Yes, beloved, our blessed Lord and Savior is our Head in glory, Who has promised, “In my Father's house are many mansions......I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.” He will soon (and oh, how soon!) come again to accomplish His blessed promise.
This world with all its vanities, the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life, will, like a rare apple of Sodom, one day collapse into dust and ashes in the fire of God's true and righteous judgment. But long—more than a thousand years—before that awful day arrives, our Savior will come for us, Whom we expect from heaven, where our conversation or citizenship is. “For yet a little while, and He that shall come will come, and will not tarry.” At His quickening word of command, His sleeping saints of all ages will arise from the dust of their graves in glorious bodies, in a moment—in the twinkling of an eye. At the same moment these corruptible “bodies of humiliation” of ours will be transformed into the likeness of His own glorious body, and He will lead us to the mansions in His Father's house. “Behold, I and the children which God hath given me.”
His great “new name,” that glorious name of JESUS, which is above every Name; that name at which every knee shall bow, of those in heaven and those on earth and those under the earth—that precious Name will then in the blaze of glory be written on the foreheads of His servants.
And when the day shall appear, when the Lord will “make up His jewels” (Mal. 3:1717And they shall be mine, saith the Lord of hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels; and I will spare them, as a man spareth his own son that serveth him. (Malachi 3:17)), every tear wept for His sake will then shine like a diamond in the sunlight of His face, “when He will come to be glorified in His saints and to be admired in all them that believed.” Then the countless hosts of His saints will fitly reflect His beauty, as the dewdrops in the field at the rising of the sun; like precious jewels, in variegated colors reflecting the glory of the heavenly orb.
And what is it, beloved, that enables those tiny dewdrops to reflect the light of that glorious orb, the splendor of which blinds the human eye? Is it not because those little drops are pure and free of earthly alloy? They come from heaven, and therefore are able to reflect heavenly glory. Thus it will be with the saints, the Lord's servants, when they shall appear with Him in glory, each “clothed upon with our house which is from heaven,” in glorified bodies—the livery of glory, the “gala-uniform,” as it were, of the servants and soldiers of Christ. Then there will be no more impediment in their bodies, no earthly nor fleshly alloy, no intrusion of vain-glorious self in our poor little service, to impede our reflecting the glories of the once-despised Jesus of Nazareth, when He, Whose “visage was so marred more than any man, and His form more than the sons of men,” shall appear from heaven with all His saints, to “sprinkle many nations;” and “His face as the sun shineth in his strength,” yet “with healing in his wings,” for His earthly people. Oh, what a radiant reflex of His glory and beauty will His servants then be! How different from what we are now! Would to God, we were now more like dewdrops—little, pure and empty, i.e. clear of alloy! What different lights we then should be, in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, and in what different ways should we now reflect the beauties and perfections of Christ in such a world and in days like these! May we learn, in the power of an ungrieved Spirit (that “Spirit of glory, which rests upon us” and is “the earnest of our inheritance"), more truly to “rejoice in hope of the glory of God.” I pray the kind indulgence of my Christian reader and fellow-heir of glory, for having introduced some hymns in this part of our meditations. Hymns are not scripture, it is true; but they often serve to convey the precious truths of Holy Writ with renewed freshness to the heart, carrying it on the wings of joyful praise, heavenward, Godward, Christ ward. When spring comes, the jubilant lark rises heavenward And should not we sing when He, Who is our hope, is so near? The weary wanderer, on sighting the battlements of his native town, forgets his weariness, and with song and winged steps hastens towards the goal of his desire and hope.
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The grace that made me Thine”
We thus have Peace, Grace, Hope, expressing the believer's past, present, and future: as to the past unbroken peace with God; as to the present, the unclouded sunshine of His favor; as to the future, the never-to-be-disappointed hope of the glory of God. May that calm and secure peace, that blessed and establishing grace, and that cheering hope, shine out more and more in our walk and daily life! We now proceed to the fourth part of the subject of our meditations: “Joyful tribulations.”