ere gills
come into play. If you have not here and now the holiness which knits
you to God, and gives you possession of Him, you would not like
'heaven,' if it were possible to carry you to that place, in so far as
it is a place. It is rather strange, if you hope to go to heaven when
you die, that you should be very unwilling to spend a little time in it
whilst you are alive, and that you should expect blessedness then from
that presence of God which brings you no blessedness now.

III. Lastly, we have here the heirs' present knowledge of their future
blessedness.

The Apostle asks that these men may know a thing that clearly seems
unknowable. It is an impossible petition, we might be ready to say,
because it is clear enough that there can be no true knowledge of the
conditions and details of that future life. The dark mountains that lie
between us and it hide their secret well, and few or no stray beams have
reached us. An unborn babe, or a chrysalis in a hole in the ground or in
a chink of a tree, might think as wisely about its future condition as
we can do about that life beyond. There can be no knowledge until there
is experience.

What, then, does Paul mean by framing such a petition as this? The
answer is found in noticing that the knowledge which he is imploring
here is a consequence of a previous knowledge. For, in a former verse,
he prays that these men may have 'the spirit of wisdom in the knowledge
of God'; and when they have got the knowledge of God he thinks that they
will have got the knowledge of 'the riches of the glory of His
inheritance in the saints.' Now, turn that into other words, and it is
just this, that the knowledge of God, which comes by faith and love
here, is in kind so identical with the fullest and loftiest riches of
the knowledge of Him hereafter, that, if we have the one, we are not
without the other. The one is in germ, the other, no doubt, full blown;
the one is the twinkling of the rushlight, as it were, the other is the
blaze of the sunshine. The two states of being are so correspondent that
from the one we draw our clearest knowledge of the other. There are
telescopes, in using which you do not look up when you want to see the
stars, but down on to a reflecting mirror, and there you see them. Such
a reflecting mirror, though it be sometimes muddied and dimmed and
always very small, are the experiences of the Christian soul here.

So, dear friends, if we want to know as much as