Was it not the object of the transfiguration, in part, to give the human soul of Christ such an idea of his future glory in heaven, as to strengthen him for his agony and death? Yes; for the heavenly visitants "spake of his decease which he should accomplish at Jerusalem." That anticipation of his glorified nature was a part of "the joy set before him." Let Christ on Tabor, and faith, do for us, with regard to present bodily sorrows and sufferings, that which the transfiguration did for Jesus in the days of his humiliation. "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."
Through the long interval of death and the separate state, the anticipation of the last day and of the resurrection will, no doubt, be to the wicked a predominant source of terror. While the joyful anticipations of it, in heaven, will be like the advancing steps of morning, when there begin to be signs, in the tabernacle for the sun, of that bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and of that strong man rejoicing to run a race, and every thing will be astir with the notes of preparation for that day, for which all other days were made, the approach of it will be, to the lost, a deepening gloom, its arrival the settling down of interminable night. Instead of entering into their bodies with transport, as the righteous do, they will each be like a prisoner removed from one jail to another with new bars and bolts. If it be not unreasonable to suppose that the appearance of the body will conform to the character, and if the bodies of Isaiah, and Paul, and John must be seraphic, to correspond with their experience and attainments, what must the bodies of the wicked be! They will have spent centuries in sinning, and suffering, debased in every part, the image of God supplanted by the image of him whose service they preferred to that of a holy God and Saviour. What a moment will that be, when the sinner's grave is opened by the last trumpet, and a hideous form rises to receive a frantic spirit! "The harvest is the end of the world, and the reapers are the angels." "As, therefore, the tares are gathered and burned in the fire, so shall it be in the end of this world. The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth." "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." There will be separations at the graves of those who lay side by side in death; many a tomb will yield up subjects both for heaven and for hell; the differences in character, between the regenerate and unregenerate, will there be made conspicuous in the correspondence of the risen body to the soul, according as the soul shall have arrived at the grave from a state of joy or of woe. Arrests will be made, there will be forcible detentions, overpowering strength, disregard of entreaties, remorseless rendings asunder of families, unclasping of embraces, and an indiscriminate mixture of all classes among the wicked, indicated by the command, "Bind ye the tares together, in bundles, to be burned." Nor will this be worse for holy angels to witness, than it was to see those sinners turn their backs on the Lord's supper, year after year. They could treat their Saviour's dying agonies, and his blood, with perfect neglect and contempt, through their love of the world and sin; now they eat the fruit of their own way, and are filled with their own devices. Our treatment of the Saviour will return upon our own heads. What a change will be made in the ideas which many sentimentalists had of holy angels, when they see them executing the terrible orders of their King! and what an illustration it will give of the severity of justice,—the rigors of its execution being compatible with the pure benevolence of holy angels, because of God. We are constantly admonished that the punishment of the wicked will be a great part of the proceedings on that day. It is called "the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men." "Behold, the Lord cometh, with ten thousands of his saints, to execute judgment."
All this serves to invest the death of a dear Christian friend, in our thoughts, with inexpressible peace and comfort. He, with his Redeemer, can say, "My flesh, also, shall rest in hope." If we are confident that a friend is gone to be with Christ, death is, even now, swallowed up of life; and now the thought of what the soul is to inherit, both before and after the resurrection, and its contrast with the experience of the lost, should make us joyful in tribulation. True, we cannot, by any artifice or illusion, make death itself cease to be a curse. Full of beauty and consolation as it may be,—nay, we will call it triumphant,—yet nothing saddens the mind, for the time, more than the sight of true beauty. In heaven things beautiful will not make us sad; nor will the remembrance of a past joy, which so inevitably has that effect upon us here. We are beholding a sunset. Day is flinging up all its treasures, as though it were breaking to pieces its pavilion forever and scattering the fragments; and now, when all seemed past, one more flood of glory streams over the scene, but only for a moment; then comes a last touch of pathos, here and there, like a more distant farewell, a whispered good night. Have tears never come unbidden, do we never feel sad, at such a time? Is not the whole of life, past, present, and to come, then tinged with sombre hues? and all because the dying day expires with such beauty and peace. Not so when a storm suddenly brings in night upon us. Then we are nerved and braced; we hear no minor key in the voice of the departing day. It is perfectly natural, therefore, to weep over our dead, even when every thing in their departure is consolatory and beautiful. It is interesting to observe that it was even when he was on his way to raise the dead body of his friend, and thus to comfort the weeping sisters, that "Jesus wept."
