"The Thought of My Fast-Coming Death Often Makes Me Very Unhappy"

() GYNUST as I was stepping out of the

2) steamboat at the pier of Weggis on the Lake of Lucerne one evening the other week these words shot suddenly into my sin-troubled mind: Curisr IS THE END OF THE LAW FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS TO EVERY ONE THAT BELIEVETH. And all that night and for several days after I walked about as with wings. I am often like Thomas Shepard in my thoughts about my coming death but all that night I was more than a conqueror. Such a great light shone all that night upon God, and upon His holy law, and upon Christ as the end of God’s holy law, and upon myself as a believer, and upon my pardon and my peace and my acceptance in Christ, and upon all that I needed for my life and my death and my abundant entrance into the new heavens and the new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. Now, why am I not always like that? And why was Thomas

Shepard not always like that? And why are you not always like that? Will you give me your best attention for a short discussion of some of the questions connected with your fast-coming death and mine?

Well then to begin with, ‘it is appointed to all men once to die,’ says the apostle. ‘Sentence of capital punishment has been passed upon every one of us,’ says the stoic. ‘Now I saw in my dream, says John Bunyan, ‘ that betwixt them and the gate there ran a river, but there was no bridge over the river, and the water of the river was very deep. At the sight of the river therefore the two pilgrims became much stunned in their minds. ‘Is there no other way to the gate?” they asked the man. And at the answer they got the two pilgrims, and Christian especially, began to despond in his mind. And though he looked this way and that he could find no way whereby to escape that so deep-running river. And entering he began to sink, till he cried out to his friend, “I go down into deep waters, and all His billows and all His waves go over me.”’ No; there is no other way but the way of that river for any one of us.

And then there is nothing else in our future of which we can be so absolutely sure as that river. The oldest and the wisest of us are still full of plans and purposes and hopes and expectations for this life. But all the time we may never see so much as one of the things for which we so much wait and expect. Only there is one thing we shall all one day see whether we look fer it or no. ‘Go to, now, all ye that say, To-day or to-morrow we will go into such and such a city and continue there a year, and buy and sell and get gain; whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow.’

And then there is this also. There are many enterprises in life in which if we fail at our first essay we may hope to succeed at our second. In a battle, in an election for some post, in a school or college examination some of our very best scholars will sometimes come short in their first trial only to attain a brilliant success at their second trial. I often recall my first schoolmaster who was wont to march us little boys round the schoolroom to this sounding couplet:

If at first you don’t succeed,
Try, try, try again!

And I have lived long enough to prove the wisdom and the truth of those early lines. But all the time there is a limit to the truth and the relevancy of that. For if we do not score a success in our first death we shall have no second chance given us. If we had a second chance of shooting that awful gulf we would practise the terrible leap day and night till we were absolutely sure of securing a foothold on the other side at our second trial. But no! ‘It is appointed to all men once to die, and after that the judgment.’ But it is time to take up some of Thomas Shepard’s reasons why so many of his best people died so unwillingly and so uncomfortably. And he tells us one outstanding case in his New England congregation as a sample of many more. He was hastily summoned one day to the death-bed of one of his best elders. And he had no sooner entered the sick-room than the dying man cried out: ‘Oh, Mr. Shepard, I did not expect this so soon and so suddenly! And I am not at all ready! I feel that I am going fast, but where I am going I know not! I thank you, sir, for all that you have done for me and mine. But God has forsaken me, and I well deserve it. Oh that I had another Sabbath day under you in that dear old church! Oh that I had another communion day, you breaking the bread! Would I not prepare myself for it! But that is all past for me!’ Bad as the case looked, Shepard was a skilful physician, and the dying man departed this life that day in evangelical peace, if not in full assurance.

Then there is sometimes this also. The sins of their long past youth come back savagely on some men when they are laid down to die. A long lifetime of repentance and of faith and of prayer and of fruitful service may have come in between their early days and their deathbed, but an old conscience of sin takes no account of all that. A cruel conscience of former sin has no respect for a reformed life, no nor for a penitent deathbed. ‘Ah, my friend, my friend! The sorrows of death have compassed me, and the pains of hell have got hold of me! And with that a great horror of great darkness fell upon him, so that he could not see before him. Here also in great measure he lost his senses, so that he could neither remember nor orderly talk of any of those sweet refreshments that he had met with in the way of his pilgrimage. Here also he was much in the troublesome thoughts of the sins he had committed both since and before he began to be a pilgrim. Hopeful therefore had much ado to keep his brother’s head above water. Yea, he would sometimes be quite gone down, and then he would rise up again half dead. Ah! brother, said he, surely if I was right He would now rise to my help. But it is for my great sins that He hath brought me into this snare and so hath left me.’

