In literature, and common speech, there is an helpful tool called a “simile,” and we use it all the time. It is a figure of speech in which one thing is linked to another with words such as “like” or “as.” We might read, “He has a heart as big as the whole outdoors, ” or “Her tears were falling like rain.” Used in this way, the word “like” is a preposition. But it is a very useful word and can also be used as an adjective, an adverb, a conjunction, a verb and even a noun. If you need proof, I’ll just ask you to refer to a good dictionary. Sadly, modern society has hijacked the word and turned it into some sort of exclamation – “Like, did you know that Jill is dating John.” “I was, like, shocked, when I saw them together.” In fooling around with this thought, I found a website called, “How to stop using the word ‘like’ in ten steps.”
In theology and in the Bible we have something similar to a “simile,” called a “type.” But unlike a “simile” a Biblical “type” is not a figure of speech or just a twist of words; it is just a FIGURE. For example in Matthew 13:24 we read, “Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field.” The Kingdom of Heaven is like a diligent farmer. Elsewhere, without using the word “like” the Bible says that “Christ is like a shepherd.” But in reality, although Jesus did things similar to what shepherds do, He actually is a shepherd.
Today, you will hear me say, “Christ is like a stone,” but there are some ways in which He actually is a stone. Let’s explore this “simile” – this divine simile, which transforms itself into a reality. Let’s consider the typology of Christ, the Stone.
As seen in I Corinthians, Christ is the Christian’s Stone of Supply.
When Israel left Egypt, she entered an arid desert – one of the driest areas of world. I hope that you don’t picture miles and miles of sand dunes, because it’s not that kind of desert. The Arabian desert is a region of rocky, often mountainous, stretches but where there is very little rain. So there are no lakes and no rivers in the Sinai. There are only a few wadis and arroyos which fill with water only once in a blue moon. Israel crossed the Desert of Shur, the Desert of Arabia, the Desert of Zin, and Etham – among others. Moses asked to be excused from leading Israel because the task of sustaining the nation was impossible. After listening to all the murmuring for a while, Jehovah finally said, “Everyone be quiet. I’ll satisfy your thirst with a rock.” Or more specifically, after the Lord educated him, “Moses and Aaron gathered the congregation together before the rock, and he said unto them, Hear now, ye rebels; must we fetch you water out of this rock? And Moses lifted up his hand, and with his rod he smote the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their beasts also.” That miraculous quenching took place near the foot of mount Sinai, and a similar event took place again in the appropriately named place called the “Wilderness of Sin.” This was nearly 40 years before Israel walked out of the desert into the promised land of milk and honey. It is believed by some commentators that the water from these miracles followed Israel during the next 39 years, permitting them to die of old age rather than starvation or dehydration.
Wouldn’t you like a rock which produced copious amounts of anything? It really wouldn’t matter what it supplied, almost anything would be miraculous. Because rocks don’t grow things, they don’t produce things. What they hold is all that they will ever hold. If a chunk of quartz gives a miner some gold, once that is gone, there will never be any more. But a rock placed in refrigerator producing distilled water would be really nice. Even if that rock bled sand or top soil, it would be worth a fortune in a freak show or science museum. What would that stone require in order to produce something worthwhile? One necessary quality would have to be some sort of life. One of the characteristics of living things is production. Inanimate objects like concrete, rocks and lead pipes don’t produce anything. Without life, in order to produce water, any rock would have to possess miraculous power. But we find both life and deity in the person of our Saviour, Jesus the Christ.
Perhaps we need to ask ourselves, Why did the Lord use a Rock to supply Israel’s water needs? What other means could He have used? Well, HE could have used just about anything! The Lord could have put a set of faucets, taps, spigots in the pillar of cloud. That would have been spectacular and highly beneficial. It would have required a member from every family to visit with the Lord every day. Or God could have sent a small black cloud of rain just outside the camp. A thousand ladies would have been forced to run under it with their water pots to collect the rain. The Lord could have left the morning dew in golden bowls along side the manna each morning.
