All Things New

4 The former things are passed away.’ — Rev. xxi. 4.

HN is gazing into the perfected city of God. He is filled with intense surprise. It is not so much what he sees, as what he does not see, which holds him in fascinated wonder. It is the things that are missing which open his eyes in a wide surprise, the ’ former things ’ that ’ have passed away.’ He discovers that many things, which he had regarded as essential and permanent portions of the structure, were only rough scaffolding, temporary expedients, which have no office in the perfected kingdom. In chapter after chapter we find him missing familiar things; scaffolding after scaffolding he finds removed, until at last, when, with one comprehensive vision, he contemplates ’ the holy city, the new Jerusalem,” prepared as a bride adorned for her husband,’ he puts his wondering sense of missing familiarities into this one pregnant

phrase, ’ the former things are passed away.’ Let us glance at two or three of the things that are missing in the perfected life.

1 1 saw no temple therein, The temple is a temporary structure erected to serve the ends of the invisible Church. If I unduly exalt the scaffolding, if I regard it as an end, and not as a means, I throw my entire life into a false perspective, and I get astray from the pregnant truth. What remains in the life to come is the character the temple has helped to produce — the character of holiness, of fellowship, of praise; the character that apprehends the divine and loves it. Upon this I must place the emphasis, the spiritual internality, and not upon the temple externality, which will assuredly pass away. Observe, then, the rightful place of symbolism. All symbols are used rightly when they are used as scaffolding — means for the rearing and exaltation of something else, unseen and eternal. But when symbolism is everything, when the scaffolding becomes the perfected structure, and the temple becomes the Church, then no warning judgement can be too emphatic or too intense; for in the great day of test, when ’ the fire shall try every man’s work, of what sort it is, all temporary scaffolding shall be consumed, and the poor symbolist shall be left without part

or lot in the inheritance of the saints in light, for ’ the former things are passed away.’

‘There shall be no night there.’ Then there will be no stars, and, as the Word says, they will ‘need no candle.’ These are the things that will be missing, the imperfect lights. The bits of light, the fragmentary revelations, will be supplanted by the perfect glory of the immediate presence of God. We know, in the physical world, how partial and imperfect are the lights of the night. The dominion of the darkness is so immediate and urgent, that we are able to push back the encroachments by only a very little way. Here is a street lamp. Just round about the lamp, where the little flame is burning, there is partial light; but before I reach the nest lamp the darkness thickens again, and I feel the intrusion of the night. Our night-lights are not continuous. They are bits of light, patches of light, broken lights, broken here and there by an obtrusive darkness which they do not dispel. ‘There shall be no night there.’ There shall be no more small night-lights, no candle-light, no bits of light about God, no partial revelation, but the fullness of the unveiled grace of the eternal God Himself. We are no longer to be dependent upon the light of conscience, the light of Nature, the

light of the Bible. ‘Now I know in part ’ — in bits of light — ’ then shall I know even as also I am known.” There shall be no night there/

‘Neither shall there be any more pain.’ Has God no further use for it? No, not in the eternal city. Pain is a minister in early stages, but now its mission is perfected. The dwellers in glory do not know the meaning of the word ‘pain.’ It has dropped out of the vocabulary, an obsolete term. ‘Sorrow and sighing shall flee away, They are all preparatory ministries, and they pass away when their ministry is accomplished. They are part of the Lord’s scaffolding, used in the erection of ’ temples of the Holy Ghost,’ and when the temples receive their top story, all the scaffolding will be removed. ‘The former things are passed away/