1. " None dieth to himself." The expression is striking, but it is practically meaningless if separated from the rest of the passage.
1 A. E., The Divine Visicm, 73. * W. M. Taylor.
ROMANS XIV. 7-9 407
It is the thought which follows that we must emphasize. We die unto the Lord. So then, it results that if we live to the Lord and die to the Lord we are eternally the Lord's. Once grasp that thought firmly, and we shall hold a weapon strong to disarm the grim fear of death.
^ Death is the withdrawal of all human support from around the soul, of its vesture and home, of the very body which is its second self, that it may be alone with Christ, and feel Him to be enough for it, more to it than any created thing. He invites the soul and constrains it to put all its confidence into that last act of surrender; to cast itself, bare of every aid but His, into the mysterious infinite, feeling that underneath it are the everlasting arms. For a man to learn this perfect confidence in Christ, he must die.^
^ Once when I was visiting a dear child whose death-bed was a very happy one, she told me she had been dreaming that she was in the act of departing, and she felt not the slightest alarm. It reminded her of a day long previously, when she was being bathed in the sea, and her big brother suddenly caught her up and carried her out far beyond her depth. It gave her only a sensation of delight, for she knew she was safe in his arms.^
2. The Apostle four times over in this short paragraph makes mention of death, and of the dead. " None of us dieth to him- self " ; " whether we die, we die unto the Lord " ; " whether we die, we are the Lord's " ; " that he might be Lord of the dead." And this last sentence, with its mention not of the dying but of the dead, reminds us that the reference in them all is to the Christian's relation to his Lord, not only in the hour of death, but in the state after death; it is not only that Jesus Christ, as the slain One risen, is absolute Disposer of the time and manner of our dying ; it is not only that when our death comes we are to accept it as an opportunity for the " glorifying of God " (John xxi. 19 ; Phil. i. 20) in the sight and in the memory of those who know of it. It is that when we have " passed through death," and come out upon the other side,
When we enter yonder regions. When we touch the sacred shore,
our relation to the slain One risen, to Him who, as such, " hath the keys of death and of Hades," is perfectly continuous and the
1 John Ker. a J. Gibson,
4o8 ETERNALLY THE LORD'S
same. He is our absolute Master, there as well as here. And we, by consequence and correlation, are vassals, servants, bondservants to Him, there as well as here.
For doubt not but that in the worlds above There must be other offices of love; That other tasks and ministries there are, Since it is written that His servants there Shall serve Him still.^
3. "Eternally the Lord's." Let us welcome the assurance from His own teaching. "To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise" — wherever that mysterious spot may be in space, at least somewhere where He is living a continuous life. The death of Jesus Christ is no ceasing, no ending of His personal existence. This is as clear as anything can be. Put to death in the flesh, He was quickened in the Spirit, and He went in that Spirit and preached to the spirits in prison. Death was to Him no ending of existence ; it was an incident in the endless life ; not an incident that came to Him as other incidents had come and were to come, of His Father's will, and in the time of His Father's ordaining. It has never touched for a single moment the continuity of His personal existence. And as with Him, so with us. He died. He rose. He revived in order that He might make manifest to us what our death is. Death, then, to us as to Him, does not touch personal existence at all. Whether we live we live unto the Lord ; whether we die we die unto the Lord ; living or dying, we are the Lord's. It is not surviving death. Death is only the inevitable incident that comes to us in a life which is of endless continuance.
Death is another life. We bow our heads, At going out, we think, and enter straight Another golden chamber of the King's, Larger than this we leave, and lovelier.^
IIL
The Lord's.
" Whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ died, and lived again, that He might be Lord of ^ R. C. Trench. • P. J. Bailey, Festus.
ROMANS XIV. 7-9 409
both the dead and the living." In these words, as so often in general statements of this kind in St. Paul, there seems to be a universal reference, and a particular one also. For while it is obvious that the great assertion of the text has a sense in which it is true of the whole race of man, in which every man, whatever he may be doing or suJEfering, is Christ's, it is equally obvious that there is also another sense, and that the only blessed and full one, in which they and they alone are His who are consciously united to Him in His death unto sin and His life unto righteousness ; who shall reign and walk with Him in light, where He is in the glory of the Father.