Daily Devotionals

Devotional: December 31st

THE FUTURE UNKNOWN

Ye know not what shall be on the morrow. - James 4:14

You can only know facts when the facts are communicated. You may speculate and argue and guess as much as you like, but that does not thin the darkness one bit. The unborn child has no more faculty or opportunity for knowing what the life upon earth is like than man here, in the world, has for knowing that life beyond. The chrysalis’s dreams about what it would be when it was a butterfly would be as reliable as a man’s imagination of what a future life will be. So let us feel two things: - Let us be thankful that we do not know, for the ignorance is a sign of the greatness; and then, let us be sure that just the very mixture of knowledge and ignorance which we have about another world is precisely the food which is most fitted to nourish imagination and hope. If we had more knowledge, supposing it could be given, of the conditions of that future life, it would lose some of its power to attract.

Ignorance is not always repellent - blank ignorance is; but ignorance shot with knowledge like a tissue which, when you hold it one way seems all black, and when you tilt it another, seems golden, stimulates men’s desires, hopes, and imagination. So let us thankfully acquiesce in the limited knowledge. " Fools can ask questions which wise men cannot answer, and will not ask."

There are questions which, sometimes, when we are thinking about our own future, and sometimes when we see dear ones go away into the mist, become to us almost torture. It is easy to put them; it is not so easy to say, "Thank God, we cannot answer them yet!" If we could it would only be because the experience of earth was adequate to measure the experience of heaven; and that would be to drop the future down to the low levels of this present. Let us be thankful, then, that so long as we can only speak in language derived from the experiences of earth, we have yet to learn the vocabulary of heaven. Let us be thankful that our best help to know what we shall be is to reverse much of what we are, and that the loftiest and most positive declarations concerning the future lie in negatives like these: "I saw no temple therein." "There shall be no night there." "There shall be no curse there." "There shall be no more sighing nor weeping, for the former things are passed away.’

The white mountains keep their secret well; not until we have passed through the black rocks that make the throat of the pass on the summit, shall we see the broad and shining plains beyond the hills. Let us be thankful for, and own the attractions of, the knowledge that is wrapt in ignorance, and thankfully say, " Now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be."

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