How many days in your life are truly memorable? A landmark anniversary here; a special birthday there; a graduation or retirement. Hopefully for the believer there are days of significant dealings with God—our Peniels and Elims and Bethels and Hebrons, our times of wrestling and refreshing and revelation. God help us to raise up cairns to remember them.
Most often under the name on a gravestone are listed two dates—the day of birth and of death. In between there is a little horizontal line, sometimes called a “short dash”—appropriately so, because that is what our lives seem to be: a short dash from our first wail to our last gasp.
Christians often add another date to their memorial stone, the day they were born again. They rightly feel that the true beginning of their life was not when they became a child of Adam’s race, but the day they became a child of God. But let me suggest that the other date (the day of a believer’s death) is somewhat suspect as well, and could do with emendation in our minds if not on our gravestones. The day of a Christian’s death is not a terminus but a transition, not the end of life but its true beginning. The Lord Jesus preferred the word “sleep” to “death” when He spoke of His own. It was not mere semantics. Sleep is only partial and temporary separation. A person sleeping is there and not there at the same time. So believers who “sleep” are no longer physically with us, yet we both are “in Christ.” We are all members of “the whole family in heaven and earth.” We share a common life and worship the same Lord. Just a shout and we shall be “caught up together with them” to be forever with the Lord. Now there is a memorable day, the day of the rapture of the people of God. Perhaps it would quicken our pulse and lift our chins if we would remind ourselves of the most breathtaking wonders of that day of all days for us.
1. We shall see Him. Whatever broad vistas that day will reveal, surely this will be heaven’s headland. Earth’s beauties will vanish, heaven’s other glories will recede in “the light of…the face of Jesus Christ.” “…In my flesh shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another” (Job 19:26-27). “Thine eyes shall see the king in His beauty” (Isa. 33:17). We will not be squinting from the back of a crowd but enraptured face to face, reverent yet unafraid for “perfect love casteth out fear.” “They shall see His face” (Rev. 22:4). And we will never lose sight of Him again.
2. We shall know Him. Robert Browning wrote: “…it shall be a face like My face that receives thee; a Man like to Me thou shalt love and be loved by, for ever; a hand like this hand shall throw open the gates of new life to thee!” It will indeed. No stranger but a well-known Friend shall greet us. And to our utter amazement, in spite of our failing and faltering pathway Home, He will be so glad to have us there. “Rejoice with Me,” He will say, for “He shall see of the travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied” (Isa. 53:11).
3. We shall be like Him. I don’t know all that means, but it does not mean that we shall be unlike Him! We shall at last love what He loves, see things the way He sees them, live as He does for the pleasure of God. And what will accomplish this? Well, what causes us to be more like Him now? “Beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, [we] are changed into the same image…” (2 Cor. 3:18). Are we changed so little because we see Him so little? But then “…we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He [really] is” (1 Jn. 3:2). The place God has prepared for us is to be with Him; and the purpose God has predestined is to be like Him.
I have an old book of stories that includes the conversion of someone listed simply as “M. C.” When the Lord saved him, from a grateful heart he said, “Jesus, Thou shalt never hear the end of this!”
Amen to that.
Written by J. B. Nicholson Jr