouragement, because we don't just have to read Acts chapter 2 and say, wasn't that wonderful? God came down. I wish I would have lived back then when God was real and when God came down.

That's not the way it is. Acts chapter 4, let me read it to you, starting at verse 23. And when they had been released, they went to their own companions and reported all that the chief priests and the elders had said to them.

And when they heard this, they lifted up their voices to God with one accord and said, O Lord, it is Thou who didst make the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them, who by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of our father David Thy servant didst say, Why did the Gentiles rage and the peoples devise futile things?

The kings of the earth took their stand. And they go on reviewing what God has said in His Word and what He's done in the past. And then they say in verse 29,. And now, Lord, take note of their threats and grant that Thy bondservants may speak Thy Word with all confidence, while that I extend Thy hand to heal, and signs and wonders take place through the name of Thy holy servant Jesus.

And when they had prayed, the place where they had gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak the Word of God with boldness. And the congregation of those who believed were of one heart and one soul.

Not one of them claimed that anything belonging to him was his own. All things were common property to them. And with great power the apostles were giving witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and abundant grace was upon them all.

Now, what happened there? They're praying, and God comes down, and the place is shaken, and suddenly they're all filled with the Holy Spirit and begin to speak the Word of God with boldness. What is this?

It's another outpouring of the Holy Spirit. As I said earlier, I think, or as Brother Mack said, historically, this has been called revival. Now, we live in a time when the term revival has taken on the meaning of just any special meetings.

We're going to have a revival. We're going to hold a revival. But historically, back earlier in church history, in the 1700s, the 1800s revival, was talking about an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. I personally don't know if that's the best word for this, because revival gives the concept that the true church is either dead or just about dead.

You know, somebody's on the beach there, and they're just about ready to go out, and you say, I gave him artificial respiration, and he revived. And I think that's a wrong idea of what we're talking about.

That's not the situation in the book of Acts. You read Acts chapter 4. These people were not backslidden. They had just been filled with the Spirit in Acts chapter 2 in a powerful, mighty way. A lot of men who are from a background of what's called covenant theology speak of revival in this way.

They equate Old Testament Israel with the revival with the true church. And so they say things like this. They say God has turned His back on the church. There's just as much adultery in the church as there is in the world.

The church doesn't any longer believe in the virgin birth. All those things. That's not the true church, beloved. That's not what the church is. And a lot of times they get all of their ideas of what they call revival from the Old Testament.

Well, there's a difference between Old Testament Israel and the church. Old Testament Israel was a physical nation made up mainly of unregenerate people. If you don't believe that, look at the way they lived.

And God said there's a day coming when I'm going to do something special. I'm going to put My law inside of them. It's not just going to be on the outside. In general, now there were regenerate people too, but in general, the reality was is that the law was just on the outside.

And as soon as you gave them a chance, like Moses goes up on the mountain for a little while, and by the time you get back, they've made a golden calf and they're going wild. That's not regenerate people.

And so in the New Covenant, God says I'm going to take care of this. The kingdom is going to be taken away from you and given to a nation that brings forth the fruit of it. And that nation is that spiritual nation, a holy nation, a royal priesthood that we are.

So God has not turned His back on the church and God has not forsaken the church, the true church. I mean, God is alive and well. At least I have the feeling that the true church is alive and well here in this gathering.

I don't want to minimize the glory of what God has done in your lives. I can see miracles. But beloved, that doesn't mean we don't need what the early church need. We need a fresh outpouring of the Lord.

The Holy Spirit. You see that? It's not a deal where we come and we pray to God and if He doesn't answer right away, we say, well, God's turned His back on me. God's not for me. God's against us. You know, that's not the reality.

God is for you. And He is with us and He is helping us. But mercy drops around us are falling, but for the showers we plead. That's what this prayer is. Oh, that you would come down. In the book of Acts, we see this happening.

God pouring out His Spirit afresh, not on a backslidden people, but on a dependent and needy people. And not on a worthy people, but on His people. His people. He's pleased to do that. Well, when God pours out His Spirit, He comes down and makes His presence known in mighty ways.

