The First-Born from the Dead

The first-born from the dead; that in all things he might have the pre-eminence. — COLOSSIANS i. 18.

F^EATH is an event we do not attempt to shut out of view. Here, our city has its cemeteries, which, by their taste and beauty, rather attract than repel a visit. There, where hoary trees fling their shadow on graves, stands the rural church, within whose humble walls the living worship in closest neighbourhood with the dead; a type of heaven, the approach to that sanctuary is by a path which passes through the realms of death. When death occurs among us, friends and neighbours are invited to the funeral; and in broad day the sad procession, following the nodding hearse, wends slowly along our most public streets. The spot that holds our dead we sometimes visit, and always regard as a sort of sacred ground; there a monument is raised to record their virtues; or a willow, with its weeping branches flung over the grave, expresses our grief; or a pine or laurel, standing there in evergreen beauty when frosty blasts have stripped the woods, symbolises the hopes of the living, and the immortality of the dead; or our hand plants some sweet flowers, which, though they shed their blossoms as our hopes were shed, and hide their heads awhile beneath the turf, spring up again to remind us how the dear ones who there sleep in Jesus are awaiting the resurrection of the just.

I have read of a tribe of savages that have very different customs. They bury their dead in secret, by the hands of unconcerned officials. No grassy mound, no memorial stone guides the poor mother’s steps to the quiet corner where her infant lies. The grave is levelled with the soil; and afterwards, as some to forget their loss drive the world arid its pleasures over their hearts, a herd of cattle is driven over and over the ground, till every trace of the burial has been obliterated by their hoofs. Anxious to forget death and its inconsolable griefs, these heathen resent any allusion to the dead. You may not speak of them. In a mother’s hearing, name, however tenderly, her lost one, recall a dead father to the memory of his son, and there is no injury which they feel more deeply. From the thought of the dead their hearts recoil.

How strange! How unnatural! No, not unnatural. Benighted heathen, their grief has none of the alleviations which are balm to our wounds, none of the hopes that bear us up beneath a weight of sorrows. Their dead are sweet flowers withered, never to revive; joys gone, never to return. To remember them is to keep open a rankling wound, and preserve the memory of a loss which was bitter to feel and still is bitter to think of; a loss which brought only grief to the living, and no gain to the dead. To me, says Paul, to live is Christ, and to die is gain. They know nothing of this; nothing of the hopes that associate our dead in Christ with sinless souls, and sunny skies, and shining angels, and songs seraphic, and crowns of glory, and harps of gold. Memory is only a curse, from which they seek relief by removing the picture from the chambers of their imagery, or turning its face to the wall.

Without the hope of a better world, apart from mercy, pardon, grace, and glory, through the blood of Jesus Christ, what were death to me, or to any, but an object of unutterable gloom? I shrink from seeing it. With all the strong consolations of the gospel, ah! what sight so “bitter as to see a loved one dying; our sweet flower withering day by day on its drooping stalk; the cold shadow of death, like an eclipse, creeping over the whole horizon of our being, till, one hope after another disappearing, the case assuming a gloomier and yet gloomier aspect, we are left, but for the inner light of the Spirit and God’s truth, in blank despair? As we hang over the dying couch or cradle, how it wrings the heart to see the imploring look turned on us, and we can give no relief; to hear the low meanings, and we cannot still them; and when the struggle is long protracted, to be forced to pray that God in mercy would drop the curtain, and close this dreadful scene. There is no event so terrible as death. There is no sound so awful as that last sigh. There is no coldness feels so chill to the hand as the brow or face of the dead. And when, in place of one full once of light, and life, and love, our arms embrace a pale, clay-cold corpse, when, for the smiling face, childhood’s pattering feet, and prattling tongue, and bright sparkling eye, and merry laughter, we have nothing but that solemn countenance, that rigid form, that marble brow, that cold clammy hand, that silent tenant of a lonesome room, beside whom we tread with noiseless step, and, as if afraid to disturb their slumbers, speak in hushed whispers, and with bated breath, verily death needs all the consolations that religion can administer.

Apart from the hopes of a better and a brighter world, to one’s self, also, what is death but an unutterable evil? What weary hours, and days, and nights, are often pre ludes to the closing scene. And that scene! what terrible sufferings may we have to endure, and others have to witness in our dying chamber? How may they resemble those appalling struggles amid which the dying man seemed to us to be doing battle with an invisible enemy, who had him by the throat, and whom he was trying, but in vain trying, to throw off? Steps he into a palace or a hovel, Death, without any question the King of Terrors, presents the features of a tremendous curse in that ghastly countenance, the fixed and filmy eyes, the restless head, the wild tossing of the arms, the hands that, as if they sought something to cling to, clutch the bed-clothes, the muttering lips, the wandering mind, the deep insensibility, the heavy breathing, the awful pauses, and that long-drawn, shivering sigh, which closes the scene, and seems to say, as the departing spirit, ere it quit the bounds of time, casts one last look on all that is past and gone, Vanity of vanities, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.

Solomon pronounces a living dog to be better than a dead lion; and I say, better be a living beggar than a dead king. I love life; I love to walk abroad and see the sun shine, and hear the birds sing, and wander by rippling stream, or sit on banks where sweet flowers grow; I love the homes where I look on happy faces smiling, receive welcome greetings, and hear kind voices speaking. To have all these shut out, to be nailed up in a narrow coffin, to be buried in the dull earth, to moulder amid silence into dust, to be forgotten, and, when fires are cheerily blazing on our own hearth, and songs and laughter by thoir merry ring tell how broken hearts are sound again, to think of ourselves lying cold, and lonely, and joyless in the tomb, are not things we love to dwell on. Our Lord himself shrank from death; he cast himself at his Father’s feet, to cry in an agony, If it be possible let this cup pass from me. And who, unless some unhappy wretch, courts death, wishes to die, to lie down among those naked skulls, and the grim unsocial tenants of the grave? Faith herself turns away from the thought. Standing on the edge of the grave, she turns her eye upward; and, leaving the poor body to worms and dust, she wings her flight heavenward, follows the spirit to the realms of bliss, and loves to think of the dead as living; as not dead; as standing before the Lamb with crowns of glory, and bending on us looks of love and kindness from their celestial seats. Yes; death needs all the comforts that religion can summon to our aid.

Nor has Christ left his people comfortless. By his life, and death, and resurrection, he has fulfilled the high expectations of prophets; nor, bold as it is, is the language too lofty which Hosea puts into his mouth, 0 death, I will be thy plagues; 0 grave, I will be thy destruction. The death of Death, the life of the grave and greatest of all its tenants, he has conquered the conqueror of kings; he has broken the prison, he has bound the jailer, he has seized the keys, and he comes in the fulness of time to set all his imprisoned people free. They are prisoners of hope. He will bring back his banished. He has entered into glory as their fore runner, or, as my text calls him, “the first-born from the dead.”

Let us consider in what respects Christ is “the first-born from the dead.”

I. He is so in the dignity of his person. He is the greatest who ever entered, or shall ever leave, the gates of death.

In one of the boldest flights of fancy, Isaiah sets forth the destruction of the Babylonian monarchy. He sees a mighty king descending into the grave, breaking its awful silence. His footsteps disturb the dead; they raise themselves in their coffins; and as he enters alone the dark domain of a monarch mightier than himself, on his ear fall the voices of kings long buried, muttering,

332 THE FIRST-BOllN FROM THE DEAD.

Art thou also become as we? Art thou become like unto us? When we die we sink into the grave like raindrops into the sea, as snow-flakes alight on the water; for however man’s death may for a little agitate some living circles, it never stirs the dead. But Jesus Christ being the Lord of glory, the fountain of life, the creator of the sun that darkened over his cross, and of the moon that shed her silver light on his lonely sepulchre, his descent into the tomb was an event which might well be set forth in the prophet’s magnificent imagery. I can fancy all the dead astonished at his coming; and that, as he enters the domain of the grave, a spirit- voice breaks its silence, saying, “It is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming; it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations. All they shall speak and say unto thee, Art thou also be come weak as we? Art thou become like unto us?”

