heavens, where He is gone, is known by faith to be all "for us. Our need, as well as our sorrow, is in remembrance there. Jacob's sufferings were those of a penitent, Stephen's were a martyr's; but heaven was the heaven of Jacob as well as of Stephen.

But though this is so, this is not all. Faith knows another secret or mystery in heaven. It knows that if the Lord, as He surely did, took His seat there in these characters of grace for us, He took it likewise as the One whom man had despised and the world rejected. This is equally among the apprehensions which faith takes of the heavens where the Lord Jesus, the Son of God, is now seated.

The Lord Jesus died under the hand of God, His soul was made an offering for sin. "It pleased the Lord to bruise Him." And He rose as the One who had thus died, His resurrection witnessing the acceptance of the sacrifice; and He ascended the heavens in the same character also, there to carry on the purpose of the grace of God in such a death and such a resurrection.

But the Lord Jesus died also under the hand of man; that is, man's wicked hand was in that death, as well and as surely as God's infinite grace. He was refused by the husbandmen, hated by the world, cast out, crucified, and slain. This is another character of his death. And His resurrection and ascension were in that character also, parts or stages in the history of One whom the world had rejected; His resurrection, consequently, pledging the judgment of the world (Acts xvii. 31), and His ascension leading Him to the expectation of a day when His enemies are to be made His footstool (Heb. x. 13).

These distinctions give us to understand the different sights which faith, in the light of the word, gets of the ascended Jesus, seeing Him, as it does, in priestly grace there, making intercession for us; and, at the same time, waiting, as in expectation, the judgment of His enemies.

The Gospel publishes the first of these mysteries, i. e., the death of the Lord Jesus under the hand of God for us, and His resurrection and ascension as in character with such a death. And this Gospel is rightly gloried

in as all our salvation. But the second of these mysteries, the death of the Lord under the hand of man, may be somewhat forgotten, while the first of them is thus rightly gloried in. But this is a serious mistake in the soul of a saint, or in the calculations and testimony of the Church. For let this great fact, this second mystery, as we have called it, the death of the Lord Jesus under the hand of man, be forgotten, as it may be on earth, it is surely not forgotten in heaven. It is not, it is true, the occasion of present action there; it is the death of the victim, and the intercessions of the Priest upon such death, which form the action that is there now. But as surely it will be the death of the divine Martyr, the death of the Son of God at the hand of man, that will give character to the action there by and bye.

These distinctions are very clearly preserved in Scripture. Heaven, as it is opened to us in Rev. iv., is a very different heaven, differently minded I mean, differently moved and occupied, from the heaven presented to us in the Epistle to the Hebrews; just as different, I may say, as the death of the Lord Jesus looked at as under man's hand, i. e., perpetrated by us, and as under God's hand, i. e., accomplished for us. We may have the same objects or materials in each, but they will be seen in very different connections. We have, for instance, a throne and a temple in each of these heavens, the heaven of the Hebrews and the heaven of the Apocalypse; but the contrasts between them are very solemnly preserved. In the Hebrews, the throne is a throne of grace, and whatever our present time of need and sorrow may require, is found there and got there. In the Apocalypse, the throne is one of judgment, and the instruments and agencies of wrath and of vengeance are seen to be lying before and around it. In the Hebrews, the sanctuary or temple is occupied by the High Priest of our profession, the Mediator of the better covenant, serving

a In preaching the Gospel, the sin of man, in putting the Lord of glory to death, will surely be declared; but it is the death of the Lord as the Lamb of God which is the ground of the grace published by the Gospel; and that is what I mean here.

there in the virtue of His own most precious blood. In the Apocalypse, the temple gives fearful notes of preparation for judgment. Lightning, and earthquake, and voices attend the opening of it. It is as the temple seen by the prophet, filled with smoke, and the pillars of it shaking in token that the God to whom vengeance belonged was there in His glory (see Isaiah vi.).

The sight we get of heaven in the Apocalypse, is thus very solemn. It is the place of power furnishing itself with the instruments of judgment. Seals are opened, trumpets are blown, vials are emptied, but all this introducing some awful visitation of the earth. The altar that is there is not the altar of the Epistle to the Hebrews, where the heavenly priesthood eat of the bread of life; but an altar that supplies penal fire for the earth. And there is war there; and at the last it opens for Him whose name is called "the Word of God," whose vesture is dipped in blood, and who carries a sharp sword in His mouth, that by it He may smite the nations.

Surely this is heaven in a new character. And the contrast is very solemn. This is not the heaven which faith now apprehends, a sanctuary of peace filled with the provisions and witnesses of grace, but a heaven which tells us that though judgment is the Lord's strange work, yet that it is His work in due season. For heaven, in its revolutions, is, as we may say, the place or the witness of grace, of judgment, and of glory. It is the heaven of grace now, it will become the heaven of judgment in the day of Rev. iv., and so continue throughout the action of the Book of the Apocalypse, and then, at the close of that Book, as we sce in chap. xxi. xxii., it becomes the heaven of glory.

The soul should be accustomed to this serious truth, that judgment precedes glory. I speak of these things in the progress of the history of the earth or the world. The believer has passed from death into life. There is no condemnation for him. He rises not to judgment but to life. But he ought to know, that in the progress of the divine history of the earth or the world, judgment precedes glory. The kingdom will be seen in the sword

or "rod of iron," ere it be seen in the sceptre. When the Son takes the heathen for His possession, the first thing He does is to dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. The Ancient of days sits in white garments on a throne of fiery flame with the books opened before Him, ere the Son of Man comes to Him with the clouds of heaven to receive dominion (Ps. ii.; Dan. vii.).

These lessons are very clearly taught and marked in Scripture. In the day of Rev. iv., as I may express it, heaven has conceived a new idea, taken notice of a new object. It is Christ rejected by man, and not Christ accepted of God for sinners, that has become its thought and object. And accordingly, preparations are making to avenge the wrongs of the Lord Jesus on the world, and to vindicate His rights in the earth: in other words, it is heaven beginning that action which is to seat Him in His kingdom upon the judgment of His enemies.

But all this shews us again, according to my leading thought in these meditations on "the Son of God," how it is the same Person that is kept before us, and to be known by us, in each and all of the stages or periods of the same great mystery. We are still, at whatever point we may have arrived, in company with the same Jesus. For these distinctions, which I have been now noticing, tell us, that He has been received up into heaven, and is now seated there, in the very characters in which He had been before known and manifested here on earth. For He had been here, as the One who accomplished the grace of God towards us sinners to perfection, and as the One who endured the enmity of the world in its full measure; and it is in these two characters, as we have now seen, that He is seated in heaven.

He does not quickly take this second character, or appear actively in heaven as the One who had been despised and rejected on earth. He lingers ere He reaches the heaven of the Apocalypse. And in this feature of character, in this delaying His approaches to judgment, and tarrying in the place of grace, we have a very sweet expression of the Jesus whom faith has already known. For when He was here, as the God of judgment He

approached Jerusalem with a very measured step. He said to her, "How often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wing," ere He said, "Behold your house is left unto you desolate." He lingered in the plains below, visiting every city and village of the land, in patient service of grace, ere He took his seat on the Mount, to speak of judgment and of the desolations of Zion (Matt. xxiv. 1). And now, of Him who, after this manner, trod softly the road which led Him to the Mount of Olives, the place of judgment, is it written, "The Lord is long-suffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance" (2 Pet. iii.).b

How do we thus hold in view the same Person, with like character attaching to Him, whether when He was here on earth, or as He is now in heaven, the Person One, the moral one, though scenes and conditions change. "The grace that was in Christ in this world is the same with that which is in Him now in heaven."

Comforting words! How truly should we know we speak truly when we say, We know Him! We have been considering Him from the beginning. He lay in the Father's bosom, and then in the Virgin's womb, and the manger of Bethlehem; He traversed the earth in full unsullied glory, though veiled; He died and was buried; rose, and returned to heaven, and, as we have now been meditating, faith sees Him there, the One whom faith had known to be here, the very One, the minister and witness of the grace of God to man, the bearer of man's full enmity against God, and yet the reluctant God of judgment.

But I must notice still more of this same Jesus, and something still more immediately in connection with my present meditation.

When the Lord Jesus Christ was here, He looked for His kingdom. He offered Himself, as her King, the Son of David, to the daughter of Zion. He took the form of the One who had been of old promised by the

b "Son of Man" is the characteristic of His Person, when presented in His judicial glory, as also in His place of dominion in the earth (see Ps. viii.; John v. 27; Matt. xx. 28.)