(1) The resurrection of the dead is an individual promise. — It is a hope to us one by one ; not like those grand promises which are made to the Church at large, in which we may, each of us, doubtless, have our share, but in which we seem to share only all together. The promise of the resurrection is to each single soul which feels and enjoys its own life, which looks forward with sadness to losing it, to which its own life is the most precious possession in the world. It tells each one of us that this precious life will not be lost; that in due time, to each possessor of it here, it will be restored again, and for ever. We look on one another ; we look on each other's faces, on the faces which we have known so long, which we love and delight in ; and we know that each must die. We know that we who look at them, who are filled with love and pity and sadness while we look, must die either after them or before them. But as truly as each shall die, so truly shall each be made alive again. So has He said, who is the resurrection and the life. So it must be if He is true.
ff The longer I live, the more clearly I see how all souls are in His hand — the mean and the great. Fallen on the earth in their baseness, or fading as the mist of morning in their goodness ; — still in the hand of the potter as the clay, and in the temple of their master as the cloud. It was not the mere bodily death that He conquered — that death had no sting. It was this spiritual death which He conquered, so that at last it should be swallowed up — mark the word — not in life, but in victory. As the dead body shall be raised to life, so also the defeated soul to victory, if only it has been fighting on its Master's side, has made no covenant with death ; nor itself bowed its forehead for his seal. Blind from the prison-house, maimed from the battle, or mad ^ J. H. Jowett, in The British Congregationalist, Feb. 28, 1907
PHILIPPIANS m. 20, 21 395
from the tombs, their souls shall surely yet sit, astonished, at His feet who giveth peace.^
Hail, garden of confident hope !
Where sweet seeds are quickening in darkness and cold ;
For how sweet and how young will they be When they pierce thro' the mould. Balm, myrtle, and heliotrope
There watch and there wait out of sight for their Sun:
While the Sun, which they see not, doth see Each and all one by one.^
(2) The resurrection is a rising into a higher and more glorious life, to a life as far beyond this in glory as He Himself exceeds in the glory of His raised body all that is greatest and most beautiful on earth. It is not a mere coming back again to this life. This life has many charms and many delights ; and if sin were not here men might well be content with such blessings as God has given us here. But it is not to the blessings and happiness of this life that that resurrection is to be. As far as the glory of heaven is greater than that of earth — as far as it is more blessed to be with God, and to know and feel His presence, than to have Him hidden from us behind a veil — so much greater is the blessedness and glory to which they who shall be accounted worthy of that world are to be raised.
^ I was once spending a few weeks in a small seaside parish in Durham, and while walking on the beach, which was sheltered by high and massive cliffs, I picked up a piece of coal. It was not rough and angular as it came from the mine, but round, and smooth, and polished ; still coal, but oh how altered and how changed ! I showed it to a friend and inquired into its probable recent history and learned that it must have fallen from some passing ship or perhaps it had dropped into the wide sea when some vessel was being laden or unladen. But whence the change ? When apparently lost beneath the waves it had been rolled about in the bosom of the deep, wafted hither and thither by its stormy waters till at last it found a resting-place on the peaceful shore So it is with the people of God. The temptations and troubles of life are means in God's hand for chipping off the angles and smoothing the rough edges which mar our characters, and thus by
^ Ruskin, Modem Painters ( Works, v. 456).
' Christiua G. Rossetti, Songs/or Stiungers and Pilgrims.
396 CITIZENSHIP IN HEAVEN
slow degrees we are fitted to fill our allotted places, and perhaps do our allotted work in the distant land of glory.^
3. The model after which we shall be fashioned is Christ's glorious body. The body of our low estate, wearing a temporary fashion, is yet capable of receiving a permanent form which is made visible in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. Why ? Because in Him the universal law that applies to man's life in every portion of it was made manifest, expressed in a Person — as, indeed, all truth that is to be vital, truth that is to be operative, truth that is to inspire, must necessarily be expressed. Examples do not move us ; aphorisms do not touch us ; we are taught by a Person, we are taught by character, and we are carried on by seeing truth expressed in a form in which it is vital, operative and active. The Lord Jesus Christ is the universal Lord of all that concerns man's body, soul, spirit, life. The Lord Jesus Christ in His own Person covers the whole realm of human nature, penetrates into every part of its sphere. Wp know that the conception of self, of soul, or spirit, cannot be realized by us apart from the body in which it dwells. The body influences it, expresses it. We know one another only through our outward semblance and appearance. We cannot separate the particular elements of man which constitute him a soul; we cannot find where his spirit lives. Man's human nature is one and indivis- ible; we cannot arrive at our spiritual self by a process of abstraction ; we cannot take from a man so much and say. That is mere material, and therefore behind that material lies something else. We cannot raise man or man's nature above the body and its limitations.