20- Heaven and The World
XX. HEAVEN AND THE WORLD.
John 14:18. “I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you.”
ACCORDING to our Christian belief, and according to the nearly universal belief of mankind, we are in two worlds. The one is that which we seem to know best, this visible world. We see the sky over our heads, the ground -under our feet. We are amongst objects which we see and feel and smell and taste.
We perceive one another and hold communication with one another. We have our own bodies, sensitive to pleasure and pain, nourished by what we eat and drink, growing and decaying. We appear in this visible world at our birth, we disappear from it at our death. We are all supposed to be pretty well acquainted with this world; it takes care that we shall not disregard it; we can none of us treat it as if it did not exist, or as if we had nothing to do with it.
It is true, at the same time, and it is a very curious fact, that when thinking persons gaze steadily at this visible world, it seems to them less and less real. Our sense of its reality is somewhat disturbed, when we see the most solid substances volatilized into invisible gases. But thought dissolves the outward world more effectually than chemistry. We know things about us by sensation: how do we know that it is not all sensation, and nothing else? If I become blind, the outward world, as a visible scene, does not exist for me; if all my senses perish, how do I know that anything external remains? A man dies, and the world is dead to him; when all die, may not the world, which had existed in their sensations, become non-existent? So inquiry speculates, and these speculations are by no means frivolous. Nevertheless, for us, as we are now, this visible world is real enough, and no one, as I said, can ignore it, or practically treat it as non-existent. The other world in which we believe is the invisible world. This is confessedly mysterious.
It is difficult to describe and explain it, partly because the very language we use is taken from the operations of our senses. And men do not agree about its nature, so much as they do about that of the visible world. They cannot investigate it by the same process. Altogether there is much that is baffling about it. Men cannot get it out of their heads; their imaginations, their hopes, and their fears, insist upon penetrating into it. By all that is highest and best in us, by all that is enduring, we seem to be related to an unseen world, as we are by what is lower and more transitory and mutable to the world of the senses. Our nature is haunted even ’in childhood by vague and shadowy apprehensions in which the poet has recognized intimations of another world to which we really belong.
“Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home.” And if this is true of childhood, it is more certainly true that the developed experiences of adult life, the witness of the conscience, and the workings of the affections, urge upon us in our more thoughtful moments the reality of the unseen world and of pur relations to it.
There are some philosophers who would persuade us that this is a mere delusive enchantment.
We are beguiled, they say, by a too active fancy, and we project images of our earthly life upon the curtain which effectually closes us in. They would have us shut our eyes resolutely to this imaginary unseen world, in which we suppose God and other invisible beings to dwell. We can know nothing about it, they assure us; our faculties are incompetent to apprehend it; our only wise course is to acquiesce in its being an absolute blank, and to turn our thoughts from it to the world which we can know and work in.
Against this conclusion, the irrepressible workings of human instinct will continue to rebel, and the Gospel utters its protesting witness.
We certainly have reason to be on our guard against the activity of the imagination, when it is stimulated by the darkness of the unseen world. Where the religious imagination has had free play, as in the heathen religions, with what various shapes, of power, of fear, of attraction, has it peopled that world! Sometimes it has aimed at creating graceful and pleasing forms and scenes; at other times it has revelled in horrors. And if we see this most glaringly displayed in heathen mythologies, we know very well that Christianity, in its course of eighteen centuries, has not been kept free from this source of corruption. We shall fare ill, if we are left at the mercy of the religious instinct, working in accordance with what the fears of guilt and the dreams of pleasure may suggest. But our privilege, dear brethren, as Christians, is to hear the Gospel and be guided by the teachings of Christ. Our Master took pains to put his followers in the way of thinking rightly about the unseen world. Let us listen this morning to the lesson which he gave to his Apostles in the prospect of his approaching departure from this visible world. The departure began with his death, and was completed by his ascension. Before his death the Lord Jesus had been living with his followers under the conditions of this world of the senses. As St John says, they heard him, they saw him with their eyes, they looked upon him, their hands touched and grasped him. He died upon the Cross the death of all men. Then the disciples, forgetting what he had taught them and the promises he had given them, were plunged in disappointment and grief. He was gone from them, and they had sorrow. Soon he shewed himself to them alive, not continuously, but in mysterious interviews, enough to assure them that he had triumphed over death. He was seen by them at intervals during forty days, and spoke to them of things pertaining to the Kingdom of God. Their grief gave way to awe and hope. Having thus trained them, as it were, to think of him as alive, he brought this intermediate period to an end, and went up into heaven. So his departure from this visible world was consummated. But the disciples were not again cast down. The force of that first terrible shock had spent itself. They now fed on the promises of their Master, and especially on one great promise which he had repeated to them over and over again. The promise was to be very quickly fulfilled. They had not long to wait; and they waited in patience and even joyfully. This promise took two forms.
