1 Corinthians 2:9,10

THE RELATION OF THE SEEN TO THE UNSEEN

‘Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. But God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit.’

1 Corinthians 2:9

We belong to two worlds, which are, in very truth, one world. We cannot escape from this necessity of our constitution; but our joy and our strength, our confidence and our inspiration is to know that we do belong to both.

I wish, therefore, to suggest only two thoughts on the relation of the Unseen to the Seen.

I. The Seen is the revelation of the Unseen.—In quieter moments we all look forward to the future, and perhaps we ask, ‘Where shall I go hereafter? Shall I be happy?’ when we ought rather to ask, ‘Where am I now? What is my idea of happiness?’ Happiness, we can see at once, involves a harmony between a man’s capacities and desires and his environment. As Christians, we believe that man was made to know God, and that, in Christ, this knowledge can be gained. Happiness for man, therefore, lies absolutely in conformity to God, and this conformity is in effort, in aim, in inception, in essence, not future, but present. ‘This is,’ the Lord said, not ‘This will be,’ or ‘This leads to,’ or ‘This assures,’ but ‘This is life eternal, that they should know Thee, the only true God, and Him Whom Thou didst send.’ This is eternal life, sovereign in its conquering power, invincible in its sustaining energy, now while the conflict is to be waged, now while the lesson is to be learned, no less than when we know even as we are known. Holiness is, in other words, the necessary foundation of happiness here and hereafter—now when we see through a mirror in a riddle, and then when we see face to face, it is clear, then, how the present is for us individually the expression of the future, the Seen and the Unseen, because it is the expression of the Eternal in the terms of human life. We are, indeed, wholly unable to give shape to being in another order, and in this respect the reserve of Scripture is in striking contrast with the boldness of human imaginings. But still we can perceive that when our earthly life ceases we are that which we have become.

II. The Unseen which is our future is prepared by the present; the Unseen which is our faith is shown by the present. No reproach has been more frequently brought against Christianity than that it teaches men to disregard the claims of to-day in the contemplation of some distant heaven. So far as the reproach is just, it applies not to our creed, but to the perversion of it. For us, as Christians, our faith is that which is the spring of our life; it brings home to us our immortality, it teaches us that we have already entered on the privileges and powers of the future. ‘Ye are come,’ and not ‘Ye shall come,’ ‘unto Mount Zion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable hosts of angels, to the general assembly and church of the first-born who are enrolled in heaven.’ Ye are fellow-citizens of the household of God, and not ‘Ye shall be’; and even now ‘We have,’ and not simply ‘We shall have’ hereafter, ‘a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.’ Just so far, then, as we use this spiritual endowment which is given us, we shall use it with the conditions of our outward state. When the Lord bade the Pharisees ‘render to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,’ He did not, as we commonly suppose, make a division between the obligations of man: He declared their real unity. He is no Christian who can pass by on the other side, busied with his own aims, where humanity lies before him naked and wounded and half dead; he is no Christian who thinks that any part of his daily work lies outside the transforming influence of his Master’s presence. Every human action must assume for the Christian fresh importance, and the same principle which enriches his view of life ennobles, as we have seen before, his view of nature. The sense of the Eternal in the present gives to things transitory a power of meaning for the believer which they cannot otherwise have. God has revealed to him that which ‘eye saw not and ear heard not.’ For him the ‘kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ,’ and he confidently demands the attributes of its service. He does not look away from the things of earth, but he looks through them to their Maker.

—Bishop Westcott.

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‘The Christian, even more surely than the poet, finds in the meanest flower that grows thoughts that often lie too deep for tears, just as he finds in the poorest outcast the throbbings of a brother’s pulse. In his estimate of the world he refuses to acquiesce in the surface of things, to disparage the least gift which God has made, to accept the verdict of a barren failure; he knows the conditions of life, the strength of life, and the end of life. “I saw,” St. John writes, after he had contemplated the Vision of Judgment, “I saw a new heaven and a new earth.” The heaven and the earth are new, and yet they are not like the former new creation. They always have been, but there is not in us the nature, the ability to behold their veiled beauty. But at last the veil shall be drawn aside, and things shall be seen as they are in the sight of God. This consummation the Apostle shadows forth, and shows how the eternal order follows the order of time, being at once its offspring and glory.’

(SECOND OUTLINE)

THE FUTURE LIFE

The spiritual life is so ordered and arranged as to be the first stage of what we are accustomed to call the eternal life; and that consequently, if we are really following in the footsteps of the Lord Jesus Christ, we are possessed of a gift of perception which enables us to penetrate, at least to a certain extent, into the mysteries of the eternal world, and to comprehend their nature.

