The Blessedness of the Saints

And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; and ye shall be my people, and I will be your God. I will also save you from all your uncleannesses; and I will call for the corn, and will increase it, and lay no famine upon you. And I will multiply the fruit of the tree, and the increase of the field, that ye shall receive no more reproach of famine among the heathen. — EZEKIEL xxxvi. 28, 29, 30.

A COUNTRY cleared of its inhabitants wears a mournful aspect. It may be that the emigrant has left poverty for plenty. Still it is not a pleasant thing to see nettles growing where the garden bloomed — the smoke-stained gable — the roofless ruin — the empty window where the morning sun was wont to shine upon the Bible and a pious patriarch. There is something chilling about that cold hearth-stone where in other days the fire of a winter evening gleamed on the faces of a happy circle, while the mother plisd her busy wheel, and, forgetful of the toils and dangers of the day, the shepherd dandled a laughing infant on his knee. Those are now silent walls that once sounded to the evening psalm, and from which, when Sabbath rested on the hills, a decent family went out, wending their way by the lake side to that old ruin beside whose crumbling walls the fathers of the exile sleep. The wind, as it moans and sighs among the trees beside that roofless home, seems in our fancy’s ear to sound the prophet’s lament — “Weep not for the dead, neither bemoan him,- but weep sore for him that goeth away, for he shall return no more, nor see his native country.”

Such scenes, the pain of which, indeed, lies more in fancy than in fact, give us an image of the desolation which reigned in the land of Judah during the time of the long captivity. By contrast also, they enhance the pleasure with which we turn to this glowing picture — a land teeming with inhabitants, the rich plains studded all over with cities, each busy as a bee-hive — the valleys clothed with corn, crowded with reapers, and ringing to their song — every rocky terrace in the close embrace of vines, and flocks bleating on a hundred hills. Such a scene, in fact, as surveyed from some eminence, awoke the piety and poetry of David — “Thou crownest the year with thy goodness, and thy paths drop fatness; they drop upon the pastures of the wilderness, and the little hills rejoice on every side. The pastures are clothed with flocks, the valleys also are covered over with corn; they shout for joy, they also sing.”

The fulfilment of my text to God’s ancient people would have invested this prophecy with interest, even though its application had been altogether confined to the Jews; and for this reason — Their God is our God, and everything which he did for them is a most precious pledge of what he can and will do for us. “He is the dwelling-place of his people in all generations.” Thus while faith turns her eye upon the future — a prospect often dark enough — she draws courage and comfort from the past, saying, “I will remember the years of the right hand of the Most High.” But, in fact, we have more to do with this prophecy than the Jews had. Under those blessings which God poured into their cup — those temporal mercies which filled their mouths with meat, and their hearts with gladness — lie the better mercies of Messiah’s kingdom.

This shines plainly through the mystic language of the prophet. The conversion of the Gentiles is, for instance, distinctly announced in the 36th verse, “Then the heathen, that are left round about you, shall know that I the Lord build the ruined places, and plant that which was desolate. I the Lord have spoken it, and will do it.” In the succeeding chapter, again, the resurrection of the body and the renovation of the soul are set forth in the vision of dry bones. In the same place also have we not a kingdom more enduring far than any which has had its seat in Palestine? “And David, my servant, shall be king over them, and they all shall have one shepherd; they shall also walk in my judgments, and observe my statutes, and do them; and they shall dwell in the land which I have given to Jacob, my servant, wherein your fathers have dwelt; and they shall dwell therein, even they, and their children and their children’s children, for ever; and my servant David shall be their prince for ever.” It appears to us that this language cannot, without violence, be applied to the old Jewish land and people; that the Koman ploughshare has buried such pious fancies under the ruins of Jerusalem. AVith the blood of God’s Son and man’s best brother on their heads, the Jews, like Cain, are vagabonds. They have no dwelling in the land which God gave to Jacob. For eighteen hundred years they have been wandering the world, nor have the soles of their feet yet found a resting-place. A nation scattered and spoiled, they are a byeword, a proverb, and a hissing — nor land, nor temple, nor oracle, nor prince, have they, nor shall have, till, turning to the hope of his best and oldest fathers, the Jew bows his proud head to the Nazarene, and kisses the feet that were nailed to a cross.

