The Righteousness Of The Saints
(Original January 2025)
As I sit to draft this article early on Sunday morning, I look out the window to see snow falling leaving a fresh blanket of white across the valley behind my daughter’s house. This is where Pam and I spent last summer with her in the hospital and then in this same house trying to get her strong enough to return home. She would be delighted to see the snow as snowy days were the ones she loved the best. As I sit here, Pam’s funeral is a few days away and I must fulfill my duty of producing a bulletin article for the coming week. Thoughts are difficult to form, and I think you might expect that what I produce would lean heavily on the exact things that run through my mind. Naturally, these are thoughts of her. At the same time, I do not want you to regard the next weeks of bulletin articles as the Pamela Smith Memorial Anthology.
If you will indulge me today, I look at the snow, I see the bright white cleanness, and I think of the purity of a place called heaven where Pam enjoys her everlasting fellowship with our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. The scriptures often use white to represent both the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ and the righteousness of the saints whom He makes this way because He washed them in His precious blood. Pam was a member of the Lord’s church, which the scriptures call the Lamb’s wife. Revelation 19:8 tells us about the church in glory: “And to her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints.”
I am sure you and I could sit and commiserate for a good while on the imperfections each of us has and we would be here for hours if we tried to list them all. It is difficult for us to think that in heaven we can sit for eternity and stare each other in the eyes the whole time and not think of one thing we would like to see done differently in the eternal lives of our companions. We find nothing to criticize because the righteousness of the saints is the righteousness of Jesus Christ. Every blemish of the lives we lived here were buried with Him in the grave over which He gloriously triumphed.
Reading further into the Revelation, there is a promise that nothing defiling will ever enter the heavenly city that would spoil the blessed peace and contentment of that exquisite place. The curse of sin is forever gone, the throne of God is in the midst of it, we see the face of Christ, and His name is written in our foreheads to show we are His servants who live forever under His powerful protection.
I am happy to sit here at the table looking out the window at the snow. If thoughts of Christ occupy my mind while I think of my love gone away, I am blessed. I know most will lose or have lost their loved ones and no such thoughts ever cross their minds because they never lived with the peace that passes understanding. I sorrow, this is for sure, but sorrow is tempered when I think of Pam wearing white while gorgeously reflecting the perfection of her Saviour. If you will, give me this peace to contemplate for a while for surely the Lord intends it for my comfort as I too belong to Him.
Pastor V. Mark Smith