The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, The Resurrection Credible, a
sermon delivered on Lord's Day morning August 25th,
1872 by C.
H.
Spurgeon at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington.
Acts 26, verse 8.
Why should it be thought a thing incredible
with you that God should raise the dead?
Concerning the souls of our believing friends who
have departed this life, we suffer no distress.
We feel sure that they are where Jesus
is, and behold His glory according to our
Lord's own memorable prayer.
We know but very little of the disembodied
state, but we know quite enough to rest
certain beyond all doubt that they are supremely
blessed, have done with sin, and care, and
woe, and with their Savior rest.
Our main trouble is about their bodies, which
we have committed to the dark and lonesome
grave.
We cannot reconcile ourselves to the fact that
their dear faces are being stripped of all
their beauty by the fingers of decay, and
that all the insignia of their manhood should
be fading into corruption.
It seems hard that the hands and feet
and all the goodly fabric of their noble
frame should be dissolved into dust and broken
into an utter ruin.
We cannot stand at the grave without tears.
Even the perfect man could not restrain his
weeping at Lazarus' tomb.
It is a sorrowful thought that our friends
are dead, nor can we ever regard the
grave with love.
We cannot say that we take pleasure in
the catacomb and the vault.
We still regret and feel it natural to
do so that so dreadful a ban has
fallen upon our race as that it should
be appointed unto all men once to die.
God sent it as a penalty, and we
cannot rejoice in it.
The glorious doctrine of the resurrection is intended
to take away this cause of sorrow.
We need have no trouble about the body
any more than we have concerning the soul.
Faith being exercised upon immortality relieves us of
all trembling as to the spirits of the
just, and the same faith, if exercised upon
resurrection, will with equal certainty efface all hopeless
grief with regard to the body.
For though apparently destroyed, the body will live
again.
It has not gone to annihilation.
That very frame which we lay in the
dust shall but sleep there for a while,
and at the trump of the archangel it
shall awaken in superior beauty, clothed with attributes
unknown to it while here.
The Lord's love to His people is a
love towards their entire manhood.
He chose them not as disembodied spirits, but
as men and women arrayed in flesh and
blood.
The love of Jesus Christ towards His chosen
is not an affection for their better nature
merely, but towards that also which we are
wont to think their inferior part.
For in His book all their members were
written.
He keepeth all their bones, and the very
hairs of their head are all numbered.
Did He not assume our perfect manhood?
He took into union with His deity a
human soul, but He also assumed a human
body, and in that fact He gave us
evidence of His affinity to our perfect manhood,
to our flesh and to our blood, as
well as to our mind and to our
spirit.
Moreover, our Redeemer has perfectly ransomed both soul
and body.
It was not partial redemption which our kinsman
effected for us.
We know that our Redeemer liveth not only
with respect to our spirit, but with regard
to our body, so that though the worm
shall devour its skin and flesh, yet shall
it rise again, because He has redeemed it
from the power of death, and ransomed it
from the prison of the grave.
The whole manhood of the Christian has already
been sanctified.
It is not merely that with His spirit
He serves His God, but He yields His
members to be instruments unto righteousness, to the
glory of His Heavenly Father.
Know ye not, says the Apostle, that your
bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost?
Surely that which has been a temple of
the Holy Ghost shall not be ultimately destroyed.
It may be taken down, as the tabernacle
was in the wilderness, but taken down to
be put up again.
To use another form of the same figure,
the tabernacle may go, but only that the
temple may follow.
We know that if this earthly house of
our tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building
of God, a house not made with hands,
eternal in the heavens.
My brethren, it would not be a complete
victory over sin and Satan if the Savior
left a part of His people in the
grave.
It would not look as if He had
destroyed all the works of the devil if
He only emancipated their spirits.
There shall not be a bone, nor a
piece of a bone, of any one of
Christ's people left in the charnel house at
the last.
Death shall not have a solitary trophy to
show.
His prison house shall be utterly rifled of
all the spoil which He has gathered from
our humanity.
The Lord Jesus, in all things, shall have
the preeminence, and even as to our materialism,
He shall vanquish death in the grave, leading
our captivity captive.
It is a joy to think that as
Christ has redeemed the entire man and sanctified
the entire man, it will be honored in
the salvation of the entire man.
So our complete manhood shall have it in
its power to glorify Him.
The hands with which we sinned shall be
lifted in eternal adoration.
The eyes which have gazed on evil shall
behold the King in His beauty.
Not merely shall the mind which now loves
the Lord be perpetually knit to Him, and
the spirit which contemplates Him will delight forever
in Him and be in communion with Him,
but this very body which has been a
clog and hindrance to the Spirit and been
an arch rebel against the sovereignty of Christ
shall yield Him homage with voice and hand
and brain and ear and eye.
We look to the time of resurrection for
the accomplishment of our adoption to it, the
redemption of the body.
Now this being our hope, though we believe
and rejoice in it in a measure, we
have nevertheless to confess that sometimes questions suggest
themselves, and the evil heart of unbelief cries,
Can it be true?
Is it possible?
At such times the question of our text
is exceedingly needful.
Why should it be thought a thing incredible
with you that God should raise the dead?
This morning I shall first ask you, dear
brethren, to look the difficulty in the face,
and then secondly we will endeavor to remove
the difficulty.
There is but one way of doing so,
and that a very simple one, and then
thirdly we shall have a word or two
to say about our relation to this truth.
First then let us look this difficulty in
the face.
We shall not for a moment flinch from
the boldest and most plain assertion of our
belief in the resurrection, but will let its
difficulties appear upon the surface.
Attempts have been made at different times by
misguided Christians to tone down or explain away
the doctrine of the resurrection in kindred truths
in order to make them more acceptable to
sceptical or philosophical minds, but this has never
succeeded.
No man has ever been convinced of a
truth by discovering that those who profess to
believe it are half ashamed of it and
adopt the tone of apology.
How can a man be convinced by one
who does not himself believe, for that in
plain English is what it comes to.
When we modify, qualify and attenuate our doctrinal
statements we make concessions which will never be
reciprocated and are only received as admissions that
we do not believe ourselves what we assert.
By this cutting and trimming policy we shear
away the locks of our strength and break
our own arm.
Nothing of that kind affects me, either now
or any time.
We do, then, really, in very truth, believe
that the very body which is put into
the grave will rise again, and we mean
this literally and as we utter it.
We are not using the language of metaphor
or talking of a myth.
We believe that in actual fact the bodies
of the dead will rise again from the
tomb.
We admit and rejoice in the fact that
there will be a great change in the
body of the righteous man, that its materialism
will have lost all the grossness and tendency
to corruption which now surrounds it, that it
will be adapted for higher purposes, for whereas
it is now only a tenement fit for
the soul or the lower intellectual faculties, it
will then be adapted for the spirit or
the higher part of our nature.
We rejoice that though sown in weakness it
will be raised in power, though sown in
dishonor it will be raised in glory, but
we nevertheless know that it will be the
same body.
The self-same body which is put into
the grave shall rise again.
There shall be an absolute identity between the
body in which we die and the body
in which we rise again from the dust.
But let it be remembered that identity is
not the same thing as absolute sameness of
substance and continuance of atoms.
We do not mention disqualification at all by
way of taking off the edge from our
statement, but simply because it is true.
We are conscious as a matter of fact
that we are living in the same bodies
which we possessed twenty years ago, yet we
are told, and we have no reason to
doubt it, that perhaps not one single particle
of the matter which constitutes our body now
was in it twenty years ago.
The changes our physical forms have undergone from
infancy to manhood are very great, yet have
we the same bodies.
Admit the like identity in the resurrection, and
it is all we ask.
The body in which we die will be
the same body in which we were born.
Everybody admits that, though it is certainly not
the same as in all its particles.
Nay, every particle may have been exchanged, and
yet it will remain the same.
So the body in which we rise will
be the same body in which we die.
It will be greatly changed, but those changes
will not be such as to affect its
identity.
Now, instead of mentioning this statement in order
to make the doctrine appear more easy of
belief, I assure you that if I saw
it taught in Scripture that every single fragment
of bone, flesh, muscle, and sinew which we
put into the ground would rise again, I
should believe it with the same ease as
I now accept the doctrine of the identity
of the body in the manner just stated.
We are not at all wishful to make
our beliefs appear philosophical or probable, and far
from it.
We do not ask that men should say,
That can be supported by science.
Let the scientific men keep to their own
sphere, and we will keep to ours.
The doctrine we teach neither assails human science,
nor fears it, nor flatters it, nor asks
its aid.
We go on quite another ground when we
use the words of the passage and say,
Why should it be thought a thing incredible
that God should raise the dead?
We look for a resurrection of the dead,
both of the just and of the unjust.
The literal rising again of the human body
is our firm belief.
Now this hope is naturally surrounded with many
difficulties, because first of all, in the great
mass of the dead, decay has taken place.
The large majority of dead bodies have rotted
and been utterly dissolved, and the larger proportion
of all other bodies will probably follow them.
When we see bodies that have been petrified,
or mummies which have been embalmed, we think
that if all bodies were preserved in that
way, it were easier to believe in their
restoration to life.
But when we break open some ancient sarcophagus
and find nothing there but a little impalpable
brown powder, when we open a grave in
a churchyard and find only a few crumbled
pieces of bone, when we think of ancient
battlefields where thousands have fallen, where notwithstanding through
the lapse of years there remains not a
trace of a man, since the bones have
so completely melted back into earth, and in
some cases have been sucked up by the
roots and plants and have passed into other
organizations, it certainly does seem a thing incredible
that the dead should be raised.
Moreover, corpses have been destroyed by quicklime, burned,
devoured of beasts, and even eaten by men.
How shall these arise?
Think how widely diffused are the atoms which
once built up living forms.
Who knoweth where the atoms may now be
which once composed Cyrus, Hannibal, Scipio, or Caesar?
Particles once wedded through a man's life may
now be scattered wide as the poles asunder.
One atom may be blowing across Sahara, and
another may be floating in the Pacific.
Who knows amidst the revolutions of the elements
of this globe where the essential constituents of
any one body may be at this time?
Where is the body of Paul, of Festus,
who sent him to Rome, or of the
emperor who condemned him to die?
Who can even guess an answer?
What wonder, then, if it seem an incredible
thing that all men should rise again.
The difficulty increases when we come to reflect
that the doctrine of resurrection teaches that all
men will rise again.
Not a certain portion of the race, not
a few thousand persons, but all men.
It might be easier to believe in an
Elijah who should raise a dead man occasionally,
or in a Christ who should call back
to life a young man at the gates
of Nain, or raise a Lazarus, or, say,
Talitha Cumi to a little deceased girl.
But hard for reason is the doctrine that
all shall rise—the myriads before the flood, the
multitudes of Nineveh and Babylon, the hosts of
Persia and of Media, the millions that followed
at the feet of Xerxes, the hosts which
marched with Alexander, and all the innumerable millions
that fell beneath the Roman sword.
Think of the myriads who have passed away
in countries like China, swarming with men, and
conceive of these throughout six thousand years fattening
the soil.
Remember those who have perished by shipwreck, plague,
earthquake, and, worst of all, by bloodshed and
war.
And remember that all these will rise without
exception.
Not one of woman born shall sleep on
earth forever, but all the bodies that ever
breathed and walked this earth shall live again.
O monstrous miracle, saith one, it wears the
aspect of a thing incredible.
Well, we shall not dispute the statement, but
give even yet more reason for it.
The wonder increases when we remember in what
strange places many of these bodies now may
be.
For the bodies of some have been left
in deep mines where they will never be
reached again.
They have been carried by the wash and
swell of tides into deep caverns of the
ancient Maine.
There they lie far away on the pathless
desert where only the vulture's eye can see
them, or buried beneath mountains of fallen rock.
In fact, where are not man's remains?
Who shall point out a spot of earth
where the crumbling dust of Adam's sons is
not?
Blows there a single summer wind down our
streets without whirling along particles of what once
was man?
Is there a single wave that breaks upon
any shore which holds not in solution some
relic of what was once human?
They lie beneath each tree.
They enrich the fields.
They pollute the brooks.
They hide beneath the meadow grass.
Yet surely from anywhere, from everywhere, the scattered
bodies shall return like Israel from captivity.
As certainly as God is God, our dead
men shall live and stand upon their feet
an exceeding great army.
And moreover, to make the wonder extraordinary beyond
conception, they will rise at once or perhaps
in two great divisions.
There is a passage, Revelation 25 and 6,
which apparently teaches us that between the resurrection
of the righteous and the resurrection of the
wicked, there will be an interval of a
thousand years.
Many think that the passage intends a spiritual
resurrection, but I am unable to think so.
Assuredly, the words must have a literal meaning.
Hear them and judge for yourselves.
But the rest of the dead lived not
again until the thousand years were finished.
This is the first resurrection.
Blessed and holy is he that hath part
in the first resurrection.
On such, the second death hath no power.
But they shall be priests of God and
of Christ and shall reign with him a
thousand years.
Yet granted that there may be this great
interval, yet what a mass will be seen
when the righteous rise, a multitude that no
man can number, an inconceivable company only known
to God's enumeration, shall suddenly start up from
beds of dust and silent clay.
The break of a thousand years shall be
as nothing in the sight of God and
shall soon be over, and then shall rise
the unjust also.
What teeming multitudes, where shall they stand?
What plains of earth shall hold them?
Shall they not cover all the solid earth,
even to the mountaintops?
Shall they not need to use the sea
itself as a level floor for God's great
assize?
Before God in a moment shall they stand,
when the trump of the archangel shall ring
out clear and shrill the summons for the
last assize.
No year shall be needed in order that
in God's great workshop bone shall be fitted
to its bone and the wondrous mechanism be
refitted.
A moment shall suffice to rebuild the ruins
of centuries.
Curiously wrought as our bodies were at first
in the lowest parts of the earth, their
restoration from the dead shall be effected in
the twinkling of an eye.
Man needs time, but God is the creator
of time and needs it not.
Ages of ages are no more to him
than moments.
In an instant his greatest marvels are accomplished.
Matchless marvel we marvel not that to many
it seems a thing incredible that God should
raise the dead.
And then bethink you that this resurrection will
not be a mere restoration of what was
there, but the resurrection in the case of
the saints will involve a remarkable advance upon
anything we now observe.
We put into the ground a bulb, and
it rises as a golden lily.
We drop into the mold a seed, and
it comes forth an exquisite flower resplendent with
brilliant colors.
These are the same which we put into
the earth, the same identically, but oh, how
different!
Even thus the bodies which are sown in
burial are so many seeds.
They shall spring up by divine power into
outgrowths, surpassing all imagination in beauty.
This increases the wonder, for the Lord Jesus
not only snatches the prey from between the
teeth of the destroyer, but that which had
become worms, meat, ashes, dust, he raises in
his own sacred image.
It is as though a tattered and moth
-eaten garment were rent to shreds, and then
by a divine word restored to its perfectness,
and in addition made whiter than any fuller
on earth could make it, and adorned with
costly fringes and embroideries unknown to it before,
and all this in a moment of time.
Let it stand as a world of wonders,
marvelous beyond all things.
We will not for a moment attempt to
explain it away, or pare down the angles
of the truth.
One of the difficulties of believing it is
this, that there are positively no full analogies
in nature by which to support it.
There are phenomena around us somewhat like it,
so that we can compare, but I believe
that there is no analogy in nature upon
which it would be at all fair to
found an argument.
For instance, some have said that sleep is
the analogy of death, and that our awaking
is a sort of resurrection.
The figure is admirable, but the analogy is
very far from perfect, since in sleep there
is still life.
A continuance of life is manifest to the
man himself in his dreams, and to all
onlookers who choose to watch the sleeper, to
hear him breathe, or to watch his heartbeat.
But in death the body has no pulses
or other signs of life left in it.
It does not even remain entire as the
body of the sleeper does.
Imagine that the slumberer should be torn limb
from limb, pounded in a mortar, and reduced
to powder, and that powder mixed up with
clay and mold, and then see him awaken
at your call, and you would have something
worth calling an analogy.
But a mere sleep from which a man
is startled, while it is an excellent comparison,
is far enough from being the counterpart or
prophecy of resurrection.
More frequently we hear mentioned the development of
insects as a striking analogy.
The larva is man in his present condition.
The chrysalis is a type of man in
his death.
The imigo, or perfect insect, is the representation
of man in his resurrection.
An admirable simile, certainly, but no more.
For there is life in the chrysalis.
There is organization.
There is, in fact, the entire fly.
No observer can mistake the chrysalis for a
dead thing.
Take it up, and you shall find everything
in it that will come out of it.
The perfect creature is evidently dormant there.
If you could crush the chrysalis, dry up
all its life juices, bruise it into dust,
pass it through chemical processes, utterly dissolve it,
and then afterwards call it back into a
butterfly, you would have seen an analogy of
the resurrection.
But this is unknown to nature as yet.
I find no fault with the picture.
It is most instructive and interesting, but to
argue from it would be childish to the
last degree.
Nor is the analogy of the seed much
more conclusive.
The seed, when put into the ground, dies
and yet rises again in due season.
Hence the apostle uses it as the apt
type, an emblem of death.
He tells us that the seed is not
quickened except it dies.
What is death?
Death is the resolution of an organization into
its original particles, and so the seed begins
to separate into its elements, to fall back
from organization of life into the inorganic state.
But still, a life germ always remains, and
the crumbling organization becomes its food, from which
it builds itself up again.
Is it so with dead bodies, of which
not even a trace remains?
Who shall discover a life germ in the
putrid corpse?
I shall not say there may not be
some essential nucleus which better instructed beings might
perceive, but I would demand where in the
corrupted body it can be supposed to dwell.
Is it in the brain?
The brain is among the first things to
disappear.
The skull is empty and void.
Is it in the heart?
That also has a very brief duration, far
briefer than the bones.
Nowhere could a microscope discover any vital principle
in bodies disinterred from the sod.
Turn up the soil wherein the seed is
buried at any time you will, and you
will find it where you placed it, if
indeed it will ever rise from the ground.
But such is not the case with the
man who has been buried a few hundred
years.
Of him, the last relic has probably passed
beyond all recognition.
The generations to come are not more undiscoverable
than those which have gone.
Think of those who were buried before the
flood, or drowned in that general deluge.
Where, I ask, have we the smallest remnant
of them?
Grind your corn of wheat to fine flour
and throw it to the winds, and behold
cornfields rising from it, and then you will
have a perfect analogy.
But as yet I do not think that
nature contains a parallel case.
The resurrection stands alone, and concerning it the
Lord might well say, Behold, I do a
new thing in the earth.
With the exception of the resurrection of our
Lord and those granted to a few persons
by miracle, we have nothing in history that
can be brought to bear upon the point,
nor need we look there for evidence.
We have a far sure ground to go
upon.
Here, then, is the difficulty, and a notable
one it is.
Can these dry bones live?
Is it a credible thing that the dead
should be raised?
How are we to meet the demands of
the case?
We said that in the second place we
would remove the difficulty.
We made no empty boast.
The matter is simple.
Read the text again with due emphasis, and
it is done.
Why should it be thought a thing incredible
with you that God should raise the dead?
It might seem incredible that the dead should
be raised, but why should it seem incredible
that God the Almighty, the infinite, should raise
the dead?
Grant of God, and no difficulties remain.
Grant that God is, and that He is
omnipotent.
Grant that He has said the dead shall
be raised, and belief is no longer hard,
but inevitable.
Impossibility and incredulity both vanish in the presence
of God.
I believe this is the only way in
which the difficulties of faith should be met.
It is of no use to run to
reason for weapons against unbelief.
The word of God is the true defense
of faith.
It is foolish to build with wood and
hay when solid stones may be had.
If my Heavenly Father makes a promise or
reveals a truth, am I not to believe
Him till I have asked the philosophers about
it?
Is God's word only true when finite reason
approves of it?
After all, is man's judgment the ultimatum, and
is God's word only to be taken when
we can see for ourselves and therefore have
no need of revelation at all?
Far from us be this spirit.
Let God be true in every man a
liar.
We are not staggered when the wise men
mock at us, but we fall back upon
thus saith the Lord.
One word from God outweighs for us a
library of human law.
To the Christian, God's ipsodixit stands in the
stead of all reason.
Our logic is, God has said it, and
this is our rhetoric too.
If God declares that the dead shall be
raised, it is not a thing incredible to
us.
Difficulty is not in the dictionary of the
Godhead.
Is anything too hard for the Lord?
Heap up the difficulties, if you like.
Make the doctrine more and more hard for
reason to compass.
So long as it contains no self-evident
contradiction and inconsistency, we rejoice in the opportunity
to believe great things concerning a great God.
When Paul uttered our text, he was speaking
to a Jew.
He was addressing Agrippa, one to whom he
could say, King Agrippa, believest thou the prophets?
I know that thou believest.
It was therefore good reasoning to use with
Agrippa to say, Why should it be thought
a thing incredible with you that God should
raise the dead?
For first, as a Jew, Agrippa had the
testimony of Job.
For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and
that he shall stand at the latter day
upon the earth.
And though after my skin worms destroy this
body, yet in my flesh shall I see
God, whom I shall see for myself.
And mine eyes shall behold, and not another,
though my reins be consumed within me.
He had also the testimony of David, who
in the sixteenth Psalm says, My flesh also
shall rest in hope.
He had the testimony of Isaiah in the
twenty-sixth chapter, in the nineteenth verse, Thy
dead men shall live.
Together with my dead body shall they arise.
Awaken, seeing ye that dwell in dust.
For thy dew is as the dew of
herbs, and the earth shall cast out the
dead.
He had the testimony of Daniel in his
twelfth chapter, second and third verses, where the
prophet says, And many of them that sleep
in the dust of the earth shall awake,
some to everlasting life, and some to shame
and everlasting contempt.
And they that be wise shall shine as
the brightness of the firmament, and they that
turn away to righteousness as the stars forever
and ever.
And then, in Isaiah thirteen, verse fourteen, Agrippa
had another testimony, where the Lord declares, I
will ransom them from the power of the
grave.
I will redeem them from death.
O death, I will be thy plagues.
O grave, I will be thy destruction.
Repentance shall be hid from mine eyes.
Thus God had plainly promised resurrection in the
Old Testament scriptures, and that fact should be
quite enough for Agrippa.
If the Lord has said it, it is
no longer doubtful.
To us as Christians there has been granted
yet fuller evidence.
Remember how our Lord has spoken concerning resurrection,
with no bated breath as he declared his
intention to raise the dead.
Remarkable is that passage in John five twenty
eight.
Marvel not at this, for the hour is
coming in which all that are in the
grave shall hear his voice and shall come
forth.
They that have done good unto the resurrection
of life, and they that have done evil
unto the resurrection of damnation.
And so in chapter six, verse forty, and
this is the will of him that sent
me, that everyone which seeth the sun and
believeth on him may have everlasting life, and
I will raise him up at the last
day.
The Holy Ghost is spoken the same truth
by the apostles.
In that precious and most blessed eighth chapter
of the Romans, we have a testimony in
the eleventh verse, but if the spirit of
him that raised up Jesus from the dead
dwell in you, he that raised up Christ
from the dead shall also quicken your mortal
bodies by his spirit that dwelleth in you.
I read you just now the passage from
the first of Thessalonians, which is very full
indeed, where we are bidden not to sorrow
as those that are without hope.
And you have in the Philippians, the third
chapter and twenty first verse, another proof who
shall change our vile body that it may
be fashioned like unto his glorious body according
to the working whereby he is able even
to subdue all things unto himself.
I scarcely need remind you of that grand
chapter of massive argument, Corinthians, the fifteenth.
Beyond all doubt, the testimony of the Holy
Ghost is that the dead shall rise and
granted that there is an almighty God, we
find no difficulty in accepting the doctrine and
entertaining the blessed hope.
At the same time, it may be well
to look around us and note what helps
the Lord has appointed for our faith.
I'm quite certain, dear friends, that there are
many wonders in the world which we should
not have believed by mere reports if we
had not come across them by experience and
observation.
The electric telegraph, though it be but an
invention of man, would have been as hard
to believe in a thousand years ago as
the resurrection of the dead is now.
Who in the days of pack horses would
have believed in flashing a message from England
to America?
When our missionaries in tropical countries have told
the natives of the formation of ice and
that persons could walk across frozen water and
of ships that have been surrounded by mountains
of ice in the open sea, the water
becoming solid and hard as a rock, all
around them, the natives have refused to believe
such absurd reports.
Everything is wonderful till we are used to
it.
And resurrection owes the incredible portion of its
marvel to the fact of our never having
come across it in our observation, and that
is all.
After the resurrection, we shall regard it as
a divine display of power as familiar to
us as creation and providence now are.
I have no doubt we shall adore and
bless God and wonder at resurrection forever, but
it will be in the same sense in
which every devout mind wonders at creation now.
We shall grow accustomed to this new work
of God when we have entered upon our
longer life.
We were only born but yesterday and have
seen little as yet.
God's works require far more than our few
earthly years of observation, and when we have
entered into eternity or out of our minority
and have come of age, that which astounds
us now will have become a familiar theme
for praise.
Will resurrection be a greater wonder than creation?
You believe that God spoke the world out
of nothing.
He said, Let it be.
The world was.
To create out of nothing is quite as
marvellous as to call together scattered particles and
refashion them into what they were before.
Either work requires omnipotence, but if there be
any choice between them, the resurrection is the
easier work of the two.
If it did not happen so often, the
birth of every child in the world would
astound us.
We should consider a birth to be, as
indeed it is, a most transcendent manifestation of
divine power.
It is only because we know it and
see it so commonly that we do not
behold the wonder working hand of God in
human birth and in our continued existence.
The thing I say only staggers us because
we have not become familiar with it as
yet.
There are other deeds of God which are
quite as marvellous.
Remember, too, that there is one thing which,
though you have not seen, you have received
on credible evidence which is a part of
historic truth, namely that Jesus Christ rose again
from the dead.
He is to you the cause of your
resurrection, the type of it, the foretaste of
it, the guarantee of it.
As surely as he rose, you shall rise.
He proved the resurrection possible by rising.
Nay, he proved it certain because he is
the representative man, and in rising he rose
for all who are represented by him.
As in Adam all die, even so in
Christ shall all be made alive.
The rising of our Lord from the tomb
should forever sweep away every doubt as to
the rising of his people.
For if the dead rise not, then is
Christ not raised.
But because he lives, we shall live also.
Remember also, my brethren and sisters, that you
who are Christians have already experienced within yourselves
as great a work as the resurrection, for
you have risen from the dead as to
your innermost nature.
You were dead in trespasses and sins, and
you have been quickened into newness of life.
Of course, the unconverted here will see nothing
in this.
The unregenerate man will even ask me what
this means, and to him it can be
no argument, for it is a matter of
experience which one man cannot explain to his
fellow.
To know it, ye must yourselves be born
again.
But believe us, ye have already passed through
a resurrection from the grave of sin and
from the rottenness and corruption of evil passions
and impure desires, and this resurrection God has
wrought in you by a power equal to
that which he wrought in Christ when he
raised him from the dead and set him
at his own right hand in the heavenly
places.
To you, the quickening of your spiritual nature
is an assured proof that the also quicken
your mortal bodies.
The whole matter is this, that our persuasion
of the certainty of the general resurrection rests
upon faith in God and his word.
It is both idle and needless to look
elsewhere.
If men will not believe the declaration of
God, they must be left to give an
account to him of their unbelief.
My dear, if thou art one of God's
elect, thou wilt believe thy God, for God
gives faith to all his chosen.
If thou dost reject the divine testimony, thou
givest evidence that thou art in the gall
of bitterness, and thou wilt perish in it
unless grace prevents.
The gospel and the doctrine of the resurrection
were opened up to men in all their
glory to put a division between the precious
and the vile.
He that is of God, saith the apostle,
heareth God's words.
True faith is the visible mark of secret
election.
He that believeth in Christ gives evidence of
God's grace towards him, but he that believes
not gives sure proof that he has not
received the grace of God.
But ye believe not, said Christ, because ye
are not of my sheep, as I said
unto you.
My sheep hear my voice, and I know
them, and they follow me.
Therefore this truth and other Christian truths are
to be held up, maintained, and delivered fully
to the whole of mankind, to put a
division between them, to separate the Israelites from
the Egyptians, the seed of the woman from
the seed of the serpent.
Those whom God has chosen are known by
their believing in what God has said, while
those who remain unbelieving perish in their sin,
condemned by the truth which they willfully reject.
Thus march upon these points.
Now let us consider, lastly, our relation to
this truth.
Our first relation to this truth is this.
Children of God, comfort one another with these
words.
You have lost those dear to you.
Amend this statement.
They have passed into a better land, and
the body which remains behind is not lost,
but put out to blessed interest.
Sorrow ye must, but sorrow not as those
that are without hope.
I do not know why we always sing
dirges at the funerals of the saints and
drape ourselves in black.
I would desire, if I might have my
way, to be drawn to my grave by
white horses or to be carried on the
shoulders of men who would express joy as
well as sorrow in their habilments.
For why should we sorrow over those who
have gone to glory and inherited immortality?
I, like the old Puritan, plan of carrying
the coffin on the shoulders of the saints
and singing a psalm as they walk to
the grave.
Why not?
What is there, after all, to weep about
concerning the glorified?
Sound the gladsome trumpet.
Let the shrill clarion peel out the joyous
note of victory.
The conqueror has won the battle.
The king has climbed to his throne.
Rejoice, say our brethren from above, rejoice with
us, for we have entered into our rest.
Blessed are the dead which die in the
Lord from henceforth.
Yea, saith the Spirit, that they must rest
from their labours and their works to follow
them.
If we must keep up the signs of
woe, for this is natural, yet let not
your hearts be troubled, for that were unspiritual.
Bless God evermore that over the pious dead
we sing His living promises.
Let us in the next place cheer our
hearts in prospect of our own departure.
We shall soon pass away.
My brethren, we too must die.
There is no discharge in this war.
There is an arrow and there is an
archer.
The arrow is meant for my heart, and
the archer will take deadly aim.
There is a place where you shall sleep,
perhaps in a lone grave in a foreign
land, or perhaps in a niche where your
bones shall lie side by side with those
of your ancestors.
But to the dust return you must.
Well, let us not repine.
It is but for a little.
It is but a rest on the way
to immortality.
Death is a passing incident between this life
and the next.
Let us meet it not only with equanimity,
but with expectation, since it is not death
now, but resurrection to which we aspire.
Then again, are we expecting a blessed resurrection?
Let us respect our bodies.
Let not our members become instruments of evil.
Let them not be defiled with sin.
The Christian man must neither by gluttony nor
drunkenness nor by acts of uncleanness in any
way whatever defile his body, for our bodies
are the temples of the Holy Ghost.
If any man defile that temple of God,
him will God destroy.
Be ye pure.
In your baptism your bodies were washed with
pure water to teach you that henceforth ye
must be clean from all defilement.
Put away from you every evil thing.
Bodies that are to dwell forever in heaven
should not be subjected to pollution here below.
Lastly, and this is a very solemn thought,
the ungodly are to rise again, but it
will be to a resurrection of woe.
Their bodies sinned and their bodies will be
punished.
Fear him, says Christ, who is able to
destroy both soul and body in hell.
He will cast both of them into a
suffering which shall cause perpetually enduring destruction to
them.
This is terrible indeed.
To slumber in the grave would be infinitely
preferable to such a resurrection, the resurrection of
damnation, so the scripture calls it, arising to
shame and everlasting contempt, so Daniel styles it.
That is a dreadful resurrection indeed.
You might be glad to escape from it.
Surely it were dreadful enough for your soul
to suffer the wrath of God eternally without
the body having to be its companion, but
so it must be.
If body and soul sin, body and soul
must suffer and there forever.
Jeremy Taylor tells us of a certain Asclelius
Aviola who was seized with an apoplexy and
his friends conceiving him to be dead carried
him to his funeral pile, but when the
heat had warmed his body, he awoke to
find himself hopelessly encircled with funeral flames.
In vain he called for deliverance.
He could not be rescued, but passed from
torpor into intolerable torment.
Such will be the dreadful awakening of every
sinful body when it shall be aroused from
its slumber in the grave.
The body will start up to be judged,
condemned, and driven from God's presence into everlasting
punishment.
May God grant that it may never be
your case or mine, but may we believe
in Christ Jesus now and so obtain a
resurrection to life eternal.
Amen.