Lessons.

As yet the home of Bethany is all happiness. The burial-ground has been untraversed since, probably years before the dust of one, or perhaps both parents had been committed to the sepulchre.[8]Death had long left the inmates an unbroken circle. Can it be that the unwelcome intruder is so nigh at hand?—that their now joyous dwelling is so soon to echo to the wail of lamentation? We imagine it but lately visited by Jesus. In a little while the arrow hath sped; the sacredness of a divine friendship is no guarantee against the incursion of the sleepless foe of human happiness. Bethany is a mourning household. The sisters are bowed in the agony of their worst bereavement—the prop of their existence is laid low—“Lazarus is dead!”

At the very threshold of this touching story, are we not called on to pause, and readthe uncertainty of earth’s best joys and purest happiness; that the brightest sunshine is often the precursor of a dark cloud. When the gourd is all flourishing, a worm may unseen be preying at its root! When the vessel is gliding joyously on the calm sea, the treacherous rock may be at hand, and, in one brief hour, it has become a shattered wreck!

It is the touching record of the inspired historian in narrating Abraham’s heaviest trial—“Afterthese things, God did tempt Abraham.” Afterwhatthings? After a season of rich blessings, gilding a future with bright hopes!

Would that, amidst our happy homes, and sunshine hours, and seasons of holy and joyous intercourse between friend and friend, we would more habitually bear in mind “This is not to last!” In one brief and unsuspected moment Lazarus may be taken. The messenger may now be on the wing to lay low some treasured object of earthly solicitude and love. God would teach us—while we are glad of our gourds—not to be “exceeding glad;” not to nestle here as if wewere to “live alway,” but rather, as we are perched on our summer boughs, to be ready at His bidding to soar away, and leave behind us what most we prize.

It tells us, too,the utter mysteriousness of many of the divine dispensations.

“Lazarus is dead!” What! He, the head, and support, and stay of two helpless females? The joy and solace of a common orphanhood,—a brother evidently made and born for their adversities? What! Lazarus, whom Jesus tenderly loved? How much, even to his Lord, will be buried in that early grave! We may well expect, if there be one homestead in all Palestine guarded by the overshadowing wings of angels to debar the entrance of death, whose inmates may pillow their heads night after night in the confident assurance of immunity from trial, it must surely be that loved resort—that “Arbour in His Hill Difficulty,” where the God-man delighted oft to pause and refresh His wearied body and aching mind. Will Omnipotence not have set its mark, as of old, on the door-posts and lintels of that consecrated dwelling, so that the destroyer, in going his roundselsewhere, may pass by it unscathed? How, too, can the infant Church spare him? The aged Simeon or Anna we dare not wish to detain. Burdened with years and infirmities, after having got a glimpse of their Lord and Saviour, let them depart in peace, and receive their crowns. These decayed trees in the forest—those to whom old age on earth is a burden—let them bow to the axe, and be transplanted to a nobler clime. But one in the vigour of life—one so beautifully combining natural amiability with Christian love—one who was pre-eminently thefriendof Jesus, and thatwordprofoundly suggestive of all that was lovely in a disciple’s character. Death may visit other homes in that sequestered village, and spread desolation in other hearts, but surely the Church’s Lord will not suffer one of its pillars so prematurely to fall!

And yet it is even so! The mysterious summons has come!—the most honoured home on earth has been rudely rifled!—the most loving of hearts have been cruelly torn; and inscrutable is the dealing, for “Lazarus is dead!”

“He, the young and strong, who cherish’dNoble longings for the strife,By the roadside fell, and perish’dOn the threshold march of life.”

And worse, too, than all, “the Lord is absent.” Why is Omniscience tarrying elsewhere, when His presence and power are above all needed at the house of His friend?

The disconsolate sisters, in wondering amazement, repeat over and over again the exclamation, “If Jesus had been here, this our brother had not died!” “Hath He forgotten to be gracious?” “Surely our way is hid from the Lord, our judgment is passed over from our God.”

