compensation
of all the ill that death has brought into human life; and when we see
death made the medium of God's clearest manifestation, we are almost
grateful to it for affording material for an exhibition of God's love
which transforms all our own life and all our own hopes.

Lasting joy is the condition in which God desires us to be, and He has
given us cause of joy. In Christ's victory we see all that is needed to
give us hopefulness about the future. Each man finds for himself
assurance of God's interest in us and in our actual condition: assurance
that whatever is needful to secure for us a happy eternity has been
done; assurance that in a new heavens and a new earth we shall find
lasting satisfaction. This true, permanent, all-embracing joy is open to
all, and is actually enjoyed by those who have something of Christ's
Spirit, whose chief desire is to see holiness prevail and to keep
themselves and others in harmony with God. To such the accomplishment of
God's will seems a certainty, and they have learned that the
accomplishment of that will means good to them and to all who love God.
The holiness and harmony with God that win this joy are parts of it. To
be the friends of Christ, imbued with His views of life and of God, this
from first to last is a thing of joy.

That which the disciples at length believed and felt to be the
culmination of their faith was that Jesus had come forth from God. He
Himself more fully expresses what He desired them to believe about Him
in the words: "I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world:
again I leave the world, and go to the Father." No doubt there is a
sense in which any man may use this language of himself. We can all
truthfully say we came forth from God and came into the world; and we
pass out from the world and return to God. But that the disciples did
not understand the words in this sense is obvious from the difficulty
they found in reaching this belief. Had Jesus merely meant that it was
true of Him, as of all others, that God is the great existence out of
whom we spring and to whom we return, the disciples could have found no
difficulty and the Jews must all have believed in Him. In some special
and exceptional sense, then, He came forth from God. What, then, was
this sense?

When Nicodemus came to Jesus, he addressed Him as a teacher "come from
God," because, he added, "no man can do these miracles which Thou doest
except God be with Him." In Nico