I am not concerned to appraise the relative value of the various
arguments and proofs, or, it may be, presumptions, which may recommend
the doctrine of a future life to men, but it seems to me that the
strongest reasons for believing in another world are these two:--first,
that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead and has gone up there; and,
second, that a man here can pray, and trust, and love God, and feel that
he is His child. As was noticed in the preceding sermon, the word
rendered 'sons' might more accurately be translated 'children.' If so,
we may fairly say, 'We are the _children_ of God now--and if we are
children now, we shall be grown up some time.' Childhood leads to
maturity. The infant becomes a man.
That is to say, he that here, in an infantile way, is stammering with
his poor, unskilled lips the name 'Abba! Father!' will one day come to
speak it fully. He that dimly trusts, he that partially loves, he that
can lift up his heart in some more or less unworthy prayer and
aspiration after God, in all these emotions and exercises, has the great
proof in himself that such emotions, such relationship, can never be put
an end to. The roots have gone down through the temporal, and have laid
hold of the Eternal. Anything seems to me to be more credible than that
a man who can look up and say, 'My Father,' shall be crushed by what
befalls the mere outside of him; anything seems to me to be more
believable than to suppose that the nature which is capable of these
elevating emotions and aspirations of confidence and hope, which can
know God and yearn after Him, and can love Him, is to be wiped out like
a gnat by the finger of Death. The material has nothing to do with these
feelings, and if I know myself, in however feeble and imperfect a
degree, to be the son of God, I carry in the conviction the very pledge
and seal of eternal life. That is a thought 'whose very sweetness
yieldeth proof that it was born for immortality.' 'We are the sons of
God,' therefore we shall always be so, in all worlds, and whatsoever may
become of this poor wrappage in which the soul is shrouded.
We may notice, also, that not only the fact of our sonship avails to
assure us of immortal life, but that also the very form which our
religious experience takes points in the same direction.
As I said, infancy is the prophecy of maturity. 'The child is father of
the man'; the bud foretells the flower. In the same way, the very
imperfections of the Christian life, as it is seen here, argue the
existence of another state, where all that is here in the germ shall be
fully matured, and all that is here incomplete shall attain the
perfection which alone will correspond to the power that works in us.
Think of the ordinary Christian character. The beginning is there, and
evidently no more than the beginning. As one looks at the crudity, the
inconsistencies, the failings, the feebleness of the Christian life of
others, or of oneself, and then thinks that such a poor, imperfect
exhibition is all that so divine a principle has been able to achieve in
this world, one feels that there must be a region and a time where we
shall be all which the transforming power of God's spirit can make us.
The very inconsistencies of Christians are as strong reasons for
believing in the perfect life of Heaven as their purities and virtues
are. We have a right to say mighty principles are at work upon Christian
souls--the power of the Cross, the power of love issuing in obedience,
the power of an indwelling Spirit; and is this all that these great
forces are going to effect on human character? Surely a seed so precious
and divine is somewhere, and at some time, to bring forth something
better than these few poor, half-developed flowers, something with more
lustrous petals and richer fragrance. The plant is clearly an exotic;
does not its obviously struggling growth here tell of warmer suns and
richer soil, where it will be at home?
There is a great deal in every man, and most of all in Christian men and
women, which does not fit this present. All other creatures correspond
in their capacities to the place where they are set down; and the world
in which the plant or the animal lives, the world of their surroundings,
stimulates to activity all their powers. But that is not so with a man.
'Foxes have holes, birds of the air have nests.' They fit exactly, and
correspond to their 'environment.' But a man!--there is an enormous
amount of waste faculty about him if he is only to live in this world.
There are large capacities in every nature, and most of all in a
Christian nature, which are like the packages that emigrants take with
them, marked 'Not wanted on the voyage.' These go down into the hold,
and they are only of use after landing in the new world. If I am a son
of God I have much in me that is 'not wanted on the voyage,' and the
more I grow into His likeness, the more I am thrown out of harmony with
the things round about me, in proportion as I am brought into harmony
with the things beyond.
