Joyful Reunions
’Aim so SHALL WE EVER BE WITH THE LOBD.” — I THESS. IV. Ij.
“Hast thou embraced them there,
Thy kindred, tenants of yon world of bliss?
Oh, say — do angels share The sympathies so sweetly sown in this? The nurtured ‘neath one roof — one native sky — Meet they with changeless love where every tear is dry ?**
UR fondest wishes respond in the affirmative. The noblest affections of our natures endorse the poet’s utterances. The Bible, in manifold direct as well as indirect passages, fosters the inspiriting hope that the hallowed intimacies of earth, fathers, mothers, children, will be renewed and perpetuated in glory. The thought of the loved and lost — now the loved and glorified — being “the loved and known again!” — does not this tinge our every anticipation of heaven with a golden hue, and form a new and holy link, binding us to the throne of God!
Our blessed Lord Himself, alike by His discourses and His example, has strengthened our belief in future reunion and recognition. He speaks of “Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” as distinct persons in the kingdom above (Matt. viii. ii). He speaks of “the beggar” — laid on earth at “the rich man’s gate” — now in “Abraham’s bosom” (Luke xvi. 23). When we have previously found Him comforting the hearts of the bereaved sisters of Bethany, His consolatory announcement was, not “Lazarus shall rise,” but “Your brother shall rise again” (John xi. 23). The old hallowed earthly link of aflfection was to be restored at the Great day; — the brother of the earthly was to be known and welcomed as brother in the heavenly home! On Mount Hermon, Moses and Elias came down, in form and feature the same as they were when they dwelt in their earthly tabernacles (Matt. xvii. 3). Could we venture the strange conjecture that their recognised identity was a mere accommodation for the ecstatic scene; — that, though known for that little while to themselves and the disciples, when the vision passed away they again melted into shades — their individuality ceasing as they returned to the spirit-world? We cannot think so. We speak of “the communion of saints” in the Church below; and how blessed it is when in sacred bonds of gospel-fellowship spirit is linked to spirit. Some of the holiest moments of earth are those in which the children of God “take sweet counsel together,” and unburden into one another’s ears the experience of their Lord’s faithfulness and love. Shall all this terminate at the hour of death? Are pilgrim-spirits, who have wept and prayed and rejoiced together, — mutual helpers till they reached the very gates of glory, — are they — just when the object of their united hopes and prayers is attained — when the crown is in sight — to exchange a cheerless farewell? Are fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters and children, to be permitted to walk to “the house of God in company” on earth, but forbidden to do this in heaven? We cannot think so! Shall Martha, and Mary, and Lazarus have no happiness there in recounting Bethany-scenes of love and friendship? Shall the Marys have no wondrous joy in re-traversing in thought their way to the tomb? Shall the disciples (no longer disconsolate) be forbidden to retrace together in glory their steps on the Emmaus road, and at the mutual recital, cause their hearts again to bum within them? (Luke xxiv. 3 2). We cannot think so! We cannot suppose that all the rills of earth’s purest social and spiritual enjoyment would thus in a moment be so strangely cut off. All one’s idea of the celestial world is, that it is an expansion and amplification of whatever on earth is “pure, and lovely, and of good report.” “If it be a happiness,” says Baxter, “to live with the saints in their imperfection, where they have sin to embitter, what will it be to live with them in their perfection, when saints are only and wholly saints?” On earth, the accidental meetings of youth not unfrequently ripen, as years roll on, into hallowed intimacies. If we view the present as the childhood of immorality, — the infancy of endless life, — may we not picture its incipient attachments reaching their prime in that glorious manhood of being! The reverse of all we have now said would involve a total extinction of the most exalted feelings of our nature. Earthly friendship is one of the flowers of heaven, — an exotic growing in the crevices of man’s rocky heart; — it will be nurtured (surely not extirpated) in its native clime. Jesus Himself experienced and cherished its hallowed influence; — He Himself reposed under this solitary column in the ruined temple of humanity. He has left Bethany behind Him a the memorial of the
most sabred fellowship earth ever witnessed; and wHle all the disciples were dearly loved by Him, there were congenialities and idiosyncrasies in the spirit of the “Disciple of love “which drew the Master to him specially as” His ownr
What Jenm hallowed by His own example, shall we count it wnhallowed to cherish when we meet Him and His in glory?
Paul invites us. to entertain the same consoling assurance. He himself looked forward to his joy and crown. What was it? “Ye in the present of the Lord Jesus!” (i Thess. ii. 19). «Ye.” He had individual Churches and members of these Churches in his eye. He looked forward (can we doubt it?) to recall many a hallowed scene in his and their chequered earthly path. How fondly he clung to the intimacies of his apostleship, — his own “sons in the faith! “How” his spirit had no rest because he found not Titus his brother! “(2 Cor. ii. 13). How Luke lightened his toilsome journey! How Epaphroditus and Timothy cheered his imprisonment! How the brethren from Appii Forum kindled the waning lustre of his dimmed eye! (Acts xxviii. 15). Shall that sympathetic spirit sympathise no more in a better and brighter existence with those with whom he toiled in the great work of the apostolate here? Shall all those for whom he laboured and travailed until Christ was formed in them be unknown to him beyond the grave? Is this mighty star to dwell apart in the spiritual firmament and never recognise again the many who, by its earthly shining, were” turned to righteousness? “Nay, rather, may we not think of him as a spiritual father gathering his many chUdren, — children in years and children in faith — around him in glory, rejoicing in the permanency of friendships, which on earth were oft unstable? No Demas now to forsake him; no” present evil world “to lure from his constancy. We may think of him as the sun of a little” system “of saints, — redeemed planets clustering around him, — bound to one another by that still closer and holier tie which binds them all to Jesus. And, just as astronomers tell us that our own is a mere integral part of a mightier astral system, of which Alcyone in the Pleiades is the wondrous centre; — so, while they who” turn many to righteousness “shall “shine as the fixed stars” (central suns) “for ever and ever;” — these are but subordinates — owning the presence and power of a mightier Lord, — the great Alcyone (if we can with reverence use the simile) of the heavenly system, who binds all together by the gravitation of His own supreme Love!
Yes! we fondly cling to the hope (the belief) that in heaven there will be joyful reunions and recognitions, in which the t«ar of bereavement, whether for the young or for the aged, shall never more dim the eye, and the tramp of the funeral crowd shall never more be heard. To imagine the reverse would, I repeat, be doing violence to all the analogies of earth and to the deepest emotions of our moral and social natures. We may exult in the anticipation of pouring into other hearts the story of redeeming love, and singing “the new song “in concert with voices that have been attuned with our own to it here! If even the Patriarchs, the pilgrim-fathers of earlier times, entertained at death the thought of being” gathered to their people; “— if even David — an Old Testament saint — had his heart-grief soothed as he bent, a stricken parent, over the couch of his dead child, dwelling on the thought of sharing with him, in the Great Beyond, a nobler crown than that of earth — shall we, as Christians, be denuded of this consolatory hope? No, no! The grave will not be permitted to efface the memorials of the past and destroy our personal identity. The resurrection-body will wear its old smiles of love and tenderness. To quote precious words already dwelt upon,” 2%em also thai sleep in Jesuits will God bring with Him’’ It is the mother hushing her infant in its night-cradle to rise the same as it lay down, in the moming-Kght of immortality. Friend will embrace friend, parent will embrace child, and child embrace parent!
“Oh, when a mother meets on high
The child she lost in infancy,
Has she not then, for pains and fears,
The day of woe — the watchful night — For all her sorrows and her tears — An overpayment of delight?”
“So shall WE ever be with the Lord I” It will be no dreamy solitude — no hermit life. Ever and anon we may imagine groups of the redeemed, known to one another on earth, hushing the music of the universal song, and retiring to hold peaceful fellowship beside the still fountains of water, there refreshing their spirits with the memories of time, and, after the sacred recitals, returning again to resume, with deeper cadence, the lofly anthem.
Nor need we so limit these ennobled friendships as to restrict them to that of contemporary and personal acquaintance. May we not rather picture them as embracing the vast multitude of the pious dead, whose names (though they lived in other lands and centuries) are among us as “household words,” — those whose example has animated our faith, quickened our love, and who, though dead, have been long heard to speak! Think of the untold joy of being ushered into the presence and fellowship of such as Abraham, and Moses,
and David, and Paul, and John! Think of the lesser
p cloud of witnesses in days nearer our own, or in our own. Sainted men, — the modern Stepfiens who have suffered, the Enochs who have walked with God, burning and shining lights, whose words and deeds have embalmed them in our dearest memories! Think of the young Josiahs who may have been summoned in early age from positions of dignity and usefulness they were here adorning and consecrating; child Timothys who are seen playing one day at the feet of mother and grandmother — the Lois and Eunice of modern times, but unlike their Apostle prototype, who have been called early away from a hallowed home on earth to the ministries above. How the heart bounds at the thought of this wondrous expansion of friendship in its noblest form, associated in the sublime services of the upper sanctuary with the great and good -of every successive age in the Church’s history — “the glorious company of the apostles, the goodly fellowship of the prophets, the noble army of martyrs;” — the children, like those of old in the earthly Jerusalem, waving their palms and singing their hosannas in the better Temple! We have but traced while on earth their “footsteps on the sands of time;” what will it be to stand with them on the shores of the glassy sea, — whole families and households reunited in “the Father’s house “?
Bereaved one! these lines may at present express the sad musings of your desolate heart: —
Silently the shades are falling
Hound my lonely childless door,
Loved and cherished ones recallirg,
Who on earth Til meet no more.
Oh, not * lost,’ but ’ gone before us,’
They can neveibe forgot;
Heaven’s bright mansions shall restore us.
In sweet ties which perish not!”
Yes! live under the cheering anticipation of a
joyful reunion with the white-robed multitude, the dear
and tender hope of meeting with those who once
joyed with you in your joys and shared with you in your
sorrows. Among these, it may be, the young voices, too
soon silenced, who helped to soothe and lull the waves
of life while you had them, and whose caresses and
loving ways were sorely missed when they were taken
from you. Think of those spoken of as taking part in
the sublime closing Gospel invitation,” The Bbide says.
Come!” The Bride! It is the Church triumphant!
and in that Church cherished ones, silent on earth,
but whose beaming spirits in “the better land” are
beckoning you upwards, and onwards, and heavenwards,
and homewards!
‘* Hast thou not glimpses, in the twilight hour,
Of mountains where immortal mom prevails?
Comes there not, through the silence, to thine ear
A gentle rustling of the morning gale — A murmur wafted from that glorious shore
Of streams that water banks for ever fair — And voices of the loved ones gone before,
More musical in that celestial <iir?”
They would incite you — aye, the very youngest among them — to fresh ardour in running your Christian race!
Think of them crowding the walls of glory, eager to welcome those they have left for a little behind, to buffet the wilderness storms — waiting to lead them, hand in hand, up the golden streets! Think of them through “the ages and the ages,” seated along with you on the everlasting hills, tracing together every rill and streamlet in the “nether valley,” and acknowledging how cdl had been combining mysteriously for good. Meanwhile, let this distant view refresh your spirit and cheer your footsteps. Fathers! mothers! with these hopes “full of immortality;” — with such hallowed forecastings beyond the tomb and the “early grave,” sing through your tears —
“Yes! the hour — the hour is hasting,
Spirit shall with spirit blend;
Fast mortality is wasting,
Then the secret all shall end!
Let, then, thought hold sweet communion,
Let us breathe the mutual prayer,
Till in heaven’s eternal union,
Oh, my child! to meet thee there!
HEAVENLY CHIMES BEYOND THE RIVER.
“The ranfomedofthe Lord nhall return, and come to Zion with »ong» and ererlattirtg joy upon their heads * they shall obtain joy and gladness and sorrow and sighing tliall Jlee ateay.” — Isa. xxxv. io.
Hark 1 a peal of heavenly bells,
Ringing, ringing;
With ten thousand voices sweet.
Singing, singing —
Worthy is the Lamb once slain,
Who hath purchased our salvation;
Made us kings and priests to reign,
Out of every tribe and nation.
We are safe beyond the river,
From His presence nought can sever j
We shall sing His praise for ever I”
Hark! a peal of heavenly bells.
Ringing, ringing;
With ten thousand voices sweet,
Singing, singing —
We have gained our Home at last,
In His Palace bright and glorious;
Every wave of Jordan past.
Over every foe victorious.
Safe across the border river,
From His presence nought can sever;
We shall sing His praise for ever I”
Hark! a peal of heavenly bells.
Ringing, ringing;
With ten thousand voices sweet.
Singing, singing —
*’ Now we read His ways aright:
All that evil once portended,
In the blaze of heavenly light,
Is with love and wisdom blended.
Now across the border river,
From His presence nought can sever;
We shall sing His praise for ever I”
Hark! a peal of heavenly bells,
Ringing, ringing;
With ten thousand voices sweet.
Singing, singing —
Here beloved friends we meet;
Here restored their smiles of gladness;
Everlasting bliss complete,
Joys unmixed with aught of sadness.
Safe across the border river.
From their presence nought can sever;
While we sing His praise for ever!”
Hark! a peal of heavenly bells.
Ringing, ringing;
With ten thousand voices sweet.
Singing, singing-
Fought the fight — the kingdom won,
Death behind us — life before us;
While eternal ages run,
Never shall we cease the chorus.
We are Home beyond the river,
From His presence nought can sever;
We shall sing His praise for ever I