A LITERAL INHERITANCE

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 17, 1860

A LITERAL INHERITANCE.

SOME are ready to cavil and object, whenever the future residence of the redeemed from the earth is represented as a literal, material place; not remembering, it would seem, that this is the usual representation of the place in the Scriptures. And they appear to forget, too, that man, in his original glory, walking and conversing with his Creator, was a being with a body as well as a soul; that he rejoiced in communion with the Lord, in the literal Eden where he was originally placed, and from which, after he sinned, he was driven. What do we sinners want more than original immortality and glory, with uninterrupted and everlasting enjoyment of God's presence and favor?

If, by the resurrection, all the effects of sin are perfectly and perpetually removed, and our bodies, like our Lord's, shall be glorious and incorruptible, shall we complain and cavil because there is nothing better? Do we demand a premium for having sinned? Do we require to be better conditioned than if we had never transgressed? Where has God promised to make sinners better and happier than man would have been if sin had not been committed?

If man was originally perfectly holy, perfectly happy, free from all disease and disquietude, and blessed with familiar communion with his Maker; why should we feel such a shrinking from the idea of having a local habitation, adapted to the spiritualized, yet—of necessity—still material body, with which all will be furnished in the resurrection state? The new heavens and the new earth will undoubtedly be indescribably and inconceivably beautiful and glorious; but they will be earth and heaven still.

The reader is earnestly advised to do himself the favor to read Dr. Chalmer's Sermon on the New Heavens and the New Earth. As all may not have at hand the Sermon referred to, it may be expedient to give some portions of it, that the reader may be informed of the Doctor's view of this subject:

"It were venturing on the region of conjecture to affirm, whether, if Adam had not fallen, the earth that we now tread upon, would have been the everlasting abode of him and his posterity. But certain it is, that man at the first, had for his place this world, and, at the same time, for his privilege, an unclouded fellowship with God, and, for his prospect, an immortality, which death was neither to intercept nor put an end to. He was terrestrial in respect of condition, and yet celestial in respect both of character and enjoyment. His eye looked outwardly on a landscape of earth, while his heart breathed upwardly in the love of heaven. And though he trode the solid platform of our world, and was compassed about with its horizon—still was he within the circle of God's favored creation, and took his place among the freemen and denizens of the great spiritual commonwealth. This may serve to rectify an imagination, of which we think that all must be conscious—as if the grossness of materialism was only for those who had degenerated into the grossness of sin; and that, when a spiritualizing process had purged away all our corruption, then, by the stepping stones of a death and resurrection, we should be borne away to some ethereal region, where sense, and body, and all in the shape either of audible sound, or of tangible substance, were unknown. And hence that strangeness of impression which is felt by you, should the supposition be offered, that in the place of eternal blessedness, there will be ground to walk upon; or scenes

luxuriant to delight the corporeal senses; or the kindly intercourse of friends talking familiarly, and by articulate converse together; or, in short, anything that has the least resemblance to a local territory, filled with various accommodations, and peopled over its whole extent by creatures formed like ourselves—having bodies such as we now wear, and faculties of perception and thought, and mutual communication, such as we now exercise. The common imagination that we have of paradise on the other side of death [Chalmers is certainly speaking of the resurrection state, as the previous paragraphs show], is that of a lofty, aerial region, where the inmates float in ether, or are mysteriously suspended upon nothing—where all the warm and sensible accommodations which give such an expression of strength, and life, and coloring to our present habitation, are attenuated in a sort of spiritual element that is meagre, and imperceptible, and utterly uninviting to mortals here below—where every vestige of materialism is done away, and nothing left but certain unearthly scenes that have no power of allurement, and certain unearthly ecstacies, with which it is impossible to sympathize. The holders of this imagination forget, all the while, that really there is no essential connection between materialism and sin; that the world which we now inhabit, had all the amplitude and solidity of its present materialism, before sin entered into it; that God so far, on that account, from looking slightly upon it, after it had received the last touch of his creating hand, reviewed the earth, and the waters, and the firmament, and all the green herbage, and the living creatures, and the man whom he had raised in dominion over them, and he saw everything that he had made, and behold it was all very good. They forget that on the birth of materialism, when it stood out in the freshness of those glories which the great Architect of Nature had impressed upon it, that then “the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” They forget that appeals that are made everywhere in the Bible to this material workmanship: and how from the face of these visible heavens, and the garniture of this earth that we tread upon, the greatness and the goodness of God are reflected on the view of his worshippers. No, my brethren, the object of the administration we sit under is to extirpate sin, but it is not to sweep away materialism."

This renewed and immortal man, composed of a spiritual and a material nature united, must now have an appropriate residence. Chalmers shall speak again:

"And we do hail the information of our text, that after the dissolution of its present frame-work, it will again be varied and decked out anew in all the graces of its unfading verdure, and of its unbounded variety—that in addition to our direct and personal view of the Deity, when he comes down to tabernacle with men, we shall also have the reflection of him in a lovely mirror of his own workmanship, and instead of being transported to some abode of dimness and mystery, so remote from human experience, as to be beyond all comprehension, we shall walk forever in a land replenished with those sensible delights, and those sensible glories, which, we doubt not, will lie most profusely scattered over the ‘new heavens and the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.’”

But will not this be Mahometanism?

"But though a paradise of sense, it will not be a paradise of sensuality. Though not so unlike the present world as many apprehend it, there will be one point of total dissimilarity betwixt them. It is not the entire substitution of spirit for matter, that will distinguish the future economy from the present. But it will be the entire substitution of righteousness for sin. It is this which signalizes the Christian from the Mahometan paradise—not that sense, and substance, and splendid imagery, and the glories of a visible creation seen with bodily eyes, are excluded from it—but that all which is vile in principle, or voluptuous in impurity, will be utterly excluded from it. There will be a firm earth, as we have at present: and a heaven stretched over it as we have at present; and it is not by the absence of these, but by the absence of sin, that the abodes of immortality will be characterized. There will be both heavens and earth, it would appear, in the next great administration—and with this speciality to mark it from the present one, that it will be a heaven and an earth wherein dwelleth righteousness!"

This long extract will be welcomed in this connection, not only for the beauty and eloquence of its composition, but for its perfect relevancy to the subject in hand. This is the way to interpret Scripture; not according to the fancies of men, but according to the teachings of Inspiration. This discourse of Chalmers is eminently valuable, as well for the correctness of its philosophy, as for the evident scripturalness of its divinity.—Our Lord's Great Prophecy, by Buck.