Looking at these words, therefore, in this light — taking them in an Evangelical, not a Jewish sense — let us give our attention to some of the blessings which they announce — the benefits which, to use the words of our Catechism, “flow from justification, adoption, and sanctification.” Let the believer look —

I. To the abundance of the blessings of grace.

A new born infant is the most helpless of all creatures. In its nakedness, weakness, dumbness, how dependent on a mother’s love! yet not more so than God’s people are on his care and kindness. Theirs are therefore circumstances in which his promises are exceedingly precious. The condition of believers closely resembles that of a man of boundless affluence, whose wealth lies, not so much in money, as in money’s worth — in bills and bonds, which have only to become due to be duly honoured. With these promises the poorest Christian is really a richer man than other men, with all their possessions; nor would he part with one of them for the world’s wealth.

This rude and naked savage — the dupe of avaricious traders — barters a coronet of gold for some worthless trinkets, and buys the wonders of a mirror, the tinkling of a bell, or a string of coloured beads, with a handful of pearls, the fit ornaments of a crown. But the child of God knows better than to sell what is of surpassing value, for anything intrinsically worthless. With this promise, “thy bread shall be given thee, and thy water shall be sure,” he holds himself richer, more sure of meat to eat, and raiment to put on, than he would be with the wealth of banks. And why? Is this reasonable? No doubt of it. No logician ever reasoned more soundly. These may fail; God’s promise cannot. The stars shall drop like figs from shaking skies, and these ancient heavens themselves shall pass away, but not one jot or tittle of what his God has spoken shall fail, till all be fulfilled.

With such security as we have in the character of God, and such fulness as is promised in the text, it needs, therefore, only a prophet’s faith to echo a prophet’s speech, and — when gaunt famine walks our streets, and there are “clean teeth,” and children cry for bread, and their mothers have none to give them — to repeat the boldest words that ever fell from mortal lips — “Although the fig-tree should not blossom, and there be no fruit on the vine; though the labour of the olive should fail, and the fields yield no meat; though the flock should be cut off from the fold, and there be no herd in the stall, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, and joy in the God of my salvation.” I can fancy a sceptic exclaiming — Extravagance! fanaticism — mad fanaticism! No such thing. In his word God’s people have meat to eat that you know not of — promises that have proved like the breasts of his daughter to the aged captive who had been barbarously condemned to die of hunger. In that cell, where the grey old man each day takes her infant’s place, her love and ingenuity have found means to save a father’s life, which his enemies never dreamt of; and the child of God, around whom fears of want are gathering, may rest assured, that he who inspired that daughter with the wit and will for such an emergency, will find ways and means to make his promise good. “The word of the Lord is a tried word” — fail us who, and what may, that cannot.

There are, indeed, times when the believer is ready to faint. Faith staggers beneath the burden, and hope all but expires. My sins are so many, my guilt so great, my burden so heavy! thus and thus they speak; now, complaining with Jacob, “All these things are against me;” and, on finding Satan so often conquering them when they should have conquered him, now crying with David, “I shall one day fall by the hand of this Saul.” Well, let your burdens, your sins, your cares, be all that you describe. Answer me this question. Is it not as easy for yonder sea to carry the bulkiest ship that ever rode her waves, as the sea- weed or foam she flings upon the shore? Is it not as easy for that affluent and effulgent sun to bathe a mountain, as to bathe a molehill in gold? Is it not as easy for this vast earth to carry on its back an Alp as a grain of sand — to nourish a cedar of Lebanon, as the hyssop on the wall? Just so, believer, it is as easy for God to supply thy greatest as thy smallest wants; even as it was as much within his power to form a system as an atom — to create a blazing sun as kindle a fire-fly’s lamp.

