The Lord will save me into His everlasting kingdom.' Was that a mistake on Paul's part? Very soon after he wrote these words, perhaps even before the winter against the cold of which he asked Timothy to bring his one cloak that he had left at Troas, he was again brought before the Emperor, and then was led outside the walls of Rome, where a gorgeous church now bears his name, and there, according to tradition, was decapitated. Yes; that was just what he expected. For, as I have already pointed out, a verse or two before my text says, I have finished my course.' And yet, with the certainty that Death was close by him, he lifts up this ringing song of triumph, The Lord will deliver me from every evil work, and will save me into His heavenly Kingdom.' He expected that deliverance and saving into the Kingdom to be accomplished precisely by the fact of his death.
A man who has a firm grip of Christ's hand sees all things differently from him who has no such stay. If Jesus is standing by us, and strengthening us, we can look with a smile at the worst that Nero can do, and can tell even the executioner: You do not mean it; do you know what you are doing? You think you are inflicting evil upon me. You are delivering me from every evil.' Death is the great emancipator from all manner of evil, be it the evil of sorrows or the evil of their parent sins. And he who rightly understands the operation of that, the last of earthly incidents, understands that it is, in the fullest sense, the smiting off of his chains, and the lifting of him up high into a region where no malaria of evil can ever rise.
Death is not merely to be looked at on the side of what it takes a man away from, but on the side of what it introduces him to. He shall deliver me from every evil'; that is much, but it might be effected by crushing the man's consciousness and annihilating him. Bare exemption and escape from the ills that flesh is heir to are not all the choice gifts with which Death comes laden. In his bony left hand is the gift of deliverance from all evil. In his right there is the positive gift of participation in all good. He shall deliver me from evil, and shall save me into His everlasting Kingdom.' And so that grim form is the porter at the gate, who ushers the man who has hoped in Christ into the royalty of His presence.
Mark that here, for the only time in Scripture, we have the expression, the heavenly Kingdom.' Why? Because Paul knew and felt that he was in the Kingdom already, and so he could not say barely that Christ through death was going to save him into the Kingdom. He was already there, but just because he was, therefore the last enemy assumed this friendly and familiar form to him, and was sure to bring him into the heavenly form of the Kingdom, of whose earthly form he was already a subject. If--and only if--you are in the Kingdom here, can you quietly look forward and be sure that the Lord, when He sends His messenger, will send Him to do the double work of delivering you out of all evil, and ushering you into all glory of good.
THE END
