9. The Consummation of All Things
CHAPTER IX THE CONSUMMATION OF ALL THINGS IN this chapter the last stage of our inquiry is reached.
Most of the subjects which have to be dealt with as conditioning, or bound up with, the consummation of all things, might with equal propriety be regarded as the completion of Redemption. But they have to do with redemption as both brought about by and resulting in the positive fulfilment of the possibilities of spiritual life. On this ground alone, therefore, we are justified in treating of them here.
But, further, such spiritual fulfilment is the condition and earnest of the “ restitution of all things.” An examination of all the apocalyptic predictions, both of the Old and of the New Testament, will clearly show how entirely the final transformation of the universe is made to depend upon the complete realisation of spiritual conditions. It is impossible, therefore, to separate the consideration of the ultimate result from that of the causes upon which it depends.
Hence the consummation of all things may be held to be inaugurated by the Resurrection of our Lord, and to beprepared for by the dispensation of the Holy Spirit, though it will only be completed by the appearance of “ new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness” (2 Peter 3:13).
We have to inquire in what relationship the whole of this work of consummation stands to the Fatherhood of God.
It is impossible to take more than a brief survey of the general view of the New Testament, showing its relation to spiritual experience, and the place in that experience of the Fatherhood of God.
1. In the first place, we must consider the Resurrection of our Lord. The Resurrection was the reward of our Lord’s atonin<r obedience, and the inauguration of His redemptive kingdom.
It was the first-fruits of the renewal of all things, and the evidence that that renewal will be brought to pass. The Resurrection was therefore the Divine vindication of our Lord, looked at in its personal aspects. It was the answer to that spirit of obedience which said, “ Not My will, but Thine, be done “; to the trust which, notwithstanding the darkness of the Passion, cried, “ Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit.” So far as our Lord’s work was concerned, the Resur rection proclaimed its acceptance by the Father. To mankind it was the assurance of justification, and the guarantee that all good men and all good things are safe in the care of God. The more closely it is examined in all these aspects, the more clearly it will be seen that the testimony of the Resur rection is, above all, to the Fatherhood of God. St. Paul’s statement in the Epistle to the Eomans is that Christ was “ declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead “ (Romans 1:4). And in his sermon at Antioch in Pisidia the apostle treated the declaration of the 2nd Psalm, “ Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee” (Acts 13:33), as fulfilled by the Resurrection.
It was as the Father that God vindicated the Son, accepted His filial obedience, and set the seal of Fatherly approval upon His work. And it was as the Father that God gave, through His dealings with the Son, an assurance as to the future to the hearts of all men. While, therefore, the Resurrection has the greatest personal significance as towards our Lord Himself, there is contained in it a revelation of the Fatherly heart of God which is of universal application. The Passion of our Lord, while it stands alone and sounds depths of suffering into which no other can enter, is yet representative in the sense that in it were present, in utmost intensity, all those elements of spiritual and moral, as well as physical, suffering, which seem to unbelieving men to be the negation of God. In the case of our Lord not only did these not shake His faith, but they were the occasion of its most perfect manifestation in His dying words, “ Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit.” That last utterance is the more remarkable as showing the triumph of unwavering trust over the agony of unspeakable horror which wrung from Him the cry, “ My God, My God, why hast Thou for saken Me? “ In this confident surrender of Himself to the care of the Father, our Lord gave representative expression to that spirit of faith in mankind which rises above the superficial appearances and the momentary happenings of the world to lay hold confidently, in spite of them all, on the love, the righteousness, and the power of God. This final and perfect expression of trust was therefore a challenge to the Father, on behalf of mankind, to make full revelation of His Fatherhood. That challenge is seen to be all the more irresistible when we reflect on the personal consciousness, the character, the revelation, and the circumstances of Christ as constituting an indivisible unity. Our Lord’s consciousness was, from first to last, that of Sonship, and His character was