Whom have I in heaven?

"Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you." (Psalm 73:25 ESV)

Over many months I have been reading Abraham Kuyper's book, To Be Near Unto God (1908), which is a series of devotionals (110 of them), written while he served as prime minister of The Netherlands from 1901 to 1905. Eerdmans published an English edition in 1918, which I have just finished. 

Kuyper was a remarkable Dutch Reformed theologian, and his devotional writings have a refreshing balance of doctrine and mysticism. He is doctrinally Protestant and Reformed, but often he writes like Thomas a Kempis. 

Here's an excerpt from one of his chapters, where he is commenting on Psalm 73:25... 

"By itself this means to know nothing in heaven but God, which is quite the same as to love God with all the mind and soul and heart. But Asaph's question puts the matter still more clearly before us. The struggle of our heart on earth is, that it goes out after all sorts of things, including God. This struggle is laid upon us, inasmuch as God himself has related our heart to all sorts of persons on earth, and has endowed it with powers to appreciate the glories of nature, and has imparted all sorts of inclinations and callings to us, which go out after visible things.

"The ascetic who withdraws his eyes from all earthly things, so that with nothing about him but air he might seek after God, evades the struggle and becomes unnatural. The holy art of the child of God is to possess things that are seen and handled in such a way, that he can truly say, that nothing on earth pleases him but God. This only means to say, that he only regards all visible things as things which are of God, and exist for the sake of God, and must serve God. Thus his pleasure in God embraces and includes all these other things. But in such a way that they are only considered insofar as they are subjected to God, and as they reveal his Divine power.

"Whether in deed and in truth this is the case with us, becomes evident only in dying. For then all these things fall away from us, and God alone remains. It has been tried to transfer earthly desires into heaven, by picturing all sorts of other persons and means of enjoyment there by the side of God. Mohammedans go farthest in this. But among Christians not a few regard heaven first of all in connection with their own dead, that there they might resume with them the former life. Thus even in heaven they imagine a whole world again by the side of God. 

"We must frequently ask ourselves: If you had nothing, absolutely nothing aside from God, would your soul be perfectly satisfied? When you seek and endeavor and strive to be near unto God, is it that you might rest in him with all your heart, or is it perhaps merely that you might find in him the helper, who can give you all sorts of other desired things after which your heart goes out really the more strongly? Let no one complain that he who has God and him alone, has nothing but God. For he who has God in him has everything." 

-- Abraham Kuyper, To Be Near Unto God (chap 109; pp 604--606)


 

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