The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire

“And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire, and them that had gotten the victory over the beast “... stand on the sea of glass, having the “harps of God.” — REVELATION xv. 2.

WITH all the mysteriousness of the Book of the Revelation, one thing we are sure of; that in it we have the summing up of the moral processes of all time. There may or may not be a more special meaning discoverable in its pictures, but this there certainly is. Many people find great pleasure in tracing out elaborate analogies between its prophecies and certain particular events in the world’s career. “Here,” they cry, pointing to some particular event of contemporary history, “do you not see that this is what these chapters mean?” — “Yes,” we may generally answer, uthey very possibly do i: that, but they mean so much besides that. They mean that, and all other events in which the same universal and eternal causes were at work. These special examples fall in under them, but do not certainly exhaust their application. They are much larger and include much more. They take in the

whole circle of great spiritual and moral principles.” no

In this way I look at, and shall ask you this after noon to study with me, the Terse which is our text. I take it to represent, in a highly figurative way, the result of all moral contest. We may call that our subject.

It surely is no unimportant one. It is a subject that ought to touch all of us very closely, to waken our interest and deep anxiety. I am not to speak to you of imaginary or unreal conditions, not of unheard of depths of sin, or unimagined heights of holy rapture, but only of moral contest, of this struggle with suffering and wickedness, of trial, of that state which every earnest man who is conscious of his own inner life at all knows full well. What is to be the end of it all? How is it all coming out? These are the questions for which I find some suggestion of an answer in the pictorial prophecy of St. John.

They who had gotten the victory over the Beast stood on a sea of glass, mingled with fire. What is the meaning of this imagery? I confess that I do not pretend to know in full what is intended in the Revelation by this term “The Beast.” But on the principle which I just stated, I think it certainly means in its largest sense the whole power of evil in all its earthly manifestations; everything that tempts the soul of man to sin or tries his constancy with suffering. Others assert more personal meanings for the name. One very large school says that it means the Church of Rome; another set of commentators used to make “the Beast” to be Napoleon the Third. Perhaps the name may well include them both, in so far as both stand for badness and mischief in the world; but for our present purpose at least, it will be well not to meddle with any of that sort of partial, precarious interpretation, but to hold what certainly is true, that “the Beast,” in its largest s< means all that is beastly, all that is low and base and tries to drag down what is high and noble; all sin and temptation; and so that “they who have gotten the victory over the Beast,” are they who have come out of sin holy, and out of trial pure, and out of much tribulation have entered into the kingdom of heaven.

These are to walk upon “a sea of glass, mingled with fire.” What does that imagery mean? The sea of glass, the glassy sea, with its smooth transparency settled into solid stillness without a ripple or the possibility of a storm, calm, clear, placid — evidently that is the type of repose, of rest, of peace. And fire, with its quick, eager, searching nature, testing all things, consuming what is evil, purifying what is good, never resting a moment, never sparing pain; fire, all through the Bible, is the type of active trial of every sort, of struggle. “The fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is.” “The sea of glass,” then, “mingled with fire,” is repose mingled with struggle. It is peace and rest and achievement, with the power of trial and suffering yet alive and working within it. It is calmness still pervaded by the discipline through which it has been reached.

This is our doctrine — the permanent value of trial — that when a man conquers his adversaries and his difficulties, it is not as if he never had encountered them. Their power, still kept, is in all his future life. They are not only events in his past history, they are elements in all his present character. His victory is colored with the hard struggle that won it. His sea of glass is always mingled with fire, just as this peaceful crust of the earth on which we live, with its wheat fields, and vineyards, and orchards, and flower beds, is full still of the power of the convulsion that wrought it into its present shape, of the floods and volcanoes and glaciers which have rent it, or drowned it, or tortured it. Just as the whole fruitful earth, deep in its heart, is still mingled with the ever-burning fire that is working out its chemical fitness for its work, just so the life that has been overturned and overturned by the strong hand of God, filled with the deep revolutionary forces of suffering, purified by the strong fires of temptation, keeps its long discipline forever, roots in that discipline the deepest growths of the most sunny and luxuriant spiritual life that it is ever able to attain.