One of them we see in our text: “I will not leave you comfortless: / will come to you’.’ You are probably aware that the word rendered by “comfortless” might more accurately be translated “bereaved.” Jesus had made himself more than parent or husband to the chosen few to whom he was speaking. He was their support and stay. His death was the greatest bereavement they could suffer. Jesus felt keenly, in his more than human sympathy, how his disciples would be affected by losing him. They would be like orphan children, like the widowed wife. But, he assured them, “ I will not leave you thus bereaved.” My absence will be but for a short time. “I will come to you.”
“I will come to you;” this was one form of the promise. “Yet a little while,” he continues, “and the world seeth me no more; but ye see me, because I live, and ye shall live.” (This is probably a truer rendering than that of our received version, “because I live, ye shall live also.”) “Ye see me, because I live and you shall then live. At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.” The disciples did not understand how it was to be that Jesus should be visible to the disciples and invisible to the world. One of them asked him, “Lord, how is it that thou wilt manifest thyself unto us, and not unto the world?” The explanation which Jesus gave was this: “If a man love me, he will keep my words, and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.” These words are enough to make us cautious in understanding the promise “I will come to you.” It is evident that the coming was not to be a bodily one. It was not to be one which could be seen by the observation of the senses. It was to be what we call a spiritual coming. And this promise was evidently identical with that of the sending of the Spirit. “I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him.” I say the two promises are substantially the same.
It is true that Jesus speaks as if the Comforter were to be a substitute for him. “I tell you the truth; it is expedient for you that I go away; for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you.” Is this, “I am going away, and I will send the Spirit to be with you,” is this the same, it may be asked, as the other saying, “I am going away for a little while, and then I will come to you again”? Yes, brethren, it is. The two different statements do not really contradict each other; the one makes the other more likely to be understood in its true sense. The Spirit of truth would come to them, and unite them in a spiritual fellowship with their ^ord; Jesus himself would come to them in the Spirit, and make the disciples feel and know that he was with them.
Now here was heaven, here was the unseen world, as the Son of God revealed it to his disciples.
They would be really and consciously in it, when they should know the Father to be near them and with them. “ This is life eternal,” said Jesus in his prayer to his Father, “ that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.” They who should be quickened with that life, would perceive Christ and the Father loving them and abiding with them. They would themselves have abiding-places in the home of the Father. And all this would depend on their keeping, in a loyal spirit, the words or commandments of Christ.
Other things may be said about the unseen world. It may be pictured with the aid of the imagery of the Revelation, with a great white throne, with a sea of glass, with myriads of angels, with elders and living creatures round about the throne.
There may be some subordinate value in the suggestions of these images. But incomparably the highest, truest, and most precious teaching concerning the unseen world is that which our Lord gave in these promises. It makes no attempt to reduce within our conceptions what is beyond their capacity. But it raises us to the highest thought of which we are capable, when it says to us, “ Heaven is, to be visited by the unseen God, to behold and love and know the Son and the Father in the Spirit.” And if it seem to you for a moment that such a heaven is uninviting, beside a heaven of spacious courts above the sky, the heaven of harps and jewels and shining raiment, remember first whose words they are that we are studying; and then let your consciences tell you that the dazzling of the senses by dreams of oriental splendour is but a poor thing compared with the awakening of Divine life in the soul. What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose himself?
Royal palaces and gorgeous entertainments, and the supreme achievements of art and wealth, make fine spectacles, and even descriptions of them find eager readers; and it may be natural that the many should idealize these in their endeavours to conceive of perfect happiness: but if you want to make Christ’s idea of heaven your own, think rather of a childlike disciple, in poverty perhaps and suffering, lifting up the aspirations of a penitent and humble but grateful and trusting heart to One felt to be infinitely gracious and closely near.
TJiere Jesus has come; there the Father and the Son are loving the obedient disciple, and making their abode with him; there the disciple is occupying the place prepared for him in the great home of the Father.
