After the scriptures of truth have instructed us in the origin of sin, they then proceed to a description of that calamity of universal influence—death, with which are connected innumerable woes. This is done, with a view to impress man with a solemn truth, which every trifle tends to obliterate from his mind, viz. that he must die; to humble him under a sense of that guilt, from whence his mortality originated, and to solemnize and prepare him for an event as inevitable, as uncertain, in the time of its arrival.
Hence death is represented as a king of mighty power, extensive dominion, and universal sway; before whose unconquerable arm, even conquering kings themselves fall; and to whom, as to a superior potentate, they must resign those very trophies that marked their own conquests, together with all the glittering regalia of sceptres, diadems, and thrones, which lie as spoils at death’s footstool.—As a king of terrors; whose train is composed of the terrific attendants of the pestilence, the famine, the sword, the earthquake; and all the numerous maladies which attack the body, or torture the mind; by which, as by a great army, death invades this microcosm man, and converts the globe into an aceldama or field of blood, filled with promiscuous heaps of slain. As a monster, armed with a sting, 1 Cor. xv. 56, so pointed as to strike through the liver of the stoutest transgressor; so impoisoned, as to communicate a venom, which mocks all the powers of medicine; and so deadly, as, by its baneful influence, to blast health in its highest vigor, and youth in perfect prime; and to reduce the outward fabric of man to a state, humble as the dust, and vile as the crawling reptile.
This king of terrors, this deadly monster, all must meet. He is a messenger of the Almighty. He bears a warrant signed in the court of heaven. He has executed his commission already upon millions; and millions more shall fall before his invincible arm. Even now he is knocking at the door of thousands of our fellow-mortals, and God only knows, who next may be accosted by this awful visitant. In the midst of fancied security, and boasted health, this invisible foe may be this very moment whetting his scythe, and meditating a blow at the healthy and the strong; while the pampered miser, who says to his soul, Soul take thine ease, thou hast much goods laid up in store, eat, drink, and be merry, may be instantly the first to be surprised with the unexpected call, Thou fool, this night shall thy soul be required of thee.
If death call, we must hear. If he summon, we must obey. If he enter our doors, we must give him the meeting. Who can stay his hand? Who can reverse or even retard the execution of his summons? Is he to be bribed by wealth? Is he to be repelled by force? Can titles or honors demand his partiality? Will he compliment the dignified, or the opulent? Can entreaties move him? Or,
“Can flatt’ry sooth the dull, cold ear of death?”
No. He is as impartial, as he is relentless and inexorable. He pays no respect to age, sex, rank, or fortune. He visits equally the palace and the cottage. The king and peasant are alike indiscriminate objects of his summons. Crowns and sceptres are no more in his estimation, weigh no more in death’s balance, than rags or pebbles. The prince and the subject, the wise and the foolish, the healthy and invalid, the beautiful and deformed, shall lie down alike in the grave, and the worms shall cover them. Job, xxi. 26. The small and the great are there; Job, iii. 19; in that land of darkness, as darkness itself, and of the shadow of death, without any order, where the light is as darkness. Job, x. 22.
Sin makes man meet death; and death brings him to a meeting with God. Those, who would not meet him, in his ordinances, by prayer or through faith, in a Mediator, shall be forced to an interview with the holy and eternal Jehovah at his tribunal, to give an account for all the deeds done in the body. To those, who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb, Rev. vii. 14, this meeting will be the commencement of perfect, perpetual, and uninterrupted bliss: but to the unrighteous it will be, beyond description, horrible. To these, death comes as an executioner; lays his axe to the root of the trees; and gives the fatal blow. If rotten and fruitless, down they fall, and so they lie as fuel fit for everlasting burnings. Isa. xxxiii. 14. Then the wicked launch into eternity; are consigned over to the bar of God; and receive their eternal doom. The instant life’s silken cord is broken, and the soul dislodged from the body, the sinner is either transported on the wings of cherubs to Abraham’s bosom, or lifts up his eyes with that rich man, in endless torments: if he meet God in his sins, unpardoned and unconverted; God meets him as a consuming fire, Heb. xii. 29, clad in all his vengeance and terrors.
O sirs, it is this consideration, that strips death of all that unimportance, with which, from the frequency of its arrival, it is viewed, in general, by a thoughtless world. To die, sounds common, and appears trivial; but not so, to die and be damned, or to die and be saved. When we consider, that either eternal damnation, or eternal salvation, is the instant and inseparable consequence of death; how wicked, how diabolically absurd, are the jests of the infidel and the wit, when affecting to smile at that solemn event! However, with all the affected gaiety of the proud and the profane, when they come to lie on a death-bed, their mirth will forsake them, and all the boasted heroism of infidelity sink in a dreadful succession of horror and dismay. And no wonder; since
“’Tis not the dying, but ’tis this they fear,
To be—they know not what, they know not where!”
The prospect of meeting the Lord God Almighty, constitutes the bitterest drug in the cup of the wicked, and is the most tormenting thought, in the view of their dissolution, that racks them on the verge of eternity. How would they court death, and solicit his arrival; were it not, that after death is the judgment! How gladly would they meet and embrace the messenger, could they but be excused from meeting that God; the light of whose countenance makes heaven, but in whose frown, is hell! From a reluctance to do this, arise dismal apprehensions, dreadful impatience, torturing doubts, and a tormenting anxiety to live. All which conflict of raging and tumultuous passions, in a soul, at the article of dissolution, and upon the point of meeting God, is most beautifully described in the following striking imagery of the poet: