Biblia

214. Settled in Heaven

214. Settled in Heaven

Settled in Heaven

Psa_119:89 : ’93Forever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven.’94

This world has been in process of change ever since it was created. Mountains born, mountains dying, and they have both cradle and grave. Once this planet was all fluid, and no being, such as you or I have ever seen, could have lived on it a minute. Our hemisphere turns its face to the sun, and then turns its back. The axis of the earth’92s revolution has shifted. The earth’92s center of gravity is changed. Once flowers grew in the Arctic and there was snow in the Tropic. There has been a re-distribution of land and sea, the land crumbling into the sea, the sea swallowing the land. Ice and fire have fought for the possession of this planet. The chemical composition of the air is different now from what it once was. Volcanoes once terribly alive are dead, not one throb of fiery pulse, not one breath of vapor. The ocean changing its amount of saline qualities. The internal fires of the earth are gradually eating their way to the surface. Upheaval and subsidence of vast realms of continent.

Moravians in Greenland have removed their boat poles because the advancing sea submerged them. Linnaeus records that eighty-seven years before a rock was one hundred feet nearer the water than when he wrote. Forests have been buried by the sea, and land that was cultured by farmer’92s hoe can be touched only by sailor’92s anchor. Loch Nevis of Scotland, and Dingle Bay of Ireland, and the fjords of Norway, where pleasure boats now float, were once valleys and glens. Many of the islands of the sea are the tops of sunken mountains. Six thousand miles of the Pacific Ocean are sinking. The diameter of the earth, according to scientific announcement, is one hundred and eighty-nine miles less than it was. The entire configuration of the earth is altered. Hills are denuded of their forests. The frosts and the waters and the air bombard the earth till it surrenders to the assault. The so-called ’93everlasting hills’94 do not last. Many railroad companies cease to build iron bridges because the iron has a life of its own, not a vegetable life or an animal life, but a metallic life, and when that life dies the bridge goes down. Oxidation of minerals is only another term for describing their death. Mosses and seaweeds help destroy the rocks they decorate.

The changes of the inanimate earth only symbolize the moral changes. Society ever becomes different for better or worse. Boundary lines between nations are settled until the next war unsettles them. Uncertainty strikes through laws and customs and legislation. The characteristic of this world is that nothing in it is settled. At a time when we hoped that the arbitration planned last summer at The Hague, Holland, would forever sheathe the sword and spike the gun and dismantle the fortress, the world has on hand two wars which are digging graves for the flower of English and American soldiery. From the presence of such geological and social and national and international unrest, we turn with thanksgiving and exultation to my text, and find that there are things forever settled, but in higher latitudes than we have ever trod. ’93Forever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven.’94

High up in the palace of the sun at least five things are settled’97that nations which go continuously and persistently wrong, perish; that happiness is the result of spiritual condition and not of earthly environment; that this world is a schoolhouse for splendid or disgraceful graduation; that with or without us the world is to be made over into a scene of arborescence and purity; that all who are adjoined to the unparalleled One of Bethlehem and Nazareth and Golgotha will be the subjects of a supernal felicity without any taking off.

Do you doubt my first proposition, that nations which go wrong perish? We have in this American nation all the elements of permanence and destruction. We need not borrow from others any trowels for upbuilding or torches for demolition. Elements of ruin; Nihilism, infidelity, agnosticism, Sabbath desecration, inebriety, sensuality, extravagance, fraud. They are all here. Elements of safety: God-worshiping men and women by scores of millions, honesty, benevolence, truthfulness, self-sacrifice, industry, sobriety, and more religion than has characterized any nation that has ever existed. They are all here. The only question is as to which of the forces will gain dominancy. The one class ascendant, and this United States government, I think, will continue as long as the world exists. The other class ascendant, and the United States goes into such small pieces that other governments would hardly think them worth picking up.

