^ Phillips Brooks, Sermons for the Principal Festivals, 270. ' H. P. Liddon, Easter in St. Paul's, 124.
340 THE POWER OF HIS RESURRECTION
have robbed him of all. Testimonies might be false, the vision at Damascus an optical delusion of over-strained hours, and he would have been of all men most miserable; but by faith he could look into the unseen and put Christ there at any moment, and St. Paul had found Him and taken Him as the Master of his life, and as a result his whole life had been changed ; and now his great desire is to know more of Christ.
^ Who knows a country best — the man who has passed through it with all the rapidity of modern locomotion, or the man who has spent years amid its hills and dales, its woods and rivers ? Whose verdict on an individual character is most trustworthy — his who has had but a superficial acquaintance with the individual in question, or his who has seen that indi- vidual in all the mutations of poverty and wealth, grief and joy, disappointment and realization ? Those inquiries admit of but one reply. So in relation to Christ : he who " knows " Christ can best explain His words, trust His promises, reveal His nature. In proportion as you " know " Christ, can you understand His most mysterious and His most awful utterances.^
II.
To Know the Powek of Christ's Eesurrection.
1. The expression "to know him, and the power of his resurrection," does not mean to know Him, even the power of His resurrection ; as if it were not He strictly that was known, but only the effects of certain things about Him that were felt, such as His resurrection. The meaning is rather the reverse, namely, to know Him in the power of His resurrection, to attain, through knowing the power of His resurrection, to a knowledge of Him, to be brought close to Him through all that He has done and all that has happened to Him, so as to know Himself,
^ As one comes on the diary of his dead mother and reads how she loved him, bore with him, prayed with him, suffered for him, the past is interpreted ; she rises out of her grave in a new and deathless beauty. What was seen only in gleams and flickerings is known for a great fire of love that never ceased to burn. The heart discerned only through narrow chinks and ^ J. Parker, Hidden Springs, 339.
PHILIPPIANS III. lo, II 341
apertures -is revealed in its completeness ; the sacred and pure image passes among the treasures of the soul.^
2. What was Paul's conception of the power of Christ's re- surrection? To Paul the resurrection was a new departure in the history of mankind. It gave him the ideal and the reality of a new man, not an earthy man, such as Adam was, before he fell, or even as Christ was upon the earth, but a heavenly and spiritual man.
It is only the spiritual man that can have perfect fellowship with God — "flesh and blood cannot enter into the kingdom of God." Now Christ on earth was not wholly a spiritual man. He had a 1)ody of flesh. But on His resurrection He became wholly spiritual ; He assumed a spiritual body. Then He was wholly, in mind and body, the spiritual man, the new man — head of the new humanity, and the second Adam. Then, too, He was constituted Son of God in power by the resurrection from the dead. He was the new man, the Lord from heaven ; and being elevated on high, was in a position as new man to put forth all His power to save men — His power, which was the power of His resurrection. And it is this power that the Apostle desires to know. Therefore, when he says the power of His resurrection, he means all the power which He now puts forth, and all the power which thinking of Him, as He now is, exerts on men's minds.
^ The student of science tells us that all energy is convertible into kindred forms. Light, heat, electricity, sound, may perhaps be degrees of the same force which is addressing men in different ways, and through varied senses. More than one inventor asserts that he is able to change the rays of light which come from the sun into electrical energy. Life, suggests a popular writer, is built up of atoms which have the power to attract and repel each other, and death is such a loss of that power that their vibrancy ceases, and they fall inert into space. Whatever is seen, heard, tasted, felt, may be a modification of one original substance, for all forces are convertible, and chemical elements are beino- resolved into simpler elements. Whether this theory is correct or not, the forces which asserted themselves in Christ's resurrec- tion reappear in many forms in the life of His redeemed people. That resurrection transmutes itself into a power through which
^ W. Robertson Nicoll, Ten-Minute Sermons, 120.
342 THE POWER OF HIS RESURRECTION
I am taken out of condemnation and brought into newness of life. It is the source from which I receive my baptism of spiritual power. In the deliverance from peril and death vouch- safed to the Church and its members, this sublime event of which the Apostles were the witnesses asserts itself anew. And in the last day the Lord's own rising will prove itself the germinal movement in the resurrection of His servants.^