I. It seems to be part of the scriptural idea of heaven that it is a region or locality in which is gathered together the vast multitude of those whom Christ hath drawn to Himself out of the world at large. They come from all ages, and from every nation, and people, and kindred, and tongue; even from those sections of the human family who have had no opportunity of hearing the Gospel. But whatever may have been their circumstances and antecedents, they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Consciously or unconsciously, they have taken up the Cross to follow Christ. Consciously or unconsciously, they have gone about doing good as Christ did. They are fit for the society of the holy angels—nay, fit for association with God Himself—and they constitute the general assembly and Church of the firstborn which are written in heaven. The conception is a magnificent one. And when we are weary, as we sometimes are, of the conflict with evil which is ever going on in the world, our keenest feelings of brotherhood and our most earnest desires for the regeneration of humanity will not keep us from wishing that the conception may very speedily become an accomplished fact; for what a blessedness it would be to leave behind us the strife and the tumult and the discord, the vice and the crime, produced by the collision of the human with the Divine will, and to enter into the calm society of the pure and loving and noble; into intercourse with the great and good of all ages; into a state in which every eye beams with the lustre of a Divine intelligence.

II. What do we suppose will be the character of the inhabitants of heaven?—I mean, rather, what common characteristic may we expect to find in them all? You say, ‘God-likeness.’ Yes, ‘God-likeness.’ But can we not express ourselves more definitely than in this way? Doubtless there will be in the mysterious future state no obliteration of the individuality of the redeemed. Peter, the man of action, will remain Peter still. John, the man of contemplation, will be the man of contemplation for ever, and have his own special task to fulfil in heaven. The substratum of feeling will be, of course, the same in all. There will be devotion to God, and perfect and unsullied holiness; but the idiosyncrasies will abide. Is this not perfectly conceivable? Heaven’s occupations, for which you and I are training now—for this world is only a school from which we shall go forth at last to the real work of existence—can hardly be the same for all: let us say, for instance, for the grand poets who have passed away from amongst us, and now lie in the marble majesty of death; or for the great preachers whose voices, not long ago, were stilled into silence; or for the musicians, of whom we have lately heard, who built up a massive structure of tones to express the thoughts that were stirring in their souls; or for the scientists who toiled for man’s sake and for God’s sake at the discovery of the secrets of nature, and enlarged to an almost incalculable extent the boundaries of human knowledge. Possibly the service of these men in the hereafter will be, to a very great extent, a continuation of their service here. But in one respect these men will assuredly, all of them, resemble each other—in the spirit of love, which manifests itself in self-sacrifice. And this is God-likeness. The gift of Jesus Christ for us was a stupendous act of self-sacrifice on the part of God.

III.—And yet we should expect a close and intimate intercourse with Deity itself to be one of the distinguishing features of the future state of existence. The world in which we are placed is full of traces of moral and material beauty; and if we may judge of the workman by his workmanship, there must be something inexpressibly lovely and attractive about the Divine Artificer Who created all. We cannot, then, be satisfied with the profoundest investigation into the wonders of the universe. The universe is, after all, only the vestibule of the palace; and we long to press forward into the very presence of the King. Besides, a voice within perpetually reminds us that God made man for Himself; and a feeling within is equally explicit in its assurance that we shall be unquiet and restless until we have found our rest in the Heavenly Father’s love. It is not, let it be remembered, mere intellectual acquaintance with Deity, important as that is, that we require. But it is, if I may venture so to speak, personal contact; it is the knowledge which one being has of another where there is a mutual understanding; a true sympathy; a real interchange of loving thought and feeling between them.

Rev. Prebendary Gordon Calthrop.

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‘Strange, very strange, is the indifference with which many a man regards his approaching entrance into the unseen world. He is, and cannot but be, under the circumstances, uncertain about the nature of his reception there; but the uncertainty does not trouble him. He does not shudder at the idea of what must be to him a leap in the dark. Strange, I say, very strange! But for us, if we be true disciples, there need be no uncertainty, no misgiving. The sights that will burst upon our view when we enter eternity may be startling, and even awful—who can tell? But there will certainly be one Person there with Whom we have already made acquaintance—One Whom we know, and know well, and have learnt to trust; One Whose voice we have heard in the Word; Whose face we have sought in prayer; on Whose arm we have leaned in the perilous journey of life; Whose example we have humbly endeavoured to follow; and He, the centre of all observation and the Lord of the whole domain, will recognise His servants, and bid them enter joyfully into their eternal home.’