HEAVEN
‘I go to prepare a place for you.’
Jesus Christ Himself is our home, our furniture, our resting-place all in one.
I. We live in Him.—‘Thou art a place to hide me in.’ It was the bitter gloom of separation from Him that cast this fluttering dismay upon the Apostles. His words were designed to reassure them. He was going before them to be ready to receive them on the other side, in the home which He had set apart for them, in the abode which He would get ready for them. The Jewish tradition had always made so much of God’s Presence here in their midst, that death seemed to them to be a going out from it into a region which had to them been only imperfectly explored, and of which they had no sure evidence. It was part of our Blessed Lord’s mission to bring life and immortality to light through the Gospel. And yet it is not for us contemptuously to despise the Jews for their scantier knowledge. At least they found God here, and that after all is the best beginning for finding Him hereafter. That ‘I may know Him and the power of His Resurrection.’ How much is contained in those words! There was a time when St. Paul had been constrained to say, ‘Who art Thou, Lord?’ It is the outpouring of a great longing when He says, ‘Then shall I know.’ We can read in the history of the martyrs how very much this meant to them as a support in their trials. ‘I see Jesus standing at the right hand of God,’ seems to have lifted St. Stephen up out of his pains and humiliation into a region where it had become true. ‘Thou shalt hide them privily by Thine own Presence from the provoking of all men: Thou shalt keep them secretly in Thy tabernacle from the strife of tongues.’ We know, perhaps, in our own experience, what it is suddenly to come across a friend in strange and difficult surroundings, where we know neither the language nor the manners of the people, and we say, ‘It seems quite like home to see you here.’
II. So we ought to live that life of personal union with Christ, that we may be able to understand without an effort that heaven is a state rather than a place. And that whatever may be the environment to which our risen life corresponds, whatever may be the analogous counterpart of our ministering senses, we may be able to find our fullness and completeness in Him. ‘And this is life eternal, that they might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, Whom Thou hast sent.’ ‘We are complete in Him.’ He gathers up all our affection, He purifies all our works. Where He is, there is heaven and happiness. Where He is not there is hell and misery. The Word was made flesh, and tabernacled among us, that He might raise us up to sit with Him in heavenly places, in the special home which He has prepared for us, in the mansion where He vouchsafes to meet us.
—Canon Newbolt.
Illustration
‘There is a story which comes to us from the days of the martyrs, that a Christian condemned to die a cruel death for his allegiance to Christ was sleeping peacefully the night before his martyrdom when he was disturbed by a dream. He dreamed that he was in heaven, where everything around him was of pure transparent glass. The ground he trod, the streets and gardens, all clear and transparent, and the blessed spirits of the righteous as they swept by, were of glass also; but to his dismay, each, as they passed him, pointed at him in amazement and pain, as if wondering at his presence in such a pure abode. And, looking down, he saw on his breast a black spot at which all were pointing. He clasped his hands over the place, but being himself of glass his hands were transparent, the defilement shone through. In his agony he awoke and remembered some breach of charity of which he had been guilty. He sought pardon of God and man, and passed away through martyrdom, to the realisation of the country of his dream.’
(SECOND OUTLINE)
THE LORD’S DEPARTURE
Thus the Lord announces the necessity and the object of His removal from the disciples.
I. The necessity for our Lord’s departure.—If He had remained here below various great ends of His mission must have remained unfulfilled. The glorification of His manhood, and of us in Him could not have been. Again, it was God’s purpose to build up again that image which in our first parents had been ruined, and this could not be accomplished without His being taken from them. It was to be the special work of the Holy Spirit dwelling in and operating on men’s hearts, and the Comforter would not come unless our Lord first went to the Father. The Ascension was necessary also for the manifestation of Christ’s sovereignty (Romans 14:9), and for the work of His High Priesthood in heaven.
II. The manner of His departure was open and undoubted. The Ascension into heaven is an article of faith resting on irrefragable testimony of the whole apostolic body.
III. The results of His departure with a view to our own faith and practice.
(a) It is the token of our acceptance. He is preparing a place and He is coming again. Let us look on the world’s progress and our own as parts of great preparation to that end.
(b) Let His Ascension draw our thoughts upward.
(c) His merciful intercession should also be in our minds. He is the Way, and no man cometh to the Father but by Him.
Dean Alford.
Illustration
‘The foreigner in some countries still is the subject of severe criticism, contempt, and sometimes danger. His appearance is strange, his dress is foreign, his customs are incongruous, he does not fit in with his surroundings; his presence is an insult. God forbid that we should attribute such feelings to the courts of heaven, where we read “there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth”! But it may be true, for all that, that man as man would be a sorry occupant for the unsullied streets of the golden city. Man was created in the image and likeness of God, dowered with freewill and spiritual power, and so man was meant to be a kind of first-fruits of God’s creatures. But read the history of the Old Testament saints and their serious imperfections. Read the lives of the Christian saints and their manifold limitations. Look at the average man, and the almost grotesque incongruity between his life and the life of any heaven which our imagination can bring before us. Look at our conception of beatitude. If the end of man is to know God and enjoy Him for ever—if this indeed be life eternal to know God, and Jesus Christ Whom He has sent, how can it be, how can we wish it so to be—we who know so little of God in our daily lives, we before whose lives He spreads His beauty, on which we turn our backs in silent contempt?’