That consciousness of belonging to another order of things, because I am
God's child, will make me sure that when I have done with earth, the tie
that binds me to my Father will not be broken, but that I shall go home,
where I shall be fully and for ever all that I so imperfectly began to
be here, where all gaps in my character shall be filled up, and the
half-completed circle of my heavenly perfectness shall grow like the
crescent moon, into full-orbed beauty. 'Neither life, nor death, nor
things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other
creature' shall be able to break that tie, and banish the child from the
conscious grasp of a Father's hand. Dear brother and sister, can you
say, 'Now am I a child of God!' Then you may patiently and peacefully
front that dim future.
II. Now I come to the second point, namely, that we remain ignorant of
much in that future.
That happy assurance of the love of God resting upon me, and making me
His child through Jesus Christ, does not dissipate all the darkness
which lies on that beyond. 'We are the sons of God, _and_,' just because
we are, 'it does not yet appear what we shall be.' Or, as the words are
rendered in the Revised Version, 'it is not yet made manifest what we
shall be.'
The meaning of that expression, 'It doth not yet appear,' or, 'It is not
made manifest,' may be put into very plain words. John would simply say
to us, 'There has never been set forth before men's eyes in this earthly
life of ours an example, or an instance, of what the sons of God are to
be in another state of being.' And so, because men have never had the
instance before them, they do not know much about that state.
In some sense there has been a manifestation through the life of Jesus
Christ. Christ has died; Christ is risen again. Christ has gone about
amongst men upon earth after Resurrection. Christ has been raised to the
right hand of God, and sits there in the glory of the Father. So far it
has been manifested what we shall be. But the risen Christ is not the
glorified Christ, and although He has set forth before man's senses
irrefragably the fact of another life, and to some extent given glimpses
and gleams of knowledge with regard to certain portions of it, I suppose
that the 'glorious body' of Jesus Christ was not assumed by Him till the
cloud 'received Him out of their sight,' nor, indeed, could it be
assumed while He moved among the material realities of this world, and
did eat and drink before them. So that, while we thankfully recognise
that Christ's Resurrection and Ascension have 'brought life and
immortality to light,' we must remember that it is the fact, and not the
manner of the fact, which they make plain; and that, even after His
example, it has not been manifested what is the body of glory which He
now wears, and therefore it has not yet been manifested what we shall be
when we are fashioned after its likeness.
There has been no manifestation, then, to sense, or to human experience,
of that future, and, therefore, there is next to no knowledge about it.
You can only know facts when the facts are communicated. You may
speculate and argue and guess as much as you like, but that does not
thin the darkness one bit. The unborn child has no more faculty or
opportunity for knowing what the life upon earth is like than man here,
in the world, has for knowing that life beyond. The chrysalis' dreams
about what it would be when it was a butterfly would be as reliable as a
man's imagination of what a future life will be.
So let us feel two things:--Let us be thankful that we do not know, for
the ignorance is the sign of the greatness; and then, let us be sure
that just the very mixture of knowledge and ignorance which we have
about another world is precisely the food which is most fitted to
nourish imagination and hope. If we had more knowledge, supposing it
could be given, of the conditions of that future life, it would lose
some of its power to attract. Ignorance does not always prevent the
occupation of the mind with a subject. Blank ignorance does; but
ignorance, shot with knowledge like a tissue which, when you hold it one
way seems all black, and when you tilt it another, seems golden,
stimulates desire, hope, and imagination. So let us thankfully acquiesce
in the limited knowledge.
Fools can ask questions which wise men cannot answer, and will not ask.
There are questions which, sometimes, when we are thinking about our own
future, and sometimes when we see dear ones go away into the mist,
become to us almost torture. It is easy to put them; it is not so easy
to say: 'Thank God, we cannot answer them yet!' If we could it would
only be because the experience of earth was adequate to measure the
experience of Heaven; and that would be to bring the future down to the
low levels of this present. Let us be thankful then that so long as we
can only speak in language derived from the experiences of earth, we
have yet to learn the vocabulary of Heaven. Let us be thankful that our
best help to know what we shall be is to reverse much of what we are,
and that the loftiest and most positive declarations concerning the
future lie in negatives like these:--'I saw no temple therein.' 'There
shall be no night there.' 'There shall be no curse there.' 'There shall
be no more sighing nor weeping, for the former things are passed away.'
The white mountains keep their secret well; not until we have passed
through the black rocks that make the throat of the pass on the summit,
shall we see the broad and shining plains beyond the hills. Let us be
thankful for, and own the attractions of, the knowledge that is wrapt in
ignorance, and thankfully say, 'Now are we the sons of God, and it doth
not appear what we shall be!'
III. Now I must be very brief with the last thought that is here, and I
am the less unwilling to be so because we cannot travel one inch beyond
the revelations of the Book in reference to the matter. The thought is
this, that our sonship flings one all-penetrating beam of light on that
future, in the knowledge of our perfect vision and perfect likeness. 'We
know that when He shall be manifested, we shall be like Him, for we
shall see Him as He is.'
'When He shall be manifested'--to what period does that refer? It seems
most natural to take the manifestation here as being the same as that
spoken of only a verse or two before. 'And now, little children, abide
in Him, and when He shall _be manifested_, we may have confidence, and
not be ashamed before Him at His coming' (ii. 28). That 'coming' then,
is the 'manifestation' of Christ; and it is at the period of His coming
in His glory that His servants 'shall be like Him, and see Him as He
is.' Clearly then it is Christ whom we shall see and become like, and
not the Father invisible.
To behold Christ will be the condition and the means of growing like
Him. That way of transformation by beholding, or of assimilation by the
power of loving contemplation, is the blessed way of ennobling
character, which even here, and in human relationships, has often made
it easy to put off old vices and to clothe the soul with unwonted grace.
Men have learned to love and gaze upon some fair character, till some
image of its beauty has passed into their ruder natures. To love such
and to look on them has been an education. The same process is
exemplified in more sacred regions, when men here learn to love and look
upon Christ by faith, and so become like Him, as the sun stamps a tiny
copy of its blazing sphere on the eye that looks at it. But all these
are but poor, far-off hints and low preludes of the energy with which
that blessed vision of the glorified Christ shall work on the happy
hearts that behold Him, and of the completeness of the likeness to Him
which will be printed in light upon their faces.
It matters not, though it doth not yet appear what we shall be, if to
all the questionings of our own hearts we have this for our
all-sufficient answer, 'We shall be like Him.' As good old Richard
Baxter has it:--
'My knowledge of that life is small,
The eye of faith is dim;
But, 'tis enough that Christ knows all,
And I shall be like Him!'
'It is enough for the servant that he be as his Lord.'
There is no need to go into the dark and difficult questions about the
manner of that vision. He Himself prayed, in that great intercessory
prayer, 'Father, I will that these whom Thou hast given Me be with Me
where I am, that they may behold My glory.' That vision of the glorified
manhood of Jesus Christ--certain, direct, clear, and worthy, whether it
comes through sense or through thought--to behold that vision is all
the sight of God that men in Heaven ever will have. And through the
millenniums of a growing glory, Christ as He is will be the manifested
Deity. Likeness will clear sight, and clearer sight will increase
likeness. So in blessed interchange these two will be cause and effect,
and secure the endless progress of the redeemed spirit towards the
vision of Christ which never can behold all His Infinite Fulness, and
the likeness to Christ which can never reproduce all his Infinite
Beauty.
As a bit of glass when the light strikes it flashes into sunny glory, or
as every poor little muddy pool on the pavement, when the sunbeams fall
upon it, has the sun mirrored even in its shallow mud, so into your poor
heart and mine the vision of Christ's glory will come, moulding and
transforming us to its own beauty. With unveiled face reflecting as a
mirror does, the glory of the Lord, we 'shall be changed into the same
image.' 'We shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.'
Dear brethren, all begins with this, love Christ and trust Him and you
are a child of God! 'And if children, then heirs, heirs of God, and
joint heirs with Christ.'