Whatever else you may think about heaven, let these Divine ideas be dominant in your minds.
We speak of Christ as having ascended into heaven; we pray, in full conformity with the words of the Lord himself and his Apostles, that we also may in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell. What do we mean by this prayer? That we, when we die, may rise through the air into an abode of perfect enjoyment? Certainly not; we are not referring to the time of death at all. We are praying that now, we, living in this visible world, may ascend and dwell with Christ. And how is that to be done? By loving him and keeping his words; because, in accordance with his promise, he has given his Spirit to men, and to them who receive the Spirit humbly Christ comes and the Father, and they manifest themselves to them and dwell with them. In those truly heavenly conversations with his disciples on the night before his Passion, our Lord makes no allusion to the change wrought by death.
He is referring indeed to his own approaching death and departure from the visible world; but in what he promises and bids his disciples look forward to, he speaks wholly of what was to come to them in their lifetime. It is not easy for us to believe this; but it is so, certainly and demonstrably. His return to them, that they might dwell with him, was to be within a few days.
What the Spirit was to do for them was to be done on the Day of Pentecost and from that day forwards. The more you can fix this in your minds, the better. But we cannot forget Death. It is constantly forcing itself upon us. We know that we ourselves must die, and it is good that we should bear it in mind. But before that time, it may be we shall know, perhaps more than once or twice, the bereaving power of Death. It is not possible to make light of this. The Lord Jesus referred to it solemnly and tenderly. But was he not doing something by his promises to assuage that power, not only on the minds that were to be grieved by his departure, but on minds which should afterwards be overwhelmed by other sad separations?
Suppose one of that company of disciples to have thoroughly learnt the lesson, to have received the Spirit, and to have lived with Christ and the Father in faith and love. Suppose that Death came, and took from him a parent or other loved one. Do you not feel sure that the habitual sense of living in the unseen world, even whilst active amongst things seen, must have greatly altered the feeling of that disciple towards death, and therefore greatly softened the pain and the shock of separation? Death is the passage from the visible world into the invisible: well, but what we most surely know of the invisible world is that Christ is there and the Father, and that spiritual communion may link those who are yet in the flesh with invisible beings. No progress of civilization or of scientific knowledge can avail in the slightest degree to make bereavement more tolerable. The happier our lot is in this world, and the more closely we are drawn to others, the more grievous must it be, that the loved companion should become the prey of the enemy. And where in this world is consolation to be found? But there is real consolation for those who have come to feel naturalized in the heavenly commonwealth. They may reasonably cherish thoughts of reunion with those who have gone before them; or, if at times they cannot help admitting how vain it is to speculate with any precision about the conditions of so different a life, they can at least cast themselves confidingly on the grace of him who visits and is mindful of such unworthy creatures as the sons of men. On Sunday next, dear brethren, we commemorate the primary historical fulfilment of the Saviour’s promise, that is to say, a remarkable linking together of the seen and unseen worlds. The Church that came into organized being on the Day of Pentecost was a permanent witness of that union.
Then began that feeding together on the Body and Blood of Christ which was appointed as a ladder from earth to heaven, an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. A vast multitude of Christians in all parts of the world will on Whitsunday observe this sacred tradition, and come together to feed by faith on him whom, if they see him at all, they can only see with the spiritual eye.
O that for many this inward vision may be made more real and clear! O that the world, to which nothing heavenly is visible, may have less occupation of the hearts of Christians! Let it be our distinct endeavour, with the help of God’s grace, so to open our hearts to the Spirit of faith and love that worldly and carnal affections may be mortified in us, and that we may know what it is to dwell with God through Christ! We greatly need to become as little children, in simplicity, and teachableness, and indifference to the world, that we may see the kingdom of God. May the Spirit of truth make us sincere, honest, and courageous in our following of Christ. We have no right to hope to be clear-sighted, if we are not single-minded. If, professing to be Christians, we harden ourselves against Christian affections, and make the things of the world our genuine interests, how can we expect Christ to manifest himself to us? The pure in heart, they shall see God. It is by being patient, loving, highminded, in the common intercourse and affairs of this life, that we shall strengthen our hold upon the things that are not seen; it is by walking in the steps of Jesus Christ that we shall come nearer to him; it is only in loving God that we can really know\\\m.