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Page 46
And, above all, Jesus opens up for us an intimacy with God which is both
unbearable and incredible without the hope of its continuation beyond
the grave. To enter with Jesus into sonship with the Father, to share
God's interests and sympathies and purposes, to become the partner of
His plans and labors, and then to think of God as living on while we
drop out of existence, is the crowning misery, or rather the supreme
confusion. Jesus would have pointed to some heartbroken man or woman,
like Jairus or the widow of Nain or the sisters at Bethany, and said,
"If ye then, being evil, know how to care so intensely for your kindred,
and would give your all to keep them with you forever, how much more
shall your heavenly Father insist on having His own with Him eternally?"
At Professor Huxley's own request three lines from a poem by his wife
are inscribed upon his tombstone:
Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep;
For still He giveth His beloved sleep,
And if an endless sleep He wills, so best.
But in such a sentence what possible meaning can be put into the
expression "His beloved"? Can we conceive of God as really loving us,
taking us into His secrets, using us in His purposes, letting us spend
and be spent in the fulfilment of His will, and then putting us to an
endless sleep? If Jesus leads us into the life with God which we
Christians know, He renders immortality indispensable if God is to
maintain His own Self-respect.
Others may do without everlasting life; to some an endless sleep may
seem welcome; life has been to them such a mistake and a failure, that
they would gladly be quit of it forever; but to followers of Jesus its
continuance is a passionate and logical longing. Ibsen puts into
Brindel's mouth the words: "I am going homewards. I am homesick for the
mighty Void; the dark night is best." Jesus acclimatizes man's spirit to
a far different home, and sets in his heart an altogether different
eternity. So insistent are the demands of our souls for the persistence
of life with our God in Christ, that "if we have only hoped in Christ in
this life, we are of all men most pitiable."
Already we have passed into Jesus' second great contribution toward
answering our question of the second life. He assures us of it because
of the character of the Father we come to know through Him. Jesus' faith
in His own resurrection was based on His personal experience of God. The
words from a Psalm, which the early Church applied to Him, sound like an
utterance some disciple may have overheard Him repeating:
Thou wilt not leave My soul in the grave,
Neither wilt Thou suffer Thy devoted One to see corruption.
Thou madest known unto Me the ways of life;
Thou shalt make Me full of gladness in Thy presence.
Love is stronger than death, and for Jesus God is love. It was this
which made Him "the God of the living." Jesus could not imagine Him
linking Himself with men, becoming the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of
Jacob, and allowing them to become mere handfuls of dust in a Hittite
grave. His love would hold them in union with Him forever. Jesus
"abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light _through the
gospel_"--through the good news concerning God. When He succeeds in
convincing us that the universe is our Father's house, it requires no
further argument to assure us of its "many mansions." The unending
fellowship with Jesus' God of all His true children is an inevitable
inference from what we know His and our God to be. We do not base our
confident anticipation of everlasting life merely upon some saying of
Jesus, which we blindly accept because He said it, nor even upon the
report of His own resurrection from the grave; these are too slight
foundations for our assured expectation. We rest it firmly upon what we
know of His and our Father. Immortality is not a mere guess nor a
fervent wish; we have solid and substantial experience of what God is
from all that He has done for His children and for ourselves. And
experience worketh hope. Faith looks both backwards and forwards, to
what God has done and to what He consistently must do; and all the while
faith looks upwards, and in His face reads a love that will not let us
go.
The Easter victory of Jesus is the vindication of His own faith. God, as
Lord of heaven and earth, is involved in our world's history; He has
been responsible for its outcome from the beginning. If He let the
truest Son He ever had end His career in defeat and failure, He is a
faithless and untrustworthy God. Calvary was the supreme venture of
faith; Jesus staked everything on the responsiveness of the universe to
love, in the trust that the God of the universe is love. "If Christ hath
not been raised, your faith is vain." But if the seeming triumph of
wrong over right, of ignorance over truth, of selfishness over
sacrifice, which took place at Golgotha be but the prelude to a vaster
victory, then the Lord of earth has cleared Himself, and proved Himself
worthy of the confidence of His children.
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