The actual words are, " I became dead " — a mysterious paradox, in which a most wonderful event is inserted, incorporated, into that eternity of being. In this short phrase He intimates the whole mystery of the Incarnation; but He presents just that aspect of it which sinful man, prone at His feet, most needs. He does not articulate the thought now of His blessed birth, or of His life, His speech, His labour, His example ; there is nothing said here of Bethlehem, or of the years in Nazareth, or of the fair borders of the Lake with the furrowed fields, and the floating fishing-craft, and the listening multitudes upon the flowery slopes. It is all the cross ; it is only and altogether the precious death and burial. "I became dead." We read that sentence in the light of the long Apocalypse, and what do we see within it ? The shame and glory of the crucifixion, the atoning and redeeming blood, the sacrifice of the Lamb, the Lamb not of innocence only but of the altar — " as it had been slain."
" And behold, I am alive for evermore." This existence after death is special, and different. It is not a mere reassertion of what had been already included in His great word, " I am the Living one." It is something added. It is an assurance that in the continued life which has once passed through the experi- ence of death there is something new, another sympathy, the only one which before could have been lacking with His brethren whose lot it is to die, and so a helpfulness to them which could not otherwise have been, even in His perfect love. This new life — the life which has conquered death by tasting it, which has enriched itself with a before unknown sympathy with men whose
REVELATION i. 17, 18 53
lives are for ever tending towards and at last all going down into the darkness of the grave — this life stretches on and out for ever. It is to know no ending. So long as there are men living and dying, so long above them and around them there shall be the Christ, the God-man, who liveth, and was dead, and is alive for evermore.
Death and darkness get you packing, Nothing now to man is lacking; All your triumphs now are ended. And what Adam marr'd is mended Graves are beds now for the weary Death a nap, to wake more merry.^
4. Because Christ lives, His people must live too. They cannot die. He made Himself one with His people, so much one with them that His life was their life, His dying their dying, and His work their work. The closeness of that union is illustrated on the other side as well. Their life is His life, their dying is His dying, and their work is His work. So the Apostle of the Gentiles says to the Colossian Christians, " Ye died, and your life is hid with Christ in God." So close is the unity between Christ and His people that St. Paul could say, " If one died for all, then were all dead." If we trace this thought, as set forth in its fulness in Scripture, we find that the fear of death is overcome because the bitterness of death is past. It is no mere figure of speech which affirms that the Christian has died when he became a Christian. Nor is it only the case that when Christ died all His people died with Him. But the other side of the twofold experience is also true. Christ shares the death of His people. He is with them in the valley of the shadow of death. It is no lonely death that they die, when body and spirit part for the time. Christ is with them, and keeps them company in their dying hour. The sting of death has been withdrawn, and the bitterness of it has been taken away. For in virtue of the faith which has made him one with Christ, a Christian has died to sin, has passed into the state where there is no more condemnation.
H It is told of Leonardo da Vinci that on his death-bed the king came to visit and cheer him. He talked to his majesty " lamenting that he had offended God and man in that he had not
* Henry Vaughan.
54 FEAR NOT
laboured in art as he ought to have done." Suddenly he was seized with a paroxysm, and the king, taking him in his arms to give him comfort, tlie weary penitent " died in the arms of his king." The words are a parable of that which awaits every Christian in the hour of death. He will die in the arms of his King, " the Eternal God, his refuge, and underneath the everlasting arms," and so the pathway will not be strange.^
III.
Fear not what comes after Death.
"I have the keys of death and of Hades."
Two things in the rendering of the Authorized Version have given rise to much misapprehension. One is the order in which, following an inferior reading, it has placed the two things specified. And the other is that mistranslation, as it has come to be, of the word Hades by the word " Hell." The true original does not read " hell and death," but " death and Hades" the dim unseen regions in which all the dead, whatsoever their condition may be, are gathered. The Hades of the New Testament includes the Paradise into which the penitent thief was promised entrance, as well as the Gehenna which threatened to open for the impenitent.