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TRUE COMFORT

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Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · May 12, 1898

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 24, No. 19.

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TRUE COMFORT.

Sentiment or Truth.

WHEN a beautiful, captivating sentiment comes to us so as to impress itself upon the mind, it is well before entertaining it to ask, Is it truth? If it is not, reject it. Error in the guise of beautiful sentiment leads captive many souls. In no field of thought is this more manifest than in that respecting the future, and the condition of the dead. Not long ago a gifted unmarried woman wrote to a friend just bereaved of a child:—
How much richer are you than I! Here I sit alone without a child to die, while you are a mother to an angel.
This would naturally appeal to a mourning mother who was not acquainted with the Scriptures; but it is not true. The angels of the Bible are not dead humans, but are ministering spirits from God, antedating in their existence the creation of man. Neither do the dead live, else are they not dead. The comfort which the infinitely loving and all-wise Father holds out to the weary, mourning ones of earth is not that the dead immediately enter Paradise, or that they then enter upon their reward. How does God comfort His people?—Here are His words: “But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which 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 [that is, with Jesus, from the dead, Heb. 13:20]. For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the Archangel, and with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first; then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air; and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words.” I Thess. 4:13-18. In what, then, is the hope of the dead and the mourning living?—In the resurrection of the dead at the second coming of Christ. “Then shall He reward everyman according to his works.” Matt. 16:27.