These all died in faith.'
That is a very grand thought as applied to those old patriarchs, that just because all their lives long God had done nothing for them of what He had promised, therefore they died believing that He was going to do it. All their disappointments fed their faith. Because the words on which they had been leaning all their lives had not come to a fulfilment, therefore they must be true. That is a strange paradox, and yet it is the one which filled these men's hearts with peace, and which made the dying Jacob break in upon his prophetic swan-song, at the close, with the verse which stands in no relation to what goes before it, or what comes after it. I have waited for Thy salvation, O Lord.' These all died in faith' just because they had not received the promises.'
So, dear brethren, for us the end of life may have a faith nurtured by disappointments, made more sure of everything because it has nothing; certain that He calls into existence another world to redress the balance of the old, because here there has been so much of bitterness and weariness and woe. And our end like theirs may be an end beatified by a clear vision of the things that no man hath seen, nor can see'; and into the darkness there may come for us, as there came of old to another, an open heaven and a beam of God's glory smiting us on the face and changing it into the face of an angel. And so there may come for us all in that article and act of death, a tranquil and cheerful abandonment of the life which has been futile and frail, except when thought of as the vestibule of heaven. Some men cling to the vanishing skirts of. this earthly life, and say, I will not let thee go.' And others are able to say, Lord! I have waited for Thy salvation.' Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace.'
These all died in faith'; and the sorrows and disappointments of the past made the very background on which the bow of promise spanned the sky, beneath which they passed into the Promised Land. These all died in faith'; with a vision gleaming upon the inward sense which made the solitude of death bliss, and with a calm willingness to depart, and to be with Christ, which is far better.'
Choose whether you will live by sense and die in sorrow, or whether you will live by the faith of the Son of God, and die to enter the City which hath foundations,' which He has built for them that love Him, and which even now, in seasons of calm weather,' we can see shining on the hill top far away.
