Philippians 3:20-22

IMMORTALITY

‘Our conversation [or commonwealth] is in heaven.’

Php_3:20

We who hold the Christian faith in a life to come have sometimes to meet severe criticisms from those who do not.

I. We have sometimes to meet a charge of selfishness in looking forward to a future life, and this charge comes most frequently in the shape of a criticism of the supposed nature of the life in heaven to which we look forward. Our critics quote to us the well-known words out of St. Bernard’s hymn:—

‘I know not, oh, I know not,

What social joys are there,’

and they say to us, ‘I see; what you want is a life of unending happiness: of course, your desire is very natural.’ We shall not deny that we look forward to happiness in heaven, but we must point out that the happiness to which we look forward is not the same thing as pleasure; that the joys we imagine in heaven are not pleasures of sense. Our collect for All Saints’ Day, following the Bible, is careful to refer to such joys as ‘unspeakable’; that is to say, the heart of man has not conceived them and cannot conceive them. But, if among those unspeakable joys in God’s presence, we define one in particular, the joys of society, the bliss of reunion with those blessed spirits whom we have loved on earth, ought that to shame us?

II. It is said to us by other critics, ‘We have no fault to find with you for so excellent a hope as the hope of immortality. It certainly is not selfish. We only wish that we ourselves could entertain it. At the same time would it not be the more manly course to face the evidence of facts and recognise the difficulties involved in the idea of immortality?’ But we Christians, who believe in man’s immortality, are not ignoring facts. We are insisting upon them. We say that man because he can say, ‘I am I,’ because he can think and act and love, is in the universe only less than God. He is the child of God, and so the heir of immortality.

III. A third sort of criticism is levelled against our belief in eternal life.—This belief, it is said, may be true or it may not, but for our life here, at any rate, it is beside the mark. As to the charge of what has been called ‘other-worldliness,’ I must confess that I have never met with that distemper amongst Christians. From my own observation, I should say that Christian men were every bit as good citizens as those who theoretically limited their interest to this world—as genuine lovers of their race. One might perhaps even dare to go further, and say that the men who have done most to make this world a better place than they found it—men like the great Lord Shaftesbury—have been the very men who looked forward to another country, and declared plainly that this was not their home.

IV. The way to realise the meaning of immortality is not to think of it as an abstract doctrine that can be argued about, and the pros put against the cons. The way to think of it is to think of Christ as living, as our King in that province of heaven, which seems so far off and is so very near; and then to think of those members of His blessed company whom we ourselves have known here and loved, and to keep their memories fresh in our prayers.

Rev. Canon Beeching.

Illustration

‘What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our own corpse-coffins at last,

Swallow’d in Vastness, lost in Silence, drown’d in the deeps of a meaningless Past?

What but a murmur of gnats in the gloom, or a moment’s anger of bees in their hive?

Peace, let it be! for I loved him, and love him for ever: the dead are not dead, but alive.’