To one, indeed, whose standing point is on the ground, objects differ much in respect of size. The cliffs tower above the low level shore; piercing the horizontal cloud of smoke, the spires rise above the humbler tenements of the town; and from her throne of snow in high midsummer, winter looks down on the valleys that lie far below smiling at the mountain’s feet. Eyed from the dead level of shore or plain, objects do appear in strong contrast, high or low, great or small, big or little. But I rise on eagle’s wings; I sit on the circle of the earth; higher still, I stand beside the angel whom John saw in the sun; still higher, I follow Paul in his ascent to the third heavens; and, seen from such elevations — if seen at all — dwarf and giant, the mountain and the molehill, are on one level. All these sublunary differences vanish, sink into insignificance — into nothing.

Now, here lies a believer’s comfort, and here shines a sinner’s hope. So vanish all distinctions between great and little wants in the eye of God; so disappears all difference between great and little sins, or great and little sinners, to the blood of Christ; and, when our cares are cast on him who invites the burden, so sinks every difference between light and heavy burdens, to the back of Jesus. It is as easy for him to save a Magdalene, or Manasseh, or hoary thief, as the infant, that (happy creature!) just leaves its mother’s womb to make of this earth a stepping-stone to heaven. Whatever be your circumstances, trials, cares, griefs, this promise fits them — “As thy day, so shall thy strength be.” Be he dwarf or giant, no man can say of an assurance so full and ample, “The bed is shorter than a man can stretch himself upon it; the covering is narrower than a man can wrap himself in it.” Are you cast down because, while others have shallows, you have depths — dark depths of sorrow, and suffering, to pass through? Bo it so: it is as easy for God to march his people through the wide, deep sea as across the bed of Jordan. Are your corruptions strong? Be it so: Samson found it as easy to snap a new spun cable as withes fresh gathered on the river’s bank; and believe me it is as easy for God to break thy tyrant’s strongest as his lightest chain. A chain of iron and a thread of flax are all one to God. The blood of thy Saviour clean seth from every sin; and nothing being impossible, nay, not even difficult to Omnipotence, be assured that in your battle, and watch, and toil, you shall find this promise true — “My grace is sufficient for thee.”

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II. Consider the happiness which God’s people enter on at death.

Egypt pursued the Hebrews to the very shores of the sea. There, however, the people saw the last of those tyrants and taskmasters who had made their burden heavy and their life so bitter, that the cry of their wrongs came up before the Lord. On this shore the oppressor and the oppressed are to part. In these weltering waves, from which they shrink back with dread — as some good men from death — their enemies and their griefs shall find a common grave. In these the wicked shall cease from troubling; beyond them the weary shall be at rest. Night has come. A sun they shall never see more has set on Pharaoh and his host. And, now under the light that illumined the camp of God, and flung a fiery lustre across the heaving deep, Moses stood up to address the people. Their redemption was nigh. That darkest hour had come which ushers in the dawn. With his foot on the shore, the symbol of power in his hand, the fiery pillar lighting up his face, Moses pointed to the gloom where the Egyptians lay, and said, “The Egyptians whom ye have seen to-day, ye shall see them again no more for ever.”

God’s people are like his ancient Israel. They have enemies who will harass them in life, and follow them to the very shores of time; but whoever, or what ever these may be — sin, sorrow, poverty, temptations, trials, fears, doubts, Satan himself — oh! a death-bed shall be the death of them all. In leaving life we leave them behind. Death is their destruction, not ours. And how should it reconcile us to that dark and doleful passage from which nature shrinks, that when we stand in its gloomy portal to take a last look at this fading world, we shall take our last look, not of friends in Christ — for we shall meet them again in heaven — but only of these our enemies. We “shall see them again no more for ever.” Pursuing God’s people to their very death-bed, Satan may harass them upon it. His time is short. It is his last chance. He knows it. Another day or hour, and they are out of his grasp; and so — summoning all his hellish powers — like the Egyptians who drove down into the sea — he follows the saint into the very depths of death — and aggravates by his horrible suggestions, the struggles of a dying hour. And now, in that time of darkness, the saint has two enemies upon him — death, and him that has the power of death, that is the devil. Be it so; God shall take off their chariot wheels; they reach not the other shore, nor set foot in heaven; there, there entereth nothing to hurt or to defile.