determined by His absolutely filial will. Out of the depths of His own unique consciousness He, for the first time, revealed to mankind the Fatherhood of God as the interpretation of all life. The apparent contra diction offered by His experience to His consciousness and His message becomes all the more startlingly dramatic. And yet throughout the contradiction His consciousness and His testi mony persist. This unique combination, it may reverently be said, created a supreme opportunity for God. This supreme perfection of the filial spirit, made the basis of a final revelation, and yet so tragically contradicted from the first, called for a correspondingly supreme manifestation of the Father hood in which Christ trusted. This urgent call, on behalf not only of our Lord, but of all men in so far as they strive to believe, supplies the divinely convincing reason of the Resurrection. Without it, such faith as has been described may well seem to be a sublime and beautiful, but yet an unverified and even discredited, imagination. When we take full account of our Lord’s conscious relationship to God, of His relation ship to mankind, and to the typical experiences of human life, the Resurrection is seen to be not only in place, but even necessary to any full confirmation and perfect development of faith in the Fatherhood of God. The unique importance of the Resurrection in the world of spiritual life is therefore the measure of its probability for those who believe that the perfecting of the spiritual life is the highest end for which the universe exists, and who believe, further, that for such perfecting the unveiling of the heart of God, as the only ground of confidence for mankind, is indispensable. This unveiling is brought about by the Resurrection. By the dealings of the Father with theperfect representative of mankind, an assurance is given to all men of the individual and all-sufficient Providence of God, of His determination to secure the permanence and the prevalence of His kingdom in the permanence and perfecting of its subjects, and of His purpose to make the history of the universe, not that of a transitory phase, but of a growing and, in the end, eternal fulness of life. “ Because I live, ye shall live also,” is the Divine logic of the Resurrection. The manifestation contained therein of what God is to Christ, contains implicitly the manifestation of what He is to all men in the Son. It is proclaimed that He is perfectly Father to His Son, that He watches over His life, receives and answers in love to His trust and obedience, treasures the preciousness of His devotion, and so orders the universe as to make it the home in which perfect spiritual life is permanently secured, and is advanced, even through death, to the full measure of its eternal influence.
Thus the Resurrection extended to the vision of man the range of life, and changed its centre to the unseen and eternal. It altered men’s attitude to the darker experiences of existence, and enabled them clearly to perceive that all these may serve as a discipline in order to the permanent ends of perfected spiritual life. Thus in the light of the Re surrection men stepped into a new spiritual certainty, a new sense of eternity, and a new power of trust in and, therefore, of surrender to God. And the whole of this change, which is unspeakably important for the development of all the highest and holiest ideals of life, was due to the assurance given in the Resurrection that God is “ the Father of spirits,” watching over them in love, seeking to bring them to the fulness of spiritual life, and to maintain them in it for ever.
It was necessary that that assurance should be given, not merely to the spiritual consciousness, but in the realm of the physical world, for it is the pressure of the physical world upon the spirit which is the most powerful cause of perplexity and doubt. The faith of the Resurrection was, as is universally admitted, necessary to the very existence of Christianity, and of all those spiritual influences which Chris tianity embodies. The fact of the Resurrection is necessary to justify the extension of Christian faith to embrace the final reconstitution of the universe, so that, it may become the adequate instrument and environment of perfect spiritual life.
But, in addition, the fact of the Resurrection is necessary to give the full revelation, once for all, of the supremacy of spirit over the material, and of the instant presence and power of the Father throughout every province of existence.
Paradoxical as it may at first sight appear, it is yet true that through, and only through, the extraordinary event of the Resurrection can mankind be fully assured of the presence of the Father in the ordinary course of events, in which no such occurrence takes place. Thus the opportunity was taken, once for all, of giving an ample assurance in the great crisis of spiritual history of the Fatherhood of God.
2. The Resurrection of our Lord is followed by His exaltation, and by the Dispensation of the Holy Spirit as the counterpart of that exaltation. It is most important to bear in mind the close connexion between these two. The rela tivity of the Holy Spirit and of His work is everywhere made manifest throughout the New Testament. His nature and activity are revealed in relation to the Divine activity of the Father and the Son, and to the spiritual effects which Heproduces on believers. He is “ the promise of the Father “ (Acts 1:4), “ the Spirit of Christ “ (see, e.g, Romans 8:9; 1 Peter 1:11). He is “the Spirit of the truth,” bestowed in order that He may guide us “ into all the truth “ (John 16:13), the truth being looked upon as “the way” of our spirits, and therefore not as abstract, but as the truth for us, to which our spiritual apprehension, insight, and character are to become conformed. He may be termed the Spirit of the kingdom; “ for the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost” (Romans 14:17). Other examples of His relativity might be given. Thus the Holy Spirit is so one with Christ in His exaltation that He manifests and verifies the heavenly life of Christ, both in its life-giving and in its illuminating power; illuminating because life-giving, life-giving because illuminating. Through Him “ grace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ “ is bestowed, men are enabled to enter into life “ in Christ,” and are thereby brought into fellowship with the kingdom of God.
Thus, as St. Paul tells the Ephesians, “ He that descended is the same also that ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things” (Ephesians 4:10).
Ascension above all the heavens is the condition of the spiritual filling of all things. Apart from the exaltation of Christ and the spiritual vision of it, with all that is involved, the work of the Holy Spirit cannot be carried on. On the other hand, without the work of the Holy Spirit, if that can be conceived, the exaltation of Christ however objectivelyreal would fade away from the hearts of men as a beautiful but baseless dream. The union between the two is not, how ever, that between a merely external fact and a merely internal dynamic, if there are such things. Both the fact of the exalted Christ and the power of His Spirit work through, and are brought together by, the great spiritual ideas and ideals which are revealed in the fact and are inspired by the Spirit. It may be said that the exaltation of Christ is followed by the corresponding exaltation of the spiritual in man, and is so because the content of the exaltation of Christ awakens and satisfies, by the Holy Spirit, the great permanent spiritual needs of men.
It is obvious that among these needs are the assurance of immortality, and therein of the permanence and advance towards eternal fruition of the spiritual interests embodied in spiritual individuals. Such demands of the spirit are deter mined by infinitely higher considerations than a desire for length or even for content of existence in itself. Above all, the exaltation of Christ and the opening of the kingdom of heaven in Him to all believers satisfies the heart; because, while the superiority of the spirit to the shocks and buffets of a material world is proclaimed therein, there is offered, above all, the assurance of the supremacy of love in the universe, and therefore of the permanence of the fellowship which love sets up. Without the exaltation of Christ and the assurance contained in it of immortality and heaven, no such supremacy of spirit or of love is established, and the desire for it is the demand of the heart made by and for the Father to be satisfied of, and with, His Fatherly love. Thus the message of the love of God proclaimed by the gospel and that of “ life and immortality “ confirmed one another. It was the spiritual content of the hope of immortality which made its evidence so convincing and its reception so satisfying. And this spiritual content is bound up with the truths revealed in the exaltation of Christ. It was as the Son that He was exalted, as King and Head also of those who, through Him, become sons of God. Thus there was given in the heavens a supreme manifestation of Fatherly love at once Divine anduniversal, yet having a gracious meaning for each individual life. For the first time the human spirit found an environment large and congenial enough to satisfy all its needs. And once more we find that the effect of the exaltation of our Lord and of the glorifying of the truth as it is in Him, which supplies the material to the Holy Spirit for His work, is simply the perfect manifestation of the Fatherly and filial relationship as supreme over and in the history of the world, and as drawing all men, in Christ, within the embrace of an everlasting love.
3. The same predominance is found when we pass from the more general aspects of the exaltation of our Lord and of the work of the Spirit to the more specifically individual aspects of salvation. The selective conditions of the Holy Spirit’s activity baffle our inquiry. “ The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou nearest the voice thereof, but knowest not whence it cometh and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit “ (John 3:8). But it is important not to conceive the process of salvation as merely dynamic, issuing from the bare decisions of will. The beginning of the full experience of salvation comes from the bestowment of “ the Spirit of adoption, by which we cry, Abba, Father! “ that bestowment being accompanied by the change of regeneration, or, as St. Paul terms it, resurrection. The two are inseparable, and it is impossible to say that either is the cause of the other. It is the regenerating power which enables men to receive “ the Spirit of adoption,” while it is the gracious intimation thus made which brings the new birth into full actuality. Yet the element of knowledge which is more than intellectual apprehension and the stirring of the heart by the Spirit crying there must not be overlooked. The work of salvation is wrought out by the revelation within the heart of the truth of God and the truth of man as contained in the cry, “ Abba, Father,” conditioned as it is by the redemptive work of Christ issuing in the forgiveness of sins. The experience of salvation, the advance towards the complete realisation of the Christian life in its essential spirit and in its outward conduct, is measured by the fulness of the consciousness of sonship and by the steadfastness and consistency with which expression is given to it. It may be said with truth that every description of the Christian temper and all injunctions to Christian virtues contained in the New Testament are attempts to give full effect to the filial spirit contained in the cry, “ Abba, Father.” Of course, other figures are used. For example, the Old Testament term “ sanctification “ has a considerable place in the New Testament. But for a man to be sanctified to God, means that he is brought, through self-surrender, to realise those relations for which God claims him on the ground of creation and redemption. What is involved, therefore, in sanctification in general, or in its particular application to the various departments of the Christian life, must be determined by the real character of the relations in which man stands to God in Christ. That is to say, we have to do, in the last resort, not with abstract phrases about being “ set apart “ to God and the like, though these have real meaning and suggestiveness, but with the substance contained in this setting apart, and with the means by which it is effected. And from every quarter of the New Testament comes the answer, that sonship is both the form and the power of a consecrated, or sanctified, life.
4. One particular experience of the spirit of sonship must, however, be singled out as having special prominence given to it in the New Testament by all the apostolic writers.
It is found most fully developed in St. Paul’s Epistles, in his doctrine of heirship and its connexions: “ If children, then heirs” (Romans 8:17; Galatians 4:7). But it occurs also in the great saying of St. John, “ Beloved, now are we children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be. We know that, if He shall be manifested, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him even as He is” (1 John 3:2).
St. Peter expresses it when he says that Christians are begotten again “ unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead unto an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven “ (1 Peter 1:4).
It is substantially the underlying thought of our Lord’s last discourse in St. John xiv. xvii, and is contained in His assurance, “ Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32).
All this is not merely apocalyptic. The expectation of the future is indeed present throughout. It is, as we have seen, the only condition under which the ideals of the Christian life can be fulfilled. But the expectation of the future is occasioned by the throwing out and forward of that which is given and implied in an inward experience of the heart. The sense of heirship is the inner verification and the personal result of the exaltation of Christ, as witnessed by the Spirit and as forming the earnest and pattern of the believer’s eventual glorification. The consciousness of sonship is accompanied by a sense of spiritual command over all worlds, over “life and death, things present and things to come.” That sense of command is a gift from God Himself, and represents the fulfilment of the claim upon Him which His Fatherly love itself establishes. The heirship is not for the distant future merely, but for the present: its reality is proved, not in prosperous circumstances only, but in the experience of “ suffering with Christ.” Those who thus suffer with Him are called upon to rejoice in tribulations, “ knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, probation; and probation, hope; and hope putteth not to shame; because the love of God hath been shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Ghost, which was given unto us “ (Romans 5:35). This inner experience that the world even now serves the purposes of spiritual life, and thus reveals that it is through out subject to those purposes, is the condition and supplies the standing justification of the Christian hope of ultimate glorification with Christ. The reasonableness of that hope can only be estimated in the light of the great spiritualpresuppositions which create and sustain it. Its evidence is not with the astronomer or the physiologist, but with the saint. No amount of discredit thrown upon it in the physical sphere can in the least degree weaken either its persistence or its validity in the spiritual. Nor could any amount of evidence in favour of it, drawn from the physical sphere, weigh at all in comparison with the intuitions and instincts which are implanted in the hearts of believers as part of their experience of sonship in Christ. In that life of Divine experience and hope, believers are joined together in the fellowship of the Church. Relation ships in the Church are moulded by the supreme Divine relationship, the knowledge of which brings men into the Church. Therefore brotherhood, as the result of common sonship, is the law of life within the Church, and fellowship as the result of common heirship.
5. But the Christian hope, as outlined in the New Testament, is not merely the hope of personal immortality and of perfected spiritual fellowship, but extends to the renovation of all things. It includes the general resurrection of the dead, and a universal uplifting and transformation of all the conditions of natural life. This expectation pervades the New Testament, but has its fullest expression in Romans 8:1-39 and in the Apocalypse. As it is set forth in Romans 8:1-39, the consummation of all things represents the bringing of the whole creation up to the standard set for it by the perfected life of the sons of God. The transition from the hope of personal immortality to these expectations of a universal transformation is made by means of the relation of the body both to the spirit and to the universe. The body, which is the instrument of the sons of God, is temporarily left under the bondage of corruption. The apostle’s hope of redemption demands, in the light of the resurrection of our Lord, that no part of human nature should ultimately be so left. But the body is also the link between the spiritual life of man and the physical nature of the universe. And the evils to which the body is exposed run throughout physical nature, and are a mark of the community of the whole. There can be no transformation of the body without a correspondingtransformation of the universe, and therefore the ultimate consummation for which the apostle looks, embraces, as part of the perfected life of fellowship conferred on the sons of God, the redemption of every part of their nature from mortality and the reconstitution of the universe, so that it may become the adequate home and the permanent instrument of perfected spiritual life, and may find in this its own emancipation, in sympathy with the sons of God. And this renovation of all things, which is consequent upon “ the manifestation of the sons of God,” returns once more to the spiritual from which it started. According to the Apocalypse, it is completed by, and is in order to, the appearance of the holy city, the heavenly Jerusalem, as the home of the perfected society of life and love. The whole doctrine of the consummation of all things shows it to be dependent upon, and instrumental to, the manifestation of spiritual life, perfected in filial love. And life, so perfected, is ecstatic. The rapture of its blessedness must needs turn all speech into song, for the exaltation which, under our present earthly conditions, belongs only to the rarest moments is now habitual. But the ecstasy is the result of perfected spiritual relationships, and of the means, now perfected, for giving complete and harmonious expression to them.
Substantially, it will be seen that the prophecy and expectation rest upon an intuition of spiritual experience that the spiritual and the natural can never be separated from one another, that the natural is subservient to the spiritual, and must therefore finally follow the fortunes of the spiritual. If this be true, there can be only one goal of history, namely, the final and complete ascendency of the spiritual throughout the universe. The spiritual, when finally and fully revealed, must constitute and shape the universe to be for ever in keeping with its own glory. That glory is the fulness of a Divine Fatherhood, finally manifested in the perfecting of sons in eternal fellowship with God and with one another. This prospect, in whatever terms it may be stated and whatever images of inspired poetry may be used to set its glory forth, is substantially simply the utterance of the in most instinct and of the surest intuition given, in Christ, to the sons of God. And these represent the highest point of the development of all things reached up to the present, and indicate both the lines upon which that development is still proceeding and the only destination which can fulfil the purpose revealed in the creation and redemption of the world.
