Hebrews 8:1. We have such an high priest, who is set on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens.
2. Another highly-valuable inference from our present doctrine is this: Christ’s priesthood, as exercised in heaven, is the bond of an intelligent sympathy between the portion of the Church that is in heaven and the portion of it on earth.
The redeemed Church of Christ in heaven and earth is one. “For this cause I bow my knees unto the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named.” Neither faith nor the instincts of spiritual feeling and love can brook the idea of any essential separation, of any effective gulf of disjunction between them. Yet, if the celestial priesthood of Christ be removed, it will be difficult to see how the Church in heaven is other than most effectually isolated from the Church militant below. Consider this from both the points of view: (1) that of the Church above, in its interest and sympathy with their brethren on earth; (2) that of the Church on earth, in our interest and sympathy with our brethren in glory. And see how all intelligent sympathy on both sides must depend on the continued execution of Christ’s priestly office in heaven.
(1) Consider the Church in heaven as interested in the affairs of the Church on earth.
We cannot imagine that they take no interest in the condition of their brethren here below. We can scarcely believe it to be a part of the perfection of “the spirits of just men made perfect” that they have ceased to take an interest in the spiritual affairs of Christ’s people on earth, and in the progress of His kingdom amidst the trials and conflicts of its militant estate. That could hardly be. Many of them, while on earth themselves, doubtless felt unceasingly that one distressing element of their imperfection consisted in the very difficulties they felt in grasping the interests of Christ’s spiritual kingdom on earth; in gaining any large acquaintance with its condition, and maintaining that constant and lively and supreme interest in its progress which its glorious character and issues demand of the believer’s heart. We can scarcely then believe that their admitted condition of perfection now shuts them out from an intelligent acquaintance, or from the means of intelligent acquaintance, with what is happening in the kingdom of Christ in its progressive warfare with the powers of darkness.
Nor can we believe that their glorious and serene and immediate insight into the condition of the Church in heaven could make up for the deprivation of their knowledge of the state of the Church on earth. For there is a special glory in God carrying His Church on earth safely through its conflicts and dangers – a glory such as does not accrue to Him from maintaining its unassailed peace and glory in heaven. The history and conduct of the Church triumphant is – if I might use a familiar term for illustration – plain sailing, as compared with the administration and protection of its endangered interests on earth. Its preservation and progress and triumph in this dark world of sin and opposition, where Satan’s battlefield is and his chiefest powers are put forth, illustrate the wisdom and grace and power of God – displayed wonderfully in ways for which heaven can afford no scope. We cannot believe that our glorified brethren, now through faith and patience inheriting the promises, are debarred from the knowledge of that manifold wisdom of God which by the Church on earth is afforded to angelic principalities and powers in heavenly places.
I know that, on such a theme, it is dangerous to argue from what we are prepared to expect, or not expect, in God’s dealings with His saints in heaven; yet no small reliance may surely be placed on the intuitions of spiritual faith when these fall into harmony with the general analogy of God’s more-largely-revealed procedure. And these intuitions are worthy of confidence when they find a footing in some indications of Holy Scripture, as they do in this case, though they may be small and vague. It is true that we have no ground for believing that the spirits of departed believers return to earth, or revisit the scenes of their former sojourning. They depart and are with Christ. We have no reason to believe that they are ever present in the Church below, witnessing directly its history and movements. The angels are indeed present, as the Scriptures plainly reveal. They are the immediate spectators of the Church’s worship. What bands of these glorious spirits may be present in our worshipping assemblies is hidden from us, but we are commanded to preach the Word as under their immediate inspection, as well as that of God Himself. Nor are they mere spectators of the Church’s history and worship on earth. They serve, as well as witness. “Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister to them that shall be heirs of salvation?”
It is true that no such relation as this subsists between the Church on earth and the redeemed spirits of just men in heaven. We have no reason to think that our glorified brethren are immediate spectators of our worship now; nor do they minister on behalf of the heirs of salvation, as the angels do. But it does not follow that they are therefore uninterested in the Church’s militant estate. It does not follow that they are excluded from knowledge of the spiritual condition, the progress or reverses, the conflicts and prospects, of their brethren below. That there is nothing whatever in their present heavenly state fitted to debar them from such knowledge is conclusively demonstrated by the express instance – as good in this case as many – of the martyred ones of Christ whose “souls” are seen in vision “under the altar” and heard crying with a loud voice: “How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost Thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth? And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellow servants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled.” Here we see souls in heaven possessing no small knowledge of what is going forward in the Church on earth; they are well-informed, not only about heaven’s history and services, but about earth’s present history and sorrows too. It can scarcely be an improper use of the passage if we remind you that these souls are represented to us as “under the altar”, the chiefest symbol and instrument of priesthood – as if to shadow forth the truth that their knowledge in some way depends on that priesthood.
But what I more immediately ask you to notice is what these souls know of affairs here below. They know that their own blood is not yet avenged. They know the slow steps of justice towards their persecutors, as it is guided by the wisdom of God, and restrained by His long-suffering. They have intelligent confidence in that justice in the long run; but they are aware of its present delay. Nor are they checked by God for expressing their information; but are rather soothed and quieted, and have their information still more enlarged. Now, it is very true that, so far as this instance goes, it indicates only knowledge of a limited matter; but then it is in circumstances which surely argue knowledge, among the redeemed in heaven, of earthly affairs to a far more unlimited extent. Shall the redeemed in glory see the dark side of things – the triumph and temporary impunity of the wicked – and shall they not know the brighter side, the prosperity and prospects and progress of the righteous? Shall they see enough of the Church’s state to understand its bearings on their own past history and wrongs, and on their own rightful claims and vindication, and shall they lack an insight into its larger and grander bearings upon the claims of Christ and the wrongs He endures – the bearings of the Church’s state on His glory, on His seeing of the travail of His soul and being satisfied? Is it consistent with the spirit of heaven that the redeemed should see the present Church on earth merely in relation to their own personal interests, and not in the more generous and enlarged conception of its relation to God and His anointed One? And when the glorified are seen to have real and true intelligence of what happens here below, is the question not finally settled, in all that appertains to its principles? And is the mere extent of their knowledge, after the fact of it is evident, not a matter which may be solved comparatively easily?
It is manifest then that the Church above has knowledge about the Church on earth, and therefore inevitable sympathy with it. And I think it must be plain that the great medium of their knowledge is the execution in heaven of Christ’s priesthood at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty there. Nor is it possible to conceive a medium more satisfactory, effective or complete. In Revelation 8 we have a grand description of our Lord fulfilling a portion of His duties as our celestial High Priest. We are told that “another angel” – manifestly the Angel and Mediator of the covenant – “came and stood at the altar, having a golden censer; and there was given Him much incense, that He should offer it with the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar which was before the throne”.
We know that the spirits of just men made perfect, though not present in our assemblies and closets below nor immediate spectators of our worship here, are present around that altar before the throne – spectators of our worship as it appears there – that is, as God sees it. And it is surely easy to believe that the advantage they thus possess for understanding the condition of the Church is not less, but greater, than if they revisited it here in its militant condition. By the mediation of Christ we see them made intelligently aware of “the prayers of all saints”. They learn of these prayers in their combined and united fulness, not by any laboured effort of their own to piece together ten thousand isolated portions of their own knowledge of them, but after these portions are combined – with no omissions and no perversions – by the ministering hand of our glorious High Priest before the throne. But the “prayers of all saints” at any moment are the very best reflection and exposition of the affairs and dangers and prospects of the whole Church at that moment. Nothing so embodies the successes or failures – the joys and sorrows, the conflicts and conquests of the Church – as her prayers. Her history is mirrored in her prayers with perfect accuracy. Give me “the prayers of all saints”, and I will tell you the condition of the Church – far more accurately than if, with the swiftness of the angels’ wings and of the lightning flash, I had gone through all her assemblies and witnessed with eyes of flesh the state of all her families and all her members. Give me the prayers of all saints, and I will write you a Church history such as no historian ever wrote. This advantage the redeemed in heaven have by being present while the Angel of the covenant offers before the throne the prayers of all saints. And if to this we add that His intercessions are with infinite accuracy grounded continually on the ever-varying state of His people on earth, and every individual of them, we will see that the priesthood of Christ in heaven is, if I may so speak, a kind of divine dial, on which the whole history of the Church on earth may be read off with perfect accuracy at every moment by the redeemed brethren in heaven.
Thus much on the one side of this noble theme. And turning now to the other side, to the correlative and supplementary truth, it will be equally plain
(2) that the priesthood of Christ in glory is the medium of the intelligent sympathy of the Church below with the interests and worship of the Church above.
For, apart from Christ executing this office in heaven, we would be more hopelessly cut off from any appreciable acquaintance with them than they from us. We cannot know by what varied means God might make up the removal of such a medium of knowledge to them; but we do know that there is nothing in our whole state here below that could remedy such a loss to us. Were the worship of our departed brethren in heaven altogether dissociated from the priesthood of our Lord, we must be aware from our own experience that we could form no conception of its elements or nature, and consequently could have no real sympathy with them. Direct acquaintance with the infinite, eternal immensity of God, and direct access to communion with God therein, we cannot have. No man comes to the Father but by Jesus – by Jesus in the execution of His priesthood.
Through the medium of that priesthood we know the aspect in which the divine nature reveals itself to us, to be adored and trusted in – to be glorified and enjoyed. We know the satisfied perfection of its infinite justice, and the satisfying and ever-ready communications of its infinite favour and gracious, fatherly complacency. We know most expressly the revealed and stipulated blessings which we may ask and expect, and the whole terms of peace and grace in which, in our unworthiness and helplessness, we may nevertheless stand toward the great God of heaven and earth. For they are laid down in a covenant, which could not more clearly or explicitly embody them than in its exceeding great and precious promises. And with sufficient spiritual light we may understand our relation and intercourse with God, and His with us – I will say far more satisfactorily and profoundly and convincingly, and with far less scope for error, than our relation and intercourse with one another in any of those ties that bind us to each other here.
It is in this self-same everlasting covenant – sealed and ministered by the self-same priesthood of our celestial High Priest – that the redeemed in glory worship God. Their spiritual light and insight into their covenant with God far exceeds ours. “We see through a glass darkly”, they “face to face”. Here “we know in part,” they “know even as also [they] are known”. But what they know fully above is what we know also truly, though partially, if we have the Spirit’s teaching here below. What they see face to face is the same that we see through a glass darkly – by the help of the Word and the medium of ordinances in the Church militant. Their worship is, in all its elements, in its materials and its spirit, identical with ours. We are not cut off from intelligent sympathy with saints in heaven – our brethren of whom we have been for a time bereaved. The elements of their joy and worship are the very elements of our own believing consciousness here below. Their use of Christ in His priesthood is identical with ours. Their mode of access to the throne in glory is our medium of access to the throne of grace; the themes of their thanksgiving and praise are ours; and the covenant which encompasses and guarantees unto eternity all their joy is ours too, for though our house be not so with God as theirs is, He hath made with us the self-same covenant, ordered in all things and sure, and the High Priest at His right hand for ever protects its validity.
“Take comfort, Christians, when your friends / In Jesus fall asleep.” They are not carried beyond the compass of your communion, nor taken away to a realm and to exercises defying your comprehension. Your own conversation – your citizenship – even while here, is in heaven. You are not “strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and of the household of God”. You are come unto Mount Zion, unto the city of the living God, to the heavenly Jerusalem, to the spirits of your beloved departed ones made perfect. They have the deepest sympathy with you; and only earthliness can shut you out from sympathy with them. Your relief against every tendency to earthliness is in the sympathy and services of the High Priest in heaven; and by that priesthood at the right hand of the throne, the children of faith on earth and of glory in heaven are knit together in one communion, and the angels of God do service to them. For in the glorious ministrations of the heavenly priesthood of Christ we see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.
And now, laying our hearts open by faith to the soothing and exalting influence of divine revelations such as these, what force should we not find in the unanimous voices of apostles, psalmists and prophets, as they call upon us, saying, “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For . . . your life is hid with Christ in God.” “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.” Come, my people, enter into these your celestial chambers; and when Christ, who is your life, shall appear, ye also shall appear with Him in glory.
1The concluding part of a sermon taken, with editing, from The Family Treasury for 1870. The first part developed the thought: “If heaven is the scene of the priesthood of Christ, it is thereby also the scene of the Church’s worship”. A previous, related sermon on this text appeared in the issues for January and February.