'Now is our salvation nearer.' We have to think away by faith and
hope all the grim externals of death, and to get to the heart of the
thing. And then everything that is repulsive, everything that makes
flesh and blood shrink, disappears and is evaporated, and beneath the
folds of his black garment, there is revealed God's last, sweetest,
most triumphant angel-messenger to Christian souls, the great,
strong, silent Angel of Death, and he carries in his hand the gift of
a full salvation. That is what our Apostle rose to the rapture of
beholding, when he knew that the thought of his surviving till Christ
came again must be put away, and when close to the last moment of his
life, he said, 'The Lord shall deliver me, and save me into His
everlasting kingdom.' What was the deliverance and being saved that
he expected and expresses in these words? Immunity from punishment?
Escape from the headsman's axe? Being 'delivered from the mouth of
the lion,' the persecuting fangs of the bloody Nero? By no means. He
knew that death was at hand, and he said, 'He will save me'--not from
it, but through it--'into His everlasting kingdom.' And so in the
words of my text we may say--though Paul did not mean them so--as we
see the distance between us, and that certain close, dwindling,
dwindling, dwindling: 'Now,' as moment after moment ticks itself into
the past, 'now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.'
Children, when they are getting near their holidays, take strips of
paper, and tear off a piece as each day passes. And as we tear off
the days let us feel that we are drawing closer to our home, and that
the blessedness laid up for us in it is drawing nearer to us. 'Our
salvation,' not our destruction, our fuller life, not in any true
sense of the word our 'death,' is 'nearer than when we believed.'
But some one may say, 'Is a man not saved till after he is dead?' Is
salvation future, not coming till after the grave? No, certainly not.
There are three aspects of that word in Scripture. Sometimes the New
Testament writers treat salvation as past, and represent a Christian
as being invested with the possession of it all at the very moment of
his first faith. That is true, that whatever is yet to be evolved
from what is given to the poorest and foulest sinner, in the moment
of his initial faith in Christ, there is nothing to be added to it.
The salvation which the penitent thief received on the cross is all
the salvation that he was ever to get. But out of it there came
welling and welling and welling, when he had passed into the region
'where beyond these voices there is peace'--there came welling out
from that inexhaustible fountain which was opened in him all the
fullnesses of an eternal progress in the heavens. And so it is with
us. Salvation is a past gift which we received when we believed.
But in another aspect, which is also emphatically stated in
Scripture, it is a progressive process, and not merely a gift
bestowed once for all in the past. I do not dwell upon that thought,
but just remind you of a turn of expression which occurs in various
connections more than once. 'The Lord added to the Church daily such
as were being saved,' says Luke. Still more emphatically in the
Epistle to the Corinthians, the Apostle puts into antithesis the two
progressive processes, and speaks of the Gospel as being preached,
and being a savour of life unto life 'to them that are being saved,'
and a savour of destruction 'to them that are being lost.' No moral
or spiritual condition is stereotyped or stagnant. It is all
progressive. And so the salvation that is given once for all is ever
being unfolded, and the Christian life on earth is the unfolding of
it.
But in another aspect still, such as is presented in my text, and in
other parallel passages, that salvation is regarded as lying on the
other side of the flood, because the manifestations of it there, the
evolving there of what is in it, and the great gifts that come then,
are so transcendently above all even of our selectest experiences
here, that they are, as it were, new, though still their roots are in
the old. The salvation which culminates in the absolute removal from
our whole being of all manner of evil, whether it be sorrow or sin,
and in the conclusive bestowal upon us of all manner of good, whether
it be righteousness or joy, and which has for its seal 'the adoption,
to wit, the redemption of the body,' so that body, soul, and spirit
'make one music as before, but vaster,' is so far beyond the germs of
itself which here we experience that my text and its like are amply
vindicated. And the man who is most fully persuaded and conscious
that he possesses the salvation of God, and most fully and blessedly
aware that that salvation is gradually gaining power in his life, is
the very man who will most feel that between its highest
manifestation on earth, and its lowest in the heavens there is such a
gulf as that the wine that he will drink there at the Father's table
is indeed new wine. And so 'is our salvation nearer,' though we
already possess it, 'than when we believed.'
Dear brethren, if these things be true, and if to die is to be saved
into the kingdom, do not two thoughts result? The one is that that
blessed consummation should occupy more of our thoughts than I am
afraid it does. As life goes on, and the space dwindles between us
and it, we older people naturally fall into the way, unless we are
fools, of more seriously and frequently turning our thoughts to the
end. I suppose the last week of a voyage to Australia has far more
thoughts in it about the landing next week than the two or three
first days of beating down the English Channel had. I do not want to
put old heads on young shoulders in this or in any other respect. But
sure I am that it does belong very intimately to the strength of our
Christian characters that we should, as the Psalmist says, be 'wise'
to 'consider our latter end.'
The other thought that follows is as plain, viz. that that
anticipation should always be buoyant, hopeful, joyous. We have
nothing to do with the sad aspects of parting from earth. They are
all but non-existent for the Christian consciousness, when it is as
vigorous and God-directed as it ought to be. They drop into the
background, and sometimes are lost to sight altogether. Remember how
this Apostle, when he does think about death, looks at it with--I was
going to quote words which may strike you as being inappropriate--'a
frolic welcome'; how, at all events, he is neither a bit afraid of
it, nor does he see in it anything from which to shrink. He speaks of
being with Christ, which is far better; 'absent from the body,
present with the Lord'; 'the dissolution of the earthly house of this
tabernacle'--the tumbling down of the old clay cottage in order that
a stately palace of marble and precious stones may be reared upon its
site; 'the hour of my departure is at hand; I have finished the
fight.' Peter, too, chimes in with his words: 'My exodus; my
departure,' and both of the two are looking, if not longingly, at all
events without a tremor of the eyelid, into the very eyeballs of the
messenger whom most men feel so hideous. Is it not a wonderful gift
to Christian souls that by faith in Jesus Christ, the realm in which
their hope can expatiate is more than doubled, and annexes the dim
lands beyond the frontier of death? Dear friends, if we are living in
Christ, the thought of the end and that here we are absent from home,
ought to be infinitely sweet, of whatever superficial terrors this
poor, shrinking flesh may still be conscious. And I am sure that the
nearer we get to our Saviour, and the more we realise the joyous
possession of salvation as already ours, and the more we are
conscious of the expanding of that gift in our hearts, the more we
shall be delivered from that fear of death which makes men all their
'lifetime subject to bondage.' So I beseech you to aim at this, that,
when you look forward, the furthest thing you see on the horizon of
earth may be that great Angel of Death coming to save you into the
everlasting kingdom.