Ah! the experience of His people is often still the same. What are many of God’s dispensations?—a baffling enigma—all strangeness—all mystery to the eye of sense.Uselesslives prolonged,usefulones taken! The honoured minister of God struck down, the unfaithful watchman spared! The philanthropic and benevolent have an arrest put on their manifold deeds of kindness and generosity; the grasping, the avaricious, the mean-souled—those who neither fear God nor do good to man, are suffered to live on from dayto day! What is it but the picture here presented eighteen hundred years ago—Judasspared to be atraitor to his Lord, while—Lazarus is dead!

But let us be still! The Saviour, indeed, does not now lead us forth, amid the scene of our trial, as He did the bereft sisters, to unravel the mysteries of His providence, and to shew glory to God, redounding from the darkest of His dispensations. Tousthe grand sequel is reserved for eternity. The grand development of the divine plan will not be fully accomplished tillthen; faith must meanwhile rest satisfied with what is baffling to sight and sense. This whole narrative is designed to teach the lesson that there is an undeveloped future in all God’s dealings. There is an unseen “why and wherefore” which cannot be answered here. Our befitting attitude and languagenowis that of simple confidingness—“Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”—Listening to one of these Bethany sayings (we shall by and by consider), whose meaning will be interpreted in a brighter world by Him whouttered it in the days of His flesh—“Said I not unto thee, that if thou wouldestbelievethou shouldestseethe glory of God?”

“O thou who mournest on thy way,With longings for the close of day,He walks with thee, that Angel kind,And gently whispers—‘Be resign’d;Bear up—bear on—the end shall tell,The dear Lord ordereth all things well.’”

Our duty, meanwhile, is that of children, simply to trust the faithfulness of a God whose footsteps of love we often fail to trace. All will be seen at last to have been not onlyforthe best, but reallythe best. Dark clouds will be fringed with mercy. What we call now “baffling dispensations,” will be seen to be wondrous parts of a great connected whole,—the wheel within wheel of that complex machinery, by which “all things” (yes,allthings) are now working together for good.

“Lazarus is dead!” The choicest tree in the earthly Eden has succumbed to the blast. The choicest cup has been dashed to the ground. Some great lights in the moral firmament have been extinguished. But God can do without humanagency. His Church can be preserved, though no Moses be spared to conduct Israel over Jordan, and no Lazarus to tell the story of his Saviour’s grace and love, when other disciples have forsaken Him and fled.

We may be calling, in our blind unbelief, as we point to some ruined fabric of earthly bliss—some tomb which has become the grave of our fondest affections and dearest hopes—“Shall the dust praise thee, shallitdeclare thy truth?”Believe! believe!God will not give us back our dead as He did to the Bethany sisters; but He will not deprive us of aught we have, or suffer one garnered treasure to be removed, except for His own glory and our good.Nowit is our province tobelieveit—inHeavenwe shallseeit. Before the sapphire throne we shallseethat not one redundant thorn has been suffered to pierce our feet, or one needless sorrow to visit our dwelling, or tear to dim our eye. Then our acknowledgment will be, “We haveknownandbelievedthe love which God hath to us.”

“Oh, weep not though the beautiful decay,Thy heart must have its autumn—its pale skiesLeading mayhap to winter’s cold dismay.Yet doubt not. Beauty doth not pass away;His form departs not, though his body dies.Secure beneath the earth the snowdrop lies,Waiting the spring’s young resurrection-day.”[9]

Be it ours to have Jesuswithus, and Jesusforus, in all our afflictions. If we wish to insure these mighty solaces, we must not suffer the hour of sorrow and bereavement to overtake us with a Saviour tillthena stranger and unknown. St Luke tells us the secret of Mary’s faith and composure at her loved one’s grave:—She had, long before her day of trial, learned to sit at her Redeemer’s feet. It was when in health Jesus was first resorted to and loved.

In prosperity may our homes and hearts be gladdened with His footstep; and when prosperity is withdrawn, and is succeeded by the dark and cloudy day, may we know, like Martha and Mary, where to rush in our seasons of bitter sorrow; listening from His glorified lips on the throne to those same exalted themes of consolation which, for eighteen hundred years, have to myriad, myriad mourners been like oil thrown on thetroubled sea. Jesus is with us! The Master is come! His presence will extract sorrow from the bitterest cup, and make, as He did at Bethany, a very home of bereavement and a burial scene to be “hallowed ground!”

The Messenger.

