The Celestial Visitors

IN EXE to the actual transfiguration of the Master, perhaps the most interesting fact of these hours of glory on the holy mount was the presence there of Moses and Elijah, two of the most remarkable and prominent figures in the Old Testament economy. They were among the number of those of whom the writer of the letter to the Hebrews said, “These all died in faith.”! Their presence in the heavens was due to their faith in the promises of God, promises which were to find their fulfilment in Jesus. On the transfiguring mount He had reached a crisis in the process of the work, and they came to greet Him in the moment of triumph, and to speak with Him of the work yet remaining to be done. By their conversation with Him they revealed the interest of the dwellers in heaven in His approaching work, for they talked with Him of the exodus which He was about to accomplish. To look at them, listen to their conversation, and consider the thoughts suggested by their presence, is the purpose of the present study. First, look at the men, Moses and Elijah; secondly, notice the significance of their presence and passing, the fact that they came, and the fact that they disappeared; and thirdly, notice the message they inferentially brought concerning the condition of those who have departed this life in the faith and fear of God.

I. Moses and Elijah — Moses, the heroic law-giver of the people; Elijah, the lion-hearted prophet of God. Moses, the founder of the economy in the midst of which Christ carried on His earthly mission up to the point of His rejection; Elijah, the reformer, the messenger of heaven to a decadent age, to a people who were heirs of the oracles, and yet were disobedient to them, to a people of whom it could be said, “They feared Jehovah, and served their own gods,”2 to a people who very largely were given over to the worship of

1Heb. 11. 13. 22 Kings 17. 33.

Baal, while still professing to have covenant relations with Jehovah.

Moses had received the law, and given it to the people. Elijah had called the people back to the law. They were the two most remarkable figures in the whole of the Mosaic economy, the founder and the reformer, the law-giver and the vindicator of its authority, who called the nation to return to its allegiance; men who both had led the people in some great Divine movement, the one initiating a new order of things in the world, the other repeating the principles upon which that order was based, in the days when the chosen nation had become disobedient.

Yet from what different experiences had they come to the holy mount? This was Moses’ first visit to Palestine. Never before had he stood in the land of promise. He had seen it from afar at the close of his work, and now he had come to stand —

“With glory wrapped around
On the hills he never trod,

And speak of the strife which won our life,
With th’ Incarnate Son of God.”

If it is possible in any measure to appreciate the feelings of those who dwell in the light of heaven, by those of the dwellers on earth, one can imagine with what keen interest Moses stood upon that holy mount. He had seen it from afar, had led the people almost to the verge of possession, and then had died in the land of Moab, and received the high and holy honour of burial by God. Centuries had passed, and at last he stood within the land, not having won his way thereinto by the law as given to him on Sinai, but by the infinite grace of God as manifested in the Person of His Son, with Whom he now held converse.

Elijah’s experience was very different. In all probability he was familiar with every part of the holy land. He had moved across it, founding the schools of the prophets, and endeavouring therein to prepare men to carry on his ministry when he had departed. He must have loved the land with a great love, wherein once he had stood — as he wrongfully thought — the only man loyal to God.

Now he was back in the land again, but under such different circumstances. He who did not die — for the chariots and horses

1Mr, Alexander.

of fire had separated him from Elisha, and the whirlwind had caught him to the saints’ abode — had returned to the earth to talk of the one and only death with the Son of God.

II. The significance of their presence and passing, suggested by these facts of their personality, is of deep interest. The religion in which they were so deeply interested was about to be changed, not destroyed. The transfiguration of Jesus was symbolic of that which was taking place, through His presence and mission, in that old economy of which one of these men was the founder, and the other the restorer..

It is somewhat difficult to speak of the old form of religion, for if one speaks of it as Judaism, the mind of the believer associates it with the thought of bondage. There are many words which have a double meaning, and care must be taken to distinguish which meaning is intended, whenever the word is used. The word Judaism, used in reference to a system of bondage to form and ceremony, ever refers to the yoke with which the saints are not again to be entangled. Yet the very heart and soul of Judaism is the heart and soul of Christianity. It was the religion of the one God, the religion that insisted upon the Divine right to govern human life, and perpetually taught the truth of the nearness of God to the affairs of men. All that abides until this hour. The old forms and symbols and signs were perishing; and the old economy which Moses had founded, and to which Elijah had recalled the people, so far as it was outward, material, and temporal, was passing away. But the heart and soul of it remained, and was rediscovered in the mission of Christ. These men in the past had been great and powerful, because they had understood the spirit underlying the letter, and in converse with Jesus upon the mount they knew that nothing was passing away which was of value.