The dead enter into rest. “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord, they rest.” “He that is dead is free from sin.” And as in the chamber of death I have gazed on the calm and deep repose of the quiet sleeper, when the tossing arms are still, and the restless head lies on its pillow, and the features which have now lost all expression of pain, or passion, present an aspect of solemn, sublime, beautiful, perfect rest, I have some times thought, that this was an emblem which the soul had left us of its own still more profound, perfect, heavenly rest.

This is what the redeemed escape from, but what they escape to — oh, the joys they enter on when they are with Christ, who can tell? We know that “to die” is — not shall be at a future time, and after some intermediate state — but “to die is gain,” gain immediate. One step — and, what a step! — the soul is in glory. Ere the wail has sunk in the chamber of death, the song of the upper sanctuary has begun. There is no delay; no waiting for an escort to travel that invisible, untrodden path. Angels unseen are moving in that chamber, looking on with tearless eyes where all else are weeping; and, the last breath out — the last quiver passed from the lip — and away, away, they are off with the spirit for glory. On angel’s wings the beggar is borne to Abraham’s bosom. And the shout of saints and angels, that greeted the conqueror, is still ringing amid the arches of heaven, when the door is again thrown open and the thief walks in. “This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise.” He leaves his cross, and direct, as on a summer evening I have seen a lark with outspread wings drop singing into her nest, he goes up singing to his crown.

And what and where is heaven? I cannot tell. To the eye of faith, heaven looks much like a star to the eye of flesh. Set there a gem on the brow of night, the star shines most bright — most beautiful; but separated from us by so great a distance as to be raised almost as high beyond our investigations as above the storms and clouds of earth. A shining object, we see it gleaming in the fields of space, but we see nothing more, even when our eyes are assisted by the most powerful telescope. By what beings it is inhabited; what forms they have; what tongue they speak; what the character of the landscape in these upper worlds, we do not know; and perhaps never shall, till we have cast loose a body which, like an anchor, moors us to this earth, and with a soul unchained, free perhaps as thought — we are left to roam the universe, and pass, on the wings of a wish, from world to world of our Father’s kingdom. Never, at least till then, shall we know either where heaven is, or what heaven is. The best description of it is to say that it is indescribable. Paul on his return attempted no other. There he “heard and saw things unutterable.” Nor does the matter cost us the least anxiety. If God spared not his own Son, heaven shall want nothing to make us supremely happy. It is enough for me to know that the home of the blessed — the palace of the Great King — has joys which eye never saw, nor ear heard, and which it hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive.

III. — The complete blessedness of the saints at the resurrection in the restoration of all that sin forfeited.

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There were periods in creation — progressive stages. Step by step the work advanced to its consummation. In creation, just as in conversion, the process began with light — letting light ill upon the darkness. God said, “Let there be light, and there was light, and the evening and the morning were the first day.” And then a wide-spread firmament of blue separates the waters above the earth from the waters beneath, and the work completed, the evening and the morning are the second day. The third day introduces a new epoch. The mountains raise their heads above the waters; like an infant the earth comes naked from the womb, and when God has wrapped his new born world in a beautiful robe of flowers, green fields, and waving forests, the evening and the morning are the third day. The heavens next are garnished, and when their boundless fields are sown with millions of stars, the evening and the morning are the fourth day. Thus the Creator goes on with his work. Each succeeding period brings it nearer to perfection, till, on the evening of the sixth day, as the sun was sinking behind the western hills, his slanting beams shone on our holy parents — their home a garden, their estate a world, the creatures all their servants; in their hearts no taint of sin, in their eyes no tear of sorrow, and on brows — too soon to be bathed in sweat, and blushing with shame — flashing crowns of innocence. Then, from the throne of his most excellent majesty, God looked on this world as it rolled away in its happy orbit, and, pronouncing all that he had made to be very good, “the evening and the morning were the sixth day.”