Is the absent Saviour not to be sought? Martha and Mary knew the direction He had taken. The last time He had visited their home was at the Feast of Dedication, during the season of winter, when the palm-trees were bared of their leaves, and the voice of the turtle was silent. Jesus, on that occasion, had to escape the vengeance of the Jews in Jerusalem by a temporary retirement to the place where John first baptized, near Enon, on the wooded banks of the Jordan. It must have been to Him a spot and season of calm and grateful repose; a pleasing transition from the rude hatred and heartless formalism which met Him in the degenerate “City of Solemnities.” The savour of the Baptist’s name and spirit seemed to linger around this sequestered region.John had evidently prepared, by his faithful ministry, the way for a mightier Preacher, for we read, as the result of the Saviour’s present sojourn, that “many believed on him there.”

If we visit with hallowed emotion the places where first we learned to love the Lord, to two at least of those who accompanied the Redeemer, the region He now traversed must have been full of fragrant memories;thereit was that Jesus had been first pointed out to them as the “Lamb of God;”therethey first “beheld His glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and of truth.” (John i. 28.)

On His way thither, on the present occasion, He most probably passed through Bethany, and apprised His friends of His temporary absence. Lazarus was then in his wonted vigour—no shadow of death had yet passed over his brow; he doubtless parted with the Lord he loved happy at the thought of ere long meeting again.

But soon all is changed. The hand of sickness unexpectedly lays him low. At first there is no cause for anxiety. But soon the herald-symptoms of danger and death gather fast and thick aroundhis pillow; “his beauty consumes away like a moth.” The terrible possibility for the first time flashes across the minds of the sisters, of a desolate home, and of themselves being the desolate survivors of a loved brother. The joyous dream of restoration becomes fainter and fainter. Human remedies are hopeless. There wasOne, andonlyOne, in the wide world who could save from impending death. His word, they knew, could alone summon lustre to that eye, and bloom to that wan and fading cheek. Fifty long miles intervene between the great Physician and their cottage home. But they cannot hesitate. Some kind and compassionate neighbour is soon found ready to hasten along the Jericho road with the brief but urgent message, “Lord! behold he whom thou lovest is sick.” If it only reach in time, they know that no more is needed. They even indulge the expectation that their messenger may be anticipated by the Lord Himself appearing. Others might doubt His omniscience, but they knew its reality. They had the blessed conviction, that while they were seated in burning tears by that couch of sickness, there was a sympathising Beingfar away marking every heart-throb of His suffering friend. Even when the stern human conviction of “no hope” was pressing upon them, “hoping against hope,” they must have felt confident that He would not suffer His faithfulness now to fail. He had often proved Himself a Brother and Friend in the hour ofjoy.CouldHe fail—canHe fail to prove Himself now a “Brother born foradversity?”

Although, however, thus convinced that the tale of their sorrows was known to Jesus,a messenger is sent,—the means are employed! They act as though He knew itnot; as if that omniscient Saviour had been all unconscious of these hours of prolonged and anxious agony!

What a lesson is there here forus! God is acquainted with our every trouble; He knows (far better than we know ourselves) every pang we heave, every tear we weep, every perplexing path we tread; but the knee must be bent, the message must be taken, the prayer must ascend! It is His own appointed method,—His own consecrated medium for obtaining blessings. Jesusmayhave gone, and probablywouldhave gone torestore His friend, even though no such messenger had reached Him: We dare not limit the grace and dealings of God: He is often (blessed be His name for it!) “found of them that sought Him not.” But He loves such messages as this. He loves the confiding, childlike trust of His own people, who delight in the hour of their extremity to cast their burdens upon Him, and send the winged herald of prayer to the throne of grace on which He sits.

Would that we valued, more than we do, this blessed link of communication between our souls and Heaven! More especially in our seasons of trouble, (when “vain is the help of man,”) happy for us to be able implicitly to rest in the ability and willingness of a gracious Redeemer.

