Depend on it—He'll come!
I wouldn’t suggest that non-Christians don’t really love their families and friends. That would be both nonsense and Christian imperialism of the worst kind. I’d only suggest that if Christians know and remember who they are and that faithful love for their loved ones is a form of “gospeling”. They’re living out of their relationship with Jesus Christ. In any case, isn’t it wonderful to watch a friendship lasting a lifetime? I watched an eighty-eight year old Christian man sitting by a hospital bed holding his dying wife’s hand, hardly able to bear the heartbreak. More than sixty years of marriage were drawing to a close. The unutterable pain he was now feeling was the price he was more than willing to pay for all those lovely years of warmth, friendship, joy and intimacy. It seems obvious to me, if a husband and wife don’t become the closest of friends their marriage hasn’t reached its potential.
I want to be my wife Ethel’s best friend on earth. I met her when she was pretty and eighteen and she was still eighteen when we married. It isn’t surprising that however we looked when we were young, we’ve lost that youthfulness and some of the things that count for physical attractiveness, but we have warm friendship that counts for more than any measure of good looks or social charisma. When I need a friend to counsel me, sympathize with and challenge or rebuke me, I’ve got her. In her I have someone to laugh and find pleasure with and someone to miss when if I’m away.
I know of course that while human loves are a rich gift from God they are never quite the same when they leave his hand and we reach out and take them. Still, they don’t cease to be his gifts and they continue to be witnesses to God’s faithfulness in the face of human betrayal. The beauty of this was well illustrated for thousands of us in a song dating from 1901, written by Edward Madden and Theodore F. Morse. They called it Two Little Boys. It was about the American Civil War but it attracted little or no attention in America though it was taken up in England and sung about the Crimean War. It wasn’t until 1969 that it made a surprise appearance in the popular market.
Australian television personality, Rolf Harris, recorded the song and it climbed to number one in the charts in Britain. In an interview I heard him tell how Ted Engram had brought the song to him, excited and urging him to release it. Engram began to sing it to Harris and Harris tells us he was thinking to himself, “How do I turn this down without hurting his feelings too much?” The song had nothing to offer the singer until as he himself said, “Then I heard the words, ‘do you think I would leave you dying?’ and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck standing up. I recorded it and the rest you know.”
It’s about two little boys who rode around on their stick horses, enjoying the world, seeing themselves cavalry soldiers. One of the boys accidentally breaks off his horse’s head and starts to cry but his friend says, “Do you think I would leave you crying when there’s room on my horse for two? Climb up here, Jack, we’ll soon be flying, I can go just as fast with two.”
The years passed and war made its ugly appearance. The two, still friends, join the army and ride together in a cavalry unit. What happens is best told in the words of Morse and Madden.
Cannons roared loud, and in the mad crowd
Wounded and dying lay
Up goes a shout, a horse dashes out,
Out from the ranks so blue,
Gallops away to where Joe lay, then came a voice
he knew,
“Did you think I would leave you dying
when there’s room on my horse for two.
Climb up here Joe we’ll soon be flying
Back to the ranks so blue.
Did you say Joe I’m all atremble?
Perhaps it’s the battle’s noise
Or maybe it’s that I remember when we were two little boys.
“Do you think I would leave you dying?” No wonder Harris felt the hair on his neck standing up. There’s gallantry in every syllable. The kind of thing we see every day without seeing it, the kind of thing we all long to be a part of us; a devotion that many in their better moments would die for; a devotion that so many die without ever giving or receiving.
But the beauty of this does more than set before us a lovely example, it bears witness to the faithfulness that is behind all our faithfulness, a faithfulness that is the source of all our faithfulness—God’s own Christ who comes in his Father’s name; who comes in his Father’s name saying, “Do you think I would leave you dying?”
When the New Testament speaks of justification “by faith in Jesus Christ” there are several texts that use a genitive which could easily be rendered “by the faith of Christ” or by “the faithfulness of Christ”. Romans 3:26 is one of those texts and this might be one more than the others that would warrant the translation, “the faith of Christ.” If we should understand it that way (and many scholars are coming around to that view) then we’re being told that God justifies us on the basis of Christ’s own faithfulness. This would mean that we are justified because God in and through Jesus Christ kept his promises, was faithful and wouldn’t leave us to die.
And these are the kind of people Jesus gathers around him (yes, I know of another kind!). They are people who watch him, admire and rejoice in him and commit themselves to him. Like him, they make their promises and come to stay.
Now...where do I go from here?
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.
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