Have you ever noticed the size of the Cemetery of Dead Nations, the vast Greenwood and Pere le Chaise, where mighty kingdoms were buried? Open the gate and walk through this cemetery and read the epitaphs. Here lies Carthage, born one hundred years before Rome, great commercial metropolis on the bay of Tunis, a part of an empire that gave the alphabet to the Greeks and their great language to the Hebrews; her arms the terror of nations, commanding at one time sixteen thousand miles of coast; her Hamilcar leading forth thirty myriads, or three hundred thousand troops; her Hannibal carrying out in manhood the oath he had taken in boyhood to preserve eternal enmity to Rome, leaving costly and imposing monuments at Agrigentum a ghastly heap of ruins. Carthage! Her colonies on every coast, her ships plowing every sea. Carthage! Where are her splendors now? All extinguished. Where are her swords? The last one broken. Where are her towers and long ranges of magnificent architecture? Buried under the sands of the Bagradas. As ballast of foreign ships much of her radiant marble has been carried away to build the walls of trans-Mediterranean cathedrals, while other blocks have been blasted in modern times by the makers of the Tunis railway. And all of that great and mighty city and kingdom that the tourist finds today is here and there a broken arch of what was once a fifty-mile aqueduct. Our talented and genial friend, Henry M. Field, in one of his matchless books of travel, labors hard to prove that the slight ruins of that city are really worth visiting. Carthage buried in the Cemetery of Dead Nations. Not one altar to the true God did she rear. Not one of the Ten Commandments but she conspicuously violated. Her doom was settled in heaven when it was decided far back in the eternities that the nation and kingdom that will not serve God shall perish.

Walk on in the Cemetery of Nations and see the long lines of tombs: Thebes and Tyre and Egypt and Babylon and Medo-Persian and Macedonian and Saxon heptarchy’97great nations, small nations, nations that lived a year, and nations that lived five hundred years.

Our own nations will be judged by the same moral laws by which all other nations have been judged. The judgment day for individuals will probably come far on in the future. Judgment day for nations is every day. Every day weighed, every day approved, or every day condemned. Never before in the history of this country has the American nation been more surely in the balances than it is this minute. Do right and we go up. Do wrong and we go down. I am not so anxious to know what this statesman or that warrior thinks we had better do with Cuba and Porto Rico and the Philippines, as I am anxious to know what God thinks we had better do. The destiny of this nation will not be decided on yonder Capitoline hill or at Manila, or at the presidential ballot-box, for it will be settled in heaven.

Another thing decided in the same high place is that happiness is the result of spiritual condition and not of earthly environment. If we who may sometimes have a thousand dollars to invest find it such a perplexity to know what to do with it, and soon after find that we invested it where principal and interest have gone down, through roguery or panic, what must be the worriment of those having millions to invest, and whose losses correspond in magnitude with their resources! People who have their three or four dollars a day wages are just as happy as those who have an income of five hundred thousand dollars a year. Sometimes happiness is seated on a footstool, and sometimes misery on the throne. All the gold of earth in one chunk cannot purchase five minutes of complete satisfaction. Worldly success is an atmosphere that breeds the maggots of envy and jealousy and hate. There are those who will never forgive you if you have more emoluments or honor or ease than they have. To take you down is the dominant wish of most of those who are not as high as you are. They will spend hours and days and years to entrap you. They will hover around newspaper offices to get one mean line printed depreciating you. Your heaven is their hell.

A dying president of the United States said many years ago, in regard to his lifetime of experience, ’93It don’92t pay.’94 The leading statesmen of America, in letters of advice, warn young men to keep out of politics. Many of the most successful have tried in vain to down their troubles in strong drink. On the other hand, there are millions of people who on departing this life will have nothing to leave but a good name and a life insurance, whose illumined faces are indices of illumined souls. They wish everybody well. When the fire-bell rings they do not go to the window at midnight to see if it is their store that is on fire, for they never owned a store; and when the September equinox is abroad they do not worry lest their ships founder in a gale, for they never owned a ship; and when the nominations are made for high political office they are not fearful that their name will be overlooked, for they never applied for office. There is so much heartiness and freedom from care in their laughter that when you hear it you are compelled to laugh in sympathy, although you know not what they are laughing about.