Prayer brings the soul near to Jesus, and fetches Jesus near to the soul. He may linger, as He did now at the Jordan, ere the answer be vouchsafed, but it is for some wise reason; and even if the answer given be not in accordance with our pre-conceived wishes or anxious desires, yet how comforting to have put our case and all its perplexities in His hand, saying, “I am oppressed;undertake Thou for me! To Thee I unburden and unbosom my sorrows. I shall be satisfied whether my cup be filled or emptied. Do to me as seemeth good in Thy sight. He whom I love and whomThoulovest is sick; the Lazarus of my earthly hopes and affections is hovering on the brink of death. That levelling blow, if consummated, will sweep down in a moment all my hopes of earthly happiness and joy. But it is my privilege to confide my trouble to Thee; to know that I have surrendered myself and all that concerns me into the hand of Him who ‘considers my soul in adversity.’ Yes; and should my schemes be crossed, and my fondest hopes baffled, I will feel, even in apparentlyunansweredprayers, that the Judge of all the earth has done right!”

“It is said,” says Rutherford, speaking of the Saviour’s delay in responding to the request of the Syrophenician woman; “It is said Heanswerednot a word, but it is not said Heheardnot a word. These two differ much. Christ often heareth when He doth not answer. His not answering is an answer, and speaks thus: ‘Pray on, go on and cry, for the Lord holdeth His door fastbolted not to keep you out, but that you may knock and knock.’”

“God delays to answer prayer,” says Archbishop Usher, “because he would have more of it. If the musicians come to play at our doors or our windows, if we delight not in their music, we throw them out money presently that they may be gone. But if the music please us, we forbear to give them money, because we would keep them longer to enjoy their music. So the Lord loves and delights in the sweet words of His children, and therefore puts them off and answers them not presently.”

Observe still further, in the case of these sorrowing sisters of Bethany, while in all haste and urgency they send their messenger, they do not ask Jesus to come—they dictate no procedure—they venture on no positive request—all is left to Himself. What a lesson also is there here to confide in His wisdom, to feel that His way and His will must be the best—that our befitting attitude is to lie passive at His feet—to wait His righteous disposal of us and ours—to make this the burden of our petition, “Lord, what wouldstThouhaveme to do?” “If it be possible let this cup pass from me,nevertheless, not asIwill, but asThou wilt.”

Reader! invite to your gates this celestial messenger. Make prayer a holy habit—a cherished privilege. Seek to be ever maintaining intercommunion with Jesus; consecrating life’s common duties with His favour and love. Day by day ere you take your flight into the world, night by night when you return from its soiling contacts, bathe your drooping plumes in this refreshing fountain. Let prayer sweeten prosperity and hallow adversity. Seek to know the unutterable blessedness of habitual filial nearness to your Father in heaven—in childlike confidence unbosoming to Him those heart-sorrows with which no earthly friend can sympathise, and with which a stranger cannot intermeddle. No trouble is too trifling to confide to His ear—no want too trivial to bear to His mercy-seat.

“Prayer is appointed to conveyThe blessings He designs to give;Long as they live should Christians pray,For only while they pray, they live.”

The Message.

The messenger has reached—what is his message? It is a brief, but a beautiful one. “Lord, behold he whom Thou lovest is sick.”

No laboured eulogium—no lengthened panegyric could have described more significantly the character of the dying villager of Bethany. Four mystic words invest his name with a sacred loveliness. By one stroke of his pen the Apostle unfolds a heart-history; so that we desiderate no more—more would almost spoil the touching simplicity—“He whom Thou lovest!”

We might think at first the words are inverted. Can the messenger have mistaken them? Is it not more likely the message of the sisters was this:—“Go and tell Him, ‘Lord, he whomwelove,’ or else, ‘he who lovethTheeis sick?’”

Nay, it is a loftier argument by which they would stir the infinite depths of the Fountain of love! They had “known and believed the love” which the Great Redeemer bore to their brother, and they further felt assured that “loving him at the beginning, He would love him even to the end.” Their love to Lazarus (tender, unspeakably tender as it was one of the loveliest types of human affection)—was at best anearthly love—finite—imperfect—fitful—changing—perishable. But the love they invoked was undying and everlasting, superior to all vacillation—enduring as eternity.

It is ours “to take encouragement in prayer from God only;”—to plead nothing of our own—our poor devotedness, or our unworthy services; they are rather arguments for our condemnation;—butHispromises are all “Yea, and amen.” They never fail. His name is “a strong tower,” running into which the righteous are safe. That tower is garrisoned and bulwarked by the attributes of His own everlasting nature. Among these attributes not the least glorious is HisLove—thatunfathomable love which dwelt in His bosom from alleternity, and which is immutably pledged never to be taken from His people!

