Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: December 12th

THE FUTURE THE PERFECTING OF THE PRESENT

Who also sealed us, and gave us the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts,-- 2 Corinthians 1:22

The "earnest" points onwards to an inheritance the same in kind, but immensely greater in degree. The " redemption of the possession " is a somewhat singular expression; for we are accustomed to regard the great act of redemption as already passed in the sacrifice of Christ upon the Cross. But the expression is employed here, as in several other places, to express not so much the act of purchase, the paying of the price of our salvation, which is done once for all and long ago, as the historical working out of the results of that price paid in the entire deliverance of the whole nature of man from every form of captivity to anything that would prevent his full possession by God.

"We shall know even as we are known." "Through a glass darkly; but then face to face," says Paul, suggesting great changes in the degree of our knowledge of, and friendly communion with, God, but also seeming to imply some unknown changes in the manner of our beholding, which may be connected with the new powers of that " body of glory" like our Lord’s which will then be ours. It is quite conceivable that the physical universe may have qualities as real as light and heat, and scent and sound, which we could appreciate if we had other senses appropriate, as we have sight and touch, and smell and hearing".

And so it is quite conceivable that when clothed upon with our "house which is from heaven," which will have a great many more windows in it than the earthly house of this tabernacle, which is built for stormy weather, there will be sides and aspects of the Divine nature that we do not know anything about to-day which shall be communicable and communicated to us.

But be that as it may, a deeper knowledge, a fixed love, an unbroken communion, with all distractions and interruptions swept clean away for ever, so that we shall dwell for evermore in the House of the Lord, - these are the plain elements which make the very Heaven of heavens, and which ought to make the joy of our hope. In the measure in which we know and love Him, in that measure shall we be known and loved by Him. He and we shall be so interwoven as that we shall be inseparable. We shall cleave to God and God shall cleave to us.

Oh, how small and insignificant all other notions of a future life are as compared with that! The accidents of locality and circumstance should ever be kept subordinate in the pictures which imagination may draw of what is beheld through the gates ajar by little pilgrims in the unseen. The representations which seem to aim at making another world as like this one as may be, dwarf its greatness, and tend to obscure the conditions of entering into its rest. "It doth not yet appear what we shall be" is as much a revelation as " when He shall appear we shall be like Him." As a great painter concentrates finish and light on the face of his sitter, and purposely keeps the rest of the picture slight, there is one face that should fill the dim, dark curtain of the future - the face of Christ - and all else may be thrown in in mere sketchy outline. We know that future chiefly by negations and by symbols, and the one positive fact is that we shall have Him and He will possess us.