It is obvious from all which we have been saying that without holiness
no man shall see the Lord. The inheritance being what it is, the
possession, the enjoyment of communion with a Holy God, it is absolutely
incapable of being entered upon by any who are unholy. That is true
about both the partial possession of the earnest of it here and of its
fulness hereafter. In the present life all tolerated sin bars us out
from enjoying God, and in the future nothing can enter that defileth nor
whatsoever worketh or maketh a lie. There are many people who think that
they would like 'to go to heaven,' but who would find it difficult to
answer such questions as these: Do you like to think of God? Do you find
any joy in holy thoughts? What do you feel about prayer? Does the name
of Christ make your heart leap? Is righteousness your passion? If you
have to answer these questions with a silence which is the saddest
negative, what do you think you would do in heaven? I remember that the
Greenlanders told the Moravian missionaries who were trying to move them
by conventional pictures of its delights, that the heaven which these
pious souls had painted would not do for them, for there were no seals
there. There are thousands of us who, if we spoke the truth, would say
the same thing, with the necessary variations arising from our
environment. There is not a spinning-mill in it all. How would some of
us like that? There is not a ledger, nor a theatre, no novels, no
amusements. Would it not be intolerable ennui to be put down in such an
order of things? You would be like the Israelites, loathing 'this light
bread' and hungering for the strong-smelling and savoury-tasting leeks
and garlic, even if in order to taste them you had to be slaves again.
Heaven would be no heaven to you if you could go there and be thus
minded. But you could not. God Himself cannot carry men thither but by
fitting them for it. It is not a place so much as a state, and the
mighty hand that works on one side of the thick curtain preparing the
inheritance in light for the saints, is equally busy on this side making
the saints meet for the inheritance.
I do not wish to enter here on grammatical niceties, but I must point
out that the form of the word which the Apostle employs to express it
points to an act in the past which still runs on.
The Revised Version's rendering, 'made us meet,' is preferable to the
Authorised Version's, because of its omission of the 'hath' which
relegates the whole process of preparation to the past. And it is of
importance to recognise that the difference between these two
representations of the divine preparation is not a piece of pedantry,
for that preparation has indeed its beginnings in the past of every
Christian soul, but is continuous throughout its whole earthly
experience. There is the great act of forgiveness and justifying which
is cotemporaneous with the earliest and most imperfect faith, and there
is the being born again, the implanting of a new life which is the life
of Christ Himself, and has no spot nor wrinkle nor any such thing. That
new life is infantile, but it is there, the real man, and it will grow
and conquer. Take an extreme case and suppose a man who has just
received forgiveness for his past and the endowment of a new nature.
Though he were to die at that moment he would still in the basis of his
being and real self be meet for the inheritance. He who truly trusts in
Jesus is passed from death unto life, though the habits of sins which
are forgiven still cling to him, and his new life has not yet exercised
a controlling power or begun to build up character. So Christians ought
not to think that, because they are conscious of much unholiness, they
are not ready for the inheritance. The wild brigand through whose
glazing eyeballs faith looked out to his fellow-sufferer on the central
cross was adjudged meet to be with him in Paradise, and if all his deeds
of violence and wild outrages on the laws of God and man did not make
him unmeet, who amongst us need write bitter things against himself? The
preparation is further effected through all the future earthly life. The
only true way to regard everything that befalls us here is to see in it
the Fatherly discipline preparing us for a fuller possession of a richer
inheritance. Gains and losses, joys and sorrows, and all the endless
variety of experiences through which we all have to pass, are an
unintelligible mystery unless we apply to them this solution, 'He for
our profit that we might be partakers of His holiness.' It is not a
blind Fate or a still blinder Chance that hurtles sorrows and changes at
us, but a loving Father; and we do not grasp the meaning of our lives
unless we feel, even about their darkest moments, that the end of them
all is to make us more capable of possessing more of Himself.