Jeremiah 32:42

All the good that I have promised.

The religion, of the promise

(with Numbers 10:29):--Obeying a true instinct, the Church of Christ has from the beginning understood the whole story of the transfer of the chosen people from the land of bondage to the land of promise as possessing, over and above its historical value, the preciousness of a divinely-planned allegory. For us, to-day, just as really as for them in days of old, the stimulus continues to be simply this--a promise. Heaven cannot be demonstrated. We merely take God’s Word for it. Not enough, in our times, is said--soberly and intelligently said, I mean--about heaven. Very “many people have the feeling that the old-fashioned heaven of their childhood’s thoughts and hopes has been explained away by the progress ex discovery. It seems to them as if heaven were pushed farther and farther off, just in proportion as the telescope penetrates farther and farther into space. The gates of pearl recede with the enlargement of the object-glass, and the search for tee Paradise of God, like that for the earthly Eden, seems to become more hopeless, the more accurate our knowledge of the map. The primitive Christians found it comparatively easy to think of heaven as a place just above the stars. To us, who have learned to think of the sun itself as but a star seen near at hand, and of the stars as suns, such localisation of the dwelling-place of the Most Highest is far from easy. Another, and a very different reason for keeping heaven, as it were, in the background, holding the mention of it in reserve, comes from those who believe that there is such a danger as that of cheapening and vulgarising sacred things by too much fluency in talking about them. It cannot be denied that there is a certain amount of reason for this fastidiousness, some strength in this protest. An indulgent rhetoric may throw open the gates with a freedom so careless as to make us wonder why there should be any gates at all; and lips to which the common prose speech of the real heaven would perhaps come hard, were they compelled to try it, can sing of “Jerusalem the Golden,” and of the Paradise for which “tis weary waiting here” with a glibness at which possibly the angels stand aghast. This is a second reason, a very different reason from the first, but still a reason, for observing reticence about heaven. And yet, m the face of both of these reasons, I think it is a sad pity, our hearing so little as we do about the hope of heaven as a motive power in human life. For after all that has been said, or can be said, these two facts remain indisputable; they stare us in the face: first, that this life of ours, however we may account for it, does bear a certain resemblance to a journey, in that the one is a movement through time, as the other is a movement through space; secondly, that any journey which lacks a destination is, and must of necessity be a dismal thing. Human nature being what it is, we need the attractive power of something to look forward to, as we say, to keep our strength and courage up to the living standard. Christians are men with a hope, men who have been called to inherit a blessing. Nor is the Old Testament lacking in this element of promise. It runs through the whole Bible. What book anywhere can you point to so forward-looking as that Book? As we watch the worthies of many generations pass in long procession onwards, from the day when the promise was first given of the One who should come and bruise the serpent’s head, down to the day when the aged Simeon in the Temple took the Child Jesus into his arms and blessed Him, we seem to see upon every forehead a glow of light. These men have a hope. They are looking for something, and they look as those look who expect in due time to find. If this be true of the general tone of the Old Testament Scriptures, doubly, trebly is it true of the New Testament. The coming of Christ has only quickened and made more intense in us that instinct of hope which the old prophecies of His coming first inspired. For when He came, He brought in larger hopes, and opened to us far-reaching vistas of promise, such as had never been dreamed of before. A solemn joy pervades the atmosphere in which apostle and evangelist move before our eyes. They are as men who, in the face of the wreck of earthly hopes, have yet no inclination to tears, because there has been opened to them a vision of things unseen, and granted to them a foretaste of the peace eternal. “The glory that shall be revealed”; “the things eye hath not seen,” prepared for those who love God; “the house not made with hands,” waiting for occupancy; “the crown of righteousness, laid up”--you remember how prominent a place these hold in the persuasive oratory of St. Paul. The complaint that the progress of human knowledge has made it difficult to think and speak of heaven as believing men used to think and speak of it, is a complaint to which we ought to return for a few moments; for, from our leaving it as we did, the impression may have been conveyed to some minds that the difficulty is insuperable. Let me observe, then, that while there is a certain grain of reasonableness in this argument for silence with respect to heaven and the things of heaven, there is by no means so much weight to be attached to it as many people seem to suppose. For after all, when we come to think of it, this changed conception of what heaven may be like is not traceable so much to any marvellous revolution that has come over the whole character of human thought since you and I were children, as it is to the changes which have taken place in our own several minds, and which necessarily take place in every mind in its progress from infancy to maturity. The really serious blow at old-time notions upon the subject was dealt long before any of us were born, when the truth was established beyond serious doubts that this planet is not the centre about which all else in the universe revolves. But the explanation of our personal sense of grievance at being robbed of the heaven we were used to believe in is to be sought in the familiar saying, “When I was a child, I spake as a child,” &c. We instinctively, and without knowing it, project this childish way of looking at things upon the whole thinking world that was contemporary with our childhood, and infer from the change that has come over our own mind that corresponding change has been going on in the mind of the world at large. This fallacy is the more easily fallen into, because it is a fact that, if we go back far enough in the history of thought, we do find even the mature minds seeing things much as we ourselves saw them in our early childhood. But let me try to strike closer home and meet the difficulty in a more direct and helpful way. I do it by asking whether we ought not to feel ashamed of ourselves, thus to talk about having been robbed of the promise simply because the Father of heaven has been showing us, lust as fast as our poor minds could bear the strain, to how immeasurable an area the Fatherhood extends. Instead of repining because we cannot dwarf God’s universe so as to make it fit perfectly the smallness of our notions, let us turn all our energies to seeking to enlarge the capacity of our faith so that it shall be able to hold more. What all this means is, that we are to believe better things of God, not worse things. It may turn out,--who can tell?--that heaven lies nearer to us than even in our childhood we ever ventured to suppose; that it is not only nearer than the sky, but nearer than the clouds. The reality of heaven, happily, is not dependent on the ability of our five senses to discover its whereabouts. Doubtless a sixth or seventh sense might speedily reveal much, very much of which the five we now have take no notice. Be this as it may, the reasonableness of our believing in Christ’s promise, that in the world whither He went He would prepare a place for us, is in nowise impugned by anything that the busy wit of man has yet found out, or is likely to find out. There is no period of life from which we can afford to spare the presence of this heavenly hope. We need it in youth, to give point and purpose and direction to the newly launched life. We need it in middle life to help us cover patiently that long stretch which parts youth from old age--the time of the fading out of illusions in the dry light of experience; the time when we discover the extent of our personal range, and the narrow limit of our possible achievement. Above all shall we find such a hope the staff of old age, should the pilgrimage last so long. But let us not imagine that we can postpone believing until then. Faith is a habit of the soul, and old men would be the first to warn us against the notion that it is a habit that may be acquired in a day. Those of us who are wise will take up the matter now, at whatever point of age the word may happen to have found us. (W. R. Huntington, D. D.).