REV. — 16
242 THE DEAD IN CHRIST
night by human torches; he may have stood beneath the cross on which St. Peter died, and beside the scaffold where St. Paul suffered for his Master. Yet, looking back from his Eastern home on these terrible and woeful things, and expecting more of them before the Lord should come, he wrote in this triumphant strain : " Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from hence- forth : yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours ; for their works follow with them."
The Blessed Dead.
1. This " voice from heaven " which St. John in Patmos heard is one of the great benedictions of the Bible, and may almost be said to give, in a single sentence, the whole New Testament teaching on the unseen life of Christ's redeemed. It is but one little corner of the curtain that is lifted, but it is enough. The dead, as well as the living, are in God's hand. We ask no more ; we know no more ; we pretend to know no more. The veil shall one day be drawn, and we shall know. It is sufficient for the present to be assured that the dead in Christ are for ever done with toil, unrest, weariness and pain, with hindrances to fellow- ship with one another as well as with Christ; that there are no more misunderstandings, no separations of feeling, no self- reproaches for sin, no need for repentance, no stirrings of remorse, such as even the best of them often had below; that they are "without fault before the throne of God," without fault because Christ whose likeness they wear is without fault; and that all the sin of the earlier life is so completely blotted out from the very memory that it is as though it had never been.
Tf We wonder at it, and wonder at ourselves to think we have passed through it all, and that we are here ; friends, faces, scenes, that were everything to us, and they are gone with a widening sea between. That must have been the feeling of the man who said, " Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness." It is at such a time that the thought of the living, unchanging Friend must come in if our own hearts are to live. I think, next to the desire for God Himself,
REVELATION xiv. 13 243
for an infinite Friend, it is the desire for our dead that presses us to the cry, " My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God," — the living God who will not let the dearest and deepest things to which He has given life die for ever, and who has sent His Son into the world to lie down in our grave and rise again, that He may be the first-fruits of them that sleep. If we can clasp Him to our heart, it recovers all and more — the shadow of death is turned into the morning, and the dim, fading past changes into a blessed future. We may say even it makes them present. " Ye shall see greater things than these," heaven opens, and the angels of God ascend and descend on Him. May you and yours, my dear friend, have something of this view, and as your faith lifts its eye by that heavenly ladder, may the departed come down and be about you in your thoughts and feelings, may we not hope with a true though unseen presence ? ^
2. The text speaks not of the dead in general, but of " the dead which die in the Lord." Who are they ? They who " die in the Lord " are in the Lord — united to Him by faith. Faith is the bond of union; by faith the believer dwells in Christ, while Christ dwells in him by His Spirit. He is one with Christ, and Christ is one with him. He is " in Christ." To die in the faith and fear of the Lord, to die in a state of reconciliation and peace with the Lord, all these are but aspects of one great principle, the principle of inner union with Christ Himself.
^ Another sorrow fell on him in the illness and death of one who had been, by her Christian character and her good works, a strength to the congregation. In a letter to Mr. David Cowan, Dr. Robertson writes from Irvine toward the end of August 1875:
" Our loving and beloved Mrs. Brown is still with us, but 'wearying, wearying,' as she said to-night, *to be home.' How sublimely simple her faith is — without all fear or doubt — not trusting to swim ashore on any raft of doctrine, or system of orthodoxy, or even on separate Scripture texts and promises, * boards and broken pieces of thB ship,' still less, least of all, not at all on any works or merits of her own, but clinging to the hand of ' Jesus only,' who has come to her over the waters of death, and bids her come to Him — to Him who gives the weary rest. *0 Lamb of God, I come.' She cannot be long outside the harbour, one would think. May she have an abundant entrance. As I left the house to-night late in the darkness under the trees,