No Separation in Christ (Continued)
“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall he able to separate us from the love of God, -which is IN Christ Jesus OUR Lord.” — Rom. viii. 38, 39. “The salvation which is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory.” — 2 Tim. ii. 10.
IN our former meditation we found the Apostle JM uttering the exultant challenge and suasion,” that nought — no circumstances of Life; no, nor Death itself; no created thing, no created being, could ever separate him from the love of God. And the ground of that challenge — the guarantee of inviolable security, was derived from his now familiar monogram — the realised mystical union and iellowship with his divine Lord. He is especially emphatic in its avowal. His words in the original are more expressive than in our rendering.
‘J* The love’ — ‘the special love’ — (ts) “Here plainly enough God’s love to xis in Chi-ist, — to us as we are in Christ” (Alford).
The completed work of the Great Surety, His cross and passion, His glorious resurrection, His triumphal ascension, His prevailing intercession: — varied links in the golden chain spoken of in succession in the same chapter, place the salvation of the child of God beyond the possibility of failure or disaster. Who shall, who can, who dare separate? In the words of a gifted writer, “The movables may go; the birthright and inheritance cannot. ... He that loved them out of darkness will love them into everlastinf:f lidit.” “How happy,” says Pascal, in language very appropriate to the present remarks, “is the soul who hnds his delight in Thee, since he may abandon himself to Thy love.... How firm and lasting is his happiness, since his hope cannot be disappointed, because Thou wilt never be destroyed, and neither life nor death shall separate him from the object of his desires,’* Not, (to repeat the qualifying remark made in more than one previous meditation) that that triumphant song of the Apostle can always be sung with unfaltering lip, or the vessel of faith be borne ever onward with propitious breezes over summer seas. No: — the normal description and expression of the spiritual as of the natural life rather is, “the day is neither clear nor dark” (Zech. xiv. 7). Like the shipmen of old in the Sea of Adria, there are times when “neither sun nor stars in many days appear, and no small tempest lay on us” (Acts xxvii. 20). Towards the close of the very chapter from which our motto-verse is taken (indeed immediately preceding it), the Apostle gives the catalogue of hostile spiritual forces. These, in a hundred varying forms and phases of antagonism, are assailing the life of faith in the believer. And a formidable list it is. “Tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword” (Rom. viii. 35). But none of these, nor all combined, can effect his final overthrow. His security in Christ is beyond the reach of peril or vicissitude. That covenant, well-ordered in all things and sure, will guarantee the tempest-tossed riding out the storm. As it has been said, “If there be tossing and doubting, it is the heaving of a ship at anchor, not the dashing on the rocks.” The heavenly Bridegroom pledges His troth to a deathless union with His affianced Bride — “I will betroth thee unto Me for ever” (Hosea ii. 1 9). The inheritance is won, and entered upon by “Him that is true: and,” it is added, “we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ” (i John v. 20). The Little- Faiths as well as the Great-Faiths can utter the challenge — “Who shall separate?”
While, then, sin may, and often does, justly dim and obscure the sense of pardon and the hope of heaven; while the wailing acknowledgment of the stricken soul often arises, “Mine iniquities have separated between me and my God,” let us remember the divine whisper heard within the veil, already quoted in one of our earlier chapters: a whisper on the lips of Him “who also maketh intercession for us,” turning the mourning into dancing, and exchanging the sackcloth for the girdle of gladness, — “I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not.” Below, a sinking, fragile, yes, apparently lost disciple; above, a praying, interceding, omnipotent Saviour. Below, sin triumphing and triumphant; but above, grace triumphant too; and leaving the assaulted soul more than conqueror through (in) IIi77i that loved it! The God who cannot lie thus at last vindicates the ineffable meaning and preciousness of His own wondrous words, with their “five negatives,” as they have been called (for so it is in the untransferable tautology of the original), — “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee — no never, no never, no never!” The challenge echoing on through infinite ages — “Who shall separate?” and the answering echo — “JVb never, no never I”
We have just spoken of the remains of corruption — the presence and the power of sin in the heart, as marring and hindering the full outburst of the believer’s song of triumph. There may be some whose eyes trace these pages who have a different experience; whose trembling, faltering notes proceed from a different cause: not so much from sin, as from sorrow. Their harps being hung on the willows of grief, how can they sing the Lord’s song? And yet, in another sense, as partakers of a living union with their divine Lord, it is their very sadness which will best attune their lips to gladness, in the fuller realisation of that Saviour’s promised nearness and love — “Ye now therefore have sorrow, but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you” (John xvi. 22). The kindred glowing words of St. Paul in his 2nd Epistle to Timothy are specially suggested: an epistle which we know was written when death and its solemn thoughts were very nigh the writer. They are words, moreover, which have imparted to them a special interest as being ingeniously supposed, from their structure, to have formed a prophetic hymn of the ancient Church — a fragment from its first service of song.’^ May we not take them as appropriate for all; but specially for the mourner in Jesus? May we without presumption think of them as sung over the holy dust of the Catacombs and their sepulchral slabs, on which, as we have seen. In Christo was often reverently though rudely carved? Here are the two opening lines: —
“If we died vdth Him, we shall also live with Him. If we suffer, we shall also reign with Him” (2 Tim. ii. 1 1, 12).
