THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY.
Suggestion:—Objects: An egg and a little chick in a cage, or a toy chick, such as are often available at Easter time may be used.
MY LITTLE FRIENDS: Can you tell me what we commemorate on Easter Sunday? Yes, we commemorate the resurrection of Christ from the dead.
You remember how some weeks ago I showed you a watch-case.[A] You thought it was a watch, but when I opened it it had no works in it, consequently it was only a watch-case. When I placed the works in the case, then it made a complete watch.
So you have also seen the body of a dead person and you have possibly thought that that was the individual, the person whom you had known; but that which you saw was only the body. The soul, the immortal part, had taken its departure and gone back to God who first placed it in the body. Now, just the same as the works of a watch can keep good time without being in the case, so the soul can exist apart from the body. If you were to take the watch-case and bury it in the ground, that fact would not affect either the existence or the accuracy of the works of the watch in measuring time. So when God takes the soul out of the body we say that it is a dead body, and it becomes necessary for us to bury it out of our sight.
The Women at the Sepulchre.
On Good Friday we commemorate the death of Christ upon the cross on Calvary. You remember how, after the crucifixion, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus came and took the body of Christ down from the cross and laid it in a new tomb which Joseph had hewn out of rock in his garden. When this had been done, Pilate remembered how Jesus had said that if He were put to death, after three days He would rise again. Now, Pilate did not believe that Jesus would rise again, but was afraid that His disciples or some friends might come by night and steal away His body and circulate the report that Jesus had risen from the dead; so he placed Roman soldiers around the sepulchre to prevent His disciples from coming near the tomb, or sepulchre where Joseph had laid away the body of Christ. Pilate purposed to prevent the possibility of Christ's resurrection, but in the fact that he placed the soldiers there he secured for all after ages the most positive proof that Jesus did actually rise from the dead. These soldiers were Roman soldiers, and if they had slept while they were upon guard duty, the penalty would have been death. But when the angel came down from heaven and rolled away the stone, then we are told that these Roman soldiers became as dead men.