Knowing Our Friends in Heaven

r I HERE is not enough in the Bible about Heaven to satisfy our curiosity; but there is quite enough to satisfy a reasonable faith. It is certainly more than a happy condition of glorified spirits. It is a holy place. Such expressions as “a city with foundations,’7 a “building” or structure of God, and a “habitation” all point to a definite locality. Certain characteristics of the abode of the blest are clearly indicated. It is a rest that remaineth for the people of God. No sin can penetrate it, or any thing whatever that defileth. Neither shall any of its inhabitants suffer from sickness or pain. Knowledge shall be commensurate with the enlarged powers of the glorified soul. We shall know even as we are known. Companionship with the spirits of the just made perfect will furnish endlesss variety and unbroken harmony of social intercourse. Above all, we shall see God, and not die.

These are among the most distinct truths which the Scriptures reveal concerning that Jerusalem the Golden whose walls are like unto precious stones and whose gates to orient pearls. For whom is this celestial habitation prepared? For beings of other worlds, or for those occupants of this globe whom Jesus hath redeemed unto himself? Certainly the latter. Christ says to his disciples: “I go to prepare a place for you.” Where he is, he desires that his own shall be also. The occupants of Heaven shall be those who were once occupants of this sinful earth. The transfer from earth to Heaven does not (according to the only Book which reveals Heaven) destroy personal identity. On the contrary, God’s Word assumes continually that this identity will be preserved. The same living organism, the same characteristics which made the Patriarch Abraham a different man from every body else in Chaldea will make Abraham a different person from any one else in Heaven. These physical and mental traits enabled his neighbors in “Ur” to recognize him. He has carried with him into the eternal world also such personal characteristics that he is recognizable there. According to Christ’s statement, the rich man “saw Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom.” He also declared that the righteous will yet sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in that Celestial Kingdom. It is preposterous to imagine that these three persons are some other persons than those who passed by those names on earth. No matter what change death and the resurrection may produce on the forms or organisms known as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The body here changes by chemical processes, so that there are entirely new particles in my physical form from what were there six or seven years ago. Yet I am the same person. My individuality is not changed in the slightest degree. Lincoln the nursing infant and

Lincoln the noble president were the same individual.

In like manner, Paul before the throne is and inevitably must be the identical Paul who preached at Athens and was martyred at Rome. When he longed to “depart and to be with Christ” he expected to be not somebody else, but the same individual. Moses died fifteen centuries before the advent of Jesus Christ. Yet there was a personality still existing, who appeared at the time of Christ’s transfiguration on the mount, and who was addressed by him as Moses. The Prophet Elijah, who had died seven hundred years before, was there also. When the great apostle speaks of his Thessalonian converts as his “glory and joy in the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ,” he assuredly expected to meet the same persons in Heaven that he had labored with in Thessalonica. If they were not the same people and if he could not meet them there, how could they be to him a “crown” or a “joy”?

This point is clearly in accordance with

Scripture and with common sense. Whatever change may be produced by death, personal identity will not be altered by one jot or tittle. The sinner who sins here will be the same sinner who will be punished in the world of woe. The believer who is welcomed with the glad salute “Come, thou blessed of my Father!” will be the same person who on earth had done the Father’s bidding. Without this preservation of perfect identity the whole idea of a future retribution of rewards and punishments would be an absurd impossibility.

If identity is preserved in eternity, will the faculty of memory also survive the grave? Undoubtedly it will. The obliteration of memory would amount to a partial destruction of the individual. It would remove some of Heaven’s richest enjoyments. If I can not remember what rny Redeemer has done and suffered for me, how can I join in the ever “new song” of grateful praise before his throne? The obliteration of memory would take away the severest and the bitterest of sin’s just retributions in Hell. Upon this point the description of Lazarus and of the selfish rich man “in torment” throws a distinct light, for Abraham said: “Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things.”

Put now together these two facts: (1) personal identity is not lost in eternity, and (2) memory remains also unimpaired. It follows inevitably that we shall know each other in Heaven. When David cried out, over his dead boy, “I shall go to him; but he shall not return to me! “that bereaved father expected to meet again the child whose spirit had flown home to God. Certainly, we shall not be more stupid in Heaven than we are on earth. If I could recognize such a person as Chalmers in his pulpit, I can not fail to recognize that same servant of God in his celestial apparelling. Martin Luther, in his “Table Talks,” makes much of this intercourse with father and mother and kindred in the heavenly home. Sharp, unpoetic old Doctor Emmons used to say: “I hope to have some talks with the Apostle Paul in Heaven.’7 And who of us would not experience a fearful shock, even amid the hallelujah raptures of Paradise, if the sweet affections of kinship were to be obliterated forever? Surely, God would not so punish those whom he loves to bless.

That infants will be doomed to the everlasting weakness and helplessness and ignorance, of infancy seems, to my mind, impossible. No mother would ever want to see her darling babe stunted to an unchanged babyhood even here. It would become a pitiable monstrosity. Half the charm of childhood is its constant growth; its delightful openings, like the rosebud, to new thought and development. The idea of an undeveloped infancy in Heaven would be almost a libel on the Creator! My darling boy will be none the less my own child in the “Father’s House” because (like another child at Nazareth) he has increased in stature and knowledge, and in favor with God and man. That I shall know him there — if God’s rich grace doth bring me there — I have no more doubt of than I have of the existence of a heavenly rest. Good Dean Alford struck a chord in every Christian heart, when he sang:

“Oh! then what raptured greetings,
On Heaven’s happy shore;
What knitting severed friendships tip,
Where partings are no more!”