And the Holy Spirit
“The eye of flesh is not capable of seeing, nor the ear of hearing, nor the heart of understanding heaven and its glories. But there the eye, the ear, and the heart are made capable. Else how could we enjoy those things in heaven? The more perfect the sight, the more delightful will be the beautiful object. ‘The more perfect the appetite, the sweeter the food; the more musical the ear, the more pleasant the melody, and the more perfect the soul, the more joyous these joys, and the more glorious these glories.”
RICHARD BAX’TER.
HE, Holy Spirit, in us, is said to be “the earnest of heaven.” The “earnest” is the security and foretaste, and so the
Holy Spirit is the certainty of heaven and its foretaste. He puts the fact of heaven, the taste of heaven, the power of heaven and the ambition and toil for heaven, freshly, strongly and constantly in our hearts. The refrain and chorus are, “‘ Heaven is my home.”
“Tn whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation; in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise. Which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, unto the praise of his glory” (Ephes. £: 13).
“Now he which establishes us with you in Christ, and hath anointed us is God, who hath also sealed us, and given the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts” Se ea
What do these great texts mean? ‘They present to us the ministry and work of the Holy Spirit as He forms in us the fact and experience of heaven, and shapes us in desire and in heavenliness, and in heavenly longings and heavenly fashion, at every point.
The music and hope of heaven would fill and sweeten our lives if we lived in the full power of the Spirit. What transporting anticipations! What “joy unspeakable and full of glory” would brighten our living and our dying days! The Spirit’s power settles our faith, and quickens the sentiment about heaven. By the Spirit’s mighty workings, heaven becomes an assured, a sublime and a glorious fact. The power of the Holy Spirit puts us on the stretch for the good world, and puts in us a thirst for heaven. He gives us constant and enlarged tastes and visions of heaven, till all other tastes pall and all other visions are heavy and dull. He gives us notes of its harmony and all earth’s notes are discord. The power of the Spirit binds us to heaven because Jesus is there. We are bound to love it, think about it and be ravished by it, for Jesus is its center and glory.
How. strongly and insistently does the Holy Spirit use heaven and its untold and manifold good to move saints to action, to awaken from death, to make zeal hot and love ardent. The Holy Spirit implants heaven in us. The Holy Spirit Himself, given to us, is God’s mark of ownership and security. His authority is put on us. But it is not His sealing process, its condition, significance, or results in full, with which we have to do now, but of one phase, the earnest of future and eternal things. The Holy Spirit is the earnest of heaven tous. “Earnest” means the pledge which, in purchase, is given that the contract will be faithfully and fully carried out. An earnest is part of the thing itself, given as a security that the whole will be given in its time. Through the Holy Spirit God gives us a part of heaven as a pledge of the full heaven when the time is ripe. The Holy Spirit is to us both a foretaste and a pledge of heaven. The first instalment of heaven is given by the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit makes much of heaven. He is Himself to us “the earnest,” the pledge and foretaste of heaven. He puts heaven in us when He puts Himself in us, and all our tastes, struggles, relishes and longings for heaven are the creations of His power and the sure tests of His presence. If there be no heavenly lookings, no heavenly, spirit, no heavenly yearnings in us, there is no Holy Spirit in us. God works in us a fitness for the heavenly world by the Holy Spirit and plants in us the heavenly mind and the heavenly image. The indwelling Spirit of God makes us unlike earth and like heaven, The Holy Spirit matures hope to its brightest luster, and enables the saint to “glory in tribulation” and “rejoice in hope of the glory of God.”
Paul, by the spirit, made much of heaven. In his mid-career, fastened to life and earth by his strenuous toil, he pauses lest his unremitting toil should earthen him, and he records his loyalty to heaven and to Jesus, for in Paul’s estimation, and in every true estimate, they are one. “Iam ina strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart and be with Christ which is far better.” We find him on the stretch always for heaven, always “confident and willing rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord.” He is ever pressing on: “Forgetting the things that are behind, and reaching forth to those things that are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of my high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” He is always “keeping his body under, and keeping it in subjection,” that he might not lose the incorruptible crown. At the close, his good battle fought, his course finished, the faith kept, heaven is still in full view, its crown gleaming brighter under Nero’s axe. It is the thought, the hope, the fact of heaven which forms Christian character and matures it into its unearthly beauty and perfection.
The stimulating demands of entering into eternal life could not be set forth with more terrific colorings and imperative exactions than by Jesus Christ. ‘If thy hand cause thee to stumble cut it off: it is good for thee to enter into life maimed, rather than having two hands to go into hell, into the unquenchable fire.”
Heaven is termed a reward. “Great is your reward in heaven,” says Christ to His persecuted and reviled disciples. And so in Revelation: “And behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be.” The meaning is dues paid for work. “For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works.”
Then let the wildest storms arise;
Let tempests mingle earth and skies;
No fatal shipwrecks shall I fear,
But all my treasures with me bear.
If thou, my Jesus, still be nigh,
Cheerful I live, and joyful die;
Secure, when mortal comforts flee,
To find ten thousand worlds in thee. — Philip Doddridge.