IN your sanctified imagination do not transport the restlessness of this dispensation into the Father-house with God.
“This world passes away and the lust thereof,” and then there comes another, a better world, populated by no other children of men, than those who have fallen asleep in Jesus.
But the “law of life” of this dispensation does not pass over into that new world. In this present world restless change itself is condition of existence; but in that new world dominates the law of unchangeableness. Here everything is in process of becoming, there nothing becomes and nothing decays, for there there dominates the majesty of eternal rest, the perfection of eternal permanence and being.
We can not enter into this, because with respect to our representation and thinking we are bound to this endless-changeableness, and because by reason of this an always permanent condition and a rest which is never broken, would impress us as something stifling and oppressive, yea, as deadly ennui.
This accounts for all our efforts to make life in heaven attractive by imagining ourselves and making others believe, that in heaven our forming and developing will unceasingly go on, and that in the new life we will forever go on progressing from glory to glory.
That endless effort after an ideal perfection, which then of course is never reached, and that endlessly becoming more happy, without ever capturing perfect happiness, is then taken as a charming thought.
The Excelsior carried into heaven. Evolution also on the other side of the grave.
Yet this would be nothing else, than making life in the Father-house a lengthening-piece of life on earth.
Directly in contradiction with what Scripture reveals, that “all that is in part” goes under in dying, and that in the eternal life it shall be: Knowing as we are known, i.e., perfectly.
In contradiction likewise with this glorious fruit of the passion and death of our Lord, that by one offering He hath perfected forever all those, that go to God (Hebr. 10, 14).
THE eternal lies in the fact of no more changing. “Eternal life” is life that no more changes.
The eternal stands over against the temporal. And what is time other than the pulsebeat of the ever changing. Hours, days, weeks, months, years; always after evening morning, after day the night. But this is not so in the Father-house. “There there shall be no more night.” Thus also no more morning. And sun and moon will be no more signs, for God and the Lamb will beam forth the eternal light, which neither changes nor is darkened.
Here is not-remaining, as one is, highest rule of life. He who each year he lives makes no advance, and climbs no higher, has trifled that year away. The seaman hastens along on the waves, to reach the haven, towards which he set his course; but as soon as the goods have been discharged, he escapes that haven again to seek wind and waves. And so we all do. We hanker after diversion and change. What always remains the same, stifles us by its monotony. Is not all our life a pilgrim journey? Always on and ever farther on. Hastening to the mile-stone, which in the distance discovered itself to our eyes, in order as soon as it is reached, to turn our back upon it, and to hasten toward the new mile-stone, which then comes. In the morning we press toward midday, that from midday we may hasten on to evening, and then to go into the night, which must bring us again the new morning.
Yet all this is foreign to eternity. Then no more pilgrims, but arrived in the Father-house, to remain there forever, without ever any more longing rising up in us after anything else. “Pillars” as Jesus says, “in the temple of our God, never more to go out” (Rev. 3, 12).
And can it be otherwise? Striving, trying, longing after more can not be thought to be endless, else the object one pursued would never, never be reached, and in heaven it would continue to be, what it was so long on earth: never perfect; never, never the eternal rest for the heart, which to the people of God is the highest good.
NO, a going on of the development here begun can not be the life in the Father-house. In dying comes in between the grace-miracle of perfecting, the full unfolding at once of the flower bud, apart from degree or transition the entire ripening of the fruit of the offering of Christ. This is the dying unto sin, this is the being delivered from the body of this death, this is the transition from time into the eternal.
Therefore they who are in Christ Jesus are already here called “saints,” already here “perfected.”
Would you bring all the dissimilarity of life here over into the Father-house? Think, how many millions died away in the cradle, and would they have to begin their development, intellectual and spiritual, only in the Father-house? And the other millions and millions, whose development, thanks to their position in life, remained here on the lowest level, would you lead them into the Father-house in all their imperfectness, only there to appropriate to themselves, what a small circle of higher privileged ones already enjoyed here below? Thus, in the Father-house also, the here more finely formed, the here more richly developed a sort of heavenly nobility, and the great multitude which no one can number, as half under age round about them.
Would that be our only comfort, the only comfort also for those thousands and millions, in their life and death?
No, and again no, says God’s Word; but this is the source of endless comfort and rest of soul, that our glorious High Priest by one offering hath perfected all them, that through Him go to God.
ARDENT and fervent longing, here to be relieved, and to enter into the Father-house, became ever less also in circles of believers. A heart-felt cry as of Paul: “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death, I have a desire to be unbound and to be with Jesus,”—no more appeals to large companies of believers. One full of days, a worn-out sufferer on a bed of sickness, one persecuted by adversity upon adversity not counted, the outlook upon the future of heaven interests us far too little.
And yet, is it not natural, that thirst after the joy of heaven burns less in the soul, when one imagines, that there it will merely be continuation of what we here leave? A higher class, but of the same training school. Why not continue that task of our development a little longer here? Then for the time being we escape anxious death, and, we make equally good advances equally well.
Break with this false representation. Understand what dying unto sin is, what it is to be made perfect, what it is, from that endless chase to be transposed in the eternal rest of Being, wholly, altogether out of time to be placed in the midst of eternity, and this altogether independent of whether you die as child, or as man, or as one of great age,—and see, how suddenly that glorious Father-house appears before the eye of your soul in an altogether different light.
That Father-house the condition of perfectness, and perfect all whom you there shall find; and when you enter there, you also a perfected one among the perfect.
THE saints, who went before, also those whom God the Lord called away from our own heart, appear by that same light before us in so altogether different a form.
You lost a child, but now in the Father-house by a miracle of grace that child is at once forever perfect. Far, infinitely far above the holiest on earth in perfectness excelling. What here was still an uncut diamond, there a sparkling jewel, shining as a star in the firmament.
Or, when he whom from your own home God called to the Father-house, had come already here to higher development, but so that to the earthly image, to the earthly form the remembrance of our fall still cleaved, then in thinking of that brother, of that sister in the Father-house, all that was painful on earth, that was sadly unholy gone, and before you appears the holy and the glorious image of one in Christ perfected, not only without spot or wrinkle, but also in heavenly perfectness.
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