Why did the Lord use a Rock to supply Israel’s water? No one on this planet knows the answer; but we can make a guess or two. For example, it could have been in order to tie together several characteristics of Christ into one valuable nugget. For the children of God, there is only one source nourishment – Christ. But again, isn’t water out of a rock illogical, impractical, impossible? Yes, it is, and so is the idea of eternal life coming out of death – the death of Christ Jesus. Christ is the water of life and the vine without which we couldn’t live. “I am the way, truth, life….” He is life itself; just as there couldn’t exist life in desert without water. “Jesus is the rock in a weary land, weary land, weary land…..”
Christ is also a stone of safety.
You may not be aware of the prominence of this figure, unless you love the Word of God.. The Old Testament is filled with as many stones as some of the fields I’ve seen around here. Deuteronomy 32:4 – Jehovah, “He is the Rock, his work is perfect: for all his ways are judgment: a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is he.” Samuel’s mother said, “There is none holy as the Lord, for there is none beside thee; neither is there any rock like our God.” David said, “The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer.” Jehovah “liveth, and blessed by my rock, and exalted be the God of the rock of my salvation.” David said, “For who is God save Jehovah? Or who is a rock save our God?” “Hear my cry, O God, attend unto my prayer. From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed; lead me to the rock that is higher than I.” “The Lord is my defense; and my God is the rock of my refuge.” Have you ever seen any documentaries on the fortifications on top of, or carved into, some of the rock formations in the Arabian Desert? This sort of thing may have been in David’s mind as he described the Lord as his rock refuge. David learned, in his struggles with King Saul, that natural fortifications were the best, better than the walls of human cities.
How many of the things which we consider strong; things we to which we trust our lives, come from rock? With what was the hull of the Space Shuttle covered? Tiles manufactured from earthen materials. Of what are the hulls of great battleships and tanks made of? Compounds of steel out of the rock. When the river looks like it will flood, how do men hold it back? Bags of tiny rocks, called sand. From what does concrete come? It is dug out of the ground. The diamond, a beautiful stone and hardest of them all, is dug out of the rock.
David, who sang the praise of his God as the rock of his defense, once found himself inside the city of Keilah. He was closer to capture by Saul while in that city than at any other time in his life. He learned to trust the Rock in the wilderness, rather than the walls of man. And that is where we should feel most confident as well, in the arms of the Saviour – the Rock. “The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer.” “The LORD liveth; and blessed be my rock; and exalted be the God of the rock of my salvation.”
A bit farther along in the Bible we have Christ the Stone of Stumbling.
In Matthew 21 – “Jesus saith unto (the chief priests and Pharisees), Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes? Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof. And whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken: but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.” With these words Christ blended a couple of thoughts – both which accurately pictured Him.
The first step in erecting a major building is getting the foundation as perfect as possible. In the days before concrete and driving rods through yards of soil until reaching bed rock, there was the necessity of finding and using the best available corner-stone. If that first corner was not laid perfectly, then everything set upon it, or laid next to it, would be further and further from the ideal and more easily brought to collapse. The Lord Jesus was telling the leadership of Israel that He was the chief and ideal cornerstone. But those men, who were supposed to be expert religious engineers, had rejected Him. Their rejection was astounding; unbelievable under the circumstances. And now their religion was doomed to collapse.
But there was more, that chief cornerstone was no ordinary chunk of granite. I Corinthians 10:4 – that rock was Christ. The stone which they rejected was the One “to whom God the Father had committed all judgment.” The man who humbly threw himself down upon that stone would be broken – but then rebuilt. But on whomsoever Christ, the cornerstone of God, shall fall, shall be ground into dust. “And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.”
Matthew 7:24-27 sheds light on those later words in Matthew 21.
Jesus said, “Whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.”
