ÀҾ˹éÒ˹ѧÊ×Í
PDF
ePub

CHAPTER IX.

Voices of the Spring continued-Spiritual Agriculture, laborious-The Fallow Ground, and the breaking of it up, in preparation for Sowing -The Process of Subsoiling in the Mind and Heart-The Connection between Working and Praying-Consequences of the Skimming System.

THE Poets and Prophets of the Old Testament drew much of their imagery and illustration of spiritual things, from rural occupations. So did our Blessed Lord and His Disciples. From this, as well as from their announcement of everlasting principles their perpetual dealing with such principles, and their introduction of the human soul into the presence-chamber of eternal re alities, resulted the universality, simplicity, and homely power of their compositions. God was pleased to put His Word in this shape.

Now there are two spring directions in the Prophets, bringing together the work of sowing and praying, and illustrating the dependence of each of these duties upon the other, and the redation of both for success to the state of the moral soil, and the labor necessary to be performed upon it; directions from different husbandmen, but almost in the same words, yet with some variety of addition and details; two in particular, so pointed and

full of meaning, that we must bring them together from Hosea and Jeremiah. "Break up your fallow-ground," says the first and earlier Prophet (earlier by about a hundred years), "for it is time to seek the Lord, till he come and rain righteousness upon you." This command comes down in the midst of a perfect shower of rural images; and it connects, in a remarkable manner, the ploughing, and all that kind of work upon the heart and mind, indicated in that part of husbandry, with the work of seeking God, the work of effectually praying.

will be in vain.

"Break up your fallow-ground," says the second and more majestic of these Prophets, but not more pointed, and sow not among thorns.' Break up your fallow-ground, or all your sowing Here the process turns upon the sowing; in the other case upon the seeking; in both cases it is necessary for success. It is time to seek the Lord; but it is useless to seek him, indeed there is no true seeking of him, unless therewith you go to work upon your own soil, your own heart, and break up the fallow-ground.

It is time to sow; but it is useless to sow, unless first you dig and plough, and break up the hard soil, and the thorns with it. The work of praying itself is a kind of sowing; it is a sowing with God's promises; and to this work especially both these Prophets refer, announcing directly, in answer to the question, How shall we gain God's blessing? a work to be done on our part, along with prayer, if we would render prayer effectual. The intimate and essential connection between praying and working is nowhere in the Word of God more strikingly exhibited than in these passages.

In some of Paul's recorded experiences, as well as admonitions, the illustrations of the same kind of truth are most instructive

angels they shall be translated to the skies.

Them also that sleep with Jesus will he bring with him. And many bodies of the Saints, which slept, arose. How beautiful, how serenely confident, is this language! How it takes its terror from the grave to consider it as a place of quiet slumber in the Lord! Them also which sleep in Jesus! As sentinels keep their nightwatch around the tent, so through this night of slumber in the tabernacle of the grave, God's angels may keep their watch, may have their appointed ministry.

The kind of resurrection to be experienced by the body, depends on what a man sows for the life and character of the soul. Whether a man shall have part in the first resurrection, whether he will be one of Paul's hearers in the fifteenth chapter of his Epistle to the Corinthians, whether he will ever lift up that halleluia anthem over the death of the body, in the prospect of its glorious resurrection in the likeness of the Lord, is to be determined by the seed which he puts into his spiritual being. The use made of the seed-time of the soul, for things and seasons temporal, determines the harvest both of soul and body, both for time and eternity. What an infinite solemnity in the truth! What an exceeding and eternal weight of responsibility in the knowledge of it, and in all our movements in regard to it! Who that comes into existence, and has this law of his being once made known to him, ever can divest himself, for one moment, of this vast accountability, this charge of the character and destiny of soul and body for eternity? Can it be questioned habit which we form, of body or of spirit, is connected with our resurrection dress?

that every

The habits of time will appear as the dress of eternity. He that raised up the Lord Jesus from the dead, shall also quicken

your mortal bodies, by His Spirit that dwelleth within you. The habit of the Spirit is the habit of life, and death itself cannot interrupt it, if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you. By that same Spirit these bodies are to be quickened, raised, transfigured, and with reference to these bodies especially it is, that the last Adam is said to be a quickening Spirit, and mortality is swallowed up of life. Even now, the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts is the beginning of this process; it produces even now an instinctive prediction of the resurrection. The whole earnest expectation of the creature, which waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God, is sustained and strengthened by this sacred intuition. The hope in Christ. takes up that as one of its elements, and does not leave us to the promise merely, but the day itself dawneth and the daystar ariseth in our hearts; and though as yet we see as through a glass darkly, yet we recognise the star,

"And feel through all this fleshy dress

Some shoots of everlastingness."

The glorious process begins with "Christ in you the hope of glory;" thus the principle of life is deposited, enshrined, as a flame in a globe, which is to be itself transfigured as one sphere of flame; and so the law of the Spirit of life in Christ works on, till it has permeated all things, and subdued all things to itself. Death cannot stop it, but only removes the process a step beyond our sight; and so, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the Spirit is life, because of righteousness. This cor ruptible puts on incorruption, and this mortal puts on immortality, by the power of that divine, indwelling, quickening Spirit. The translation and transfiguration of Enoch and Elijah may

CHAPTER VIII.

Analogies from Nature to the Resurrection.

THE doctrine of the resurrection of the dead is purely a doctrine of Divine Revelation. Nevertheless, there is a foreshadowing of it in the processes of nature itself, so that it may be regarded also as a natural revelation in types and analogies, which only waited for the Word of God to receive their full interpretation and confirmation. All nature is but as the beginning or groundwork of God's revelations; a woof on which the bright and glorious figures of Divine Revelation are wrought, as flowers, landscapes, and historical tablets on a piece of tapestry. The only service of the texture and course of the natural world is to receive these superadded glories, to have them inwrought (these grand and infinite truths, unattainable by intuitive intelligence), inwrought and supported upon the very vestments of mortality, even as the sentences of God's word were threaded in the robes of the High Priest, and displayed as frontlets and fringes of their garments. The frame of Nature, yea, the universe itself, is but as a loom for the weaving and unrolling of truth revealing God; and when it shall have answered its present purpose, then it shall be laid aside, just as a loom is taken to pieces, when nothing more is to be done with it. Yea, O Lord God, said the inspired Psalmist, this

« ¡è͹˹éÒ´Óà¹Ô¹¡ÒõèÍ
 »