“HERE below the becoming, once up above the being!” Have you ever, with strong anticipation, as in advance lived through the glory, which shines upon you in this “no more becoming,” but “eternal being”?
Our becoming here is our constant changing. On the way we travel, as the poet sang, there is no footstep that leaves a lasting print. All the present becomes past, though it be laid up against us.
And consider well, that restlessness of “becoming” is no punishment for sin. Surely, sin also affected for the worse that becoming, and decadence, and changing in a terrible way. Death and grave sufficiently show, what, as bitter result of sin, becomes at last of our person, of our life, of our sphere of activities, of our happiness, and of our earthly ideals.
So, outside of sin, it would not have been. By one man sin came into the world, and by sin death.
Yet, even without and outside of sin, in this dispensation there would have been constant change, the restless becoming, as part of our nature.
God created us in original righteousness, undoubtedly, and in that sense Adam had righteousness, holiness and wisdom. But he did not have this spiritual good, to remain what he was and where he was. He was called to something yet far higher and more glorious. That very transition from the paradise-state into the heavenly state was the mystery of the covenant of works. He stood before the commandment, and by fulfilling that commandment he would attain unto what he not yet had; the eternal, not changing, enduring life. The stamp, which God Himself has put upon things here below, is what the Psalmist describes in these words: “Thou shalt change them, and they shall be changed.”
Always becoming, never being. “Here no abiding city, but a seeking of one to come.”
At mother’s breast our eye opens itself. From child we become lad and youth. He who is youth, hastens to become man. And when we continue to be man, we become old. Presently stricken in years, we go into the grave. And that becoming and changing again in our years, is but the image of the restless changing, through which our whole existence hastens. Our training is becoming. Our whole experience of life is to form and ripen us. Every morning we awake, we are different again from what we were when we went to sleep. We grow, and from small become mature. Almost no feature on our face remains the same. Everytime different sensations, feelings, longings. Restless changing in our in- and outward existence. Sometimes even that changing in and about and around us, goes on so quickly and almost violently, that we become estranged from ourselves, and feel ourselves as it were driven by a driver, who never lets up.
Now all this anxiety in the processes of change is from sin. But even when you think this anxiety out of it, never being, but restlessly changing, would yet have been your portion upon earth.
Of course, there is something in you, your ego, your hidden being. The man who dies full of years, is the same being, which once as infant by his mother was conceived.
But in his condition, in his manner of existence, in his life there was never anything else observable than change.
Compare the picture of the infant on mother’s lap with the photograph of the old man, taken shortly before his death.
He was that infant, and also that aged man is he, but waxen old as a garment.
That is what Scripture calls: “the change of those things that are shaken” Hebr. 12, 27; and over against this the same Scripture puts “the things which can not be shaken.” The life above which is not changeable, the Divine-heavenly which never becomes, but eternally is, and therefore is called: eternal life.
A CLEAR and intelligent idea of what it implies, eternally to be, and never more to become, we can not form.
The language we speak, the representations we form, the ideas we put together, are all borrowed from this dispensation. And here on earth everything is subject to the law of change. The Lord is the Rock. But alongside the walls of that Rock the waters of life run restlessly on. Nature changes, the face of the heavens changes, history says, that always other things came. And therefore, what it is to become, we understand. But what being is, we do not understand.
In the burning bush God gave Moses a sight of it by miracle. What burns consumes. But see, the bush burned, and consumed not. It glittered in brightness of glow, and yet it did not consume. That was being. And therefore that burning bush was symbol of the Lord’s Holy Name: I AM THAT I AM, Jehovah, that God Who never becomes, but always is.
So also spake the Mediator. Not “before Abraham was, I was,” but: before Abraham was, I am. To Him it was given to have life in Himself. And therefore, also in Him there is no becoming, truly after His human, but not after His Divine nature. In Him also the eternal being.
When the world was created and prepared, nothing more became. The world was there. And therefore the Sabbath then came in. For God’s Sabbath is that being. Cessation of the labor of becoming.
And therefore the Sabbath is inshining of heavenly rest in the weariness of the endless becoming on earth.
He who so recognizes it, experiences already here on earth the beginning of the “eternal Sabbath.”
But only by anticipation, by foretaste, by the forward reach.
The eternal Sabbath, rest from endlessly becoming, the blessedness of eternal being and continuing, belongs with the realm of glory, when nothing more shall change, and nothing more shall be shaken, when becoming is ended, and we enter into eternal Being.
ON the good understanding of this, depends already here the blessedness of faith, the wealth of enjoyment of what Scripture calls grace.
This glory is ciphered away in these times from the Gospel of Jesus, and thereby the Gospel is rendered powerless.
Oh, that Grace might again be understood, as Scripture presents it and the fathers grasped it.
“I know that I am translated from death into life.” “Justified by faith I have peace with God.” Not: Ye become, but: “ye are holy through the word which I have spoken unto you.” He whom He has foreordained, He has also justified; and whom He has justified, He has also glorified.” “The inheritance is incorruptible, undefilable, unfadable.” “He that is born of God, sins no more, and he can no more sin, for the seed of God remaineth in him.” “We have redemption through His blood.” Our life is not still to come, but is here, “with Christ hidden in God.” Christ is “given us of God, as our wisdom, our justification, our sanctification, our redemption.” We must not still receive all this, but we have all this; not still to come, but is ours now.
That is the Gospel.
But that Gospel even the so-called orthodox throw over. Of being in grace they have no more knowledge. Also in grace everything must become. Not in Christ are they sanctified, but by self-exertion they must become holy. They are not children of God, but they must gradually become God’s children. And of course, they are not through with this before they die. And so they teach, that this becoming goes on on the other side of the grave.
The things that can not be shaken, they make shakable, and thereby the unrest of this world is carried over into heaven.
KEEP your soul far from that falsified Gospel. Things here and things in the hereafter are dominated by this absolute antithesis, that on earth things become, and that in the heavenly things are.
Thus also you, and also those, who, asleep in Jesus, went from you. Here change and always a becoming different, but there all this is ended. Then the pilgrim’s journey is finished. Then on the home-course the bark has run into the haven of the eternal rest. Not presently to lift anchor again, and to be tossed about by storm and wind on angry waves, but never to set sail again, and eternally to remain where it is.
Yet even so you are not there yet.
It is not alone, that from a shakable world you have been transported into an unshakable world, but far more still, that then, with your person, with your heart, with the deepest depths of your whole inward existence, you yourself shall have ceased to become, never to know anything else than an eternal rest, an eternal-being in the Mediator.
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