The cheering crowd of witnesses

Therefore, since we also have such a large cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us lay aside every hindrance and the sin that so easily ensnares us. Let us run with endurance the race that lies before us, keeping our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.

The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews has just rattled through a list of the faithful from the Old Testament era, those who pointed the way and passed on into death still holding to their hope in God.  He envisages them, and also I think those faithful Christians who have fallen asleep in the Lord, as the crowd in the stadium, cheering on the believers who are still toiling in the race.  Those runners are not looking at the crowds; they are looking to Jesus, who stands at the finish line and beckons them on, just as he stood at the start line and set them running in the first place.  Nevertheless, the cheering crowds are surely an encouragement to those who are growing weary.

I've been thinking in the last couple of days that sometimes the Christian life feels less like a race on a stadium track and more like a lengthy cross country.  The course is not always as clearly marked as you'd like.  It seems to have been designed to take in as many obstacles as possible.  Sometimes you find yourself running through streams, or dodging through trees, and wondering if you've taken a wrong turn.  Sometimes you can't really imagine that the race will ever be finished - unlike a stadium race, you can't see the finish line clearly and you might not be sure how far through you are.  Has anyone, in fact, ever completed this gruelling course?

And of course the primary encouragement when we feel like this is that the Lord Jesus ran this way.  Even when we struggle to lift our eyes to see him at the finish line, we see marks along the way that remind us of him.  Yes, he also battled through these brambles; we see the signs of his passing this way.  That sharp rock on which you stumbled and cut yourself is already marked with the blood which he shed there.  Christ ran this way, and he reached the finished line.  Lift your eyes to him.

But also - do you hear the crowds?  There are so many.  Some of them have barely had time to change out of their running kit; some have been there in the crowd for millennia.  They cheer us on.  They made it.  They ran the race, they reached the finish.  We are all mud-bespattered, but they are gloriously clean.  Some of them still carry marks from the wounds they picked up in the race, but healed now; mere memories of suffering, emblems now of triumph, in some ways more significant than the crowns they wear.  And they cheer us on.  They made it; we can make it.

Let's keep running.

Some disconnected thoughts on All Saints Day

1. I'm guessing not many people in my ecclesiastical neck of the woods will be celebrating All Saints Day, and there are good reasons for that.  However, if we carefully observe that in biblical usage a 'saint' is not a believer of superior rank, but simply anyone who is sanctified (saint-ified) by union with the Lord Jesus through faith, that removes most of the theological objections.  All Saints Day is a day to remember the believers who have gone before us.

2. In our day, there has been a lot of helpful pushback against talk of 'heaven' as the Christian's ultimate destiny, with the more biblical emphasis on 'new creation' coming to the fore.  That is all to the good, but it would be a shame if in the recovery of the great Christian hope we lost something of the penultimate hope, which is to depart and be with Christ.  It is true that we will not all sleep, and we cannot say whether we are the generation that will not die but will see Christ's return - but many of our brothers and sisters have slept, have gone to be with the Lord, and it's right that we bear in mind that they are safe in heaven.

3. It is a huge encouragement to know that there are those who now enjoy something of what we will one day rejoice in forever.  It seems to me that the New Testament does not say that departed believers currently enjoy the vision of God which will captivate them for all eternity; there is a sense in which they cannot yet see the Lord as he is, because they are not wholly themselves - they await the resurrection at the Lord's appearing.  They currently rest in peace; they will rise in glory.  Like us, they do not yet know what they shall be.  But what a blessing to be in the presence of the Lord, even if it means being away from the body!  Better to be a doorkeeper in the house of our God...

4. There is real and living fellowship between those who have gone before and those of us who still labour on earth.  I don't think we have immediate access to the departed saints - I don't think we can or should pray to them, for example - but we have something in a sense more intimate than immediacy.  We are joined to Christ, and they are joined to Christ.  We are one body with them, united by the one Spirit.  They pray and praise above, we pray and praise below, and it is all taken up in one great worship service, presented before God as the offering of the whole church in Jesus.  When we gather we worship, we gather into their presence, because we gather to Christ and to the heavenly Zion.

5. All of this answers, with a firm and unsentimental reality, the dim groping after hope that we see in so much funeral mawkishness.  They are not dead, but have simply gone nextdoor - that sort of thing.  For the dead in Christ, how gloriously true it is that they are not really dead!  How we can rejoice in their comfort and joy!  In Christ they all live.  Alleluia.