In the words of the apostle, in his Epistle to the Colossians, I call upon you, “If ye be risen with Christ, seek those things that are above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God.” “Set your affections on things above, and not on things on the earth.” Yes, to such an exercise of the affections we have constant need to exhort one another. Perhaps we know too little of the glorious things above in order to love them heartily. First, let us consider the event itself; secondly, what the apostle saw in heaven.
1. Who is the man that speaks to us in our text? The more remarkable the things are which any one relates, the more important it is to know who our informant is, whether he deserves credit. Now, you are aware that the speaker on this occasion is no fanciful enthusiast, no mere sentimentalist. He is a man who in numerous passages of his Epistles zealously opposed religious delusions and a false spirituality, and strove to fix both himself and the Church on the written, firm, prophetic Word, and not on feelings, visions, and ecstasies. Indeed, we may say of him that a calm reflective understanding predominated in him more than in any other of the apostles. He was also a man of learning. It cannot be imagined for one moment that vainglory and self-exaltation prompted him to give the narrative contained in our text. Oh! in what a light do we, imperfect Christians, appear when placed by the side of this great apostle! We who are used to experience only some slight measure of answer to prayer and of spiritual elevation. Only think! for fourteen years he kept this matter to himself! How does this impress on it the stamp of truth! Let us now consider the statements of the apostle. He begins with saying, “It is not expedient for me, doubtless, to glory.” Do not imagine (he means to say) that I wish to utter this for my own glory. “I knew a man in Christ,” he goes on to say. Paul speaks of himself as of a third person. In looking back on a period of life long since passed, a person feels as if he was contemplating another and not himself. At such a distance a person judges of himself with more freedom, impartiality, and truth. Paul calls himself “a man in Christ.” He enjoyed the great privilege to lose sight of his own personality, and only to view himself in the attire of his Surety. He had a special reason for calling himself on this occasion “a man in Christ.” He wishes in doing so to meet the question how it came to pass that he was so highly honoured; it was because he was a man in Christ that before him the gates of paradise must fly open. He says, “I was caught up”; according to the word used in the original, I was forcibly carried away. He was caught up from the earth. But whither? To some blessed star, from whence, as Moses viewed the promised land, so he might view the land of glory glimmering in the distance? Oh no, his flight went further. He was in the very heart of this land. How often in the dark seasons of his life had he looked with sighs to this distant region! How often had he thought that he would willingly resign everything on earth that only a fleeting glance might be allowed him through the impenetrable veil which covers that land of immortal beauty! There he stood. The tumult of the world was hushed around him. Oh what a life in those serene fields of light and love! In those palmy groves of everlasting peace what forms, what visions, what tones of praise!
2. Was Paul then literally in heaven? Is there, in fact, a world of blessedness behind the clouds? Truly I think that Paul was not the first to inform us of that. He says, “He was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.” And his meaning appears to be simply this: what he had heard and seen during this visit to the other world was of such a peculiar kind that it was absolutely impossible to express it in human language. Oh yes, the apostle might have been cordially willing to have painted before our eyes an image of that blessed world, but whence could he take the colours for the painting? Would he have taken something from the light of the sun, from the blooming meadows of our earthly spring, from the groves and solemn stillness of our summer mornings? Alas! he would only have dipped his pencil in poor dull shades. All this the apostle felt, and he preferred being silent. He might have been willing to describe to us how the saints appeared. Oh, gladly would he have told us in what glory his Lord and Saviour there appeared to him. But what could he say? But there is still another circumstance which perhaps gives us a greater idea of the glory of what Paul heard and felt in the third heaven than even his silence--I mean the ardent longing of the apostle to return again to the blessedness that he had once enjoyed. But his wishes could not be taken into consideration. He was obliged to return to this dark earth and to the toilsome path of his apostleship. But after his return his renunciation of the world and its lusts was rendered complete. His conversation is henceforth in heaven. Paul knew that he could return to the blessedness he had beheld by no other path than death. Well, be it so, no hour was more longed for by him than that. What the apostle saw on this occasion we certainly cannot see in the same way, but we may still behold it in the mirror of an unimpeachable testimony. (F. W. Krummacher.)
I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord.--
Paul’s vision
How did St. Paul come to speak of himself under the personality of another?
1. Natural diffidence. For the more refined a man is the more he will avoid direct mention of himself. All along he has been forced to speak of self. Fact after fact was wrung out.
2. St. Paul speaks of a divided experience of two selves: one Paul in the third heaven, enjoying the beatific vision; another on earth, buffeted by Satan. The former he chose rather to regard as the Paul that was to be. He dwelt on the latter as the actual Paul, lest he should mistake himself in the midst of the heavenly revelations. Such a double nature is in us all. In all there is an Adam and a Christ--an ideal and a real. Witness the strange discrepancy often between the writings of the poet or the sermons of the preacher and their actual lives. And yet in this there is no necessary hypocrisy, for the one represents the man’s aspiration, the other his attainment. But the apostle felt that it was dangerous to be satisfied with mere aspirations and fine sayings, and therefore he chose to take the lowest--the actual self--treating the highest as, for the time, another man (verse 5). Were the caterpillar to feel within himself the wings that are to be, and be haunted with instinctive forebodings of the time when he shall hover about flowers and meadows, yet the wisdom of that caterpillar would be to remember his present business on the leaf, lest, losing himself in dreams, he should never become a winged insect at all.
