01.02.01. Heavenly Citizenship

Part II Chapter I.

HEAVENLY CITIZENSHIP A man’s dwelling in one country, and holding citizenship in another and far remote country, is not an unknown circumstance. In such a case, we may have the singular anomaly of one being most a stranger in the land in which he is present, and most at home in the land from which he is absent. Our blessed Lord was the first perfectly to realize this idea respecting the heavenly coun­try. For He speaks of Himself as “He that came down from heaven, even the Son of man who is in heaven.” So truly a citizen of the other world was He that even while walking with men and talking with men He regarded Himself as there, not here. And this saying of His occurs in that discourse where, with an emphatic “verily, verily,” He declares that “except a man be born from above he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

Here is the key to the whole mystery. As the only begotten of the Father, Christ’s native country was above; and during all the days of His flesh He neither relinquished His heavenly citizenship nor acquired an earthly residence. “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel: for He hath visited and redeemed His people,” is a significant note in the prophecy of His birth. And four times in the Gospels is our Lord’s advent to earth spoken of as a visit. But it was a visit which never for a moment looked toward a permanent abiding. At His birth He was laid in a borrowed manger, because there was no room for Him in the inn; at His burial He was laid in a borrowed tomb, because He owned no foot of earth; and between the cradle and the grave was a sojourn in which “the Son of man had not where to lay His head.” The mountaintop whither He con­stantly withdrew to commune with His Father was the nearest to His home. And hence there is a strange, pathetic meaning in that saying, “And every man went unto his own house; Jesus went unto the Mount of Olives.”

Now, as it was with the Lord, so it is to be with His disciples. “For our citizenship is in heaven,” says the apostle. Herein is the saying of Lady Powerscourt true: “The Christian is not one who looks up from earth to heaven, but one who looks down from heaven to earth.” A celestial nativity implies a celestial residence; and with a certain divine condescension may the Christian contemplate the sordid, self-seeking children of this present evil age and say, with his Lord: “Ye are from beneath; I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world.” Let us be admonished, however, that to say this truly and to live it really may subject us to the experience indicated by the apostle: “Therefore the world knoweth us not because it knew Him not.” There is a certain quaint beauty in the apology which an old reformer made for the hard treatment which he and his friends received from the men of this world. “Why, brethren,” he would say, “they do not understand court manners or the etiquette of heaven, never having been in that country from whence we come; therefore it is that our ways seem strange to them.” Would that in the Christians of today celestial traits were so con­spicuous as to occasion like remark! Perhaps it is because there are so few high saints in the Church that there are so many low sinners out­side the Church, since the ungodly can never be powerfully lifted up except by a Church that reaches down from an exalted spiritual plane.

What means that lofty address of the apostle, “Wherefore, holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling”? (Hebrews 3:1). The reference is not merely to our final destiny as those who are to be called up to heaven, but to our pres­ent service as those who have come down from heaven; sons of God rejoicing in a celestial birth, bringing the air and manners of glory into a world that knows not God. As such we are exhorted to “consider the Apostle and High Priest of our profession, Christ Jesus;” an apos­tle being one who comes forth from God, and an high priest one who goes in unto God. And Christ Jesus not only fulfils both these offices in Himself, as he says, “I came forth from the Father and am come into the world; again I leave the world and go to the Father,” but He makes us partakers with Him of the same hea­venly calling, sending us into the world, as the Father hath sent Him, and permitting us “to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus,” as He has entered in by His own blood.

Confessing that our citizenship is in heaven, it should be easily determined what our conduct and bearing towards the world must be. One is expected to pay taxes and make investments where he holds residence. Therefore all calls to bountiful giving and all demands for rigid self-denial are to be esteemed as reasonable assess­ments, not as gratuities. Christianity is no para­dox, in which believers are required to do pecu­liar things for the sake of being peculiar, and to exhibit startling contradictions for the sake of arousing the contradiction of sinners against themselves. When we are called to lay up trea­sures in heaven, it is because that is our country; when we are enjoined not to love the world, nei­ther the things that are in the world, it is be­cause this is not our country. Two practical er­rors spring from an earthly theology, viz., that the world is the Christian’s home, and the grave the Christian’s hope. On the contrary, one pos­sessed of a clear advent faith would choose for himself such an epitaph as that which Dean Al­ford composed for his tomb: “The inn of a trav­eller on his way to Jerusalem.” Ah, yes, that is it! A pilgrim’s portion, food and raiment and contentment therewith; the mansion which for­tune has provided, or the cabin which penury has reared, each alike counted a hospice where one lodges as “a pilgrim and stranger in the earth; “and the grave a narrow inn whose win­dows look towards the sun-rising, where the so­journer sleeps till break of day, —this, without question, is the ideal of the Christian life as out­lined in the Gospel. An impracticable ideal, it will be said. But it was not so in the beginning. To say nothing of apostolic Christianity, let us ask what it was that gave the Christianity of the first two centu­ries such extraordinary vigor in its conflict with heathenism. An eminent writer, Gerhard Uhlhorn, has shown with a graphic hand that it was just this quality of absolute unworldliness which constituted the secret of its power. 1 The men who conquered the Roman Empire for Christ bore the aspect of invaders from another world who absolutely refused to be naturalized to this world. Their conduct filled their heathen neigh­bors with the strangest perplexity: they were so careless of life, so careful of conscience, so prodi­gal of their own blood, so confident of the over­coming power of the blood of the Lamb, so un­subdued to the customs of the country in which they sojourned, so mindful of the manners of “that country from whence they came out.” The help of the world, the patronage of its rul­ers, the loan of its resources, the use of its meth­ods, they utterly refused, lest by employing these they might compromise their King. An invad­ing army maintained from an invisible base, and placing more confidence in the leadership of an unseen Commander than in all imperial help that might be proffered, —this was what so bewil­dered and angered the heathen, who often de­sired to make friends with the Christians with­out abandoning their own gods. But there can be no reasonable doubt that that age in which the Church was most completely separated from the world was the age in which Christianity was most victorious in the world. 2

