John 11
THOSE who know heaven to be their home can look upon all things here as a steppingstone helping them on up there.
All must pass away here; the stamp of death is upon everything, but marvelous the power the gospel gives to face it all! To nature death is terrible, and there is sadness in the thought even of the fading of a flower not to be expressed, seeing flowers in the room of a sick one and feeling both are fading and dying, and the hand that gathered shall gather no more. Yet the grace of God comes in just there in all the sweetness of the gospel, giving His dying children to realize and to know all the brightness of their future home in heaven. What if all the power of the enemy is brought before us at the grave, have we not all in the second Adam to uphold and lift us above everything. We are all passing on, going home. We have to look upon heaven as a home to which we are on our way, so to have hold of the hope of the gospel with the one hand as to let go the world with the other. The gospel brings eternal realities before the soul, and shows us we ourselves are linked with them.
Oh! how bright the glory of God burning in the lamp of our future.
To have hold of Christ is to have hold of the resurrection and the life. He is the power and spring of life. He spake as it were upon the tombs of us all in this vast charnel house. We see in Him the God of creation and the God of resurrection, He who could people the earth out of nothing, and raise the dead out of nothing by one and, the same power. The very fact of our Creator being presented to us as a man, how marvelous! To have Him who spake and it was done down on this earth in our form, God manifest in flesh! To have Him up there on the throne of God a man still, and able up there to be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; to know there is nothing for us in all our sorrows but gathering round this tender-hearted risen Jesus, how blessed a thought!
Alas, alas! how we do shut out God from His creation. How would you have your Creator manifested to you in this vast charnel house, where pining sickness and misery meet the eye on all sides? If you don’t know your God you may know Him by His having been manifested down here, and when He manifested Himself it was to meet the condition in which the world was.
Mark Him in this death scene, He, the resurrection and the life, weeping with the weepers.
Mary does not go to the grave, but to Christ.
Terrible to nature to see one we love in the dust of death, yet sweet to think we commit those we love to His care, at whose voice they will come forth in everlasting vigor and fresh immortality.
There is something so marvelously blessed in the fact of God in human form down here to weep with man, and by almighty power to turn man’s sorrow into joy, to see Him going hither and thither to give life to the dead, and entering the house of mourning for that purpose. Here we read when God saw the poor woman weeping, He groaned in spirit, anguish choked His utterance―God in human form joined issue with man and wept with him. It was worth as it were an ocean of tears to see those precious drops. It was through the human nature of Christ the heart of God was let out,
“and Jesus wept.”
J. Willans.
THIS has been, for some thirty years, a deep conviction of my soul, that no book can be written in behalf of the Bible like the Bible itself. Man’s defenses are man’s word; they may help to beat off attacks, they may draw out some portion of its meaning. The Bible is God’s word, and through it God the Holy Ghost, who spake it, speaks to the soul which closes not itself against it.