Already we have passed into Jesus' second great contribution toward answering our question of the second life. He assures us of it because of the character of the Father we come to know through Him. Jesus' faith in His own resurrection was based on His personal experience of God. The words from a Psalm, which the early Church applied to Him, sound like an utterance some disciple may have overheard Him repeating:
Thou wilt not leave My soul in the grave,
Neither wilt Thou suffer Thy devoted One to see corruption.
Thou madest known unto Me the ways of life;
Thou shalt make Me full of gladness in Thy presence.
Love is stronger than death, and for Jesus God is love. It was this which made Him "the God of the living." Jesus could not imagine Him linking Himself with men,
becoming the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, and allowing them to become mere handfuls of dust in a Hittite grave. His love would hold them in union with Him forever. Jesus "abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel"—through the good news concerning God. When He succeeds in convincing us that the universe is our Father's house, it requires no further argument to assure us of its "many mansions." The unending fellowship with Jesus' God of all His true children is an inevitable inference from what we know His and our God to be. We do not base our confident anticipation of everlasting life merely upon some saying of Jesus, which we blindly accept because He said it, nor even upon the report of His own resurrection from the grave; these are too slight foundations for our assured expectation. We rest it firmly upon what we know of His and our Father. Immortality is not a mere guess nor a fervent wish; we have solid and substantial experience of what God is from all that He has done for His children and for ourselves. And experience worketh hope. Faith looks both backwards and forwards,
to what God has done and to what He consistently must do; and all the while faith looks upwards, and in His face reads a love that will not let us go.
The Easter victory of Jesus is the vindication of His own faith. God, as Lord of heaven and earth, is involved in our world's history; He has been responsible for its outcome from the beginning. If He let the truest Son He ever had end His career in defeat and failure, He is a faithless and untrustworthy God. Calvary was the supreme venture of faith; Jesus staked everything on the responsiveness of the universe to love, in the trust that the God of the universe is love. "If Christ hath not been raised, your faith is vain." But if the seeming triumph of wrong over right, of ignorance over truth, of selfishness over sacrifice, which took place at Golgotha be but the prelude to a vaster victory, then the Lord of earth has cleared Himself, and proved Himself worthy of the confidence of His children.
And of the fact of that victory not only the first disciples are witnesses, but every man and woman since in whose life Christ has been and is a present force. Explain as
we may the details of the resurrection narratives, conceive as we please of the manner in which Christ made Himself known to His followers in His post-resurrection appearances long ago, we know that He is "no dead fact stranded on the shore of the oblivious years," but a living force in our world today, and that Easter triumphs are reenacted wherever His Spirit animates the lives of men. History again and again has demonstrated that His labor has not been vain in God; that the whole structure and fabric of things responds to trust and love; that careers such as His cannot be holden of death, but find an ally in the universe itself, which sends them on through the years conquering and to conquer. That demonstration in history confirms Jesus' trust in God, sets a public seal which the whole world can see to the correctness of His testimony to Him whom He found in the unseen, and in whose cause He laid down His life.
And Jesus has made still another contribution to the answer of our question: it is through Him that we form our pictures of the life to which we look forward so certainly. The New Testament expectations
center about Jesus Himself: "With Me in paradise;" "Where I am, there also shall my servant be;" "I go to prepare a place for you;" "So shall we ever be with the Lord." Men who had experienced Christ's hold upon them, through all the divisive circumstances of life, had no doubt of His continuing grasp upon them through death; they spoke of the Christian dead as "the dead in Christ"—the dead under His transforming control. Not death nor life could separate them from His love.