Man’s love to his God is like the changing sand—Hisis like the solid rock. Man’s love is like the passing meteor with its fitful gleam.Hislike the fixed stars, shining far above, clear and serene, from age to age, in their own changeless firmament.

Do we know anything of the words of this message? Could it be written on our hearts in life? Were we to die, could it be inscribed on our tombs, “This is one whomJesus loved?”

Happy assurance! The pure spirits who bend before the throne know no happier. The archangels—the chieftains among principalities and powers, can claim no higher privilege, no loftier badge of glory!

Love is the atmosphere they breathe. It is the grand moral law of gravitation in the heavenly economy. God, the central sun of light, and joy, and glory, keeping by this great motive principle every spiritual planet in its orbit, “forGod is love.”

That love is not confined to heaven. It may be foretasted here. The sick man of Bethanyknew of it, and exulted in it. Though in the moment of dissolution he had to mourn the personal absence of his Lord, yet “believing” in that love, he “rejoiced with joy unspeakable and full of glory.” His sisters, as they stood in sorrowing emotion by his dying couch, and thought of that hallowed fraternal bond which was about so soon to be dissolved, could triumph in the thought of an affection nobler and better which knit him and them to the Brother of brothers—and which, unlike any earthly tie, was indissoluble.

And what was experienced in that lowly Bethany home, may be experienced by us.

That love in its wondrous manifestation is confined to no limits, no age, no peculiar circumstances. Many a Lazarus, pining in want, who can claim no heritage but poverty, no home but cottage walls, or who, stretched on a bed of protracted sickness, is heard saying in the morning, “Would God it were evening! and in the evening, Would God it were morning!” if he have that love reigning in his heart, he has a possession outweighing the wealth of worlds!

What a message, too, of consolation is here tothesick! How often are those chained down year after year to some aching pillow, worn, weary, shattered in body, depressed in spirit,—how apt are they to indulge in the sorrowful thought, “Surely God cannot care forme!” What! Jesus think of this wasted frame—these throbbing temples—these powerless limbs—this decaying mind! I feel like a wreck on the desert shore—beyond the reach of His glance—beneath the notice of His pitying eye! Nay, thou poor desponding one, Hedoescherish, Hedoesremember thee!—“Lord,he whom Thou lovestis sick.” Let this motto-verse be inscribed on thy Bethany chamber. The LordlovesHis sick ones, and He often chastens them with sickness, justbecauseHe loves them. If these pages be now traced by some dim eyes that have been for long most familiar with the sickly glow of the night-lamp—the weary vigils of pain and languor and disease—an exile from a busy world, or a still more unwilling alien from the holy services of the sanctuary—oh! think of Him wholovesthee, who loved theeintothis sickness, and will love theethroughit, till thou standest in that unsuffering,unsorrowing world, where sickness is unknown! Think of Lazarus inhischamber, and the plea of the sisters in behalf of their prostrate brother, “Lord, come to the sick one,whom Thou lovest.”

Believe it, the very continuance of this sickness is a pledge of His love. You may be often tempted to say with Gideon, “If the Lord be with me, why hasallthis befallen me?” Surely if my Lord loved me, He would long ere this have hastened to my relief, rebuked this sore disease, and raised me up from this bed of languishing? Did you ever note, in the 6th verse of this Bethany chapter, the strangely beautiful connexion of the wordtherefore? The Evangelist had, in the preceding verse, recorded the affection Jesus bore for that honoured family. “Now JesuslovedMartha and her sister and Lazarus.” “When He had heardthereforethat he was sick,”—what did He do? “Fled on wings of love to the succour of His loved friend; hurried in eager haste by the shortest route from Bethabara?” We expect to hear so, as the natural deduction from John’s premises. How we might think could love give a more truthful exponent of its reality thanhastening instantaneously to the relief of one so dear to Him? But not so! “When He had heardthereforethat he was sick,He abode two days still in the same place where He was!” Yes, there istarryinglove as well assuccouringlove. Hesentthat sickness because He loves thee; Hecontinuesit because He loves thee. He heaps fresh fuel on the furnace-fires till the gold is refined. He appoints, not one, but “many days where neither sun nor stars appear, and no small tempest lies on us,” that the ship may be lightened, and faith exercised; our bark hastened by these rough blasts nearer shore, and the Lord glorified, who rules the raging of the sea. “We expect,” says Evans, “the blessing or relief inourway; He chooses to bestow it inHis.”

Reader! let this ever be your highest ambition, to love and to be loved of Jesus. If we are covetous to have the regard and esteem of the great and good on earth, what is it to share the fellowship and kindness of Him, in comparison with whose love the purest earthly affection is but a passing shadow!

Ah! to be without that love, is to be a littleworld ungladdened by its central sun, wandering on in its devious pathway of darkness and gloom. Earthly things may do well enough when the world is all bright and shining—when prosperity sheds its bewitching gleam around you, and no symptoms of the cloudy and dark day are at hand; but the hour is coming (it may come soon, itmustcome at some time) when your Bethany-home will be clouded with deepening death-shadows—when, like Lazarus, you will be laid on a dying couch, and what will avail you then? Oh, nothing,nothing! if bereft of that love whose smile is heaven. If you are left in the agony of desolation to utter importunate pleadings to anUnknown Saviour, aStranger God—if the dark valley be entered uncheered by the thought of a loving Redeemer dispelling its gloom, and waiting on the Canaan side to shew you the path of life!

Let the home of your hearts be often open, as was the home of Lazarus, to the visits of Jesus in the day of brightness; andthen, when the hour of sorrow and trial unexpectedly arises, you will know where to find your Lord—where to send your prayer-message for Him to come to your relief.

Yes! Hewillcome! It will be in His own way, but His joyous footfallwillbe heard! He is not like Baal, “slumbering and sleeping, or taking a journey” when the voice of importunate prayer ascends from the depths of yearning hearts! If, instead of at once hastening back to Bethany, He “abides still for two days where He was”—if He linger among the mountain-glens of distant Gilead, instead of, as we would expect, hastening to the cry and succour of cherished friendship, and to ward off the dart of the inexorable foe—be assured there must be a reason for this strange procrastination—there must be an unrevealed cause which the future will in due time disclose and unravel. All the recollections of the past forbid one unrighteous surmise on His tried faithfulness. “Now, Jesus loved Lazarus,” is a soft pillow on which to repose;—raising the sorrowing spirit above the unkind insinuation, “My Lord hath forsaken me, and my God hath forgotten me.”

If He linger, it is to try and test the faith of His people. If He let loose the storm, and suffer it to sweep with a vengeance apparently uncontrolled, it is that these living trees may striketheir roots firmer and deeper in Himself—the Rock of eternal ages. Trust Him where you cannot trace Him. Not one promise of His can come to nought. The channel may have continued long dry—the streams of Lebanon may have failed—the cloud has been laden, but no shower descends—the barren waste is unwatered—the windows of heaven seem hopelessly closed. Nay, nay! Though “the vision tarry,” yet if you “wait for it” the gracious assurance will be fulfilled in your experience—“The Lord is good to them that wait for Him, to the soul that seeketh Him.” The fountain of love pent up in His heart will in due time gush forth—the apparently unacknowledged prayer will be crowned with a gracious answer. In His own good time sweet tones of celestial music will be wafted to your ear—“It is the voice of the Beloved!—lo, He cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills!” If you are indeed the child of God, as Lazarus was, remember this for your comfort in your dying hour, that whether the prayers of sorrowing friends for your recovery be answered or no, the Lord of love has at leastheardthem—themessenger has not been mocked—the prayer-message has not been spurned or forgotten! I repeat it, Hewillanswer, but it will bein His own way! If the Bethany-home be ungladdened by Lazarus restored, it will exult through tears in the thought of Lazarus glorified. And the Marthas and Marys, as they go often unto the grave to weep there, will read, as they weep, in the holy memories of the departed, that which will turn tears into joy—“Jesus loved him.”

The Sleeper.

“Our friend Lazarus sleepeth.”—The hopes and fears which alternately rose and fell in the bosoms of the sisters, like the surges of the ocean, are now at rest. Oft and again, we may well believe, had they gone, like the mother of Sisera, to the lattice to watch the return of the messenger, or, what was better, to hail their expected Lord. Gazing on the pale face at their side, and remembering that ere now the tidings of his illness must have reached Bethabara, they may have even expected to witness the power of a distantword;—to behold the hues of returning health displacing the ghastly symptoms of dissolution. But in vain! The curtain has fallen! Their season of aching anxiety is at an end. Their worst fears are realised.—“Lazarus sleepeth.”

How calm, how tranquil that departure! Never did sun sink so gently in its crimson couch—never did child, nestling in its mother’s bosom, close its eyes more sweetly!

“His summon’d breath went forth as peacefullyAs folds the spent rose when the day is done.”

Befitting close to a calm and noiseless existence! It would seem as if the guardian angels who had been hovering round his death-pillow had well-nigh reached the gates of glory ere the sorrowing survivors discovered that the clay tabernacle was all that was left of a “brother beloved!”

From the abrupt manner in which, in the course of the narrative, our Lord makes the announcement to His disciples,[10]we are almost led to surmise that He did so at the very moment of the spirit’s dismissal—the Redeemer speaks while the eyelids are just closing, and the emancipated soul is winging its arrowy flight up to the spirit-land!

DeathaSleep!—How beautiful the image! Beautifully true, andonlytrue regarding the Christian. It is here where the true and the false—Christianityand Paganism—meet together in impressive and significant contrast. The one comes to the dark river with her pale, sickly lamp. It refuses to burn—the damps of Lethe dim and quench it. Philosophy tries to discourse on death as a “stern necessity”—of the duty of passing heroically into this mysterious, oblivion-world—taking with bold heart “the leap in the dark,” and confronting, as we best can, blended images of annihilation and terror.

The Gospel takes us to the tomb, and shews us Death vanquished, and the Grave spoiled. Death truly is in itself an unwelcome messenger at our door. It is the dark event in this our earth,—the deepest of the many deep shadows of an otherwise fair creation—a cold, cheerless avalanche lying at the heart of humanity, freezing up the gushing fountains of joyous life. But the Gospel shines, and the cold iceberg melts. The Sun of Righteousness effects what philosophy, with all its boasted power, never could. Jesus is the abolisher of Death. He has taken all that is terrible from it. It is said of some venomous insects that when they once inflict a sting, theyare deprived of any future power to hurt. Death left his envenomed sting in the body of the great victim of Calvary. It was thenceforward disarmed of its fearfulness! So complete, indeed, is the Redeemer’s victory over this last enemy, that He Himself speaks of it as no longer a reality, but a shadow—a phantom-foe from which we have nothing to dread. “Whosoever believeth in Me shallnever die.” “If a man keep My sayings, he shallnever see death.” These are an echo of the sweet Psalmist’s beautiful words, a transcript of his expressive figure when he pictures the Dark Valley to the believer as the Valley of a “shadow.” The substance is removed! When the gaunt spirit meets him on the midnight waters, he may, like the disciples at first, be led to “cry out for fear.” But a gentle voice of love and tenderness rebukes his dread, and calms his misgivings—“It is I! be not afraid!” Yes, here is the wondrous secret of a calm departure—the “sleep” of the believer in death. It is the name and presence ofJesus. There may be many accompaniments of weakness and prostration, pain and suffering, in that final conflict; the mind may be awreck—memory may have abdicated her seat—the loving salutation of friends may be returned only with vacant looks, and the hand be unable to acknowledge the grasp of affection—but there is strength in that presence, and music in that name to dispel every disquieting, anxious thought. Clung to as a sheet-anchor in life, He will never leave the soul in the hour of dissolution to the mercy of the storm. Amid sinking nature, He is faithful that promised—“Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”—“Thou art with me,” says Lady Powerscourt—“this is the rainbow of light thrown across the valley, for there is no need of sun or moon where covenant-love illumes.”

A Christian’s death-bed! It is indeed “good to be there.” The man who has not to seek a living Saviour at a dying hour, but who, long having known His preciousness, loved His Word, valued His ordinances, sought His presence by believing prayer, has now nothing to do but to die (tosleep), and wake up in glory everlasting! “Oh! that all my brethren,” were among Rutherford’s last words, “may know what a Master I have served,and what peace I have this day. This night shall close the door, and put my anchor within the veil.” “This must be the chariot,” said Helen Plumtre, making use of Elijah’s translation as descriptive of the believer’s death; “This must be the chariot; oh, how easy it is!” “Almost well,” said Richard Baxter, when asked on hisdeath-bedhow he did.

