With One Another – Forever!!! (6)

 

“He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, to him I will give of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and a new name written on the stone which no one knows but he who receives it.” Revelation 2:17.

 

This may appear to be a strange verse in an exploration of living in eternity with one another in Jesus Christ, and yet it strikes at the heart of the matter. In pondering the glory within and through and behind this verse (for the inside of this verse is larger than the outside – in other words, we can’t really “see” this verse until we move into the verse and live in the verse and live through the verse into the eternals), I have found no greater guides than C. S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory, and George MacDonald in The New Name. And, as students of Lewis know, MacDonald’s The New Name is the headwaters of Lewis’s The Weight of Glory.

 

In Lewis’s preface to his, George MacDonald, An Anthology – 365 Readings, he writes:

 

“The Divine Sonship is the key – conception which unites all the different elements of his thought. I dare not say that he is never in error; but to speak plainly I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself.”

 

“I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him. But is has not seemed to me that those who have received my books kindly take even now sufficient notice of the affiliation.”

 

While I want to continue to ponder Lewis’s preface, I’ll defer until this series on being with one another in eternity is completed and then, the Lord willing, come back to the preface in some more writing. For the present, Lewis quotes from The New Name in the anthology. Below are some excerpts I’ve selected from The New Name; can you connect what MacDonald is saying with the glory of being with one another in eternity?

 

 

“The true name is one which expresses the character, the nature, the being, the meaning of the person who bears it. It is the man's own symbol, - his soul's picture, in a word, - the sign which belongs to him and to no one else. Who can give a man this, his own name? God alone. For no one but God sees what the man is, or even, seeing what he is, could express in a name-word the sum and harmony of what he sees. To whom is this name given? To him that overcometh. When is it given? When he has overcome. Does God then not know what a man is going to become? As surely as he sees the oak which he put there lying in the heart of the acorn. 

Why then does he wait till the man has become by overcoming ere he settles what his name shall be? He does not wait; he knows his name from the first. But as -- although repentance comes because God pardons -- yet the man becomes aware of the pardon only in the repentance; so it is only when the man has become his name that God gives him the stone with the name upon it, for then first can he understand what his name signifies. 

It is the blossom, the perfection, the completion, that determines the name; and God foresees that from the first, because he made it so; but the tree of the soul, before its blossom comes, cannot understand what blossom it is to bear, and could not know what the word meant, which, in representing its own unarrived completeness, named itself. Such a name cannot be given until the man is the name.”

 

“God's name for a man must then be the expression in a mystical word--a word of that language which all who have overcome understand--of his own idea of the man, that being whom he had in his thought when he began to make the child, and whom he kept in his thought through the long process of creation that went to realize the idea. To tell the name is to seal the success--to say, "In thee also I am well pleased."”

 

“From this it follows that there is a chamber also – (O God, humble and accept my speech) – a chamber in God himself, into which none can enter but the one, the individual, the peculiar man, - out of which chamber that man has to bring revelation and strength for his brethren. This is that for which he was made – to reveal the secret things of the Father.”

 

“Each will behold in the other a marvel of revelation, a present son or daughter of the Most High, come forth from him to reveal him afresh. In God each will draw nigh to each.”

 

MacDonald is saying that, in Christ, we each have a unique aspect of God to display to others, and that our New Name indicates that aspect, that dimension (I’m not sure there is an adequate word for what I mean by “aspect” and “dimension” because we don’t know what we don’t know).

 

When MacDonald writes, “Each will behold in the other a marvel of revelation,” I think of Lewis writing that, “It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor.”

 

Peter writes, “But you are a Chosen Race, a Royal Priesthood, a Holy Nation, a People for God’s own possession, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light…” (1 Peter 2:9). 

In the deep wisdom and holy purposes of our God, it takes us all, in Christ, to display our Father’s excellencies.

 

To be continued…