How wide this doctrine is. The health of the grown man is something different from the health of the little child, because it has been reached through so many strains and tests and dangers. His strong body carries within it not only the record, but the power of all that it has passed through. His bones are strong by every tug and wrench and burden they have borne. His pulse beats even and true with the steady purposeful power which it has learned from many a period of feverish excitement. His blood flows cool, his eye is clear with the simple and healthy action which they have gathered out of many a tiim; of danger that has come since the rosy untried In -a 1th of babyhood. He is stronger by the accumulated strength of trial. Hisseaof glass is mingled with fire.

So take the strong man who has won a large property through many disappointments and reverses, and compare him with the baby of fortune who has just dropped by inheritance into money which he never earned. Compare the rich fathers who have made the fortunes with the rich sons who spend them. Is there no keener and more intelligent sense of the value of money in one than in the other? Sometimes indeed the sense is only keener and not more intelligent. Sometimes the father is a miser, while the son is a pattern of judicious liberality. These differences are personal; but always, either for good or bad, the old contest, the long, hard days of patience, the courage, the perseverance which earned the fortune color its whole possession and use. The repose of old age is full of the character that came from the early struggle. The sea of glass is mingled with fire.

Or shall we take the man whose life has known bereavement, who has passed sometime through those days and nights which I may not try to describe to you, but which come up to so many of you as J say the old word, death? Days and nights when he -watched the slow untwisting of some silver cord on which his very life was hung, or suddenly felt the golden bowl dashed down and broken of which his very life had drank. The first shock became dulled. The first agony grew calm. The lips subsided into serenity. But was there not something in him that made him greater and purer and richer than of old; something that let any one see who watched the change, that it was “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” A whole new quality, that rich quality which the Bible calls by its large word “patience,” the power of his trial, was in his new serenity, until he died. His sea of glass was always mingled with fire.

So it is with the world; so it is with nations. A people that has fought for its life, that has had its institutions and ideas subjected to the fiery ordeal, can never be again what it has been. It is not sim ply older by so many years, but deeper and truer by so much suffering. Besides the mere value which men learn to put into what they have had to fight for, however worthless it may be in itself, the nation that has been saved by struggle, if it has faith enough to believe that it was really saved by struggle and not by accident, by the strength of its ideas and not by the chance turning of the weathercock of battle, must always, in whatever times of peace may follow, deal with its ideas with greater reverence for the strength that has come out of them in war. Under its safest security it will always want to feel still the capacity for the same vigorous self-defence if it should ever again be needed. Thus its sea of glass will always be mingled with fire.

These are all illustrations of our doctrine. But the trouble will be that, however much we recognize the general rule, tin- exceptions to it, tin* variations in the effect of trial upon character, will be so numerous as to perplex us. We meet with so many people whose character seems not to be elevated or fired, but depressed and smothered by suffering. They come out of adversity apparently with a great loss of what was noblest and most attractive in them before. Men who were smooth and gracious in health, become rough and peevish in sickness. M 1 1 who were cordial and liberal in wealth, turn proud and reserved and close as poverty overtakes them. If trial kindles and stirs up some sluggish natures, on the other hand it quenches and subdues many vigorous and ardent hearts and sends them crushed and self-distrustful to their graves. It seems sometimes as if trouble, trial, suffering were in the world like the old fabulous river in Epirus of which the legend ran that its wonderful waters kindled every unlighted torch that was dipped into them, and quenched every torch that was lighted.

But however much difficulty this may give us in single cases, it falls in well with our general doctrine. For it makes trial an absolutely necessary element in all perfected character. If so much character does really go to pieces at its first contact with suffering and struggle, then all the more, no matter how terrible the waste may be, we see the need of keeping struggle and suffering as tests of character. We see that to sweep them away would be both an insult and a cruel harm to the nature which was meant to meet them, to crush and conquer and analyze them, to assimilate their strength out of them as a plant assimilates the nutriment out of the hindering ground through which it has to fight its way up into the sunshine, and to grow strong by struggle. You may just fling your seed upon the surface, and it will easily come to a sort of sickly germination. It has no earth to fight its way through, but then it has no earth to feed on, either; and the first of it is almost the last of it too.

