My thoughts soared high yesterday as I dwelt upon the joys, the happiness, and the eternal fullness of living in the presence of God and growing in the knowledge of God forever. Today my thoughts are sobered by the present realities of dwelling upon this earth. Life, as the poets say, is a vale of tears. Jesus said, in this world you will have tribulation (Jn 16.33), and Paul said, we must enter the kingdom of God through many tribulations (Acts 14.22). Why, then, should we expect comfort in this world?
Can we hope to go through this world any better than our best Friend? While He was here He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Shall we be a stranger to these things? Can we expect to be kindly entertained in the very place where He had nowhere to lay His head? Did He not say that if the world hated Him, then it’ll also hate us (Jn 16.20)? And did He not bless the way we travel, though He knew it would be a way of suffering and persecution, of losses and crosses (Mt 5.10-12; Mk 10.29-30)? This world is not the heaven promised us; the heaven promised us is yet ahead of us. We are traveling, like the OT church before us, through a wildness land. Ours is a night and a day of weeping, a night and a day of trouble (Job 14.1). The joy that comes in the morning to those who weep through the night, the comfort that’s promised to those who mourn over their sin, and the light that’s promised to those who traverse the darkness of a fallen world, all come with the dawn, not of tomorrow, but of eternity.
There is nothing for us in this world–yet. Until it is made new by God (Rev 21), it is the wilderness in which Christ is our manna, in which Christ is our Rock in a weary land, in which Christ is our water from the rock, in which Christ is our cloud of covering, our light in the night, our Healer lifted up in the wilderness for the healing of all who will look on, our taste of heaven until earth itself is made heaven.
Christ Himself traveled through the very world in which we live. He walked on its rugged paths. He rubbed shoulders with its cruel sinners. He was buffeted by its heart-breaking sorrows. He shed both His blood and His tears here. He gave His life here. But it was in so doing that He actually overcame the world. This is why He told us to take heart (Jn 16.33). Our comfort lies in the fact that though we will have trouble here, in Him we may be of good cheer because He has overcome it–for us, and now, increasingly, in us. In Christ, we can have an inward soul-joy (the greatest of joys), that causes our whole being to sing and blossom with the beautiful prospect of an incomparable happiness and blessedness yet to come in which death, sorrow, pain, and all our tears will be no more.
So how’s your journey going? Do you have strength for another day? Are you resting on earths dried up and deceitful brooks for your comfort, joy, and happiness, or are you drawing these from the River of Life that flows from the throne of God and never runs dry?
You must traverse this vale of tears for now; and you must add your tears to all those which have been shed by those who walked it before you. There’s no true, lasting joy in this rugged place for the souls of hungry pilgrims. But there is strength for the journey, comfort in the way, joy in the walk, and eternal happiness at the end for all who walk through this wilderness feeding their souls on Christ and setting their hearts on the Land He promised us, the Land in which He is preparing a place, the Land from which He’ll come again to take us home.
Press on dear pilgrim! Run the race! Don’t faint now; you’re almost home.
