I need not dwell at any length upon this point, because, to a large
extent, it has been anticipated in former sermons, but just a word or
two may be permitted me. That love, you may be very sure, is not
going to lose its objects in the dust. The old Psalmist who knew so
much less than we do as to the love of God, and knew nothing of the
whispers of a Divine Spirit within his heart charged with the message
of the love as it was manifested in Jesus Christ, had risen to a
height of confidence, the beauty of the expression of which is often
lost sight of, because we insist upon dealing with it as merely being
a Messianic prophecy, which it is, but not merely: 'Thou wilt not
leave my soul in Sheol, neither wilt Thou suffer Thy beloved' (for
that is the real meaning of the word translated 'thy Holy
One')--'Thou wilt not suffer the child of Thy love to see
corruption.' Death's bony fingers can untie all true lover's knots
but one; and they fumble at that one in vain. God will not lose His
child in the grave.
That love, we may be very sure, will not foster in us hopes that are
to be disappointed. Now, it is a fact that the more a man feels that
God loves him, the less is it possible for him to believe that that
love will ever terminate, or that he shall 'all die.' In the lock of
a canal, as the water pours in, the vessel rises. In our hearts, as
the flood of the full love of God pours in, our hopes are borne up
and up, nearer and nearer to the heavens. Since it is so, we must
find in the fact that the constant and necessary result of communion
with Him here on earth is a conviction of the immortality of that
communion, a very, very strong guarantee for ourselves that the hope
is not in vain. And if you say that that is all merely subjective,
yet I think that the universality of the experience is a fact to be
taken into account even by those who doubt the reality of the hope,
and for ourselves, at all events, is a sufficient ground on which to
rest. We have the historical fact of the Resurrection of Jesus
Christ. We have the fact that wherever there has been earthly
experience of true communion with God, there, and in the measure in
which it has been realised, the thermometer of our hopes of
immortality, so to speak, has risen. 'God is love,' and God will not
bring the man that trusts Him to confusion.
And may we not venture to say that, contemplating the analogous
earthly love, we are permitted to believe that that divine Lover of
our souls desires to have His beloved with Him, and desires that
there be no separation between Him and them, either, if I might so
say, in place or in disposition? As certainly as husband and wife,
lover and friend, long to be together, and need it for perfection and
for rest, so surely will that divine love not be satisfied until it
has gathered all its children to its breast and made them partakers
of itself.
There are many, many hopes that put the men who cherish them to
shame, partly because they are never fulfilled, partly because,
though fulfilled, they are disappointed, since the reality is so much
less than the anticipation. Who does not know that the spray of
blossom on the tree looks far more lovely hanging above our heads
than when it is grasped by us? Who does not know that the fish
struggling on the hook seems heavier than it turns out to be when
lying on the bank? We go to the rainbow's end, and we find, not a pot
of gold, but a huddle of cold, wet mist. There is one man that is
entitled to say: 'To-morrow shall be as this day, and much more
abundant.' Who is he? Only the man whose hope is in the Lord his God.
If we open our hearts by faith, then these three lines of sequence of
which we have been speaking will converge, and we shall have the hope
that is the shining apex of 'being justified by faith,' and the hope
that is the calm result of trouble and agitation, and the hope that,
travelling further and higher than anything in our inward experience
or our outward discipline, grasps the key-word of the universe, 'God
is love,' and triumphantly makes sure that 'neither death nor life,
nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor
things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall
be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus
our Lord.'