Death in Christ, assuredly followed by a spiritual and glorious resurrection IN Him. ‘Death shall not separate! ’
And this further suggests, that our meditation would be incomplete without a few closing thoughts on an additional prominent clause in the Apostle’s challenge, — “Things to come shall not separate.” The trance of
1 See Mack, quoted by Dr. Reynolds in Expositor, p. 298. Also Mr. Cheetham’s interesting article on Ancient Church Hymns in Smith’s “Dictionary of Christian Antiquities,” vol. i. p. 801.
that beatific heavenly bliss can never be broken; and this, once more, because we are in Christ. Identification with Him on earth, in His cross and sufferings, is followed by identification with Him in heaven in His crown and glory. The avowal of time is the theme and rejoicing of eternity — “I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”
God is OUR God in Christ. If I may be allowed to quote remarks made elsewhere, which seem appropriate here — “The words to us are written (which to the unredeemed angels they are not) in the blood of atonement! Imagine, for a moment, a conversation between a bright angel in heaven and a ransomed sinner from earth. The angel can speak of a past eternity; he can tell a glorious pedigree; he can point up to his Almighty Maker, and say, “He has been my God for ages and ages past. I have been kept, supported, gladdened by His amazing mercy, long before the birth of time or your world I” True,’ we may imagine the redeemed sinner to reply, but I can tell of something more wondrous still: ITe is my God in covenant. Thou art His by creation, but I am His also by adoption, filiation, sonship. Though grace has kept thee through these countless ages, during which Thou hast cast thy crown at His feet, what is the grace manifested to thee, in comparison with the grace manifested to me? Grace made thee holy, and preserved thee holy. But grace found me on the brink of despair; plucked me as a brand from the burning; brought me from the depths of woe and degradation to a throne and a crown! Thy God hath loved thee. My God hath loved me and given Himself for me! Who shall separate me” from the love of Christ “? ’ If every saint in glory is to be “a priest unto God” (Rev. i. 6), the In Christo of the catacombed dead on earth will become — like the Urim and Thummim — (the “gems oracular” which gleamed on the high priest’s ephod or breastplate of old), the consecrated pledge of immortal bliss. We have seen in one of these opening meditations, when the Apostle Paul was caught up to Paradise, what the thought of heaven ever afterwards was to him: — “In Christ.’’ All our heavenly knowledge will come direct from this mysterious everlasting union. Here there is needed the intervention of the Word, Ordinances, and Sacraments. There the spiritual world will no more be lighted up by satellites. The fairness of the moon will give place to the brightness of the sun. Heaven win be an eternal Mount of Transfiguration — Hermon with all its radiance, and none of its transience. As every eye rests on the One all-glorious Person — the true Shekinah, — -the old utterance will be breathed with an eternal significance — “Lord, it is good for us to be here.”
Further still, in Christ will be the guarantee for an ever-progressive acquaintance with divine realities, and
* “The Hart and the “Waterbrooks,”
the entering ever deeper and deeper into the secrets of Redeeming Love: — soaring ever higher and higher to the heights of His revealed glory. The Song of heaven will be a true Excelsior — a “Song of degrees.” Like the well-known Parabolic assymtotes of the mathematician (to adopt Addison’s beautiful and appropriate simile), the saint in glory will be always approaching nearer and nearer the Infinite perfection, although feeling the utter impossibility of that ever being reached. Jesus the Great Shepherd will lead His people from steep to steep on the everlasting hills, and as they survey the ever- widening prospect. He will say to them, as He did to Nathaniel of old, “Ye shall see greater things than these!”
Who, indeed, can form the faintest conception, in this lower world and imperfect state, of all which this wondrous mystical union involves, in its connection with “Things to come “? Saints becoming one IN Christ for ever. His ransomed people, not so much constellating around Himself as their great central orb; He ‘resting them’ in His love, and joying over them with singing (Zeph. iii. 1 7): but rather like the dewdrops exhaled by the morning sun, absorbed in the sun itself; not the living stones rising tier on tier, but rather those enshrined and incorporated in the Great Eternal Temple; according to the words of the Apocalyptic vision — words best left in their own mysterious indefinite grandeur — “I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it” (Rev. xxi. 22). They are “glorified together.” They are glorified in Him, and He is glorified in them. It is the Dove of the Psalmist — “its wings covered with silver and its feathers with yellow gold,” no longer hastening its escape from the windy storm and tempest, but sinking out of sight in the clefts of the Rock, — folding its pinions in the perfected bliss of everlasting rest and everlasting love IN Him!
Yes, wonderful climax this in our motto-verse, where the Apostle, rising in his eagle flight from perch to perch, from altitude to altitude, defies “things to come,” the cycles of Eternity — ever to separate Him from “the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
“Then across the border river:
From His presence nought can sever:
We shall sing His praise for ever!”
If the consciousness of being “in Christ” on earth be supremest happiness, what will it be to be in Christ in glory, and that for “the ages of the ages!” If even here, amid falling shadows and interrupted converse, the assurance of an Invisible Presence evokes the testimony — “Did not our hearts burn within us while He talked to us by the way” (Luke xxiv. 3 2): — what will it be to sit at a Banqueting Table where, unlike the earthly one, there can be no “vanishing out of sight!” If the few wavelets of Divine love be precious as they break on the earthly shores, what will it be to be launched on the Infinite ocean of Redeeming love, listening to its everlasting music, — and enabled in some feeble measure to comprehend (but even then, oh, kow feebly /), the height and depth, the length and breadth of the love of God IN Christ! Then, at least, shall Paul’s prayer be fulfilled: the glorious consummation of the motto-words which head this chapter, and on which, page after page in this volume, we have been dwelling, — “That they may also obtain the salvation which is IN CHRIST JESUS with eternal glory I”