How such a consummation will be brought about, when it shall come to pass, and what it shall be in concrete detail, all these things are hid from our eyes. All forecasts are, and can be, only shapes thrown upon the screen of the future by great spiritual forces. Even as divinely inspired, they can be but poetic glimpses of a reality which will exceed them all. It stands to reason that that reality can be but imperfectly pictured by means of any experience of thepresent order of things. All that the spiritual consciousness, as taught by the exaltation of Christ and quickened by the indwelling of His Spirit, can confidently affirm, is not the How, or When, or Where of these things, but the That. This assurance of a final consummation, which while it passes man’s power to conceive is yet dependent upon spiritual conditions, is a vital part of the content of Christian experience. And it is no doubtful sign, but is the voice of spiritual and cosmic development, speaking through its highest conscious product. It affirms, as part of that highest consciousness, the supremacy of spirit in nature, and therefore the spiritual possibilities of nature. It further affirms the incompleteness of the present expression of this supremacy and of these possibilities. It affirms, finally, that so deep, abiding, and central is the spiritual reality that the present incompleteness is destined ultimately to pass away, in order that full outward effect may be given to the eternal truth. The presentation of this great affirmation in and by men naturally and necessarily centres in man, his world, and his future. That he must have a sufficient and abiding universe, fitted to his spiritual conditions; that he belongs to this universe, and cannot, even in imagination, be transported to another; that therefore he is to look to its transformation, and not to its abandonment, as a waste product, in order to the creation of a new one, all these propositions are bound up with the hope of the consummation of all things, as set before us in the New Testament.
Every manifestation of the power of man over nature in every department of human life brings a certain, though weak, confirmation of this great affirmation, or rather stirs the spirit to a more confident assertion of it. It inspires and directs the whole activity of those who give full effect to it, so that they labour for the progress of society, for the improvement of human environment, and for the subjugation of nature, both as thereby foreshadowing and co-operating with the action of God, and as realising the life of spirit on all sides and in all relationships. But ultimately it rests upon the philosophy of a spiritual experience, which proclaims that as is the spirit so is its world; that therefore, as the spiritual is supreme, its world must ultimately be in complete conformity with the relationships and powers of the spirit.
It must be repeated that the evidence of all this is not to be found scientifically in physical things, considered as physical. Nor can its refutation be found there. If the constitution of the world be according to the facts manifested in the Incarnation, and if redemption be the bringing of men into a real life of sonship, as being that for which their nature was originally planned and prepared, then all the rest follows as a matter of course. And it is established not by a mere logical process, but by the unfailing witness of a spiritual life, which, based upon the realities manifest in the Incarnation and in redemption, represents, so to speak, the process of evolution become self-conscious, proclaiming whence it came and whither it goeth.
Hence the Divine visions of the New Testament must be interpreted in the light of the spiritual constitution of the world in the Son of God, in the light of the facts and history of Redemption, and in the light of the sure intuitions of the spiritual consciousness which founds itself on Christ. In this final consummation the supremacy of the Fatherly and filial relationship, eternal in the Godhead and the ground of creation, has its crowning display. It will be the “ appearing “ of the Son, the “ manifestation of the sons of God.” Without such a consummation, the evidence, the manifestation, and the satisfaction of the Fatherhood of God would alike be incomplete.
If, then, the requirements of the Fatherly and filial relationship furnish the principle by which the consummation of all things is determined, then that relationship is the principle both of inclusion and exclusion, both of life and death. “ If any man have not the Spirit of Christ “ the Spirit of adoption “ he is none of His “ (Kon1:8:9). The Son admits to His kingdom only those who do the will of His Father which is in heaven (Matthew 7:22, Matthew 7:23). In the world perfected in filial life, and blessed because the filial life is perfected, there is no room for the unfilial.
Thus the judgment which determines fitness or unfitness for the blessed life is not arbitrary or accidental. It gives effect to existing and all-determining spiritual conditions. The last word that can be uttered of such a universe as this is: “ The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into His hand. He that believeth on the Son hath eternal life; but he that obeyeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him” (John 3:35, John 3:36).