We cannot exaggerate the importance of the change which comes to pass in a man’s life when he once thoroughly has learnt this simple truth. Disappointments of every sort, sorrows, sufferings, trials, struggles, restlessness and dissatisfaction, false friends, poor health, low tastes and standards all about us — who shall enumerate the million forms, new to each man’s new appreciation, in which life is to each man dark and not bright, bitter and not sweet? Who shall catalogue the troubles of human life? But who shall tell the difference between two men who live in different aspects of all these things? Are they intrusions, accidents, thwartings and disappointments of the will of God? Or are they (this is what our doctrine says they are) Messiahs, things sent, having like the ships that sail to our ports from far-off lands of barbarian richness, rare spices and fragrant oils and choice foods that we cannot find at home, whose foreign luxuriance forces its odorous way through the coarse and uncouth coverings in which their wealth was packed away in the savage lands from which they came? Are they prolific sources of spiritual culture, contributing what our best happiness could not have except from them, the energy and vitality which there is no way of stirring up in human nature but by some sense of danger, the fire to mingle with the glass.

In sick-rooms, in prisons, in dreary, unsympathetic homes, in stores where failure brooded like the first haze of a coming eastern storm, everywhere where men have suffered, to some among the sufferers this truth has come. They lifted their heads up and were strong. Life was a new thing to them. They were no longer the victims of a mistaking chance or of a malignant devil, but the subjects of an educating God. They no longer just waited doggedly for the trouble to pass away. They did not know that it ever would pass away. If it ever did it must go despoiled of its power. Whether it passed or stayed, that was not the point, but that the strength that was in it should pass into the sufferer who wrestled with it; that the fire should not only make the glass and then go out, leaving it cold and hard and brittle. The fire must abide in the glass that it has made, giving it forever its own warmth and life and elastic toughness. This is the great revelation of the permanent value of suffering and struggle.

But some lives still grow old, some men live strongly and purely in this world, you say, and tln-n go safely and serenely up to heaven, who have no struggle anywhere, who never know what struggle is. What shall we say of them? How are they ripened and saved? How does the fire get into their sea of glass? Ah, iny dear friend, first you must find your man. And you may search all the ages for him. You may go through the crowded streets of heaven, asking each saint how he came there, and you will look in vain everywhere for a man morally and spiritually strong, whose strength did not come to him in struggle. Will you take the man who never had a disappointment, who never knew a want, whose friends all love him, whose health never knew a suspicion of its perfectness, on whom every sun shines and against whose sails all winds, as if by special commission, are sent to blow, and who still is great and good and true and unselfish and holy, as happy in his inner as in his outer life? Was there no struggle there? Do you suppose that man has never wrestled with his own success and happiness, that he has never prayed, and emphasized his prayer with labor, “In all time of my prosperity, Good Lord, deliver me! — “Deliver me!” — that is the cry of a man in danger, of a man with an antagonist. For years that man and his prosperity have been looking each other in the face and grappling one another. Whether he should rule it or it should rule him, that was the question. He saw plenty of men whose prosperity ruled them, had them for its slaves, bound them, and drove them, and beat them, and taunted them, mocked them with the splendid livery it made them wear, which was only the symbol of their servitude to it; that dreadful prosperity of theirs which they must obey, no matter what it asked of them, to

1 20 The Sea of Glass Mingled -^ith Fire.

which they must give up soul and body. He determined it should not be so with him. He v. tlni with his prosperity and mastered it. His soul is not the slave of his rich store or of his comfortable house. They are the slaves of his soul. They must minister to its support and culture. He, rules // >, and that is a supremacy that was not won with out a struggle, than which there is no harder on the earth.

