Luke 21:33,34

ETERNAL WORDS

‘Heaven and earth shall pass away: but My words shall not pass away. And take heed to yourselves.’

Luke 21:33

So, and with such solemn words, doth Christ the mighty Prophet close the awful strain of the prophecy. ‘My words shall not pass away.’ ‘Heaven and earth shall. My words shall not.’ My words. Oh, surely here we are listening to the Divine asseveration of the Eternal Son with which He clenches and confirms the weighty truths He has just now uttered: truths weighty, but truths marvellous, truths hard to understand and harder still to reconcile, truths strange and unacceptable to flesh and blood. Note:—

I. The certainty of Christ’s coming.

II. The abiding character of Christ’s words.

III. How we may realise these things.

Our Lord says, ‘Take heed to yourselves.’ We must force ourselves to look at our life and all about us in this spirit. By prayer; by resolute determination in God’s strength to see things from God’s point of view, and not man’s; by avoiding, as far as in us lies, the excitements and distractions of busy life and frivolous society, which drown the voices by which God speaks to the soul, and dim the eye of faith by the dust of the world. We know, we all of us know, the things of which we have spoken; but we do not realise them. There is a world of difference between the two.

Illustration

‘Surely this means that His words are eternal, perpetual; for ever present, possible, imminent; for ever coming true. So, indeed, they would not pass away. So they would be like the heavens and the earth, and the laws thereof; like heat, gravitation, electricity, what not—always here, always working, always asserting themselves, with this difference, that when the physical laws of the heavens and the earth, which began in time, in time have perished, the spiritual laws of God’s kingdom, of Christ’s moral government, of moral beings, shall endure for ever and for ever, eternal as that God Whose essence they reflect. Most miserable would mankind be if these words were not to be fulfilled till some future last day and Day of Judgment.’