Fancy some great, good, brave, patriotic monarch, bound in chains, and after being ignorniniously paraded through the public streets, thrust into the common gaol, to exchange the glory of a palace for the gloom and shame of a dungeon. How would such an event impress the spectators with the mutability of earthly greatness! And were such a reverse of fortune borne out of love to his subjects, how would it w;in their admiration, how would it move their love as well as pity! Yet, what were such an event to that which, unnoticed by the world, is passing in yonder garden, where by the waning light of day two men and a group of weeping women, amid silence broken only by sobs and soft whispers, are laying a dead body on a hurriedly-prepared bed of spices? Nor man’s, nor angel’s eyes, had ever looked on a scene so wonderful. Solomon had said, Will God in very deed dwell with men on the earth? but what would Solomon have said, had he seen the young child in the manger, still more, had he seen the lonely tenant of that tomb? Whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain, here a sepulchre holds. Repulsive to the eye as are these skulls and mouldering bones, the grave boasts of having held some nights within its chambers one who, while he honoured lowly cottages with his visits, was greater than any whom palaces have opened to receive. The language of the prophet is literally accomplished. The regions of death were moved at Jesus’ coming. Never before, never since, has the opening of these gates awakened those within. They sleep too sound for that. How unmoved do parents lie when their children are laid by their side; the mother never flings her arms about the dear babe that death restores to her bosom; and to the cry of room, room, the unmannerly beggar stirs not to make way for a king. They neither revere the good, nor respect the great. They feel no love there; and, unlike the burst of joy, the rushing into each other’s embrace, the smiles, the tears, when the loving and long parted meet again on earth, how cold and dreary the reunions of the grave, these silent meetings of the dead!

But Christ’s descent into the tomb roused death from its deepest apathy. That awoke those who are heedless of the shock of earthquakes. The dead were moved at his coming. The graves were opened. The inspired poet’s fancy became a literal fact. And, waiting for him to lead the way, many dead saints left the tomb on the morning of his resurrection; in them he led captivity captive, and was followed by the strangest train, that ever graced the triumph of a returning conqueror. If we should certainly conclude that the jailer has been beaten and bound, when we see the captives pouring from the open prison, how plainly do those yawning tombs, untouched by mortal hand, and these dead men, who return alive to Jerusalem, show that the long reign of death is drawing to a close, and the oldest of earth’s kingdoms tottering to its fall. Their escape plainly proved that death had received from Christ’s hand, what no other hand could deal, a mortal blow. Thus, all the circumstances that signalized alike our Lord’s descent into the tomb and his triumphant resurrection, proclaim him, as with the sound of royal trumpets, the first and greatest of the dead.

II. Because he rose by his own power.

There is no sensibility in the dead. The eyelids your fingers have closed open no more to the light of day. The morning raises up all within the house to a fresh sense of bereavement: without, it wakens business, pleasure, the music of skies and groves; but it wakens not the sleeper in that locked and lonely chamber, who, once dreading to be left alone, is alike fearless now of darkness and of solitude.

There is no passion in the dead. The sight of them affects us, not our grief and sorrow them; as well kiss marble as that icy brow; our tears will flow, nor does Christ forbid them; but their hottest gushes thaw not the fountains that death has frozen.

There is no power in the dead. The cold hand you lift drops; the poor body lies as it is laid. And, so soon as that last long sigh is drawn, though the colour still lingers on the cheek, and the limbs are not yet stiffened into cold rigidity, they can rise no more than the ashes on the hearth can resume their original form, and change into what once they were, a branch green with leaves, and decked with fragrant blossoms. The dead can do nothing to help themselves. In all cases but Christ’s resurrection, life was not resumed, but restored; it was given, not taken back. At the grave of Lazarus it proceeded from Christ’s lips, wafted on the air to the ear of death. At the gate of Nain it passed from Christ’s hand, streaming, like the electric fluid, into the body of the widow’s son. And there, where Elisha lies stretched on the Shunammite’s dead boy, his eyes on the child’s eyes, his hands on the child’s hands, his lips on the child’s lips, that prostrate praying man forms a connecting medium by which life flows out of Him in whom is its fulness, to fill a vessel that death has emptied. And, at the last day, we ourselves shall not awake, but be wakened, roused from sleep by the trump of God, as, blown by an angel’s breath, it sounds throughout the world, echoing in the deepest caves of ocean, and rending the marble of the tomb.

Now look at our Lord’s resurrection. He rose in the silent night; no hand at the door, no voice in his ear, no. rough touch awaking him. Other watchers than Pilate’s soldiers stood by the sepulchre; but these angels whom it well became to keep guard at this dead man’s chamber door, beyond opening it, beyond rolling away the stone, beyond looking on with wondering eyes, took no part in the scenes of that eventful morning. The hour sounds; the appointed time arrives. Having slept out his sleep, Jesus stirs; he awakes of his own accord; he rises by his own power; and arranging, or leaving attending angels to arrange, the linen clothes, he walks out on the dewy ground, beneath the starry sky, to turn grief into the greatest joy, and hail the breaking of the brightest morn that ever rose on this guilty world. That open empty tornb assures us of a day when ours too shall be as empty. Having raised himself, he has power to raise his people. Panic-stricken soldiers flying the scene, and Mary rising from his blessed feet to haste to the city, to rush through the streets, to burst in among the disciples, and with a voice of joy to cry, He is risen, He is risen! prove this was no vain brag or boast, “I lay down my life that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.”

III. Because he is the only one who rose never to die again.

The child of the Shunammite, the daughter of the ruler, the widow of Nain’s son, Lazarus, and all the saints who followed our Lord from the grave, were prisoners on parole. The grave took them bound to return. Dear-bought honours theirs! While Enoch and Elijah never tasted death, these twice drank the bitter cup; with one cradle, each had two coffins; one birth, but two burials; and thus, that God might be glorified, suffering pains from which obscurer saints have been exempt, they in part fulfilled the noble saying of that dauntless martyr, who declared his love for Christ to be such, that if he had as many lives as he had grey hairs on his head, he would lay them all down for him. These honoured ones were out on bail. After a while they retraced their steps; and, now lying in dusty death, they wait the summons of the resurrection. But Jesus waits to summon, not to be summoned. The grave holds them, but heaven holds him. For heaven, as well as hell, was moved at his coming; and there, saints adoring, angels worshipping at his feet, in the very body which was stretched on the cross and laid in the sepulchre for us, he fills his Father’s throne. The King of kings and Lord of lords is “He who liveth and was dead.”

IV. Because he has taken precedence of his people, who are all to rise from their graves to glory.

It is better for me, if I am a poor man standing in need of royal favours, to have a friend at court than in my own humble cottage; and it is better for us that Christ is with his Father in heaven than with his people on earth. It is expedient for you, he said, that I go away. He has gone to prepare a place for us; and while his Spirit has come down to take care of the business of his church on earth, he looks after and watches over its affairs in heaven. He had work to do which could not otherwise be done. He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. So, after three days’ unbroken rest, he rose to sleep no more, and be the first-born of the dead. Apart from that, precedence was his right. It belonged to him in the very nature of things. The king precedes his train; the head rises first out of pit or grave, afterwards the body and its members; the foundation stone is laid first, afterwards the stones of the superstructure; the elder brother breaks first from a mother’s womb, afterwards the children of whom he is forerunner.

It is as the prelude of our own resurrection, that Christ’s is to us the object of the greatest satisfaction and joy. In these cast-off grave clothes, in that linen shroud and napkin, there is more to draw our eyes, and fix our interest, and move our admiration, than in the jewelled robes or royal purple of the greatest monarch of earth. That empty tomb, roughly hewn in the rock, is a greater sight than Egypt’s mighty pyramids, or the costliest sepulchres that have received the ashes of the proudest kings. How full of meaning is its very emptiness! What good news to us in Mary’s disappointment! What joys flow to us in these women’s tears! Thanks be to God, they could not find him. He is not there. No, Mary! they have not taken away your Lord; no robber has rifled that sacred tomb. See, the dew lies sparkling on the grass, nor feet have brushed it but those of one who has left the grave. He is risen; and, as the first fruits of them that sleep, as the first ripe sheaf that was offered to the Lord, his resurrection is the pledge and promise of a coming harvest. Henceforth the grave holds but a lease of the saints. Because he rose, we shall rise also. Sweeter to our ear than the full chorus of bright skies and greenwood, are the first notes of the warbler that pipes away the winter, and breaks in on its long, drear silence! And more welcome to our eye than the flush of summer’s gayest flowers, is the simple snow-drop that hangs its pure white bell above the dead bare ground. And why? These are the first-born of the year, the forerunners of a crowd to follow. In that group of silver bells that ring in the spring with its joys, and loves, and singing birds, my fancy’s eye sees the naked earth clothed in beauty, the streams, like children let loose, dancing, and laughing, and rejoicing in their freedom, bleak winter gone, and nature’s annual resurrection. And in that solitary simple note, my fancy hears the carol of larks, wild moor, hillside, and woodlands full of song, and ringing all with music. And in Christ, the first-born, I see the grave giving up its dead; from the depths of the sea, from lonely wilderness and crowded churchyard they come, like the dews of the grass, an innumerable multitude. Risen Lord! we rejoice in thy resurrection. We hail it as the harbinger and blessed pledge of our own. The first to come forth, thou art the elder brother of a family, whose countless numbers the patriarch saw in the dust of the desert, whose holy beauty he saw shining in the bright stars of heaven.