And He has been pleased to do this time after time down through church history. And in my own life, I don't know about some of you, this may be new, you've maybe never heard of God pouring out His Spirit historically.

But some of you have heard about it. And maybe like me, you've been stirred for a while, you pray about it and so on, but you kind of begin to feel like, well, maybe He's not going to do that. Beloved, He could do it again here.

It's not because we're so worthy. You know, you can get the idea, boy, if we were just more on fire for God like the early church was, then He'd do stuff, He'd pour out His Spirit on us. Beloved, the reason the early church was on fire was that God had poured out His Spirit upon them.

It's not the idea that they merited something and then He came. It's very easy to get this thing, and I've listened to men preach on this subject, and you get this whole thing turned around the fruit of love, joy, and peace and so on is the Holy Spirit.

That's not what the Bible says. It's not saying if you're Christ-like enough, God will give you His Spirit. It's that He supplies us with what we need to be like that. And so we're coming as His children, and we're saying, Father, You said that the new covenant could be characterized as the ministry of the Spirit.

And we're seeing so little right now. And brethren, I remember a time, and from the people that I've known, they've told of little. I mean, it was 50 or 100 years ago, it was not uncommon, or 75 years ago, it was not uncommon to have just a camp meeting, and 25 or 30 people, God would move in, and 25 or 30 people would be sobbing in the front under deep conviction of sin.

And we're thankful for what He's doing even here, but if God came down here, this thing would be a totally different thing, wouldn't it? I mean, deep movings of the Spirit of God. What happens when God comes down?

The Manifest Presence of God

Well, three things that I want to bring out that are illustrated in the verses in Isaiah 64. First of all, there is a glorious sense of God's presence. Now, there are many other things related to the outpouring of the Spirit, or what has historically been called revival, but at least this much in this passage.

Oh, that thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down that the mountains might quake, what? At thy presence. And verse 2, that the nations may tremble at thy presence. And verse 3, when that has come down, the mountains quaked at thy presence.

Now, we might expect that there would be a sense of God's presence because when God comes down, He's the one that comes down. But think of this, when we think of our great God, the God who created everything, suppose that God came down in here tonight.

I mean, we would all dissolve, as would the building and the whole world. Now, we know God is everywhere, and we know that when God comes down, He doesn't manifest all that He is, or we'd all die. But what He does is, He pulls back the curtain more than it's ever been in our lives.

He comes and manifests. We're talking about, of course, He's present, but He manifests His presence. He comes down. And what happens when He's present is, mountains start quaking and nations start trembling.

And He does awesome things. Conscious reality. When God's presence becomes a conscious reality. I was in a meeting one time in Louisiana many years ago, and this was not historic revival. It was just God coming into the meeting.

And the sermon, I didn't particularly get that much out of the sermon, but after that sermon was over, God came into the room. I can't explain that. Everybody there knew that He was there. I mean, it was this sense of God is in this room.

He just was pleased to do that. We had a little taste of that one time. Brother Don, when Keith McLeod came to Missouri, and we went into a basement meeting room right after lunch, I think it was, and we were going to have a little testimony time and celebrate communion.

I mean, take the Lord's Supper and go out. And we had communion, but it wasn't that kind. Never got around to that. God came in a measure. And it was one of those things, our children, our little crying babies, who hadn't had anything to eat all day that afternoon, went to sleep, and all the mothers were right there.

Everybody was up. You wouldn't even know there were any babies. They were all asleep. And when we came out of that time, it was like time stood still. And when we came out of that meeting, we looked around.

It's dark out here. We've been in there for hours. No knowledge of time. What is, as Duncan Campbell, I think, said, the silence of eternity. God coming down into the midst. Don't you want Him to come down?

Think of this. When God comes down, and His presence and mountains shake and mountains melt, they do. And nations fear. It's like when Jacob said, surely the Lord is in this place. He came to that realization.

And he said, he was afraid, and he said, how dreadful is this place. This is none other than the house of God. This is the gate of heaven. There's a sense of awe. You can see that in the book of Acts.

