And it is this God whom Christianity presents as coming down from the heaven of glory, and clothing himself with a new, a distinct, but a mortal humanity in which to die as an infinite substitute for guilty men, that through death, he might abolish death for men.
Having died as a sacrificial substitute, death considered as a penalty, and the guilt and demerit of sin which induced the penalty, have been set aside for all for whom his substitution avails.
Nor does Christianity leave us long in doubt as to those for whom the substitution obtains. In full and precise statement of doctrine it tells us that this substitution is on the behalf of, and for, all who individually claim our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross as a personal sacrifice for sin, and who by faith offer him to God as the sacrifice and sin offering which God himself has provided.
Thus it follows, that for every believer—death as a penalty has been abolished, brought to nought.
This is the first great and joyous proclamation of Christianity, Death has been abolished as a penalty for every believer.
It has been abolished de jure, not yet de facto.
The Christian still dies, but his death is no longer penal, it is providential and provisional.
In the hour of death the Christian is not seized as a culprit and hurried away to execution. On the contrary, when the hour of death sounds for him, a voice inspired from heaven assures him that he has reached the threshold of the “far better”; he arises and “departs,” that he may be “absent from his home in this body and present at his home with the Lord.” His death is not a defeat, but a begun victory, and, inasmuch as both soul and spirit are delivered from the underworld and the shades of death, he has the assurance that the penalty will yet be completely abolished concerning his body: it is both the assurance and the prophecy of it.
Christianity is, then, primarily, the good news, and the doctrinal demonstration, that death as a judicial sentence has been abolished for the Christian.
But Christianity is something more than the abolition of death—it is—