"I go to prepare a place for you"
(John 14:2).
This of itself is enough to give us hopeful thoughts of the future state. Christ is busied in preparing for us what will give us satisfaction and joy. When we expect a guest we love and have written for, we take pleasure in preparing for his reception,--we hang in his room the picture he likes; if he is infirm, we wheel in the easiest chair; we gather the flowers he admires and set them on his table; we go back and back to see if nothing else will suggest itself to us so that when he comes he may have entire satisfaction. This is enough for us to know--that Christ is similarly occupied. He knows our tastes, our capabilities, our attainments, and he has identified a place as ours and holds it for us. What the joys and the activities and occupations of the future shall be we do not know. With the body we shall lay aside many of our appetites and tastes and proclivities, and what has here seemed necessary to our comfort will at once become indifferent. We shall not be able to desire the pleasures that now allure and draw us. The need of shelter, of retirement, of food, of comfort will disappear with the body; and what the joys and the requirements of a spiritual body will be we do not know. But we do know that at home with God the fullest life that man can live will certainly be ours.
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Marcus Dods was a Scottish divine and biblical scholar. He was born at Belford, Northumberland, the youngest son of Rev. Marcus Dods, minister of the Scottish church of that town.
He studied at Edinburgh Academy and Edinburgh University, graduating in 1854. Having studied theology for five years he was licensed in 1858, and in 1864 became minister of Renfield Free Church, Glasgow, where he worked for twenty-five years. In 1889 he was appointed professor of New Testament Exegesis in the New College, Edinburgh, of which he became principal on the death of Robert Rainy in 1907.
Throughout his life, both ministerial and professorial, he devoted much time to the publication of theological books. Several of his writings, especially a sermon on Inspiration delivered in 1878, incurred the charge of unorthodoxy, and shortly before his election to the Edinburgh professorship he was summoned before the General Assembly, but the charge was dropped by a large majority, and in 1891 he received the honorary degree of DD from Edinburgh University.
He edited Lange's Life of Christ in English (Edinburgh, 1864, 6 vols.), Augustine's works (1872-1876), and, with Alexander Whyte, Clark's Handbooks for Bible Classes series. In the Expositors Bible series he edited Genesis and 1 Corinthians, and he was also a contributor to the 9th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and James Hastings's Dictionary of the Bible.