We love our friends, and in the love we bear for them we love their personal presence. It is impossible to conceive how this could be otherwise.
To the one who loves father, mother, wife, or children, there is no place in all the earth so dear as the hearthstone and the family circle. Here is sweetness of communion of which the world knows nothing. Heart beats in sympathy with heart; love flows free and untrammeled. The cold formality of the world is shut out. Position loses its distinction. All meet on common ground, and love makes all hearts one. Such a home is the nearest approach to heaven that this earth affords. The love of such a home is a type of the love which will exist in the heavenly family. And as love of home and friends embraces love of personal communion, so will it be between God and His children.
THE FIRST DEATH — W. A. Bouguereau
As one truly comes to love the Lord Jesus Christ, and finds in Him a Saviour, a Friend, a Brother, a Father, will he not love personal communion with such a being? Will he not love to look up into the glorious face of Him who has appeared so many times to his aid and encouragement, and hear that melodious voice which has so often sustained his courage and quieted his fears and nerved him for all of life’s conflicts? Strange, indeed, would be a Christian experience foreign to such desires!
In all the history of the world no class of men ever suffered keener disappointment than did the disciples at the departure of their Lord. With their hopes crushed to the earth, with every ambition disappointed, the death and burial of the Lord left an aching void in every heart, which no human agent could supply. Their feelings were voiced in the sorrowful lament of the two disciples who went down to Emmaus, when they said, “We trusted that it had been He which should have redeemed Israel.” It had been their fondly cherished desire that Christ should take the throne of David, and they looked with eager anticipation to every succeeding event in Christ’s experience to bring about this fruition of their dreams. But now all was lost, and their hopes and ambitions were as dead as the lifeless body of their Lord, sealed in its rock-bound tomb.
The resurrection of the Lord revived their hopes. At the meeting in Galilee which He had appointed, and to which hundreds assembled they believed that the time had come when Christ was to take the throne. They ask, “Lord, wilt Thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” Again are they doomed to disappointment. “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in His own power.” That event is still future. Before the hour of triumph is the time of labor. They are to be His witnesses, the heralds of His work to earth’s remotest bounds.
He is parted from them, and again unutterable sorrow fills their hearts. But the Lord leaves them not without comfort and assurance. Two angels appear to comfort them. “This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven.” This is their message of cheer. And again there echo in their ears the blessed words of their Lord, spoken the night of His apprehension: “Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in Me. . . . I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto Myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. . . . I will not leave you comfortless [orphans]; I will come to you.”
This was their support in the hour of darkness and disappointment; and blessed assurance it was indeed. This same Jesus was to come again. The One with whom they had associated for three years; who had acted the part of a friend and a counselor, the part of a brother in every trial; with whom they had walked and talked and communed in every phase of life’s experience among the hills and valleys of Judea; whose blessed hands had supplied their temporal needs; whose sympathetic tones had quieted their fears—He was to come again.
Truly this was comforting assurance, but no less comforting to them than it may be to us. This, today, is the sweet assurance which Heaven gives to every child of God.
Sometime, and now not very long hence, we shall see Him as He is. We shall bask in the presence of the One we have learned to love. We shall see the King in His beauty. Our faces will lighten under the glance of His kindling eye, and the sweetness of communion with Him shall be the inspiration of eternity.
