AN EASTER MESSAGE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 88, 15 April 1933, Page 2 (Supplement)

AN EASTER MESSAGE.

(By S.)

The ninetieth psalm is the oldest psalm we possess, and there is a pathos and a weirdness about it that are awe-inspir-ing. And no wonder. It was composed on the wilderness journey of the Israelites, under the melancholy inspiration of the deaths and fimerals that were constantly occurring. These everlasting notifications and mournful ceremonies set their leader a-tliinking both of the brevity and of the uncertainty of life. It was thus ho wrote the psalm, and it was thus he taught his people to recite it, and to repeat the prayer: "So teach us —by these incessant deaths and funerals—to number o.ur days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." If we are wise, we shall need no urging to act on the counsel, and, if we do, it will suggest to us that we ought to think of our life in terms of days, like the great thinkers of the Old Testament, and in terms of days that we are unable to compute. For how often the un expect ad happens. How often the last person in the world with whom we associated the thought of an early or a sudden death has had his or her career cut short, and with a swiftness and in circumstances that were nothing short of tragic Some of us may be able to estimate, at least approximately, how much money we can count on during our life, though, in these strange times, it is doubtful, but none of us can say how many days we can count on. What comfort there is, then, in the message that Easter brings to us. He who says, "I am He that liveth and was dead, and, behold, I am alive for evermore," also sayrft to all of us who have accepted Him as our Lord and Saviour, " Because I live ye shall live also, and where I am ye shall be too." Their death was an incident in the career of the loved ones who have been taken from us, as it will be an incident in our own career one day, breaking -.its continuity only in seeming. The inscription that was engraved on the tomb of Albrecht Durer, the celebrated German painter and writer of the Middle Ages, may also be engraved on the tomb of each of us, " Dead he is not, but departed." Not only so, but, to a good man or woman—and bad men and women we leave with Him who is "the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world"•—a better day has dawned on which no sun will ever set. They have outsoared the shadows of our night, and are in a greater and better city than any of which earth can boast. And, best of all, they are with Christ. And who knows, as one has beautifully said, what new possibilities of intimacy and intercourse with Him may be theirs, and what new doors may be opened in their souls from out of which they may pass to touch parts of His nature all impalpable and inconceivable to us now?