Let us more and more love the Christian's grave. Angels love it. Two of them sat in the tomb where the body of Jesus had lain—they loosed the napkin that was about his head, and "wrapped" it "together in a place by itself;" and when Jesus had left the place, instead of following him, they lingered, to comfort the weeping friends on their arrival at the sepulchre. Can it be Michael, guardian of the dead Moses and his grave, on "the great stone" which has been rolled "from the door of the sepulchre"? Is he thinking how he will one day hear the command, "Take ye away the stone" which covers all who sleep in Jesus? As the cross is hallowed by the death of the Son of God upon it, the grave is hallowed for the believer through the Saviour's burial. There are three places which must possess intense interest for a glorified friend. One is his home; another is his seat in the house of God; and another is his grave. Let us cherish it. We do well to visit such a spot. Sometimes approaching it with sadness and fear, we go away with surprising peace; looking back for a last view of the stone, and feeling towards the spot as we do when we are leaving little children in the dark for the night, unutterable love, we find, has cast out fear. Those graves are treasures which heaven has made sure, "sealing the stone, and setting a watch." Of those who still live, we are not certain that, in the providence of God, they will henceforth be an unmingled source of comfort; but they who are in those graves are garnered fruits, are finished works, are each like the rod of Aaron laid up in the ark, which "bloomed blossoms and yielded almonds." All else which is dear to us on earth may seem changeful, or changed; the property may have disappeared, the home may have been broken tip, the plighted faith and love may have been recalled; the whole condition of life may have been altered: but we visit that burial spot, and there is permanence; that fast-anchored isle has defied the surges and roaring currents; the grave seems beautifully constant; it has not betrayed our confidence; it is not weary of its precious charge; it has kindly staid behind to permit and encourage our griefs when all else may have fled. The winter's snows have fallen, the tempests have beaten, there; and now, this April or May morning, it is as steadfast and quiet as when the slumber there began.
Great honor is paid to the dead in giving them precedence to the living at the last day. "The dead in Christ shall rise first," that is, before the living are changed;—they shall rise, and after that, in a moment, in a twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet, the living will be transformed; for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. This is said in order to comfort those who mourn the death of Christian friends,—intimating such care on the part of their Redeemer, that the apostle is directed to tell us "by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive, and remain to the coming of the Lord, shall not" have precedence of "them that are asleep." It is declared that the change of the living will be effected "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye." This must be a matter of pure revelation; for it could not have been foretold, from any apparent probabilities, whether it would happen instantaneously or by degrees. It is suited to impress the mind with the power and majesty of Christ, inasmuch as this is to be one of the great acts connected with his second coming, and as really an exercise of his omnipotence as the raising of the dead. For he is "Lord both of the dead and of the living."
"And the sea shall give up the dead that are in it." Many a form of a believer is waiting there for the redemption of the body. Nor has it escaped the eye of the great archangel. Wrapped in its rude shroud, or decomposed and scattered, or in whatever way seemingly annihilated, personal identity still attaches to it, and the all-seeing eye watches every thing which is essential to that identity, as easily as though the body were in the grave with kindred dust. That the power of God in the resurrection may be fully illustrated, and that some may be preeminent witnesses in their own persons of that mighty power, perhaps it will appear that they were permitted, for that purpose, to be devoured, or to dissolve and to waste away in the sea. If they who came out of great tribulation are arrayed in white robes among the righteous, we may look for some special sign of glory and joy in those who receive their bodies, not from the sheltering grave, but from the sea, and from the very frame of nature, into which their bodily organization will, in one way and another, have been incorporated. O the unspeakable wonders and raptures connected with the resurrection, both as it relates to our own experience, and to the illustrations which the resurrection will afford, of the divine wisdom and power. No wonder, we say, that Paul esteemed it the height of Christian privilege, that he, as a redeemed human being, "might attain unto the resurrection of the dead."
It is an innocent fancy, if it be not worthy of a better name, that the great attention which has been given of late years to new cemeteries, now in such contrast to the old graveyards, whose reckless disorder so perfectly expressed abandonment to sorrow and unresisting surrender to the last enemy, is a symptomatic token of growing faith in the great, general heart of the Christianized part of the race, with regard to that consummation of all things, the resurrection of the dead.
As at sea there is, within certain degrees of latitude and longitude, an uphill and a downhill, made by the convexity of the globe, we, perhaps, may have reached the meridian of the great voyage, and may have begun to feel the inclination which will set us forward more swiftly to the end. The power of the great consummation will be waxing stronger and stronger. Men are looking to the cemeteries as places where great treasures went down, or were abandoned, and they begin to think that some great restoration awaits them. These costly and beautiful cemeteries, which men are preparing, are like Hiram's contributions to the building of the temple; they foretell some great thing; they have a look not only of expectation, but of design, not merely of faith, but of hope. With a truly liberal regard to the decoration of those burial places with costly works of general interest, in the department of art, we shall do well to make provision, by statute, for the perpetual repair and preservation of every enclosure, and every grave, the whole body corporate thus pledging itself, as far as possible, to each incumbent, that his last resting place shall be the care of the perpetuated fraternity to the end of time.
And when the prophecies are accomplished, and the stone cut out of the mountain without hands has filled the earth, and the apostasy which is to follow the general prevalence of religion, has deluged the world with blood, and Satan, loosed a little season, is triumphing in his maddened career, and the graves are full, and the souls under the altar, with their importunate cry, can no longer wait for the avenging arm,—then shall be seen the sign of the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory.