404. Divine Chirography

Divine Chirography

Luk_10:20 : ’93Rejoice because your names are written in heaven.’94

Chirography, or the art of handwriting, like the science of acoustics, is in a very unsatisfactory state. While constructing a church, and told by some architects that the voice would not be heard in a building shaped like that proposed, I came in much anxiety to this city and consulted with Professor Joseph Henry, of the Smithsonian Institute, about the laws of acoustics. He said: ’93Go ahead and build your church in the shape proposed, and I think it will be all right. I have studied the laws of sound perhaps more than any man of my time, and I have come so far as this: two auditoriums may seem to be exactly alike, and in one the acoustics may be good and in the other bad.’94 In the same unsatisfactory stage is chirography, although many declare they have reduced it to a science. There are those who say they can read character by handwriting. It is said that the way one writes the letter ’93I’94 reveals his egotism or modesty, and the way one writes the letter ’93O’94 decides the height and depth of his emotions. It is declared a cramped hand means a cramped nature and an easy, flowing hand a facile and liberal spirit; but if there be anything in this science, there must be some rules not yet formulated, for some of the boldest and most aggressive men have a delicate and small penmanship, while some of the most timid sign their names with the height and width and scope of the name of John Hancock on the immortal document. Some of the cleanest in person and thought present their blotted and spattered page; and some of the roughest put before us an immaculate chirography. Not our character, but the copy-plate set before us in our schoolboy day, decides the general style of our handwriting. So, also, there is a fashion in penmanship, and for one decade the letters are exaggerated, and in the next minified; now erect and now aslant, now heavy and now fine. An autograph album is always a surprise, and you find the penmanship contradicts the character of the writers. But while the chirography of the earth is uncertain, our blessed Lord in our text presents the chirography celestial. When addressing the seventy disciples standing before him, he said: ’93Rejoice, because your names are written in heaven.’94

Of course the Bible, for the most part when speaking of the heavenly world, speaks figuratively while talking about books and about trumpets and about wings and about gates and about golden pavements and about orchards with twelve crops of fruit’97one crop each month’97and about the white horses of heaven’92s cavalry; but we do well to follow out these inspired metaphors, and reap from them courage and sublime expectation and consolation and victory. We are told that in the heavenly library there is a Book of Life. Perhaps there are many volumes in it. When we say a book, we mean all written by the author on that subject. I cannot tell how large those heavenly volumes are, nor the splendor of their binding, nor the number of their pages, nor whether they are pictorialized with some exciting scenes of this world. I only know that the words have not been impressed by type, but written out by some hand; and that all those who, like the seventy disciples to whom the text was spoken, repent and trust the Lord for their eternal salvation, surely have their names written in heaven.

It may not be the same name that we carried on earth. We may, through the inconsiderateness of parents, have a name that is uncouth, or that was afterward dishonored by one after whom we were called. I do not know that the seventy entrances of the names of the seventy disciples correspond with the record in the genealogical table. It may not be the name by which we were called on earth, but it will be the name by which heaven will know us, and we will have it announced to us as we pass in, and we will know it so certainly that we will not have to be called twice by it; as in the Bible times the Lord called some people twice by name, ’93Saul! Saul!’94 ’93Samuel! Samuel!’94 ’93Martha! Martha!’94

When you come up and look for your name in the mighty tomes of eternity, and you are so happy as to find it there, you will notice that the penmanship is Christ’92s, and that the letters were written with a trembling hand. Not trembling with old age, for he had only passed three decades when he expired. It was soon after the thirty-third anniversary of his birthday. Look over all the business accounts you kept or the letters you wrote at thirty years of age, and if you were ordinarily strong and well then, there was no tremor in the chirography. Why the tremor in the hand that wrote your name in heaven? Oh, it was a compression of more troubles than ever smote any one else, and all of them troubles assumed for others. Christ was prematurely old. He had been exposed to all the weathers of Palestine. He had slept out-of-doors, now in the night dew and now in the tempest. He had been soaked in the surf of Lake Galilee. Pillows for others, but he had not where to lay his head. Hungry, he could not even get a fig on which to breakfast. Oh, have you missed the pathos of that verse, ’93In the morning, as he returned unto the city, he hungered, and when he saw a fig tree in the way he came to it and found nothing thereon.’94 He was a hungry Christ, and nothing makes the hand tremble worse than hunger; for it pulls upon the stomach, and the stomach pulls upon the brain, and the brain pulls upon the nerves, and the agitated nerves make the hand quake. In addition to all this exasperation came abuse. What sober man ever wanted to be called a drunkard? But Christ was called one. What respecter of the Lord’92s Day wants to be called a Sabbath-breaker? But he was called one. What man, careful of the company he keeps, wants to be called the associate of profligates? But he was so called. What loyal man wants to be charged with treason? But he was charged with it. What man of devout speech wants to be called a blasphemer? But he was so termed. What man of self-respect wants to be struck in the mouth? But that is where they struck him. Or to be the victim of vilest expectoration? But under that he stooped.

Oh, he was a wornout Christ. That is the reason he died so soon upon the cross. Many victims of crucifixion lived day after day upon the cross; but Christ was in the courtroom at twelve o’92clock of noon and he had expired at three o’92clock in the afternoon of the same day. Subtracting from the three hours between twelve and three o’92clock the time taken to travel from the courtroom to the place of execution and the time that must have been taken in getting ready for the tragedy, there could not have been much more than two hours left. Why did Christ live only two hours upon the cross, when others had lived forty-eight hours? He was worn out before he got there, and you wonder, oh, child of God, that, looking into the volumes of heaven for your name, you find it was written with a trembling penmanship’97trembling with every letter of your name, if it be your earthly name, or trembling with every letter of your heavenly name, if that be different and more euphonious. That will not be the first time you saw the mark of a quivering pen; for did you not, years ago, see your name so written on the back of a letter, and you opened it, saying, ’93Why, here is a letter from mother,’94 or ’93Here is a letter from father,’94 and after you opened it you found all the words, because of old age, were traced irregularly and uncertainly, so that you could hardly read it at all. But after much study you made it out’97a letter from home, telling you how much they missed you and how much they prayed for you and how much they wanted to see you, and if it might not be on earth that so it might be in the world where there are no partings. Yes; your name is written in heaven; if written at all, with trembling chirography.

Again, in examination of your name in the heavenly archives’97if you find it there at all’97you will find it written with a bold hand. You have seen many a signature that, because of sickness or old age, had a tremor in it; yet it was as bold as the man who wrote it. Many an order written on the battlefield and amid the thunder of the cannonade, has had evidence of excitement in every word and every letter and in the speed with which it was folded and handed to the officer as he put his foot in the swaying stirrups; and yet that commander, notwithstanding his trembling hand, gives a boldness of order that shows itself in every word written. You do not need to be told that a trembling hand does not always mean a cowardly hand. It was with a very trembling hand Charles Carroll of Carrollton signed his name to the Declaration of American Independence, but no signer had more courage; and when some one said: ’93There are many Charles Carrolls, and it will not be known which one it is,’94 he resumed the pen and wrote: ’93Charles Carroll of Carrollton.’94 Trembling hand no sign of timidity.

The daring and defiance seen in the way your name is written in heaven is a challenge to all earth and hell to come on if they can to defeat your ransomed soul. The way your name is written there is as much as to say, ’93I have redeemed him; I died for him; I am going to crown and enthrone him. Nothing shall ever happen, down in that world where he now lives, to defeat my determination to keep him, to shelter him to save him. By my almighty grace I am going to fetch him here. He may slip and slide, but he will surely come here. By my omnipotent sword, by the combined strength of all heaven’92s principalities and powers and dominions, by the twenty thousand chariots of the Lord Almighty, I am going to see him through.’94 Bold handwriting! It is the boldest thing ever written, to write my name there and your name there. He knows our weaknesses and bad propensities better than we know them ourselves. He knows all the Apollyonic hosts that are sworn to down us if they can. He knows all the temptations that will assail us between now and the moment of our last pulsation of the heart, and yet he dares to write our name there. Boldness! Nothing at Saragossa or Chalons or Marathon or Thermopyl’e6 to equal it! Nothing in the sack of gunpowder which one English soldier carried under the blazing artillery of the Sepoys and blew up the Cashmere Gate of Delhi! Can you not see the boldness in the penmanship that has already written our names there? Apostle Peter, what do you think of it? And he answers, ’93Kept by the power of God through faith unto complete salvation.’94 Oh, blessed Christ, what dost thou mean by it? And he answers, ’93They shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.’94 ’93Your names are written in heaven.’94

Again, if, according to the promise of the text, you are permitted to look into the volumes of eternity and shall see your name there, you will find it written in lines, in words, in letters unmistakable. Some people have come to consider indistinct and almost unreadable penmanship a mark of genius, and so they affect it. Because every paragraph that Thomas Chalmers and Dean Stanley and Lord Byron and Rufus Choate and Horace Greeley and other potent men wrote was a puzzle, imitators make their penmanship a puzzle. Alexander Dumas says that plain penmanship is the brevet of incapacity. Then there are some who, through too much demand upon their energies and through lack of time, lose the capacity of making the pen intelligible, and much of the writing of this world is undecipherable. We have seen piles of inexplicable chirography, and we ourselves have helped augment the magnitude. We have not been sure of the name signed or the sentiment expressed or whether the reply was affirmative or negative. Through indistinct penmanship last wills and testaments have been defeated, widows and orphans robbed of their inheritance, railroad trains brought into collision through the dim words of a telegram put into the hand of a conductor; and regiments, in this wise mistaking their instructions, have been sacrificed in battle.

I asked Bishop Cowie, in Auckland, New Zealand’97the Bishop having been in many of the wars’97what Tennyson, in his immortal poem, ’93The Charge of the Light Brigade,’94 meant by the words, ’93Some one had blundered,’94 and the Bishop said that the awful carnage at Balaklava was the result of an indistinctly-written and wrongly-read military order. ’93Some one had blundered.’94 But your name, once written in the Lamb’92s Book of Life, will be so unmistakable that all heaven can read it at the first glance. It will not be taken for the name of some other, so that in regard to it there shall come to be disputation. Not one of the millions and billions and quadrillions of the finally saved will doubt that it means you and only you. Oh, the glorious, the rapturous certitude of that entrance on the heavenly roll! Not saved in a promiscuous way; not put into a glorified mob. No, no! Though you came up, the worst sinner that was ever saved, and somebody, who knew you in this world at one time as absolutely abandoned and dissolute, should say, ’93I never heard of your conversion and I do not believe you have a right to be here,’94 you could just laugh a laugh of triumph, and turning over the leaves containing the names of the redeemed, say, ’93Read it for yourself. That is my name, written out in full, and do you not recognize the handwriting? No young scribe of heaven entered that. No anonymous writer put it there. Do you not see the tremor in the lines? Do you not also see the boldness of the letters? Is it not as plain as yonder throne, as plain as yonder gate? Is not the name unmistakable and the handwriting unmistakable? The crucified Lord wrote it there the day I repented and turned. Hear it! Hear it! My name is written there! There!’94

I have sometimes been tempted to think that there will be so many of us in heaven that we will be lost in the crowd. No. Each one of us will be as distinctly picked out and recognized as was Abel when he entered from earth, the very first sinner saved, and at the head of that long procession of sinners saved in all the centuries. If we once get there, I do not want it left uncertain as to whether we are to stay there. After you and I get fairly settled there, in our heavenly home, we do not want our title proved defective. We do not want to be ejected from the heavenly premises. We do not want some one to say, ’93This is not your room in the house of many mansions, and you have on an attire that you ought not to have taken from the heavenly wardrobe, and that is not really your name on the books. If you had more carefully examined the writing in the register at the gate, you would have found that the name was not yours at all, but mine. Now, move out, while I move in.’94 Oh, what wretchedness, after once worshiping in heavenly temples, to be compelled to turn your back on the music, and after having joined the society of the blessed, to be forced to quit it forever, and after having clasped our long-lost kindred in heavenly embrace, to have another separation! What an agony would there be in such a good-by to heaven! Glory be to God on high that our names will be so plainly written in those volumes that neither saint nor cherub nor seraph nor archangel shall doubt it for one moment, for five hundred eternities, if there were room for so many. The oldest inhabitant of heaven can read it, and the child that left its mother’92s lap last night for heaven can read it.

You will not just look at your name and close the book, but you will stand and soliloquize and say, ’93Is it not wonderful that my name is there at all? How much it cost my Lord to get it there! Unworthy am I to have it in the same book with the sons and daughters of martyrdom and with the choice spirits of all time! But there it is, and so plain the word and so plain all the letters!’94 And you will turn forward and backward the leaves and see other names there, perhaps your father’92s name and your mother’92s name and your brother’92s name and your sister’92s name and your wife’92s name and apostolic names, and say: ’93I am not surprised that those names are here recorded. They were better than I ever was. But astonishment overwhelming that my name is in this book!’94 And, turning back to the page on which is inscribed your name, you will stand and look at it until, seeing that others are waiting to examine the records with reference to their own names, you step back into the ranks of the redeemed, with them to talk over the wonderment.

Again, if you are so happy as to find your name in the volumes of eternity, you will find it written indelibly. Go up to the State Department in the National Capital and see the old treaties signed by the rulers of foreign nations, just before or just after the beginning of this century, and you will find that some of the documents are so faded out that you can read only here and there a word. From the paper, yellow with age, or the parchment unrolled before you, time has effaced line after line. You have to guess at the name, and perhaps guess wrongly. Old Time is represented as carrying a scythe, with which he cuts down the generations; but he carries also chemicals with which he eats out whole paragraphs from important documents. We talk about indelible ink, but there is no such thing as indelible ink. It is only a question of time, the complete obliteration of all earthly signatures and engrossments. But your name, put in the heavenly record, all the millenniums of heaven cannot dim it. After you have been so long in glory that, did you not possess imperishable memory, you would have forgotten the day of your entrance, your name on that page will glow as vividly as on the instant it was traced there by the finger of the Great Atoner. There will be new generations coming into heaven, and a thousand years from now, from this or from other planet, souls may enter the many-mansioned residence; and though your name were once plainly on the books, suppose it should fade out. How could you prove to the newcomers that it had ever been written there at all? Indelible! Incapable of being canceled! Eternity as helpless as time in any attempt at erasure! What a reenforcing, uplifting thought! Other records in heaven may give out, and will give out. There are records there in which the Recording Angel writes down our sins, but it is a book full of blots, so that much of the writing there cannot be read or even guessed at. The Recording Angel did the writing, but our Saviour put in the blots; for did he not promise, ’93I will blot out their transgressions?’94 And if some one in heaven should remember some of our earthly iniquities and ask God about them, the Lord would say, ’93Oh, I forgot them. I completely forgot those sins, for I promised, ’91Their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.’92’93 In the fires that burn up our world all the safety deposits and all the title-deeds and all the halls of record and all the libraries will disappear, worse than when the two hundred thousand volumes and the seven hundred thousand manuscripts of the Alexandrian Library went down under the torch of Omar; and not a leaf or word will escape the flame in that last conflagration, which I think will be witnessed by other planets, whose inhabitants will exclaim: ’93Look! There is a world on fire!’94 But there will be only one conflagration in heaven, and that will not destroy, but irradiate! I mean the conflagration of splendors that blaze on the towers and domes and temples and thrones and rubied and diamonded walls in the light of the sun that never sets. Indelible!

There is not on earth an autograph letter or signature of Christ. The only time he wrote out a word on earth, though he knew so well how to write, he wrote with the consciousness that it would be soon shuffled out by human foot’97the time that he stooped down and with his finger wrote on the ground the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. But when he writes your name in the heavenly archives’97as I believe he has or hope he may’97it is to stay there from age to age, from cycle to cycle, from ‘e6on to ‘e6on. And so for all you Christian people I do what John G. Whittier, the dying poet, said he wanted done in his home. Lovely man he was! I sat with him in a haymow a whole summer afternoon, and heard him tell the story of his life. He had for many years been troubled with insomnia and was a very poor sleeper, and he always had the window-curtain of his room up so as to see the first intimation of sunrise. When he was breathing his last, in the morning hour, in his home in the Massachusetts village, the nurse thought that the light of the rising sun was too strong for him, and so pulled the window-curtain down. The last thing the great Quaker poet did was to wave his hand to have the curtain up. He wanted to depart in the full gush of the morning. And I thought it might be helpful and inspiring to all Christian souls to have more light about the future, and so I pull up the curtain in the glorious sunrise of my text, and say, ’93Rejoice that your names are written in heaven.’94 Bring on your doxologies! Wave your palms! Shout your victories! Pull up all the curtains of bright expectations! Yea, hoist the window itself, and let the perfume of the roses and lilies of the King’92s garden come in, and the music of harps all a-tremble with symphonies, and the sound of the surf of seas dashing to the foot of the throne of God and the Lamb.

But there is only one word on all this subject of divine chirography in heaven that confuses me, and that is the small adverb which St. John adds when he quotes the text in Revelation and speaks of some ’93whose names are not written in the Book of Life of the Lamb slain.’94 Oh, that awful adverb ’93not!’94 By full submission to Christ the Lord, have the way all cleared between you and the sublime registration of your name this moment. Why not look up and see that they are all ready to put your name among the blissful immortals? There is the mighty volume; it is wide open. There is the pen; it is from the wing of the ’93Angel of the New Covenant.’94 There is the ink; it is red ink from Calvarean sacrifice. And there is the Divine Scribe: the glorious Lord who wrote your father’92s name there and your mother’92s name there and your child’92s name there and who is ready to write your name there. Will you consent that he do it? Before I say ’93Amen’94 in the benediction of this service ask him to do it. I wait a moment for the tremendous action of your will, for it is only an action of your will. Here some one says, ’93Lord Jesus, with pen plucked from angelic wings, and dipped in the red ink of Golgotha, write there either that which is now my earthly name or that which shall be my heavenly name.’94 I pause a second longer, that all may consent. The pen of the Divine Scribe is in the fingers and is lifted and is lowered and it touches the shining page and the word is traced, in trembling yet bold and unmistakable letters. He has put it down in the right place.

’91Tis done! The great transaction is done;

I am my Lord’92s, and he is mine.

And if there be among you a hopeless case, so-called hopeless by yourself and others, I take the responsibility of saying that there is a place in that book where your name would exactly fit in, and look beautiful; and you can, quicker than I can clap my hands together, have it there. A religious meeting was thrown open, and all those who could testify of the converting grace of God were asked to speak. Silence reigned a moment, and then a man covered with the marks of dissipation arose and said: ’93You can see from my looks what I have been, but I am now a saved man. When I left home, a thousand miles from here, I had so disgraced my father’92s name that he said, ’91As you are going away, I have only two things to ask of you: first, that you will never come home again, and next that you will change your name.’92 I promised. I have not heard my real name for years. I went the whole round of sin, until there was no lower depth to fathom. But I am, by the grace of God, a changed man. I wrote home asking forgiveness for my waywardness, and here are two letters, one from father and another from my sister. My mother died of a broken heart. But these two letters ask me to come home, and, boys, I start to-morrow morning.’94 The fact was that his name was written in heaven, where I pray God all of our names may be written, though so unworthy are the best of us and all of us.

If you have ever been in the thick woods and heard the sound of village bells, you know the sound is hindered and muffled by the foliage, though somewhat sweet; but as you come to the edge of the woods, the you step out from the deep shadows into the sunlight sounds become clearer and more charming; and when you hear the full, round, mellifluous ringing of the bells. Oh, ye down in the thick shadows of unbelief and who hear only the faint notes of this Gospel bell, come out into the clear sunlight of pardon and peace, and hear the full chime of eternal harmonies from all the towers of heaven. Oh, come out of the woods!

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage