^ Heavenly bliss is no arbitrary beginning of existence over again. It is the carrying out into endless issues of the process
346 THE PERFECT LIFE
which grace begins on this side the grave. It is a joyful harvest reaped in the sunlight of an eternal summer ; but it is reaped off the very fields which were ploughed and sown beneath the clouds and showers of time. ^
The text gives three elements of the perfected life — Service, Vision, Likeness.
Service.
''His servants shall do him service."
To understand the precise force of this statement, one must observe that the two expressions for " servant " and " serve " are not related to one another in Greek as they are in English, but are two quite independent words, the former meaning literally " a slave," and the latter being exclusively confined in Scripture to one kind of service. It would never be employed for any ser- vice that a man did for a man ; it is a religious word, and means only the service that men do for God, whether in specific acts of so-called worship or in the wider worship of daily life.
1. The highest life is a life of service. In heaven itself there is no emancipation from the bonds of God. The holy nations are eternally bound, in absolute obligation, to the will of God and of the Lamb. It is no part of the Creator's promise to raise or to educate the creature to independence, to self-dependence. That could not be, without a profound and fatal contradiction. The created soul cannot be the basis of its own being ; how could it be the source of its own joy and power, or the law of its own eternity ? We read what is but likely when we read that the nearer and the clearer is the sight of the Creator granted to the creature, the better the creature recognizes the blessedness of self-surrender; the nearer the approach, the more entire the service.
^ I used as a child to pore over the Apocalypse, which I thought by far the most beautiful and absorbing of all the books of the Bible ; it seemed full of rich and dim pictures, things which I could not interpret and did not wish to interpret, the
1 H. C. G. Moule, Christ is All, 214.
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shining of clear gem-like walls, lonely riders, amazing monsters, sealed books, all of which took perfectly definite shape in the childish imagination. The consequence is that I can no more criticize it than I could criticize old tapestries or pictures familiar from infancy. They are there, just so, and any difference of form is inconceivable. In one point, however, the strange visions have come to hold for me an increased grandeur ; I used to think of much of it as a sort of dramatic performance, self-consciously enacted for the benefit of the spectator ; but now I think of it as an awful and spontaneous energy of spiritual life going on, of which the prophet was enabled to catch a glimpse. Those " voices crying day and night," " the new song that was sung before the throne," the cry of " Come and see " — these were but part of a vast and urgent business, which the prophet was allowed to overhear. It is not a silent place, that highest heaven, of indolence and placid peace, but a scene of fierce activity and the clamour of mighty voices.^
2. The ideal life, though full of activity, knows the truest rest. There is a rest which is mere inaction — the quiet of the stone, the stillness of the grave, the exhaustion of a spent and feeble nature. But there is a nobler rest than this. There is rest in health ; there is rest in the musical repose of exquisitely balanced powers ; there is rest to the desiring faculties when they find the thing desired ; there is rest in the rapture of congenial employ- ment ; rest in the flow of joyful strength ; rest in the swift glide of the stream when it meets with no impediment. Such is the rest of the glorified — perfect beings in a perfect world, rejoicing in their native element, having no weakness within, and no resisting force without, to check the outflow and expression of their loving natures ; their activity, therefore, being easy, natural, and necessary as light is to the sun, and fragrance to the flowers of spring — activity to them is rest.
Stagnation is as incompatible with the life that is lived in the heavenly city as it is with true life here. To represent heaven as a place of rest merely is to present it as a place where men would be less truly men than before. Peace and fellowship with God do not exclude activity ; rather must they stimulate it.
I count that heaven itself Is only work to surer issues.
* A. 0. Benson, Joyous Gard, 119,
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Heaven means the bringing to maturity and perfection of those powers and energies which are only partially developed here. " His servants shall do him service " : in love without a grain of selfishness, in faith without a spasm of doubt, in knowledge without a shadow of uncertainty. All " those instincts im- mature," all "those purposes unsure," which we recognize in ourselves or have guessed in others, find their full develop- ment, their completion, when "that which is in part is done away."