Moses stood upon that mount of glory the representative of the law. Elijah there represented prophecy. Moses for the law, with its requirements, its provisions, and its shadow of sacrifice. Elijah for prophecy — not foretelling merely, but forth-telling — that wonderful gift bestowed upon various men among the ancient people, and continued at intervals in unbroken succession, until it ceased with

Malachi.

Moses’ presence signified that in Jesus the shadows of the law were all fulfilled and now withdrawn. In Jerusalem men were still fighting, not merely for the law of Moses, but for the traditions of the elders, and priests and leaders were still arguing about the tithe of mint and cummin, while here upon the mount was the great law-giver himself, by his presence acknowledging that this glorified One, Who should presently be crucified in the name of the law, did in Himself gather up all that was hinted at, suggested, included in the economy of the past.

The law, with its commands, its forbiddings, was fulfilled in the Person of Jesus; and the law-giver Moses, by the will of God had left the heavenly places to greet upon the mount of transfiguration the One, Who in His own Person, had magnified the law, and made it honourable.

So also with Elijah. He had spoken the word of God. From place to place he had journeyed, speaking to kings in their corruption, to courts in their degradation, and to individuals in their need, that one unceasing word, “Thus saith Jehovah.”! He had certainly been one of the most remarkable men in the history of the nation from the prophetic standpoint. God had spoken in times past by divers portions in the prophets, but by no man had He said more to the nation than by Elijah.

And now he stood upon the mount in converse with OneWho had said to His disciples, “I am the truth,”2 and concerning Whom Peter, on a subsequent occasion, speaking under the inspiration of the Spirit, said “To Him bear all the prophets witness.”3 Every word that had passed the lips of Elijah in the olden days had been but the spelling out in simple syllable and speech, of that which was embodied in the Person of Christ; and he stood now upon the mount to acknowledge that in this transfigured One all the speech of heaven begins and ends, that in Him every prophecy of the past is fulfilled, and that the prophet of the days to come, will gather from this Man and His teaching, his inspiration and his power.

“They spake of His exodus,’4 of His going out. The word here unfortunately translated “decease” signifies infinitely more than our Lord’s death. It includes everything that was necessarily bound up in the thought of departure — His death, His resurrection,

1y Kings 21. 19. “John 14. 6. 3 Acts, 10. 43. 4Luke 9. 31.

His ascension. His death was the first fact, but because “it was not possible that He should be holden of it,”! resurrection was the necessary sequence, and if resurrection, having triumphed over death, then ascension to the heavenly places.

How much the word meant to these men! How familiar “exodus” must have been to Moses, carrying his memory back to that wonderful movement from Egypt. He would recall the moment of peril and of victory, when from imminent death God made a way of life through the cleft waters of the sea. Elijah, too, would comprehend the true significance of the word. What had his mission been but a leading out of the people, an “exodus” from a new slavery.to a new freedom, in the government of Jehovah. Both these men had led in an exodus, and now they have come to speak of that of which those of the past were but a shadow. They talked with Him Who is “the Author and Perfecter of faith.”2 That word “Author” literally means a file-leader, the Man in front, Who makes a track through the forest in which all that come after Him shall walk in safety. His exodus was to be a passing through death into life, through the baptism of passion into the infinite spaces of His Father’s kingdom. The surging of the waves upon the shore of old, would speak to Moses of the waves and billows, that soon should break over the head of Him with Whom he held speech upon the holy mount as He should lead the way through death to life. Alone He breasted the waves, alone He broke the pathway through the forests. And until this moment those who have believed in Him are following in the way He led and because of His exodus, they also have theirs, and are led out to the infinite reaches of the kingdom of the heavens.

The presence of Elijah upon the mount, and his conversation with Jesus, was almost a more wonderful story. His message to men had been that they should live the life of righteousness, but this Man is about to give His life to be the new dynamic of righteousness. Elijah had only been able to tell men of the things of God, but this Man will not only teach, but will energise, will Himself pass into the lives of men, and give them the power to do the things that He shall tell them they ought to do. Moses and Elijah talked to Him of His exodus, and found that in His outgoing

lActs 2. 24. 2Heb. 12. 2.

176 THE CRISES OF “THR CHRIST

through death there should be the fulfilling of their own dreams, the realisation of their own ambitions.

If their presence meant much, their passing was also full of significance. A cloud of glory overshadowed and removed them, and in their removal taught the completion of their work in Him. There was now no need for Moses, nor yet for Elijah. All that the Mosaic economy foreshadowed found its substance in Him, and Moses may pass back to the rest of the Father’s house. All that Elijah had heroically said in the midst of much opposition, with faltering and even failure, Christ is now to say with absolute certainty, and never failing, and Elijah may pass back to the celestial spaces, to wait the consummation of the work of Jesus.

A significant statement by Luke is worth passing notice in this connection. “When they were fully awake, they saw His glory, and the two men that stood with Him.”! The significance of the statement is that the glory in which Moses and Elijah stood upon the mount was His glory. They stood, these saints of the old covenant, in the light in which they shall abide for ever. There upon the mount stood these representatives of the service of the past. Moses had died with sadness in his heart. The people whom he had led for forty years, were still outside the promised land, and yet he had to lay down his work ere it was completed. Elijah was translated very quickly after the terrible experience under the juniper tree, and while the people were still living in idolatry he had been called away. These men did their work, and laid it down unfinished, but God had gathered them into the glory of His final kingdom, and now upon the mount had given them the promise that all they had left undone would yet be perfectly accomplished.

So through all the ages He will gather His workers, and at the last, in the light of the final victory, they will understand the meaning of their work. Presently every one will have to lay down life’s work unfinished. Nothing can be completed here. And yet, at last, no piece of work faithfully done will be lost. He will gather Moses and Elijah and all the company of His faithful servants, and show how their work merges into the work of Jesus, and there finds its crown and reward.

III, The presence of these men suggests a message from heaven, 1Luke 9. 32.

The teaching of this last section is inferential rather than direct, but may not on that account be the less valuable. Looking upon them something is learned about the condition of the departed, something about their knowledge, and something about the central interest of their existence.

“There talked with Him two men, who were Moses and Elijah.” Only Luke states the matter exactly in this form, and the statemen is of value. Note the absence of wings. “Two men,” that is to say, they still were what they had been in the essential fact of their being. Their presence in heaven was not due to a change in essential nature.

Then, notice that they were in a conscious state. Their minds still followed the same line as when upon the earth, though now they saw and understood clearly. Matters at which Moses had looked in his own economy through a glass darkly, he now saw face to face. Gleams of truth that had fallen upon the soul of Elijah and compelled obedience, even while he knew there were infinite possibilities beyond which he could not fathom, now fell in full radiance upon his mind. The presence of these men suggested not merely existence after life, but conscious existence, and not conscious existence only, but the continuity of the same existence with enlarged powers.

It is evident that Peter, James, and John knew Moses and Elijah. How they knew them, of course, cannot be told. But the fact that they knew them suggests that the identity of personality is maintained in the world that lies beyond, and in some wonderful manner, men know those whom here they never saw. Men will certainly then know their own loved ones when they meet in the Father’s home. The holy mount lights for a moment the land where our loved ones wait for us. They are still human, they are still conscious and they are what they were. We shall know them.

There is yet another suggestion here in the interest these men took in the earth and what was passing on it. They came and talked to Him of His exodus, spoke of the mystery of His passion, of the joy of His resurrection, of His loving lingering amid the ways of men, and His triumphant ascension to the Father’s right hand. These are only suggestions. Sometimes the question is asked, if

12 *Luke 9. 30.

the loved ones in the heavens know what is going on upon the earth. The answer seems to be that upon occasion, under the express command of God, they are able to find their way back and watch the process of the spirits that yet move amid probationary things. It is sometimes declared that if this be so, then there must be sorrow in heaven. And why should men shrink from this conclusion? Faber was surely right when he said:

“There is no place where earth’s sorrows
Are more felt than up in heaven.”

Let it be remembered, however, that it is always sorrow in the light of joy, the sorrow of a present sympathy with pain, in the knowledge that the pain moves towards a purpose which in its blessedness far — outweighs the present endurance.: Moses and Elijah could talk of His coming sorrow, because with Him they looked on to the joy that was yet to be revealed.

If to-day men pass through sorrow, and the loved ones beyond the vale, visiting them, feel the sorrow in comradeship, they also joy, knowing that presently the song of triumph shall end the sigh of trial.