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The Pilgrim and his Friends.
i. The Invitation.
It is one of those kindly gracious invitations which abound throughout the Word of God. It is the invitation of one relative to another. By faith, Moses saw before him the Promised Land ; he realized it. " Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen " (Heb. xL 1). And he longed intensely to have his friend and relative with him, in the inheritance of that land. Hence his earnest appeal. And as with Moses, so with all who are Christians indeed.
^ When Paul had tasted the joy and peace of believing, he said, " My heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that they might be saved " (Eom. x. 1). When Andrew had found Christ himself, " he first findeth his own brother Simon, and saith unto him, We have found the Messias, which is, being interpreted, the Christ ; and he brought him to Jesus " (John i. 41, 42). So also Philip : he " findeth Nathanael, and saith unto him, We have found him, of whom Moses in the law and the prophets did write, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph." And when " Nathanael said unto him. Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth ? Philip saith unto him. Come and see " (John i. 45, 46). Further, when our Lord had cured the man possessed with a legion of devils. He bade him, " Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compas- sion on thee " (Mark v. 19). And, nearer to our own time than these instances, when the poor slave in Antigua had been con- verted to God, he used, day by day, to pray that there might be
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afvll Jieaven, and an empty hell. Yes, and a little girl of eleven years, who had found Jesus as her all, ran to her mother, her heart overflowing with love, and cried, " 0 mother, if all the world knew this ! I wish I could tell everybody — may I not run in and tell some of our neighbours, that they may love my Saviour too ? " Such is everywhere and always the spirit of true Christianity.^
1. The Invitation is a promise, a promise of good in the future. "For the Lord hath spoken good concerning Israel." The religion of the Bible is emphatically the religion of the promise. In heathen religion, the threat predominates over the promise. But in the glad faith that boasts the name of Gospel, the promise predominates over the threat. Christians are men with a hope, men who have been called to inherit a blessing. This element of promise runs through the whole Bible. What book anywhere can you point to with such a forward look as that book ? As we watch the worthies of many generations pass in long pro- cession onwards, from the day when the promise was first given of the One who should come and bruise the serpent's head, down to the day when the aged Simeon in the Temple took the Child Jesus into his arms and blessed Him, we seem to see upon every forehead a glow of light. These men, we say, front the sunrising. They have a hope. Their journey is into the morning. A purpose is in their eyes. They are looking for something, and they look as those look who expect in due time to find. If this be true of the general tone of the Old Testament Scriptures, doubly, trebly is it true of the New Testament. The coming of Christ has only quickened and made more intense in us that instinct of hope which the old prophecies of His coming first inspired. For when He came, He brought in larger hopes and opened to us far-reach- ing vistas of promise, such as had never been dreamed of before. Only think how full of eager, joyous anticipation the New Testament is, from first to last.
2. The promise is of a Place, " The place of which the Lord said, I will give it you." The progress of human knowledge has made it difficult to think and speak of heaven as believing men used to think and speak of it. But, while there is a certain grain of reasonableness in the argument for silence with respect to heaven and the things of heaven, there is by no means so much
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weight to be attached to it as many people seem to suppose. For after all, when we come to think of it, this changed conception of what heaven may be like is not traceable so much to any marvellous revolution that has come over the whole character of human thought, as it is to the changes which have taken place in our own several minds, and which necessarily take place in every mind in its progress from infancy to maturity. The reality and trustworthiness of the promise are not one whit affected by the revelation of the vastness of the resources which lie at His command who makes the promise. Instead of repining because we cannot dwarf God's universe so as to make it fit perfectly the smallness of our notions, let us turn all our energies to seeking to enlarge the capacity of our faith, so that it shall be able to hold more.