So that even here there is no exception. There is no exception anywhere. Every true strength is gained in struggle. Every poor soul that the Lord heals and frees goes up the street like the man at Capernaum, carrying its bed upon its back, the trophy of its conquered palsy. There are no glassy seas which will really bear the weight of strong men but those that have the fiery mingling. All others are counterfeits, and crack or break.

There are several special applications of our doc trine to the Christian life, which it is interesting to observe.

I. It touches all the variations of Christian feeling. In almost every Christian’s experience comes times of despondency and gloom, when there seems to be a depletion of the spiritual life, when the fountains that used to burst and sing with water are grown dry; when love is loveless, and hope hopeless, and enthusiasm so utterly dead and buried that it is hard for us to believe that it ever lived. At such times there is nothing for us to do but hold with r hands to the bare rocky truths of our r<-%- ion as a shipwrecked man hangs to a strong ragged cliff when the great retiring wave and all the little eddies all together are trying to sweep him back into the deep. The rough rock tears his hands, but still he clings to it. And so the bold bare truths of God and Christ, of responsibility and eternity, unclothed for the time of all the dearness that they used to have, how sometimes we have just to clutch and hold fast by them in our darkness to keep from being swept off into recklessness and despair. Then when the tide returns, and we can hold ourselves lightly where we once had to hang heavily, when faith grows easy and God and Christ and responsibility and eternity are once more the glory and delight of happy days and peaceful nights, then certainly there is something new in them, a new color, a new warmth. The soul has caught a new idea of God’s love when it has not only been fed but rescued by Him. The sheep has a new conception of his shepherd’s care when he has not merely been made “to lie down in green pastures,” but also has heard the voice of him who had left the ninety and nine in the wilderness and gone after that which had wandered astray until he found it. The weakness of our own nature and the strength of that on which we rely: danger and its correlative, duty; watchfulness, and its great privilege, trust, come in together, and are the new life of the soul, the active power in its restored peace, the fire in its glassy sea.

The same applies to doubt and belief. “Why do things seem so hard to me?” you say;” why does

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every conceivable objection and difficulty start up in a moment, just as soon as I attempt to lay hold upon the Christian’s faith? Why is it so easy for these others to believe, so hard for me?” One can not answer certainly until he knows you better. There is a willful and an unwilling unbelief. If it is willful unbelief, the fault is yours. Man must not certainly complain that the sun does not shine on him, because he shuts his eyes. But if it is unwilling unbelief; if you really want the truth; if you are not afraid to submit to it as soon as you shall see it, and it is something in your constitution, or in your circumstances, or in the side of Christian truth that has been held out to you that makes it more difficult for you to grasp it than your neighbor; then you are not to be pitied. You have a higher chance than he. To climb the mountain on its hardest side, where its rough granite ribs press out most ruggedly to make your climbing difficult, where you must skirt round chasms and clamber down and up ravines, all this has its compensations. You know the mountain better when you reach its top. It is a realler, a nobler, and so a dearer thing.

If there be such here, let me speak to them. The world has slowly learnt that Christianity is true. If you learn slowly, it is only the old way over again. The man who learns slowly learns completely, if he learns at last at all. If you can only keep on bravely, perseveringly, seeking the truth, saying I must have it or I die; saying that till you do die; dying at last, if needs be, in the search; then I declare not only that somewhere, here or in some better world, the truth shall come to you; but that when it comes the peace and the serenity of it shall be made vital with the energy of your long search. Yours shall be that faith with which a pure, truth-lov ing soul may stand unashamed before the throne of God, and hear his work called “Well-done,” and blessed and consecrated to perpetual value. You will believe better even in heaven for these earthly difficulties bravely met. For perfect truthfulness must find the truth at last, or where is God? As we look out, the applications of our doctrine widen everywhere. What is the whole history of the world under the Gospel of forgiveness, from its first to its last, but one vast application of it. Here are men whose condition as perverted, mistaken, sinful beings makes it absolutely necessary that the dispensation that shall save them must be one not of mere culture and development but of rescue and repentance. Let the great future of those men be what it will; let the sublimest regions of calm unbroken holiness be reached in some celestial sphere; let truth and godliness become the atmosphere and the unconscious life-blood of the perfected man, still tho perfected man must carry somewhere in the nature which holds high converse with the angels and worships with affectionate awe close to the throne of God, the story of its sin and its escape. Kedeemed, its great redemption must forever be the shaping and the coloring element of all its glorious life.

“Worthy is He who hath redeemed us” — that song the purest lips and the most exalted heart never will outgrow.

Simon Peter is forgiven, re-adopted, becomes the preacher of the first sermon, the converter of the first Gentiles, the founder of churches, the writer of epistles, the champion of faith; but he is always, to the last, the same Simon Peter who denied his Master and struggled with himself in all the bitterness of tears, upon the crucifixion night. Paul mounts up to the third heaven, hears wonder ful voices, sees unutterable things, can give in bold humility the autobiography of the eleventh chapter to the Corinthians, but he never ceases to be the Paul who stood by at the stoning of Stephen, and had his great darkness rent asunder by the bright light that he saw upon the road from Jerusalem to Damasus. You and I, brethren, come by Christ’s grace into sweet communion with God, but the power of our conversion — does it ever leave us? Are not we prodigals still, with the best robe and the ring and the shoes upon us, and the fatted calf bi-li pr«j us in our father’s house, conscious always that our filial love is full of the strength of hard repentance which first made us turn our faces homeward from among the swine? And so the saved world never can forget that it was once the lost world. All. of a history such as its has been accumulates, and none of it is lost It will forever shine with a peculiar lilit, sing a psalm among its fellows that shall be all its own. The redeemed world — all the strong vitality which that name records, will be the fire that will mingle with the glassy serenity of its obedient and rescued life.

Here then we have the picture of the everlasting life. What will heaven be? What will be the substance on which they shall stand who worship God and praise him in the ages of eternity? I find manifold fitness in the answer that tells us that it shall be a “sea of glass mingled with fire.” Is it not a most graphic picture of that experience of rest always pervaded with activity; of calm, transparent contemplation, always pervaded and kept alive by eager work and service, which is our highest and most Christian hope of heaven? Let us be sure that our expectations regarding heaven are scriptural and true. Heaven will not be pure stagnation, not idleness, not any mere luxurious dreaming over the spirit ual repose that has been safely and forever won; but active, tireless, earnest work; fresh, live enthusiasm for the high labors which eternity will offer. These vivid inspirations will play through our deep repose and make it more mighty in the service of God than any feverish and unsatisfied toil of earth has ever been. The sea of glass will be mingled with fire.

Here too we have the type and standard of that heavenliness of character which ought to be ripening in all of us now, as we are getting ready for that spiritual life. As men by the grace of God gradually win the “victory over the beast,” they begin already to walk upon the sea of glass mingled with fire. Let this be the lesson with which we close our thoughts upon our text Surely, dear friends, there is a very high and happy life conceivable, which few of us attain, and yet which our religion most evidc -ntly intends for all of us. Calm and yet activ.-, peaceful and yet thoroughly alive, resting always completely upon truth, but never sleeping on it for a moment, working always intensely, but serene and certain of results, never driven crazy by our work, grounded and settled, yet always moving forward in still but sure progress, always secure, yet always alert — glass mingled with fire.

That life which we dream of in ourselves we see in Jesus. Where was there ever gentleness so full of energy? What life as still as his was ever so pervaded with untiring and restless power? Who ever knew the purposes for which he worked to be so sure, and yet so labored for them as if they were uncertain? Who ever believed his truths so entirely, and yet believed them so vividly as Jesus? Such perfect peace that never grew listless for a moment; such perfect activity that never grew restless or excited; these are the wonders of the life of Him who going up and down the rugged ways of Palestine, was spiritually walking on “the sea of glass mingled with fire.”

As more and more we get the victory over the beast, we too are lifted up to walk where he walked. For this all trial, all suffering, and all struggle are sent. May God grant us all much of that grace through which we can be “more than conquerors through him who loved us,” and so begin now to ‘’walk with him in white,” upon “the sea of glass mingled with fire.”