We are surrounded, as we face this new year, by the mysteries of omnipotence, by a power whose unerring wisdom has filled heaven and earth with the glory of great things for our good. For us are sun, and moon, and stars, and daybreak and sunset; for us the ordered seasons and the teeming wealth of earth and sea; for us the arching heavens are blue and the pleasant earth is green; for us the world is carpeted with flowers and beautified by song. And God has given us the power to assimilate His great gifts for our good. We have eyes to see and ears to hear, and a heart to throb with the divine rapture of the passing hours. But sights, and sounds, and thoughts are passing with the passing world, and what we enjoy here today we lose tomorrow, for death shadows every landscape and clouds every pleasant sight.
But the soul of a man in a dying world can never die. When all the splendor of omnipotence that greets us every day has passed away, the immortal soul within us will be living still. Oh! the solemnity of it all. I must live when the world is gone. You must live when time shall be no more. Before the dread significance of it all, my spirit seems to sink, awed by the unspeakable power and majesty of God.
But this mighty God is love, and while His judgments terrify my soul, His boundless mercy makes me glad. The heavens are defiled by Satan’s sin, and the earth by man’s, and so a holy God must cleanse them with the fires of destruction. But He willeth not the death of the sinner. He saves to the uttermost; and in these “last days” He is speaking to the world by His Son, and faith in Him and His atoning work will cleanse my soul from my life’s sin and give me a place amid “the inheritance of the saints in light.” God has prepared a home in another world for those who trust in Him. Redeeming love has opened the gates of heaven for all believers, and the passing away of the world is as nothing to those who seek a city yet to come, “whose builder and maker is God.” “For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”
What will happen to us in 1922. Some of us will leave this earth scene altogether. Either through the gates of death, or at the call of Christ. Are you, my reader, saved? Are you redeemed by the precious blood of Christ? There is great truth in the following lines for some of us, way-worn, with failing powers, but rejoicing in hope. God help us to be faithful to His name until we see His face in glory.