Acts 2 .43, fear or awe came upon every soul. 5 .11, great fear came upon all the church. 19 .17, fear fell upon them all. And the name of the Lord Jesus was magnified. I want to read to you just a little bit of some accounts from church history.

And I've almost picked these at random, not quite. But just to give you a feel again. This is from a book called Rent Heavens by R .B. Jones. This was the Welsh revival that Brother Mack talked about in 1904, 1905.

He says, if one were asked to describe in a word the outstanding feature of those days, one would unhesitatingly reply that it was the universal, inescapable sense of the presence of God. God had come down.

A sense of the Lord's presence was everywhere. It pervaded, it created the spiritual atmosphere. It mattered not where one went. The consciousness of the reality and nearness of God followed. Felt, of course, in the revival gatherings.

It was by no means confined to them. It was also felt in the homes, on the streets, in the mines and factories, in the schools, even in the theaters and drinking saloons. The strange result was that wherever people gathered became a place of awe.

And places of amusement and carousal were practically emptied. Many were the instances of men entering public houses, ordering drinks, and then turning on their heels and leaving them on the counters untouched.

The sense of the Lord's presence was such as practically to paralyze the arm that would raise the cup to the lips. Football teams and the like were disbanded, their members finding greater joy and testimony to the Lord's grace than in games.

The pit bottoms and galleries became places of praise and prayer where the miners in Wales, Wales was a mining country, where the miners gathered to worship before they dispersed to their several stalls.

Even the children of the day schools. Stories could be told of how they would gather in any place they could, where they would sing and pray in most impressive fashion. Sense of the Lord's presence. He tells about one of the meetings.

He says, It's difficult to overstate or overvalue this remarkable feature of the revival. The writer will never forget one outstanding experience of this sense of an atmosphere laden with the power of God's realized presence.

He says,. The memory of that meeting, even after more than a quarter of a century, is well nigh overwhelming. The memory, overwhelming. It was easily the greatest meeting the writer was ever in. The theme of the message was Isaiah 6,.

The light of God's holiness was turned upon the hearts and lives of those present. Conviction of sin and its terrible dessert was so crushing that a feeling almost of despair grew over all hearts. So grievous a thing was sin, so richly and inevitably did it deserve the severest judgment of God that hearts questioned, Could God forgive?

Could God cleanse? Then came the word about the altar, the tongs and the live coal touching the confessedly vile lips and the gracious and complete removal of their vileness. After all, there was hope.

God was forgiving, and he had cleansing for the worst. When the rapt listeners realized all this, the effect was absolutely beyond any metaphor to describe. As one man, first with a sigh of relief, and then with the delirious shout of joy, the whole huge audience sprang to their feet.

The vision had completely overwhelmed them, and one is not ashamed to tell it. For a moment, they were beside themselves with heavenly joy. All that's from hearing about the tongs touching the lips of Isaiah.

The whole place at that moment was so awful with the glory of God. The holy presence of God was so manifested that the speaker himself was overwhelmed. The pulpit where he stood was so filled with the light of God that he had to withdraw.

That's God coming into one meeting. The presence of God. When God comes down, there's a sense of his presence. Duncan Campbell in the Hebrides revival in 1949 said that God's presence was so manifest in those Hebrides islands that sea captains would be sailing down the channel between the islands and the continent, and they would come under conviction of sin, and they'd be out on the deck of their ships praying, crying out to God.

But God's presence. This is from Edward Payson. He talks about how in a meeting like this, sometimes there'll be one person, there'll be someone that God speaks to, and he feels that he alone is the one spoken to, and that God is there, and he's almost unconscious of the presence of his fellow worshipers.

But he says, when God thus speaks to the whole or the greatest part of an assembly at once, as he sometimes does when he comes to revive his work extensively, these effects are experienced in these appearances exhibited by all.

No scene on this side of the bar of God can be more overpoweringly solemn than the scene which such an assembly exhibits. Then the Father of Spirits is present to the spirits he has made, present to each one of them, and speaking to each.