NO SORROW
THERE
CHAPTER NINE
NO SORROW
THERE
In heaven at last. The days of mourning are ended. God shall wipe all tears from
their eyes. To the wicked he says, “Woe to you who laugh now; for you shall
mourn and weep,” to the righteous, “Blessed are you who weep now; for you shall
laugh.” Everlasting joy shall be upon their head, and sorrow and sighing shall
flee away.
“O blessed way, and
thrice-blessed end!” We are still in the wickedness, and have not yet reached
that city of our God. We are still buffeting the storm, but pressing onward to
the land where clouds and darkness are known no more.
The soul of man in the
present world is no true expression of its Maker’s handiwork. Its elements are
incongruous and discordant. It is a disjointed mechanism; unrefined and
undirected, all its movements are ominous of disaster. It needs to pass through
the furnace, before it shall come out in purity and brightness. So long as the
people linger on these shores of time, they will not only be suffering, but sinning men, “I shall be satisfied,” says the Psalmist,
“when I awake in your likeness.” Nothing else satisfies. The regenerated soul
thirsts for God, for the living God. The turbid and bitter waters of earth have
served to prepare it for the pure river of life. Nor was the process completed
until, at the graves mouth, the last chain that bound it to earth was
dissolved. These infirmities and sins and sorrows will vanish then. Christ’s
sorrowing followers are made like unto the angles; they are “the children of God,
being the children of the resurrection.”
Eye has not seen, nor ear
heard, nor have entered into the heart of man, the things that God has prepared
for those who love him.” That is a wondrous world of which the Savior says,
“Where I am, there shall also my servant be.” It has no need of the sun or the
moon to shine in it. The glory and honor of the nations are gathered into it;
there is no more curse; but the throne of God and the
Lamb shall be in it, and his servants shall serve him. The actual transmission
of the immortal spirit from time to eternity, from earth to heaven, no human
eye ever beheld. No ear of man ever heard the shout, as the weary feet of the
once mourning pilgrim were first planted on the long wished for shore, though guardian angels hovered over him as he passed through
the dark valley.
There is no darkness now;
the Lamb is the light thereof; they are the dazzling glories of eternal day.
When the martyr Stephen fell, he exclaimed, “I see the glory of God, and Jesus
standing at the right hand of God.” And what must be the vision when the
children of sorrow see him face to face, and know even as they are known; where
“the ransomed of the Lord return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting
joy upon their heads, and they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and
sighing shall flee away.”
Well may
they look upon the rock whence they were hewn, and the hole of the pit whence
they were dug. It was a world alienated from God, and where sorrow
upon sorrow, and convulsion upon convulsion agitated it in a thousand forms. It
is a mournful, a fearful retrospect they look upon, with only here and there a
few radiations—Is this the dark from where we have been rescued, and this the wilderness we have traveled over?”
And how were they rescued? They
were partakers in the universal apostasy, and under the condemning sentence of
that law which is holy, just, and good. It was not by works of righteousness
which they had done, or ever could perform. They are redeemed sinners, and
would have sunk under the weight of their iniquity; had not the God-man bore
their sins in his own body on the tree. Not a thread, nor a filament, not a
fiber of their justifying righteousness was wrought by their own hands. And
their personal holiness, whence was it? Who made them to differ from a world
that lies in wickedness, and from what they themselves once were? When days of
trial came, and temptations assaulted them, and flesh and sense were arrayed
against them; when there was conflict and tumult, and the subtle adversity went
about seeking whom he may devour; who stimulated them to watch and pray, and
wrestle and overcome? Whose unsleeping eye and unwearied arm and unchanging
faithfulness cared for them in their youth, in manhood, and in old age—at home
and abroad, in health and in sickness, in storm and in sunshine? And whose were
those everlasting arms ever and anon thrown around them; and whose that loving
heart, giving them the oil of joy for mourning, and the garment of praise for
the spirit of heaviness, lest they should be discouraged in the conflict, and
never reach the heavenly land?
Many a youthful pilgrim who seemed to run well, grew weary and fainted, and
turned back. The wilderness, as they look back upon it, is strewed with the
fainting, the slumbering, the fallen, the dead, the
lost. From the cradle to the grave, and from the grave up to the heavenly city,
every incident in their history, every joy and every pang of sorrow has been
under the control of infinite love. Even the hairs of their head were all numbered.
Will it not be delightful to look back and see how the outstretched arm was
spread over them, and how they were borne as on eagles’ wings?
Oh what adoring, what humble
thankfulness will then take the place of that restless and depressed and murmuring
spirit with which they so unsubmissively endured their trials in the present world. Sweet reminiscences these, that make the mourner
humble. Blessed retrospect, that prostrates the soul in the dust, and makes it
fall at the feet of Jesus, and cover its angelic face with its wings. Profound
will be the veneration with which they enter into his presence and contemplate
his awesome majesty, yet calm and tranquil as the sea of glass on which they
stand to show forth his praise. Never will they again love the creature more
than the Creator. They are lost and swallowed up, not in the flood of earthly
sorrow, but the ocean of heavenly joy—not in themselves and those they loved on
earth, but in the uncreated, undying glories of the Infinite One. It will be the
wonder of their eternity that they are thus filled with all the fullness of
God, and that, plunging as they once were in miry places, they now float in
that ocean of light and love where there is neither bottom nor shore.
The humility of heaven is
one of the brightest features of its character, and one of the sources of its
sweetest joy. Honors they have; but they cast their crowns before the throne.
If “pride were not made for man,” it will never be found in heaven. Its empire
on earth is world-wide and powerful; it reigns in hell; but in the spirits of
just men made perfect it shall find no place. Amid the splendors of that
everlasting and glorious world, every laurel withers that is not wreathed
around the Savior’s brow, If the religion of earth is the religion of heaven in
miniature, the purest gem that adorns it is this heaven-born humility. It is a
sacred thing, because it is so humble and lies so low. We should love to think
of that blessed world if it were only for its humility. When those ransomed spirits,
weary of the conflicts of earth, repose under the shadow of the tree of life,
and there, at the feet of the enthroned Lamb, reflect upon the way they have
been led through the wilderness, and look down upon the agonies of that eternal
pit from which they have been rescued, how can it be otherwise than that a deep
and everlasting sense of their unworthiness and ill-desert should add to the
fullness of their gratitude and joy?
They are perfectly humble,
and perfectly happy. From the hour of their conversion, redeeming love has been
their theme; but never until now, as they stand on
“Up there,” sin and sorrow
and death never enter.
“Up there,” sighs and
farewells are a sound unknown.
“Up there,” they sit
together in heavenly places, and drink the wine new with Christ in his Father’s
kingdom.
“Up there,” the holy men and
women who parted at the grave, redeemed parents and their redeemed children,
whom the voice of the archangel and the trumpet of God have summoned from the
sleep of centuries, will meet, not to recount their own sorrows, but to tell of
him who came to the humiliation of the manger and the agonies of the cross to
rescue them from endless weeping and infinite despair.