Like creation, the Gospel has had its periods of progress. It gradually advanced in its development from the first promise given by God, when he, the judge, and the culprits man and the devil stood face to face upon the ruins of Eden. First we have a rude altar with the smoke of sacrifice curling up to the skies from earth’s unbroken forests; — none there but our two solitary parents, weeping, as well they might, when they gazed on the miserable wreck which they had made of their own and their children’s fortunes; yet, while they wept, lifting up their heads in hope of a coining redemption. The scene shifts, and next we have a desert with a mighty host scattered over its arid sands, and in their midst a tented sanctuary, up from which a cloud of incense goes floating, like a prayer, away to heaven. The scene shifts again, and Jerusalem sits upon her hills, and where hundreds of white-robed priests are serving, and thousands of worshippers are kneeling, a magnificent temple of marble, cedar, and gold, towers high over all — the ornament and palladium of the land. The scene shifts once more. It is mid-day, and yet dark; smitten with fear, the earth is trembling, graves are yawning to let out their dead, and through the gloom of an unnatural eclipse, we behold the cross of Calvary with its bleeding victim. Son of God! He is dying, “the just for the unjust.” He cries, “It is finished,” and, Saviour of the world, he expires. The work, so long ago begun, has reached its triumphant close. By the act of death he swallows up death in victory. And thus you see how, from one garden to another, from the bowers of Eden to the olives of Gethsemane, from the first promise to the final performance, redemption advances by successive steps. Jesus bows his head; and then once more from the throne of his most excellent majesty, God looks on all his work, and over the bloody cross and his own dead Son, pronounces this judgment, “Behold, it is very good.” And ushering in an eternal Sabbath, the evening arid the morning were the sixth day of redemption.

There yet remains an aspect of redemption in which it is not complete. The prince of this world is still out, and in the battle-field fighting — fighting like the devil he is for his kingdom. The body yet lies a captive in the tomb, and the grave must yield its ancient charge. Insatiate and insatiable devourer! thou robber of our pleasant homes! with thy black mouth ever opening, and thy cry “give, give, give,” ever in our ear, thou thyself must give — thou must restore thy dead. The dust of saints is dear to Christ. He comes to claim it. All that death and Satan hold they must relinquish; all that Christ has purchased he shall possess. The soul wants her partner; and although the exile may return no more, nor see his native land, the redeemed shall come back to claim their bodies from the earth — aye, and claim the very earth they lie in. “The saints shall inherit the earth.”

A grand and most noble destiny awaits our world. Purified by judgment fires, this earth shall be the home of the blessed. The curse, that lies upon its soil, shall pass away with sin. “Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the briar shall come up the myrtle tree.” Of the thorns of that curse Christ’s crown was woven, and he bore them off upon his head. Under laws accommodated to a new economy, this wide world shall become one smiling Eden, where, exempt from physical as from moral evils, none shall shiver amid arctic frosts, nor wither under tropic heat; these fields of snow and arid sands shall blossom all wdth roses. From the convulsions of expiring — or rather the birth-pangs of parturient nature — a new-born world shall come, a home worthy of immortals, a palace befitting its King. The blood that falling on Calvary dyed earth’s soil shall bless it, and this ancient theatre of Satan’s triumph shall be the seat of Emmanuel’s kingdom, and the witness of his glory.

Then the saints shall inherit the earth. Some, like Abraham in the promised land, are poor wanderers here — the proprietors of nothing but a grave. Some own not even so much as that. Like the descendants of a noble but decayed house, we wander strangers on the soil which was once the property of our fathers. But the time of redemption draweth nigh. Man shall get his own again, and hold it by a charter written in the blood of his King. This world was our patrimonial estate. It was the land given to our fathers. And it seems most meet, that with the rank and title, the lands should come back to the old family; and, as forming the crowning triumph over sin and Satan, that our redemption should be altogether like that of Israel, when Moses turned round on Pharaoh, saying — “Not a hoof shall be left behind.” Even so come, Lord Jesus, come quickly.