may receive you into everlasting habitations." What is the meaning of this verse? Apparently this: the mammon of unrighteousness is money. It is too often devoted to the promotion of unrighteousness, and hence it is here coupled with it. With this money we may, if we will, make for ourselves friends who, when we die, will be waiting at the portals of heaven to welcome us to our home. How? Why, if, instead of spending all our money in self-gratification and the amassing of short-lived gains, we so use it in the promotion of Christian work, that, by means of it and of us, souls are reclaimed from sin and "made meet for the inheritance of the saints in light." What a stimulating thought! You build a church, let us suppose, with some of the wealth which God has given you. This "mammon" thus becomes the instrument of gathering souls to the Redeemer. The Gospel preached within these walls draws them, and your money was at the foundation of the enterprise. So they pass into heaven, and in eternity they hail your coming when the time of your entrance there arrives. You have been their friend, and they have been made your Or friends by your wise use of your means. look at a case on a smaller scale. You expend a few shillings on the purchase of religious books, and expend some of your time in their distribution. By means of one of them a soul is gained for the Lord, and hails you as, under God, his deliverer. He dies, and by and by you follow him into the spirit-world. When your emancipated spirit wings its flight home, he is waiting to "receive you into everlasting habitations." Will there not be recognition between him and you? How can he welcome and thank you otherwise? Is not the doctrine of recognition most plainly implied again in that sublime passage which has, by the side of so many an open grave, brought comfort to the mourning heart: "I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others who have no hope; for if we believe that Jesus died, and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him"? What comfort would there be in God bringing back His sleepers from the grave, if, when we and they met at His throne, neither knew that the other was there? Does not the essence of the consolation here preached lie in the seeing of our friends and recognising them as alive again, and in the prospect of an everlasting uninterrupted fellowship with them? The The Scriptures seem, indeed, to have one voice, only one, on this subject. Old Testament and New, prophets and apostles, and our Master Himself speak the same language regarding it. All tell us in the plainest terms that in heaven, far from not knowing each other, we shall know with a more intimate, clear-sighted knowledge than ever we had on earth. yearnings of our own hearts and our instinctive feelings had prepared us for such a revelation. It fills up that which was wanting for us, and we are comforted to learn from the sure word of prophecy what otherwise we might only have guessed, that we and our beloved shall not be strangers above, but shall "know even as also we are known." |