Yes! there is speechless eloquence in such a scene. The figure of a quiet slumber is no hyperbole, but a sober verity. As the gentle smile of a foretasted heaven is seen playing on the marble lips—the rays gilding the mountain tops after the golden sun has gone down—what more befitting reflection than this, “Sogiveth He His belovedsleep!”

“Sweetly remembering that the parting sighAppoints His saints to slumber, not to die,The starting tear we check—we kiss the rod,And not to earth resign them, but to God.”

Or shall we leave the death-chamber and visit the grave? Still it is a place ofsleep; a bed of rest—a couch of tranquil repose—a quiet dormitory “until the day break,” and the night shadows of earth “flee away.” The dust slumbering thereis precious because redeemed; the angels of God have it in custody; they encamp round about it, waiting the mandate to “gather the elect from the four winds of heaven—from the one end of heaven to the other.” Oh, wondrous day, when the long dishonoured casket shall be raised a “glorified, body” to receive once more the immortal jewel, polished and made meet for the Master’s use! See how Paul clings, in speaking of this glorious resurrection period, to the expressive figure of his Lord before him—“Them also whichsleepin Jesus will God bring with Him!”Sleep in Jesus!His saints fall asleep on their death-couch in His arms of infinite love. There their spirits repose, until the body, “sown in corruption” shall be “raised in incorruption,” and both reunited in the day of His appearing, become “a crown of glory in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of their God.”

Weeping mourner! Jesus dries thy tears with the encouraging assurance, “Thy dead shall live; together with My body they shall arise.” Let thy Lazarus “sleep on now and take his rest;” the time will come when My voice shall be heard proclaiming,“Awake, and sing, ye that dwell in dust.” “The winter is past, the rain is over and gone, the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.” “Weep not! he is not dead, but sleepeth. Soon shall the day-dawn of glory streak the horizon, and then I shall go that I may awake him out of sleep!”

Beautifully has it been said, “Dense as the gloom is which hangs over the mouth of the sepulchre, it is the spot, above all others, where the Gospel, if it enters, shines and triumphs. In the busy sphere of life and health, it encounters an active antagonist—the world confronts it, aims to obscure its glories, to deny its claims, to drown its voice, to dispute its progress, to drive it from the ground it occupies. But from the mouth of the grave the world retires; it shrinks from the contest there; it leaves a clear and open space in which the Gospel can assert its claims and unveil its glories without opposition or fear. There the infidel and worldling look anxiously around—but the world has left them helpless, and fled. Therethe Christian looks around, and lo! the angel of mercy is standing close by his side. The Gospel kindles a torch which not only irradiates the valley of the shadow of death, but throws a radiance into the world beyond, and reveals it peopled with the sainted spirits of those who have died in Jesus.”

Reader! may this calm departure be yours and mine. “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord. ... Theyrest.” All life’s turmoil and tossing is over; they are anchored in the quiet haven.Rest—but not the rest of annihilation—

“Grave! the guardian of our dust;Grave! the treasury of the skies;Every atom of thy trustRests in hope again to rise!”

Let us seek to have the eye of faith fixed and centred on Jesusnow. It isthatwhich alone can form a peaceful pillow in a dying hour, and enable us to rise superior to all its attendant terrors. Look at that scene in the Jehoshaphat valley! The proto-martyr Stephen has a pillow of thorns for his dying couch, showers of stones are hurled by infuriated murderers on his guiltless head, yet, nevertheless, he “fell asleep.” Whatwas the secret of that calmest of sunsets amid a blood-stained and storm-wreathed sky? The eye of faith (if not of sight) pierced through those clouds of darkness. Far above the courts of the material temple at whose base he lay, he beheld, in the midst of the general assembly and Church of the First-born of Heaven, “Jesusstanding at the right hand of God.” The vision of his Lord was like a celestial lullaby stealing from the inner sanctuary. WithJesus, his last sight on earth and his next in glory, he could “lay him down in peace and sleep,” saying, in the words of the sweet singer of Israel, “What time I awake I am still with Thee.”

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