I. The time when this vision took place. The date is vague--“about fourteen years ago.” Some have identified it with that recorded (Act_9:1-43) at his conversion. But--
1. The words in that transaction were not “unlawful to utter.” They are three times recorded.
2. There was no doubt as to St. Paul’s own locality in that vision. So far from being exalted, he was stricken to the ground.
3. The vision was of an humbling character: “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?”
II. Paul had known many such visions (verse 7).
1. This marks out the man. Indeed, to comprehend the visions we must comprehend the man. For God does not reveal His mysteries to men of selfish or hard or phlegmatic temperaments, but to those of spiritual sensitiveness. There are physically certain sensitivenesses to sound and colour that qualify men to become gifted musicians and painters--so spiritually there are certain susceptibilities, and on these God bestows strange gifts, sights, and feelings not to be uttered in human language. The Jewish temperament--its fervour, moral sense, veneration, indomitable will, adapted it to be the organ of revelation.
2. Now all this was, in its fulness, in St. Paul. A heart, a brain, and a soul of fire; all his life a suppressed volcano; his acts “living things with hands and feet,” his words “half battles.” A man, consequently, of terrible inward conflicts (read Rom_7:1-25.). You will find there no dull metaphysics; all is intensely personal. So, too, in Act_16:1-40. He had no abstract perception of Macedonia’s need of the gospel. To his soul a man of Macedonia cries, “Come over and help us.” Again (Act_18:1-28), a message came in a vision. St. Paul’s life was with God, his very dreams were of God. He saw a Form which others did not see, and heard a Voice which others could not hear (Act_27:23).
3. But such things are seen and heard under certain conditions. Many of St. Paul’s visions were when he was--
(1) “Fasting.” “Fulness of bread “ and abundance of idleness are not the conditions in which we can see the things of God.
(2) In the midst of trial. In the prison, during the shipwreck, while “the thorn was in his flesh.”
4. This was the experience of Christ Himself. God does not lavish His choicest gifts, but reserves them.
5. Yet though inspiration is granted in its fulness only to rare, choice spirits, in degree it belongs to all Christians. There have been moments, surely, in our experience, when the vision of God was clear. They were not moments of fulness or success. In some season of desertion you have in solitary longing seen the sky-ladder as Jacob saw it, or in childish purity--for “Heaven lies around us in our infancy”--heard a voice as Samuel did; or in feebleness of health, when the weight of the bodily frame was taken off, Faith brightened her eagle eye, and saw far into the tranquil things of death; or in prayer you have been conscious of a Hand in yours, and a Voice, and you could almost feel the Eternal Breath upon your brow.
III. The things seen are unutterable.
1. They are “unspeakable” because they are untranslatable into language. The fruits of the Spirit--love, joy, peace, etc.
how can these beexplained in words? Our feelings, convictions, aspirations, devotions, what sentences of earth can express them? In Revelations 4 John in high symbolic language attempts, but inadequately, to shadow forth the glory which his spirit realised, but which his sense saw not. For heaven is not scenery, nor anything appreciable by ear or eye; heaven is God felt.
2. They are “not lawful for a man to utter.” Christian modesty forbids. There are transfiguration moments, bridal hours of the soul, and not easily forgiven are those who would utter the secrets of its high intercourse with its Lord. You cannot discuss such subjects without vulgarising them. God dwells in the thick darkness. Silence knows more of Him than speech. His name is secret, therefore beware how you profane His stillness. The secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him. To each of His servants He giveth “a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth save he that receiveth it.” (F. W. Robertson, M. A.)
St. Paul’s rapture and thorn in the flesh
Paul probably refers to the “trance,” or vision, of Act_22:1-30.
I. Some explanation of this remarkable passage.
1. The nature of the vision. It was in a state in which the mental faculties, apart from the senses, are so engrossed by certain objects as to render the mind incapable of attending to any other. Such raptures were one of the ancient modes of inspiration. God spake to Moses, David, and the prophets in visions, and their return in the days of the apostles served to evince the identity of the two dispensations in their origin and authority.
2. The special communications made in this vision. If the “third heaven” is the place where God immediately resides, we are sure that “paradise” is the same, from the promise to the penitent malefactor. There Paul “heard unspeakable words,” etc. Doubtless the inhabitants of heaven conceive of objects in a manner as superior to our modes of conception as are the objects themselves to those of earth. How, then, could they communicate their conceptions to beings of our limited and dull faculties! In like manner the apostle on his return to his former state would find an insurmountable impediment to the communications of what he had seen and heard. But though not to be described in the language of sense, it would appear from the effect left on his mind that the revelation was of the most exhilarating nature; a tone had been given to his character, and a new and seraphic passion had been kindled in his soul. He felt for ever afterwards as a man to whom heaven was not altogether future.
3. The affliction with which he was immediately visited.
II. The general instruction which it furnishes. Note--
1. The wisdom and goodness of God in those severe afflictions with which even eminent saints may be visited.
2. The Divine nature of Christ, and His immediate presidency over the affairs of the whole Church. This Divine Saviour is particularly employed about the mission of His servants, their qualifications for office, their trials, supports, and deliverance. Hence the propriety of direct address to Him in critical circumstances, while, in the ordinary course of affairs, the ultimate object of address is the Almighty Father.
3. The existence of paradise and a third heaven as the receptacle of the souls of believers. What ground, then, for the notion of a sleepy condition of the soul after death? (J. Leifchild, D. D.)