When the children of that family assemble in the sitting-room of the old homestead to hear the father’92s will read, they are not fearful of being cut off with a million and a half dollars, for the old man never owned anything more than the farm of seventy-five acres, which yielded only enough plainly to support the household. They have more happiness in one month than many have in a whole lifetime. Would to God I had the capacity to explain to you on how little a man can be happy, and on how much he may be wretched! Get your heart right, and all is right. Keep you heart wrong, and all is wrong. That is a principle settled in heaven.

Another thing decided in that high place is that this world is a schoolhouse or college for splendid or disgraceful graduation. We begin in the freshman class of good or evil, and then pass into the sophomore, and then into the junior, and then into the senior, and from that we graduate angels or devils. In many colleges there is an ’93elective course,’94 where the student selects what he will study’97mathematics, or the languages, or chemistry, or philosophy; and it is an elective course we all take in the schoolhouse or university of this world.

We may study sin until we are saturated with it, or righteousness until we are exemplifications of it. Graduate we all must, but we decide for ourselves the style of graduation. It is an elective course. We can study generosity until our every word and every act and every contribution of money or time will make the world better, or we may study meanness until our soul shall shrink up to a smallness unimaginable. We may, under God, educate ourselves into a self-control that nothing can anger, or into an irascibility that will ever and anon keep our face flushed with wrath and every nerve aquiver. Great old schoolhouse of a world, in which we are all being educated for glory or perdition!

Some have wondered why graduation day in college is called ’93commencement day,’94 when it is the last day of college exercises, but graduation days are properly called commencement days. To all the graduates it is the commencement of active life, and our graduation day from earth will be to us commencement of our chief life, our larger life, our more tremendous life, our eternal life. But what a day commencement day on earth is! The student never sees any day like it’97at any rate, I never did. Old Niblo’92s theatre in New York comes back to me. The gowned and tassel-hatted professors behind us, and our kindred and friends before us and above us, and the air redolent with garlands to be thrown us. What a commencement day it was for all of us about to graduate! But mightier day will it be when we graduate from this world. Will it be hisses of condemnation or handclapping of approval? Will there be flung to us nettles or wreaths? Will it be a resounding ’93Come,’94 or a reverberating ’93Depart’94?

In the real college, before graduation and commencement comes examination day, and before our graduation and commencement will come examination. It will be asked what we have been doing, what we have learned under the tutelage of years of joy and sorrow, and under the teaching of the Holy Ghost are we educated for heaven. Have we done our best with the curriculum of study put before every mortal and immortal? Oh! this world is not the terminus of a journey. It is not a theatre on whose stage we are enacting the tragic or comic. It is a schoolhouse for splendid or disgraceful graduation, and death is commencement. All that is settled in heaven.

Another thing decided in the high places of the universe is that this world, with or without us, will be made over into a scene of aborescence and purity. Do not think that such a consummation depends upon our personal fidelity. It will be done anyhow. God’92s cause does not go a-begging. If all the soldiers of Jesus Christ now living should become deserters and go over to the enemy, that would not defeat the cause. A large part of the Bible is taken up with telling us what the world will be. There is a large army, human and angelic, now in the field, but God’92s reserve forces are more numerous and more mighty than those now at the front. And if he could in Gideon’92s time rout the Midianites with a crash of crockery, and if he could in Shamgar’92s time overcome a host with an ox-goad, and if in Samson’92s time he could defeat an army with a bleached jawbone, and if the walls of Jericho went down under a blast of perforated ram’92s horn, and if in Christ’92s day blind eyes were cured by ointment of spittle, then God can do anything he says he will do. As yet, he has taken only one sword, out of a whole army of weapons. Do not get nervous, as if the Lord were going to be defeated. The redemption of these hemispheres was settled in heaven, and Isaiah and Ezekiel and Habakkuk and Malachi and St. John only reported what the Lord God Almighty had decided upon. My only fear is that our regiment will not get into the fight to do something worthy of the Christ who redeemed us, and we be left in lazy encampment at Tampa, when we ought to have been at Santiago.

