"Like the days of heaven upon earth." This is the promise the Lord gave to Israel when they went into Canaan, if they would obey Him (Deut. 11:21). and the heavenly kingdom are all alike; they are not of, or out from, this world, but they are to come down from God, out of the heavens, and exist on this earth. All true life on this earth went into bankruptcy with the fall of Adam. Since then, all true life is from above, and founded in redemption. There is a passage in Col. 3:1-4 which contains a wonderful setting forth of Three great facts are stated regarding namely: It is a

supernatural life, a hidden life, and then a life to be revealed.

1. It is a Supernatural Life, "If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set- your affection (or, more literally, your imagination) on things above."

Here we have the great secret of in that it is a life in union with Christ, a life that flows into us from having our spirits grafted into Christ by the Holy Ghost, a life which incessantly flows down into US, like the blood from the heart coursing down to the lower extremity of the body, so from the infinite Christ, who, during this dispensation, is seated at the right hand of God, His heavenly life comes streaming down to us. There are two words which we need clearly to understand at the outset in this exposition. The first word is "risen." We inquire what is meant by being "risen with Christ." It is not the same word as that used for the resurrection. The Greek word for resurrection is "anastasio" from "'ana'' (again), and "stasis" (to stand up), and is used especially to mean the resurrection, or the standing up again of the dead body that was laid down in the grave. A great many people, not having accurate knowledge of Scripture, speak of the souks conversion as being a resurrection, and some call it "The first resurrection." This is a mistake, as the first resurrection spoken of in Scripture is applied only to saints, and instead of the new birth being the first resurrection, it is distinctly revealed that we must be justified, regenerated and sanctified in order to have a place in the first resurrection. "Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection." (Rev. 20:6.) When we are awakened and born of the Spirit, our human spirits, which have been dead in sin, do rise up from moral death, but it is not a rising again like the standing up of a dead body that had previously stood upright in living vigor; hence this word, 'To be risen with Christ,"� does not in any sense take the place of the resurrection of our bodies, nor does it imply that fanatical notion that we are now glorified, and will never die. It is the moral, the spiritual being, that has risen from a state of nature and sin into a state of grace by a living faith in the ascended Savior. Another word we need to understand, is the expression, "Where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God." So many people speak of Christ as at present sitting on His own throne, which is entirely unscriptural. Every passage in the Bible describing the present location of the glorified body of Jesus speaks of Him as being "on the Father's throne," "at the right hand of the throne of God," "at the right hand of the majesty on high," and the Father saying to Him during this present age, "Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thy enemies thy footstool.'" Thus every Scripture speaks of Christ in this age as at the right hand of the Father, on the Father's throne. But on the other hand, every single Scripture that speaks of Christ sitting on His own throne, uniformly fixes the time of His occupancy of His throne at His second coming. So, be careful never to confound the sitting of Jesus at the right hand of the Father in the present age, with the sitting of Christ on His own Messianic throne in the age to come. With this explanation of these two words, let us notice more particularly the heavenly life the true believer has in this dispensation, by virtue of being in heart, and by a living faith, united to Christ. All life is a fathomless mystery. The life in a grain of corn, or an egg, or the root of a tree, is hidden from all our five senses, from all science, from all comprehension, and as deeply shrouded in God's omnipotence as the life of any plant, or animal, or angel in the most distant world or space. God only knows what life is. He alone can originate life, and establish the laws by which every kind of life can reproduce itself. When we are regenerated, the life of Christ is imparted to our human spirits, through the organ of the human heart and by the agency of the Holy Ghost. We are told in Scripture that the Father gave His Son power to have life in Himself, and that the Son gives His life to those who truly believe in Him. This imparted divine life is more than thought; it is more than action, for it leads to action; it is more than all good works, for it is the seed from which all the good works sprout, just as the life of a tree is more than the leaves and the fruit which it produces. The essence of this heavenly life is Divine love communicated to our spiritual organism. Just as trees and animals and men are living organisms, so the soul is a living organism, into which the life of Christ is injected through the living word of promise. This heavenly life has instinctive affinities for the supernatural. It has modes of nourishment, and laws of growth, and possibilities of celestial flower and fruitage, similar to other species of life. In a certain sense, men may live many kinds of lives. Some live a political, others a scientific life; yet others live a financial life, by which the ruling passion subsidizes to itself all the energies and capabilities of the man. Just so, it is possible to live a love life, even in the human as well as the divine. For instance, here is an excellent woman who is in love with, and espoused to, a true gentleman. It is expedient, in order to gain an immense fortune, that he leave his native land, also the object of his love, and cross the seas to some distant country, there to spend a few years in patiently looking after his estate. When he goes away, the heart, the thought, the imagination -- in one sense, the very life of the woman that loves him, goes along with him to that distant land, and she more truly lives in his life and with him in that distant land, than with the people and in the locality where her body sojourns. This is the exquisite picture that is set forth in this passage of Scripture. If we are thoroughly espoused to Christ and have His life in our hearts, then with His ascension to the right hand of God the Father, there goes up with Him the secret fountains of all our inner being; and our hearts, our thoughts, rise with Him; our imaginations and longings, our hopes and dreams fly toward Him, ever hovering around Him; and we paint ideal pictures of Him and His glorious surroundings in that radiant land whither He has gone to gather the materials of His coming kingdom. The word "affection" in this passage is in the margin "mind." There are four Greek words translated mind" one signifies the apprehending faculty, another the reasoning faculty, another the judging or determining faculty, and yet another signifies the imaginative faculty, the power of fancy, the artistic or picture-making power of the mind. The word we are now speaking of, and which is translated "affection," is, in the Greek, "phronos," from which we make the word "phrenology," and signifies the imaginative part of the mind. Hence we are to seek after those things which pertain to Christ, and set out fond imagination to building thought-pictures of Jesus and Paradise and the saints and the angels and the coming of the Lord and the coronation day, of the rich and manifold rewards, of the glorious kingdom, and the city of pure gold, and of the long, bright ages that stretch away in a successive series of ever-increasing splendor, world without end. If the mind must build air-castles, let us build them in the heavens. The true believer in this present life is like a diver in the sea. As a man puts on a diving bell and descends to the bottom of the ocean and is supplied with fresh air by an air pump on the ship over his head, so the believer is to put on the baptism of the Holy Ghost from heaven and live down in this lower world surrounded and pressed on every side by the dark waters of this present evil age, and draw down from the right hand of God the vital breath of heaven through the mediation of Jesus. The diver can live down in the sea, provided he has fresh air from the top, and provided the sea does not get into him. In like manner we can live the heavenly life down in this world, if we only get our prayer breath from Christ, and providing the world is kept out of us.

2. It is a hidden life. "For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God." The word ''dead"' here does not of course refer to the physical death, but to being crucified in heart with Christ, being dead to sin and to this present world. Conversion is a birth, and sanctification is a death. How strange that so many cannot see the difference between these two spiritual conditions. By the grace of sanctification we utterly die to this present world, its life, spirit, aims, honors, notions and desires, and we are thereby put out of joint with all its affairs and adjusted to another kingdom which is to come. When anything dies, its life passes out beyond the range of observation, and no one can follow it by any manifestation which it gives forth. This is exactly the double thought stated here by the apostle. As long as a man is living his natural life, the world can recognize it, but when some day the stroke of the sword of God's Word slays that man's natural life and he dies to sin and all the world, he is, like a dead man, an offensive corpse in the eyes of the world, and his life has slipped away into such inscrutable secrecy as to be beyond the knowledge and all comprehension of his fellows. As I have said before, every form of life is a secret, hidden in fathomless depths beyond all human knowledge. If no microscope and no science can find the life in a grain of wheat or a hen's egg, how much less is that divine life imparted to the soul by the Holy Ghost within the range of all human recognition as to what it is, and how it subsists, and what are its everlasting results. As God only knows the love of God, so God alone knows the secrets of His own life.

You will notice there is a double hiding of the heavenly life referred to in this passage. Our life is hid with Christ, and then Christ, in this present age, is hidden from the world up in the heavens with the Father. In our temperate zones, when winter comes on, vegetation dies, the vines and fruit trees shed their foliage, and to all appearance to the eyes of men, they are dead. The life in the tree or vine runs back into the root and hides itself there; and then the root is hidden in the ground. This is an exact likeness of the double hiding of the heavenly life in this present dispensation. Jesus is the vine, the root, and true believers are the branches. We are now living in the winter of faith. When we are crucified with Christ it is like the blight of a killing frost to the verdure and foliage of our natural, earthly lives, and we pass down into the baptism of death, and the world sees us no more, except in the language of David, "as dead men out of mind,"� and they cannot follow that swift retreat which our inner lives have made into Christ, the root of David, and the root of holy hearts and pure faith. And then they cannot see the Root, the immortal Jesus, for He is concealed beyond the blue sky, with the Father in the heavens.

There are several Scriptures in which the time of Christ's absence from the earth is compared to winter, and His return compared to the coming of summer. (See Song of Solomon, 2:10, 11; Matt. 24:32, 33.) It seems that very few Christians have enough discernment to heartily accept of this humiliating truth, that in order to be locked up in this hidden life of Christ, we must really die a death that will make us as uninteresting to men as trees stripped of all their gay foliage by the blasts of winter are dull and unattractive to the natural eye. So many people want a kind of religion that is attractive to the world, being ignorant of the fact that neither Jesus nor the apostles had that fascinating kind, but their very heavenly beauties were offensive to men, and they were hunted like wild beasts. The only religion that looks beautiful to the world is that which is invented by the devil. Christians who are so eager to make a good impression on men, always fail to make a good impression in heaven, and in spite of themselves the secret desire to have a religion that pleases men is an offensive displeasure to Almighty God. Jesus, to the world, is a leafless, bloomless "root out of a dry ground, and He never becomes "the Rose of Sharon," or "the Lily of the valley," except to anointed eyes -- to those who are baptized into His death by the Holy Ghost and enter that hidden life, of which this present world knows nothing at all.

Those whose hearts are locked up with Jesus walk this earth in the present age as princes in disguise. They move around in the temporal duties of life like private detectives in a distant and unfriendly nation. They are breathing prayers, and thinking thoughts, and nursing hot fires of love, and ruminating on vast and amazing events that stretch over coming times and distant worlds. They are silently loading themselves up with a divine dynamite, that Daniel and Jesus both tell us will some day grind the kingdoms of this present world to powder. Their joys are hidden, for it is written "that a stranger doth not intermeddle with it." And their sorrows, also, are cloistered in the ear and bosom of God, for they know they need not look to the people of the world, and not even to the people of the church, for heart-felt sympathy; and so, like venturesome pioneers, they leave the crowded walks of life and traverse the great, solitary mountains, and take up claims on new and unexplored territory, and hold communion with the unseen God, and are more at home amid the great snowy mountain peaks of the divine perfection, than with the crowds that live only for the flesh and time.

The saints are called in Scripture "the hidden ones" Their life is doubly hidden, in the Son and in the Father. God says to them, "Call unto me, and I will show you great and hidden things." Their life is constantly fed by secret prayer. Their good deeds are to be folded in such quiet modesty, that the left hand (the goat) shall not know what the right hand (the sheep) doeth. The prophet says of the Almighty, "Verily, thou art a God that hidest thyself," and we are told on several occasions that Jesus hid himself" from the crowd. God is working, as it were, by stealth, in this present age, and moves softly amid the affairs of life, as if shod with wool. The uncrucified life is not hidden, but showy, and makes great appearances, and seeks to be known, whether in church or in state. When we sink into God, like submarine ships down in the sea, we pass out of sight of the natural world and the natural man.

3. The heavenly life is to be revealed. "When Christ, our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with Him in glory." Please notice that the unfolding of all the secrets, and graces, and powers, and fruitage of the lives of the saints, is put right in connection with the return and visible appearing of the Son of man.. All the Scriptures that bear on any one given thing always agree in their teaching on that subject. Hence, throughout all Scripture the second coming of Christ is referred to as the time when all hidden things shall be manifested," "appear," "be revealed," and openly seen and known. It is at the time when Christ comes again, that 'The thoughts of all hearts are to be revealed," when all secret prayers are to be "rewarded openly," when all faithfulness and unfaithfulness is to receive an open attestation, When every hidden thing shall be brought to light," and when "The vail that now covers all flesh shall be taken away," and when mystery shall be finished," and when "they shall see eye to eye in Zion," and when we shall know even as we are known,"

It will astonish yon to take a concordance and hunt up the words "reveal" and "manifest," and kindred terms' and find how full the Bible is on what is to be made visible when Jesus returns and openly shows Himself to all the nations. That is when Paul expressly declares this heavenly life, which is now doubly hid, shall appear, with all things pertaining to it, in visible glory. God is forever working from the unseen to the visible, from darkness to light, from the secret to the known, from mystery to manifestation, from the inner to the outer. He first created the substance of the universe, and afterwards He said, "Let there be light." He first gave the shadow of good things to come, and then revealed the substance in Jesus. The Jehovah-Messiah was in this world, talking to prophets, giving laws, inspiring Scripture, receiving worship, and arranging providence, for four thousand years, and then was made flesh and became visible, and was seen and heard and touched by thousands, and visibly ascended to heaven till the time when His kingdom also shall become visible.

Human theology has coined a great many doctrines exactly opposite to the Bible, and because human nature is contrary to God, these unscriptural doctrines find ready acceptance by the majority of even professed Christians. One of these unscriptural doctrines concerning the future state is, that all things are going to be sublimated into a vague intellectualism and idealism. away from the solid and definite and sensible creation which God instituted at the beginning, and pronounced it very good. Swedenborgianism is simply old heathen Brahmanism remodeled and mixed with some Bible truth, and it accordingly contradicts the literal, historic facts of Scripture, and denies that there will be any literal resurrection of the dead body, or a visible return of the glorified humanity of Jesus. It is only one of the demon kind of last-day religions of the intellect and fancy, and, like what is falsely called "Christian Science" and Theosophy, teaches a lie under the pretense of presenting a religion so fine, so ethereal, so intellectual, so exquisitely and sublimely spiritual, as never to be contaminated with anything so gross as the blood shed out of the real body of Jesus, or with a real resurrected human body, or with a literal heavens and new earth, be their skies ever so blue, or the mountains and plains ever so filled with vernal beauty, and singing birds and happy, God-loving, substantial generations of men. Thousands of elegant religious teachers in these latter days are getting too fine to believe in the plain, old-fashioned words of the God that made them. The most popular teaching in these heretical days, is that everything is traveling toward a lofty, intangible, invisible, inaudible sort of intellectualism -- a kind of thin ghost-smoke of God's great creation.. Now, the fact is, that all creation, and all Scripture, and all history, is directly the opposite of such foolish teaching.

We are moving toward the age of open revelation, of glorious manifestation, when everything and every creature will be more distinctly recognized and more intensely individualized, than in the present age. Everything in creation travels from secrecy to open manifestation, and from indefinite thought and force toward well-rounded, well-defined life and action, to solidity of personality and character.

Creation was first formless, and in darkness; then came the moving of the Holy Ghost to produce solid forms and life; next came the outshining of light (Gen. 1:1-3). Every building on earth today, the palaces, the great monuments, the vast bridges, the swift-flying steamships, and palatial railway trains, at one time were only thoughts, vague ideas, little, dreamy inventions that teased some busy brain, till, step by step, the unseen ideas became visible, and shadowy imaginations sailed forth and anchored and developed themselves into forms of solid grandeur. The statues, the poems, the paintings, and the mighty music that charm millions today, were once silent feelings and fancies that fluttered noiselessly in some soul. The sinful thought of today becomes the open, solid crime of tomorrow. The unknown loving or heroic desire in the heart of a child comes forth in a few years in open manifestation of the matchless deeds of a Wesley or a Washington.

When we speak of the return of Jesus as being the time when His kingdom shall break forth into a sudden and visible glory over all the earth, and when the glorified "saints shall rule the nations with a rod of iron," in the exact language of Jesus, thousands of professing Christians, who only see one edge of prophetic truth, seem horrified, and begin to talk about Christ's kingdom not being of this world, and its being only a spiritual kingdom, and that it would degrade the dignity of Jesus and saints to live and reign on a visible and material world. In most cases these very people are swayed by love of money, love of church office, and church honor, and fine houses, and furniture, and politics, and society pride, loaded down with the earth and carnality, but pretending to have a religion that is too sublimated and etherial to walk on a redeemed planet, or touch the precious body of the glorified Jesus. Certainly Christ's "Kingdom is not of the world," or, as the Greek has it, "out from the world"; neither was Jesus of the world, but He lived and died on it without losing His holiness, or one trait of His matchless character; and according to Scripture He will live here again. The Bible is not of the world, but it is in the world, and being circulated by millions of copies. The saints, Jesus tells us, are not of the world, even as He Himself is not of the world, but they are in the world, and about fifty passages of Scripture inform us that in the coming age they will "inherit" and "possess" and "judge" and 'Tule" the world. The Son of God and the glorified saints can live on this green earth, and under these azure skies, when the moral conditions are made perfectly right, just as easily, just as honorably, just as beautifully, just as righteously, and a hundred times more  scripturally, than on some imaginary, etherial cloud mystical Swedenborgian dreamland.

The kingdom of Jesus is just like Jesus. For many centuries He was in this world before He became visible on it in a human form. In like manner. His kingdom has for many centuries been unseen as a spiritual force righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost"� in the hearts of His true subjects, but that kingdom, like the King, is to come down from heaven and come forth in the first resurrection as a visible body, and displace, according to Daniel, every other kingdom on earth, and occupy the territory. The lives of all the saints, long hidden, will then appear, and all their characters, and prayers, and good works, and variegated graces, and numberless shades and traits of experience, will be openly manifested in cloudless light and unconfused personality. Do we dream of the sweep of this prophetic word, that "our life shall appear"� (become visible) when Christ shall appear in His glory? The secret fountains in the soul, the processes of our salvation, our repentances, and consecrations, and prayers, and spiritual struggles, and complex movings and experiences, and stages of growth in grace, and efforts of obedience and charity, will all come forth, in some way, unknown to us, but as well-defined about our personality as the qualities of light are untwisted and hung out in the rainbow on a summer cloud when the storm has passed over.

What is more beautiful in the vegetable world, than a peach orchard drenched with pink blossoms on a lovely spring day? Now, suppose an Icelander, who never saw a peach orchard, were to visit some of our Southern States in the winter, and a fruit grower should take him out to see a large peach orchard, utterly stripped of leaves, with the ground frozen, and all the trees looking like crooked, dead sticks stuck in the ground. On being told that he was looking at a magnificent and valuable peach orchard, he would likely curl his lip in scorn at the ungainly sight. The proprietor might expatiate eloquently on the value and merits of that orchard, but the Icelander would see nothing in it. Let the same traveler from the frigid zone visit that orchard in April or May, and find it in full bloom, he would feast his eyes upon a beautiful picture beyond all his dreams. In the winter the life of those trees is hidden in the roots, and the roots are hidden in the earth, and the sun was far away beyond the equator. When the sun returns from the tropic of Capricorn, and comes toward the North, then the secret life in those hidden roots rises with the coming spring, and comes forth in open manifestation, clothing those seemingly dead, crooked sticks with gorgeous beauty and flowery robes of grace and color and fragrance. This is but one of the Creator's mute prophecies of things to come in those sanctified "trees of righteousness" planted by His own hand in the garden of grace. The saints are now living in their winter; and they look insignificant, deformed, and uninteresting to their fellows, and their life is deeply hidden. But when Jesus, who is their life, returns, He will bring the immortal spring morning, and the secret life in His saints will bloom forth in such colors of glory, of honor, of radiance, of princely authority, of fragrant love, that the very angels will shout for joy, the nations of the world will stand aghast in terrified bewilderment, and Satan and his demons, abashed and smitten, will hie them to the abyss for a thousand years, and the saints themselves will tremble with amazement and adoration that they should be so honored and loaded down with glory, like the twigs on orange and coffee trees that bend beneath the weight of their immaculate and odorous blossoms. Then will come to pass the saying that is written, "Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners That is when Jesus "shall come down into His garden, to see His fruit trees in the valley, and to watch the branches of the true vine to flourish, and to see the pomegranates bud with their beautiful red bell-shaped flowers." Song of Solomon 6:10-11 Thus the heavenly life is above nature, but not contrary to nature as God first created it. It is a hidden life, but not a powerless or inactive one, but most full of Divine energy. And it is a life that is to come forth in a most perfect revelation of beauty and glory, "at the appearing of the Lord."