The text shows us a Divine method in providence; a law for individual and national life, and for the larger life of the race; a law borne witness to by the history of the people whose history is a light for all time, and by which we have gleams through experience of bitter times, foretastes and earnests of the inheritance of light, periods filled with special mercy and truth, times of quickening and spiritual growth, days of heaven upon earth.
I. The first days of the Christian revelation were, in the highest and most absolute sense, days of heaven upon earth. And these days still return to us. Times of revival are simply repetitions on a smaller scale of the first days of the Church.
The old doctrines, the old familiar facts of the Gospel, are transfigured as Christ was. They rise, as He rose, from the dead, and again we behold the miracle of a nation being born in a day.
II. The times when the soul is open to the revelations and offers of Divine life are days of heaven upon earth. The dawns and sunsets of these days are in the soul itself. "Be not disobedient to the heavenly vision." While the light of it is shining walk in the light. It is the light which is the life both of God and man.
III. The coming of Christ into a life is the beginning of days of heaven for that life. That would be a day of heaven to Zaccheus when Christ said to him, "To-day I must abide at thy house." Suddenly, by Christ's visit, life changes for him, and the poor lorn, lost, hated Zaccheus has a song in his heart, and a heart resolute to be on God's side and do God's will.
IV. Times of service under Christ are days of heaven upon earth. The time spent in Christian service seems to expand, to become more capacious for enterprise, more filled with opportunity, until we come, in our experience of it, to have vivid conceptions of the state concerning which it is written, "There is no night there," and real gleams of days of heaven upon earth.
V. The beautiful days of earth are types and sometimes actual realisations of such days of heaven.
VI. Christ is the Light which makes days of heaven possible. And such days fail of their purpose if they fail to increase our joy in Him.
A. MACLEOD, Days of Heaven upon Earth, p. 1.
References: Deuteronomy 11:21. G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons,p. 326. Deuteronomy 11:26-32. Parker, vol. iv., p. 212.