Oh, that coming day of the world’92s perfection! The earth will be so changed that the sermonology will be changed. There will be no more calls to repentance, for all will have repented. No more gathering of alms for the poor, for the poor will have been enriched. No hospital Sunday, for disjointed bones will have been set and the wounds all healed, and the incurable diseases of other times will have been overcome by a materia medica, and a pharmacy, and a dentistry, and a therapeutics that have conquered everything that afflicted nerve, or lung, or tooth, or eye, or limb. Healthology complete and universal. The poultice, and the ointment, and the panacea, and the catholicon, and the surgeon’92s knife, and the dentist’92s forceps, and the scientist’92s X-ray will have fulfilled their mission. The social life of the world will be perfected. In that millennial age, I imagine ourselves standing in front of a house lighted for levee. We enter among groups filled with gladness, and talking good sense, and rallying each other in pleasantries, and in every possible way forwarding good neighborhood. No looking askance; no whispered backbiting; no strut of pretension; no oblivion of some one’92s presence because you do not want to know him. Each one happy, determined on making some one else happy. Words of honest appreciation instead of hollow flattery. Suavities and genialities, instead of inflations and pomposities. Equipage and upholstery and sculpture and painting paid for. Two hours of mental and moral improvement. All the guests able to walk as steadily down the steps of that mansion as when they ascended them. No awakening the next morning with aching head and bloodshot eye, and incompetent for the day’92s duties. The social life as prefect as refinement and common sense, and culture, and prosperity, and religion can make it. The earth made better than it was at the start. And all through gospelizing influences, directly or indirectly.

I suppose the greatest tidal wave that ever rolled the seas was that which in 1868 was started by the Peruvian earthquake. At Arica, Peru, the wave was fifty feet high, and swung warships a mile forward on the land. At San Pedro, California, the wave was sixty feet high. It moved on to the Sandwich Islands and submerged some of them, and beat against the shores of New Zealand, and rolled up the beach of Japan, and stopped not until it had encircled the entire globe. Oh, what a wave! But the earthquake that shook the mountain where our Lord died started a higher and swifter and mightier tidal wave that will roll round and round the earth until all its rebellions and abominations have gone under.

That was an exciting scene after the battle of Bosworth, which was fought between Richard III and the Earl of Richmond, the King falling and the Earl triumphing, when Lord Stanley brought the crown and handed it to the Earl, seated on horseback, while the dying and the dead of the battle were lying all around. But it is a more thrilling spectacle as we look forward through the centuries and see the last armed and imperial iniquity of the world slain and the crown of universal victory put upon the conqueror on the white horse of the apocalypse, and all nations ’93hail the power of Jesus’92 name.’94 That the whole earth will be redeemed is one of the things long ago settled in heaven.

Another thing decided in that high place is that all who are adjoined to the unparalleled One of Bethlehem and Nazareth and Golgotha will be the subjects of a supernal felicity without any taking off. The old adage says that ’93Beggars must not be choosers,’94 and the human race in its depleted state had better not be critical of the mode by which God would empalace all of us. I could easily think of a plan more complimentary to our fallen humanity than that which is called the ’93plan of salvation.’94 If God had allowed us to do part of the work of recovery, and he to do the rest; if we could do three-quarters of it and he do the last quarter; if we could accomplish most of it and he just put on the finishing touches, many could look with more complacency upon the projected reinstatement of the human family. No, no! We must have our pride subjugated, our stubborn will made flexible and a supernatural power demonstrated in us at every step. A pretty plan of salvation that would be, of human draughting and manufacturing! It would be a doxology sung to ourselves. God must have all the glory. Not one step of our heavenly throne made by earthly carpentry. Not one string could we twist of the harp of our eternal rejoicing. Accept all as an unmerited donation from the skies, or we will never have it at all.

