Homilist Psalm 17:15 As for me, I will behold your face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with your likeness. I. MAN'S LIFE IS A DREAM. In what respect is it like a dream? 1. It is unreal. A dream is a mere phantom of the brain, an airy fiction; what the mind sees and hears is mere semblance, not substance. So is life. Every man walketh in a vain show. We live amongst shadows, not substances. 2. It is disorderly. Dreams seem to have no method, no law of succession; they are a jumble of incoherences and incongruities. How disorderly is our life, our plans and theories are conflicting and shifting. 3. It is fleeting. We can dream a poem, a history in a minute or two; dreams take no note of time. So with life: how fleet and fluctuating. It is forgettable. How soon is a dream forgotten! The grandest vision of the night often dissolves into forgetfulness at the break of day. What a tendency in this life there is to forget our best impressions and holiest resolves. Truly, life is a dream. We are often but the creatures of imagination, uncontrolled either by judgment or conscience. II. MAN'S DEATH IS AN AWAKENING. In that dread moment when the soul quits the body it wakes up to the realities of existence. The markets, governments, trades, professions, pleasures, and pursuits of the world fade as a baseless vision of the night the moment the soul opens its eye in eternity. The man is brought, not only into a life of realities, but into conscious contact with these realities — Law, Spirit, God. Death, instead of being the extinction of being, is the awakening of it out of sleep. III. MAN'S SATISFACTION IS GOD'S LIKENESS. "Then shall I be satisfied, when I awake, with Thy likeness." In what respect? Not in the respect of might, or wisdom, or ubiquity. But in the sense of moral character, and the essence of that character is love. "God is love." Man's satisfaction is where? In love. "God is love, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God." "We all, with open face beholding as in a glass the image of God, are changed from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of Christ. (Homilist.) Parallel Verses KJV: As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness. |
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