Every one of us will some day stand before the Judge, the Lord Jesus Christ. Around Him will swirl a hurricane of judgment. Some will find Him to be a Rock of personal support, while others will be crushed to powder. Notice the word “liken” in verse 24; this reminds us how close we are to a simile. A house of some variety is a very common necessity. It is a place of shelter amidst all of the storms and changes in the weather. That house is a place where we can rest and let our hair down, so to speak. And a house is place of communion and fellowship with the people that we love. But that house must be solidly built and well placed. Any life built on a foundation other than Christ is essentially foundation-less. Only Christ is unmoveable; only Christ is earthquake free; only Christ is uncrumbleable. I thank God that He showed me that evolution and humanism are sandy foundations. I thank Him for showing me that my geneological and genetic ties to the past are nothing but earthquake faults awaiting disaster. I praise Him for not permitting me try to build my life on the shifting sand of education and Bible-less religion
My life is built on “nothing less than Jesus Christ and righteousness. I dare not trust the sweetest frame, but wholly lean on Jesus Name.” Oh, I hope that you can see that I am not just picking up a few pebbles here this morning. The Rock called “Christ” is like huge monolith with two thirds of its bulk beyond sight. It is buried in the infinitude of sovereign deity.
I should spend time expounding our relation to Christ the Foundation of the Church. “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” This is a theme which we’ve been examining for several weeks at 10:00 on Sunday mornings, so I am not going to address it again.
Rather, I will close with Christ is the Stone of Sovereignty and Splendor.
Daniel 2 suggests a reason for placing this stone – Christ – above all others. The prophet Daniel was given the privilege know and understand a dream which God gave to Nebuchanezzar. “Thou, O king, sawest, and behold a great image. This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible. This image’s head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay. Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces. Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshingfloors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.” Daniel then explained to the king what God had intended the dream to teach the man. “Thou, O king, art a king of kings: for the God of heaven hath given thee a kingdom, power, and strength, and glory. And wheresoever the children of men dwell, the beasts of the field and the fowls of the heaven hath he given into thine hand, and hath made thee ruler over them all. Thou art this head of gold.” But eventually, King Nebuchanezzar, “the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever.” Once again, Christ is that stone which shall bring all the kingdoms of the earth to dust. This is why Christ shall be a stone of stumbling grinding his enemies to powder.
This prophecy placed among the whole panoply of God’s prophesies reminds us that Christ is the omega. He is not only the alpha, the Creator of the Universe, but He is the omega – the end of all things. A causal consideration of world events teaches us that we are living in the last days of the Gentiles. The rule of Nebuchanezzar has come and gone; along with the Medes and Persians, the Israelites and the Persians a second time. Greece has passed away and in some sense so have the Romans. But in the last days, the days of the ten toes of Nebuchanezzar’s vision, the Chief Cornerstone will arise again. With no help from man of any kind, He shall be cut out of the mountain and come crashing down on everything which world governments call dear. He shall destroy all that remains of the federation of Satan’s nations, including the one in which we live. And He, Christ, shall occupy the world which He created. His dominion shall be from horizon to horizon, over every part of the globe, and over every soul which has ever lived.
That stone will be the most glorious and splendid imaginable. The sapphire and diamond will be nothing more than filthy mirrors reflecting the glory of Christ the Rock. His kingdom will be awesome. I remember the first time I walked through the Natural History Museum in Denver Colorado. I entered a room dedicated to the rocks and minerals dug out of Colorado dirt. Some of them were displayed under ultraviolet light and others in white, yellow and red lights. I was awestruck by their outstanding, exquisite beauty. I can honestly say that I’ve seen very few things more beautiful than those crystals, raw minerals and stones taken directly from the hand of the creator. But if the creation is that spectacular what must the Creator be like? When the rock, cut out of the mountain without hands, shall dominate creation, every mouth will be shut – but every eye will be as big as saucers.
What kind of stone is Christ to you today? Is he your foundation, your fortress, the rock upon which the little house of your life now stands. Or have you rejected him, and turned to intellectualism, or pleasure, or money, whatever? If that is the case then He will crush you to powder. Cast yourself down upon this stone in humility and repentance. “Repent before God and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.”