“ He is not a God of the dead, but of the living; for all live unto him.
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We need not only a body to convey revelation to us, but to reveal us to others. Therefore the new body must be like the old. Nay, it must be the same body, glorified as we are glorified, with all that was distinctive of each from his fellows more visible than ever before. The accidental, the nonessential, the incomplete will have vanished. That which made the body what it was in the eyes of those who loved us will be tenfold there. Every eye shall see the beloved, every heart will cry, “My own again! More mine because more himself than ever I beheld him!” Do we not say on earth, “He is not himself today,” or “She is more like herself than I have seen her for long?” For we carry a better likeness of our friends in our hearts than their countenances, save at precious seasons, manifest to us.
Shall a man love his neighbor as himself, and must he be content not to know him in heaven? Shall the love that God has created towards father and mother, brother and sister, wife and child, go moaning and longing to all eternity; or worse, far worse, die out of our bosoms? No, God will not take you, has not taken you from me to bury you out of my sight in the abyss of his own unfathomable being, where I cannot follow and find you, myself lost in the same awful gulf. Our God is an unveiling, a revealing God. He will raise you from the dead, that I may behold you; that that which vanished from the earth may again stand forth, looking out of the same eyes of eternal love and truth.
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Commentary
by Dale Darling
The imaginative hope in this passage is something I now and then see in my dreams. And I long for the promise that we will know as we are now known. But I cannot linger in such a dream world, too long for release, when there are neighbors to love in the eternal present, and so much yet to do in obedient faith.