It would be rather truer to the original, and more closely corresponding with the facts, to say—not that our Lord hath abolished death, for, alas! that still remains around us—but that He hath brought death to nought, annihilated its power, and destroyed its strength. “The last enemy,” we are told, “which shall be destroyed is death”; but meanwhile, for every Christian soul, its greatest distress and terror is gone because our Lord has thrown a glorious illumination upon it, and has “brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel.” He has enabled us to see beyond the grave, beyond those dreadful battlefields, strewn with the bodies of those whom we had loved and honoured, and has made manifest to us that they still live on in a new life, and a glorious immortality. Who can estimate the mercy to sad and sorrowing hearts of the establishment of that blessed hope on the firm assurance of our Lord Himself, who, after suffering an agonizing death here, appeared to His Apostles and declared, “Fear not; I am the first and the last: I am He that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death”? The pain of bereavement remains—that is like the loss of a limb, which time alone can soften—but the definite assurance, from the Saviour’s lips, that those who have died in His faith and obedience have entered on a new and blessed life, must be of infinite comfort to those who loved them. We are not left any longer to hopes and to future expectations; but can grasp the assurance of present realities which are vouched for by the Saviour who took our nature upon Him, who lived our life, and died our death, and showed Himself alive beyond the grave. This is what we owe to the Saviour’s birth, with all the gracious revelation of which it was the commencement.
The Apostle’s assurance goes, indeed, beyond this illumination of our present experience, and seems to throw a glorious light upon the whole history of mankind. “God,” he says, “hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace which was given us in Christ Jesus, before the world began.” It is now made manifest by the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, but it existed from all eternity “before the world began.” If so, then through those long ages which preceded our Lord’s birth, this life and immortality were given to the millions to whom His Name had not been manifested, but who died in the discharge of their duty, and who faithfully made the sacrifices which were involved in His government and just judgment of the world. Christ revealed the wars and sufferings of this world as the inevitable consequence of the operation of God’s righteousness and justice upon the evil, the sin, and the Godlessness of mankind. Sooner or later those sins and evils gather to a head, in some great corruption of society and political life, in some enormous crime of ambition or pride; and the righteousness and justice of God, working through the ordinary laws of human nature, evokes some tremendous reaction against them; and we behold the overthrow of a great Empire, or a European Revolution, or a world-wide clash of the forces of right and wrong. That is the course of history, as determined before the world began by the inscrutable righteousness and wisdom of God.
That is the condition under which the world now exists, and people who talk of abolishing war are like people standing on the crater of a great volcano, and trying to persuade themselves that there will be no more eruptions. As long as there is evil in the world and God’s righteousness in the world, you will have the moral reactions between the two bursting from time to time into some awful conflagration like the present. That is the revelation of the whole Bible, brought to its culmination in the Book of Revelation. But what was manifested to-day, and proclaimed by the Heavenly Hosts, was God’s love and mercy to the individual souls who have been the victims of these convulsions, and who might seem to have been treated as mere passing elements in the temporal scene. At the Birth of Christ, and by means of it, were manifested and assured God’s peace and good will to every soul of man who passes through this brief scene of struggle and, it may be, of death. It proclaims that for each individual soul death may be said to have been in effect abolished, that for every one of them, according to the eternal purpose of God, “life and immortality” have been prepared and assured; and that the struggles and sufferings of this mortal life, terrible as they may be, are not worthy to be compared with the glory that was designed, before the world began, for those who do the will of God. This is the blessed revelation of Christmas, and it is our privilege to fix our eyes and our hearts upon it, amid the sorrows and troubles of the moment; and in proportion as we do so, we shall respond with our whole hearts and souls to the exhortation of the same Apostle. “Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.”
The Things Seen and the Things Not Seen.
PREACHED IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, EASTER DAY, 1915.
“For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.”—2 Cor. iv. 16.
These touching words of St. Paul are based upon the grand truth to which Easter Day is a standing witness. “Therefore,” he says, or “for which cause, we faint not.” That cause is stated in the verse just before, “Knowing that He Which raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise up us also with Jesus, and shall present us with you.” The Apostle had just been giving a vivid description of the extreme strain, and almost mortal struggle, in which the work of his ministry involved him. “We are troubled,” he says, “on every side ... always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh. So then death worketh in us, but life in you.” The Apostle was undergoing a strain which was draining the very life of his body, in order to preach the Gospel which was bringing life to the souls of others; but he endured it in the knowledge that, even if it involved the sacrifice of his life, He Who raised up the Lord Jesus would raise him up also by Jesus, and present him in a new life at the day of the Resurrection. In this knowledge, his experience that his outward man was perishing did not make him faint, for he knew that his inward man was being renewed day by day. If he was daily dying, he was but experiencing the dying of the Lord Jesus; and thus, by entering into closer sympathy with his Lord, he was becoming united also with His life. Christ’s resurrection in glory was an assurance to him of his own resurrection, and the sufferings of the moment were as nothing to him in comparison with that glory. That affliction was, after all, light and momentary, when it was realized that it was working out for him, more and more exceedingly, an eternal weight of glory. The things which he saw and felt at the moment were, after all, but temporary, whereas the things which were not then visible were eternal. If the earthly frame, which was his present tabernacle, were dissolved by death, he knew that there was ready for him “a house not made with hands, eternal, in the heavens.”
Is not this application of the great message of the Resurrection peculiarly opportune and welcome to us at the present moment? We are living through a time when the things that are seen are distressing and painful beyond anything in our experience—we might perhaps say, in the experience of Christian Europe. We seem to have gone back, on a sudden, to the days before the flood, when “the earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence”; and we seem to need a re-issue of the Divine proclamation, after that world of violence had been swept away: “Surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God made He man.” The curse of this violence and bloodshed is being inflicted, day by day, upon innumerable homes; and day by day we each apprehend it for our own families. In order to stay the curse, the blood of our own brothers and sons is being poured out like water, and the desolation of our homes is becoming more and more appalling. The blood-stained fields of Belgium, France and Poland, the engulfing of the innocent lives of women and children in the ocean—these are the things that are seen; and we need some supreme assurance—nay we need some Divine revelation—if we are to live through such experiences in faith, and hope, and in Christian charity. We mourn, day by day, the loss of precious lives, and we are appalled at the thought of the further sacrifices of such lives, young and mature, which we fear must be required; and so far as we look only on the things thus seen, our hearts might well fail us. Like St. Paul, as he describes himself in the context, “we are troubled on every side ... we are smitten down, though not destroyed.”