That is expressed, of course, by the very attitude in which, in the symbol, He is represented. Away down in the Egyptian desert there sit, moulded in colossal calm, two giant figures, with hands laid restfully in their laps, and wide-open eyes gazing out over the world. There they have sat for millenniums, the embodiment of majestic repose. So Christ sitteth at the right hand of God' rapt in the fulness of eternal calm. But that tranquillity is parallel with the Scriptural representation of the rest of God after creation, which neither indicates previous exhaustion nor connotes present idleness, but expresses the completion of the work and the correspondence of the reality with the ideal which was in the Maker's mind.
In like manner, as I have been trying to point out to you, Christ's rest means the completeness of His finished work, and carries along with it, as that divine rest after creation does in its region, the conception of continuous activity, for just as little as the continuous phenomena of nature can be conceived of, apart from the immanent activity of the ever-working God, and just as the last word of all physical science is that, beneath the so-called causes and so-called forces there must lie a personal will, the only cause known to man, and preservation is a continuous creation, and the changes in nature are the result of the will of the active God, so the past work of Christ, of which He said, when He died, It is finished!' is prolonged into, and carried on through, the ages by the continuous activity of the ever-working Christ. He sitteth at the right hand of God'; and to that session may be applied in full truth what He said Himself, in the vindication of His work on the Sabbath day--My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.'
So the dying martyr looked up in the council chamber, and beyond the vaulted roof saw the heavens opened, and with a significant variation in the symbolical attitude, saw the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.' The seated Christ, we might say, had sprung to His feet, in answer to the dying martyr's faith and prayer, and granted him the vision, not of calm repose, but of intensest activity for his help and sustaining.
The appendix to Mark's Gospel, in like manner, unites these two conceptions of undisturbed tranquillity and of energetic work. For he says that the Lord was received up into heaven, and sat at the right hand of God, and they went everywhere preaching the word.' Then did the Commander-in-chief send His soldiers out into the battlefield, and Himself retire to the safe shelter of the hill? By no means. For the two halves of the picture which look so unlike one another--the Lord seated there, and the servants wandering about and toiling here--are brought to-gether into the one solid reality, they went forth and preached everywhere, the Lord '--seated up yonder--working with them.' So constant activity is the very essence and inseparable accompaniment of the undisturbed tranquillity of the seated Christ. In other places in Scripture we get the same blending together of the two ideas, as, for instance, when Paul says It is Christ that died, yea, rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us.' And in like manner, in Peter's utterance upon Pentecost, already referred to, you find the same idea. Being at the right hand of God exalted, He hath showed forth this which ye now see and hear.' So, working with us, working in us, working for us, working through us, the ever active Christ is with His people, and seated at the right hand of God, shares in all their labours, in all their difficulties, in all their warfare.