’93Now,’94 says some one, ’93if Christ is the only way what about the heathen, who had never heard of him?’94 But you are not heathen, and why divert us from the question of our personal salvation? Satan is always introducing something irrelevant. He wants to take it out of a personality into an abstraction. Get our own salvation settled, and then we will discuss the salvation of other people. ’93But,’94 says some one, ’93what percentage of the human race will be saved?’94 What will be the comparative number saved and lost? ’93There Satan thrusts in the mathematics of redemption. He suggests that you find out the mathematical proportion of the redeemed. But be not deceived. I am now discussing the eternal welfare of only two persons, yourself and myself. Get ourselves right, before we bother ourselves about getting others right. O, Christ, come hither and master our case! Here are our sins’97pardon them; our wounds’97heal them; our burdens’97lift them; our sorrows’97comfort them. We want the Christ of Bartimeus to open our blind eyes, the Christ of Martha to help us in our domestic cares, the Christ of Olivet to help us to preach our sermons, the Christ of Lake Galilee to still our tempests, the Christ of Lazarus to raise our dead. Not too tired is He to come, though He has on His whipped shoulders so long carried the world’92s woe, and on His lacerated feet walked this way to accept our salutation.

By the bloody throes of the mountain on which Jesus died, and by the sepulchre where His mutilated body was enclosed in darkened crypt, and by the Olivet from which He arose, while astonished disciples clutched for His robes to detain Him in their companionship, and by the radiant and omnipotent throne on which He sits, waiting for the coming of all those whose redemption was settled in heaven, I implore you to bow your head in immediate and final submission. Once exercise sorrow for what you have done, and exercise trust in Him for what He is willing to do, and all is well for both worlds. Then you can swing out defiance to all opposition, human and diabolic. In conquering His foes he conquered yours. And have you noticed that passage in Colossians that represents Him ’93having despoiled principalities and powers, he made a show of them, openly triumphing,’94 so bringing before us that overwhelming spectacle of a Roman triumph?

When Pompey landed at Brindisi, Italy, returned from his victories, he disbanded the brave men who had fought under him and sent them rejoicing to their homes, and entering Rome his emblazoned chariot was followed by princes in chains from kingdoms he had conquered, and flowers, such as only grew under those Italian skies, strewed the way, and he came under arches inscribed with the names of battlefields on which he had triumphed, and rode by columns which told of the fifteen hundred cities he had destroyed, and the twelve million people he had conquered or slain. Then the banquet was spread, and out of the chalices filled to the brim they drank to the health of the conqueror. Belisarius, the great soldier, returned from his military achievements, and was robed in purple, and in the procession were brought golden thrones and pillars of precious stones, and the furniture of royal feasts, and amid the splendors of kingdoms overcome he was hailed to the hippodrome by shouts such as had seldom rung through the capital. Then also came the convivialities. In the year 274 Aurelian made his entrance to Rome in triumphal car, in which he stood, while a winged figure of victory held a wreath above his head. Zenobia, captive queen of Palmyra, walked behind his chariot, her person encircled with fetters of gold, under the weight of which she nearly fainted, but still a captive. And there were in the procession two hundred lions and tigers and beasts of many lands, and sixteen hundred gladiators excused from the cruel amphitheatre that they might decorate the day, and Persian and Arabian and Ethiopian ambassadors were in the procession, and the long lines of captives’97Egyptians, Syrians, Gauls, Goths, and Vandals.

It was to such scenes as that the New Testament refers when it speaks of Christ ’93having despoiled principalities and powers, he made a show of them, openly triumphing.’94 But, Oh, the difference in those triumphs! The Roman triumph represented arrogance, cruelty, oppression, and wrong, but Christ’92s triumph meant emancipation and holiness and joy. The former was a procession of groans accompanied by a clank of chains, the other a procession of hosannas by millions set forever free. The only shackled ones of Christ’92s triumph will be Satan and his cohorts tied to our Lord’92s chariot wheel, with all the abominations of all the earth bound for an eternal captivity. Then will come a feast, in which the chalices will be filled ’93with the new wine of the kingdom.’94 Under arches commemorative of all the battles in which the bannered armies of the church militant through thousands of years of struggle have at last won the day, Jesus will ride, Conqueror of earth and hell and heaven. Those armies, disbanded, will take palaces and thrones. ’93And they shall come from the East, and the West, and the North, and the South, and sit down in the kingdom of God,’94 and may you and I, through the pardoning and sanctifying grace of Christ, be guests at that royal banquet!

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage