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which they that believe on him should receive.' By the agency of his Holy Spirit, he conducts in his people, in the present life, a moral process by which they experience a resurrection to holiness. The hour is not only coming, but now is, when the dead hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear it live. Starting from the slumbers of sin, they awake to newness of life, and attire themselves in the garments of salvation. Dissevering themselves from their former bonds, they ask to be trained for every duty his service may require, and pant to enjoy all the happiness his kingdom may contain. Conscious that they are once more breathing the only atmosphere in which the soul can live-the complacent favor of God-they feel within themselves an earnest of immortality; feel that the new principle of which they have been made the subjects has nothing to fear from death, that it is made for eternity, that it can smile at the decay of the body, and will soon spring from the bed of death to immortality.

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And, from the fact that they have been made the partakers of a divine principle, there arises to believers this new pledge of a resurrection to eternal life-that Christ has engaged to raise them as a part of his own being. This truth he himself distinctly taught; As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me; '—'he dwelleth in me, and I in him; '-'I will raise him up at the last day; '—' because I live, ye shall live also.' He became one flesh with us, in order that we might become one spirit with him. Here is a two-fold bond subsisting between Christ and his people but the former of these they possess only in common with all mankind, it allies him to the species, and, by virtue of it, all the ungodly shall be raised. The spiritual bond however, is peculiar to themselves; it has been tied by his own hand, and nothing shall be able to

separate it. By virtue of this union it is that believers shall arise; not merely by an act of his power, for thus the wicked shall arise, but by an extension of his life as their life. To the ungodly he can say, 'I am the resurrection; but to the faithful alone he proclaims, I am the resurrection and the life.' The grave was the prison-house of insulted justice; and as their Representative he bowed himself down, and condescended to wear its fetters; but his enlargement and return from it shows that it no longer retains its original character; he has changed it into the peaceful depository of their dust; the treasury of the skies; they contemplate his grave as the basement-ground whence their nature takes its spring to immortality.

So ample and sufficient are the preparatory measures which Christ has taken for the final extinction of death, that he speaks of it in terms of comparative disparagement and indifference. So effectually is it disarmed and mutilated, and so completely at the disposal of Christ, that he speaks of it already as if it were not. 'Whosoever believeth in me, shall never die.' 'If a man keep my sayings he shall never taste of death, he shall never see death.' In accordance with these representations, he has given to the state of death the soft and tranquillizing name of sleep. This use of the term, indeed, was not unknown to Jewish saints; but as applied by them to death, it denoted chiefly the silence, darkness, and inactivity of the grave. The Greeks, too, had long been accustomed to speak of death in the softest terms: the dead they often spoke of as the departed, the worn out; and called their burial-grounds, dormitories or sleeping places. But this arose partly from the dislike they felt to allude to a gloomy and unwelcome subject; and partly from a wish to propitiate the deceased, of whom they stood in considerable dread. How superior the sense in which Jesus employed the term, sleep! they

used it as a figure, but he turned it into a reality; they uttered it from fear, but he made it the language of hope and of faith. He used it with the highest authority, for he was about to awaken one of the sleepers from his sleep; and, however protracted the slumbers of his people may be, he knew that they are all finally to hear his voice and to come forth.

Dense as the gloom is which hangs over the mouth of the sepulchre, it is the spot, above all others, where the gospel, if it enters, shines and triumphs. In the busy sphere of life and health, it encounters an active antagonist; the world confronts it, aims to obscure its glories, to deny its claims, to drown its voice, to dispute its progress, to drive it from the ground it occupies. But from the mouth of the grave the world retires; it shrinks from the contest there; it leaves a clear and open space in which the gospel can assert its claims, and unveil its glories without opposition or fear. There the infidel and the worldling look anxiously around, but the world has left them. helpless and fled. There the christian looks around, and lo the angel of mercy is standing close by his side. The gospel kindles a torch, which not only irradiates the valley of the shadow of death, but throws a radiance into the world beyond, and reveals it peopled with the sainted spirits of those who have died in Jesus. It descends with us into the low chambers of the grave; bids us look on its silent inmates; and to look on them with the persuasion that they only sleep. It assures us that death, like sleep, is not the destruction of the living principle, but only a temporary change in the mode of its operation; that, like sleep, it is a state of rest, discharging us from all the concerns of the world; that, like sleep, it principally affects the body, the activity of the soul being meantime continued, and perhaps greatly increased; and, most of all, that,

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like sleep, it will not be perpetual, but only endure for a night. It tells us that a day will dawn on the world, when Jesus, assuming an aspect of infinite benignity, will say, in effect, of all his sleeping saints, as he said of Lazarus, 'I go to awake them out of sleep.'

O how vast the immortal awakening! Who can lift his mind to the greatness of the occasion! Where is the height from which we can command a view of the sublime spectacle? In prospect of it, 'Jesus said, The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.' As the first fruits of them that sleep, he has arisen and appeared before God, the certain pledge of the great harvest-home. 'Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe: multitudes, multitudes, in the valley of decision.' The wide earth shall stand thick,' and wave, with that ocean plenitude of life. The produce of the fields, every year, is a renewed triumph of life over death; but the triumph of life on that day will be final and complete, leaving not an atom for which death can contend. It will be a triumph of the highest order, consisting, not in the mere creation of new being, but in the release and reanimation of what had been dragged away from the territories of life; death itself will be turned into life, corruption will put on incorruption. The triumph will be enhanced by the circumstance that it will be achieved on the very spot where death had reigned; if the power of death be confined to this world, what an opprobrium must earth be to all the regions of life, and how naturally may it be pointed at by their inhabitants as the mysterious sepulchre of life, the dishonor of the universe; but the morning of the resurrection will wipe off that disgrace, will make earth their boast and song; for, 'there, they will be able

to say, there death was overthrown; there the great antagonist of life, after wasting the earth for thousands of years, and threatening to push the conquest into other worlds, was expelled from the universe as an evil no longer to be borne. And from that very scene where death once reigned, heaven has received its largest influx of spiritual and immortal life.' And to consummate the triumph, life on that day will be crowned with immortality; it will not merely be restored, but ennobled, exalted to the highest state of security and glory it can sustain. From the ruinous heap of every grave a living structure shall arise, built up into an imperishable monument of 'the Resurrection and the Life;' in the stead of corruption, it shall be inaccessible to decay; for neither can they die any more, they are equal unto the angels; and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection.' In the stead of dishonor it will be raised in glory, radiating a splendor which shall eclipse all sublunary glory. In the place of weakness, it shall be clothed with the vigor of immortal youth, asking no relaxation or repose, the wings of the soul accompanying and aiding it in all its untiring flights. In the place of a natural body, it shall be raised a spiritual body; the original grossness of its materiality shall be purged away, it shall be refined and etherialized into spirit, a robe of light rivaling the invisible essence of the soul itself; while each of its senses shall form an inlet to floods of enjoyment, and each of its organs be instinct and emulous with zeal for the divine glory.

Earth has been often the scene of splendid triumphs, the fame of which has filled the world, and reverberated from age to age; but how tame, how trifling the greatest achievments of man compared with this! a triumph which not only effaces the remembrance of all that man has done, but even eclipses the glory of the divine exploits; the

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