It was also the era of undimmed hope of the Lord’s imminent return from glory, so that it illustrated and enforced both clauses of the great text: “For our citizenship is in heaven, from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus” (Php 3:20). Our Lord set forth His departure from the world under the parable of “a certain nobleman who went into a far country to receive for him­self a kingdom, and to return,” (Luke 19:12). As a Roman, living in Judea on appointment to the governorship of that province, would go to Rome to be invested with office, and then return to rule, so Christ has gone to heaven to be in­vested with the kingship of the world, and now He and His watchful servants are eagerly wait­ing for the same thing; He sitting at God’s right hand “expecting till His enemies be made His footstool,” and they expecting till He shall return to reign over the earth. Of the kingdom, the King and His kinsmen, the same avowal of unearthly origin is made by Christ: “My king­dom is not of this world;” “They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.” The kingdom is the “kingdom of God,” the “king­dom of heaven;” its constituency are those who are “begotten of God,” and “born from above.” True, this kingdom is now in the world in its rudiments and principles, in its citizens and representatives: those who, like their Lord, have been sent hither to accomplish the work of gath­ering out a people for His name. But, lest we fall into fatal error, let us not imagine that we are now reigning with Christ on the earth, or that the kingdom of God has been set up in the world. The Church’s earthly career during the present age is the exact facsimile of her Lord’s, —a career of exile rather than of exaltation; of rejection rather than of rule; of cross-bearing rather than of scepter-bearing. Grasping at earthly sovereignty for the Church while the Sovereign himself is still absent has proved, as we shall show hereafter, the most fruitful root of apostasy. It may be said that this picture of the Church, as despised and rejected in the world, suffering, outcast, and in exile, does not correspond to the facts. Not to the facts of our own generation, we admit, wherein the world is on such excellent terms with Christians. But that it represents the character of the dispensa­tion as a whole cannot be questioned, when we recall the dark ages and martyr ages of the Christian era; the prisons, and racks, and dungeons, and stakes, which stretch on through so large a portion of this age. And the pictures of proph­ecy are composite pictures, gathering up the main features of the entire dispensation and presenting them in one. Viewed thus, prediction and his­tory perfectly accord.

“The kingdom is now here in mystery, and to be here hereafter in manifestation,” one has tersely put it. And to this the predicted destiny of believers corresponds. “Your life is hid with Christ in God; when Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with Him in glory,” (Colossians 3:4). “Sons of God, therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew Him not,” (1 John 3:1). “The earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God,” (Romans 8:19). “If we suffer, we shall reign with Him,” (2 Timothy 2:12). Ob­scurity, rejection, exile, and trial in the world now; manifestation, vindication, enthronement, when the King comes, —this is the foretold call­ing of the children of the kingdom. The un­precedented exemption of the Church from per­secution, and the extraordinary triumphs of the Gospel which have characterized this nineteenth century, may tend to seduce us into the notion that the kingdom has already come, though the nobleman who had gone into a far country has not yet returned. That we may think truly on this subject, let us hear our Lord’s voice, say­ing: “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom,” (Luke 12:32). In spite of widespread conquests of the Gospel the Church is still “a little flock,” amid the vast populations of Pagans, Mohammedans, Infidels, and Apostates. This flock in every age has been branded with opprobrium, and torn by persecution, and beaten by hireling shepherds, and the end is not yet; for, as good Samuel Rutherford says, “So long as any portion of Christ’s mystical body is out of heaven, Satan will strike at it.” However favored in our times, this flock is not the kingdom; but it has the promise of the kingdom, in which rejection shall give place to rule, and crucifixion to coronation. When? “And when the Chief Shepherd shall appear, ye shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth not away,” (1 Peter 5:4). Whatever temporary respite from persecution we may enjoy, so that for the time it may be said as of old, “then had the Churches rest,” no permanent peace is guaranteed until the Lord’s return. “And to you who are troubled, rest with us when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven,” (2 Thessalonians 1:7).

Endnotes:

1 Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism.

2 These few sentences from a writer of the second century give a graphic portrait of the Christians of that period: “They inhabit their own country, but as strangers; they bear their part in all things as citizens, and endure all things as aliens. Every foreign country is a fatherland to them, and every fatherland a foreign country. . . . They live in the flesh, but walk not after the flesh. . . . They dwell on earth, but are citizens of heaven. They are poor, and make many rich; they are in want of all things, and they have all things in abundance; they are dis­honored, and in dishonor glorified.”— Epistle to Diognetus V.