Another thing; take care lest you die in your present sins, our Lord says to us in some of the most solemn words He has ever spoken. And that not without good reason. For some of His not wholly untrue disciples will sometimes be found dying under the continued dominion of lifelong sins that make their deathbeds almost as dark as hell itself. I never forget, but often make my own, old Bishop Andrewes’s confession that he had been in a great trespass from his youth up, and was still in that great trespass of his in his saintly old age. Some of you will be like him and me. You will know quite well the names and the places and the occasions of your deathbed-darkening sins, unless you escape their dominion in time. For unless you crucify them more than you have ever yet done, the day is at the door when they will bite like a serpent and sting like an adder.

Yet another thing. You will sometimes find some of God’s servants dying most uncomfortably because of something He has laid upon their hands to do for Him and which is not even begun to be done; some public service, some domestic duty, some assistance not given to the Church of Christ, some pension not paid to some of His poor, some bitter dispute to assuage, some reconciliation to seek, some broken friendship with some men to be put into repair, and so on. The truth is, it is a wonder that any man among us ever dies in peace of conscience with so many causes of reproof and remorse crowding round his deathbed. Seeing the negligent and the selfish lives that some of our not wholly ungodly men live, the wonder is that they have so few bands in their death. And it is to be doubted if their freedom from such bands is a very good sign of their case.

And then, as I have said to you a thousand times: Have your best books near your deathbed and well within your reach. Aye, have your best books near you while yet death has not knocked at your door. The last time I saw one of our most godly-minded members in his widowed room, he was sitting with his cup of tea on his lonely table, and with his well-worn Bible lying open between his cup and his plate. Do you know that simple-looking sight made a deep impression upon me. So much so that I could not but tell it at his funeral service. Again, the first pastoral visit I made after I came to St. George’s was to an old elder of Dr. Candlish’s who was on his deathbed. And I see the thing as if it had been yesterday. There lay open on his pillow — what book do you think? His Bible? No. The Pilgrim’s Progress? No. The Saint’s Rest? No. Rutherford’s Letters? No. I will tell you what it was, for you would never guess. It was the Westminster Confession of Faith, and it was open at the great chapter on justification. ‘I am dying on that Gospel chapter, he said. And I had no sooner finished it to him than he fell asleep in Christ his Righteousness. On the other hand, I was at another deathbed the other day, and there was neither a Bible nor any of the above books in all the room. And when I asked for a Bible, one was at last rummaged up at the bottom of a drawer full of family rubbish, cast-off clothes, and such like. Show me your most favourite books and those nearest your table and your bed, and from them I will read your prospects when you come to die. And often read in your Bible. Very few people ever open their Bible unless it is to find the text in church. I never all my life came on a man or a woman with their Bibie open on their tea-table but the true saint of whom I have just told you. Not one in a hundred read their Bible to call reading. Even those people who read Bunyan and Baxter and Rutherford very seldom read their Bible to be called reading. And thus it is that few people know where to turn in their Bible when they come to die. Yourselves, for instance. When do you read in your Bible? Where, and how much, and how long at a time? And what are your favourite Scriptures? And what will you ask your minister to read and open up to you when every other book has failed you? Read the best books and only the best. Read like that unbaptized heathen who said that he never read a book but to make himself a better man. Read only the best books, but, as Brea said, Always run your pipe up to the fountain.

But far better than merely reading your Bible will be the constant employment of your evangelised imagination on all you read. As Newman says, think you see the Four Last Things: Death and Judgment and Heaven and Hell, and that by God’s blessing will prepare you for dying as nothing else will. Compel yourself sometimes to think you are now in the act of dying. Forefancy your deathbed, as Rutherford counselled one of his correspondents to do, and which he did with such success. Read sometimes the intimation of your death in the paper. Open your eyes in imagination on your bed in hell. Imagine, which you will easily do, that you have sinned away for ever your long lengthened-out day of grace. Or, on the other hand, imagine that where sin abounded grace has much more abounded. ‘Till the first sound after death to you is the Voice of Christ saying to you, ‘Come, thou blessed of my Father.’ Open your eyes in heavenly imagination and see Him whom your soul loveth. And standing around Him and waiting for you your father and your mother and your minister, and with them those great authors and great preachers to whom you owe your soul. Read your Bible and all your best books in that way, and when you come to die and to live again you will have your everlasting reward for your humility, your teachableness, and your obedience. But take the best advice of all. When in spite of your best books and all your best preparation your old sins come back upon your bed as Christian’s ghosts and hobgoblins came back upon him when he was crossing the river: then, instantly, and with all your might, and with all the lifelong practice of that you have had, betake yourself to the Blood of Christ, which is also the Blood of God, as Paul said it was to the old elders of Ephesus. Take it as an English contemporary of our American author has it: ‘ When your old sins crowd around your deathbed and stare you in the face have instant resort to the blood of atonement. And as you lay aqua fortis upon letters of ink to eat them out, so still be dipping the hands of thy faith in the Blood of Christ. This do every moment that is now left thee, and that so awful handwriting that was recorded against thee, when it is sought for it shall no longer be found.’ Or as we had it at the beginning of this discourse, ‘Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth. As Rutherford sings it : —

I stand upon His merit, I know no safer stand,

Not even where glory dwelleth in Immanuel’s Land.