The first-born! This spoils the grave of its horrors, changing the tomb into a capacious womb that death is daily filling with the germs of life. The first fruits! This explains why men called the churchyard, as once they did, God’s acre. Looking at these grassy mounds in the light of that expression, the eye of faith sees it change into a field sown with the seeds of immortality. Blessed field! What flowers shall spring there! What a harvest shall be gathered there! In the neighbouring fields “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap;” but here how great the difference between what is sown amid mourners’ tears, and what shall be reaped amid angels’ joys; between the poor body we restore to the earth, and the noble form that shall spring from its ashes. Who saw the rolling waves stand up a rocky wall; who saw the water of Cana flow out rich purple wine; who saw Lazarus’s festering corpse, with health glowing on its cheek, and its arms enfolding sisters ready to faint with joy, saw nothing to match the change the grave shall work on these mouldering bones. Sown in corruption, they shall rise in incorruption, mortal putting on immortality. How beautiful they shall be! Never more shall hoary time write age on a wrinkled brow. The whole terrible troop of diseases cast with sin into hell, the saints shall possess unfading beauty, and enjoy a perpetual youth; a pure soul shall be mated with a worthy partner in a perfect body, and an angel form shall lodge an angel mind. There shall be no more death, nor sighing, nor sorrow, for there shall be no more sin.

If we are reconciled to God through Jesus Christ, what reconciling views of death does this open up to us? Why don’t we think better of death, and oftener of death? No doubt his hand is rough, and his voice is gruff, and, rudely seizing us by the throat, as if he were an officer and we were the prisoners of justice, he has none of the courtly manners of Eleazer when he went to bring his bride home to Isaac; yet why should those things make us overlook so much the glittering crown he brings in his grisly hand, the message he brings us to come away home. We should be much happier if we familiarised our minds with this event, and trained our selves to think of death more as glory than as death, as our return to our Father and our Father’s house, as going home to be with Jesus and the saints; or, if you will have death in, as the death of all sin and sorrow, as the death of Death. To a child of God, what are its pains but the pangs of birth; its battle, but the struggle that precedes the victory; its tossings but the swell and

3-12 THE FIRST-BORN FKOM THE DEAD.

surf that beats on the shores of eternal life; its grave but a bed of peaceful rest, where the bodies of saints sleep out the night that shall fly away for ever before the glories of a resurrection morn. I know a churchyard where this is strikingly set forth in the rude sculpturing of a burial stone. Beneath an angel figure, that, with outstretched wings and trumpet at the mouth, blows the resurrection, there lies a naked skull. Beneath the angel, and beside this emblem of mortality, two forms stand; one is the tenant of the grave below, the other it is impossible to mistake, it is the skeleton figure of the King of Terrors. His dart lies on the ground broken in two, and the hand that has dropped it is stretched out over the skull, and held in the grasp of the other figure. Enemies reconciled, the man bravely shakes hands with death, and his whole air and bearing show that they are become sworn friends. As if he had just heard Jesus announcing, I am the resurrection and the life, you seem to hear him saying, 0 death where is thy sting, 0 grave where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law; but thanks be to God who giveth me the victory through my Lord Jesus Christ.

We shall rise like Him who, in his own resurrection, and in the church he has redeemed with his own blood, and in the universe he created by his own power, has the preeminence, the unchallenged preeminence. Let him have it in our thoughts, our lives, our hearts. Who but he should have it? Holy Spirit! enable us to enthrone in our hearts him whom his Father hath enthroned in the heaven of heavens. Preeminence! Shall we give it to the world that hated him, to the devil that tempted him, to the sins that crucified him? Gracious God, forbid! Let Jesus have the pre eminence! Help us, Lord, to love thee best, to serve thee first, to follow thee, leaving all to follow thee. If, in one sense, we cannot say, Whom have I in heaven but thee, because there we may have father and mother, brother and sister, and sweet children whom we loved, and love still, and will rejoice again to embrace, we would say, Thou art the chiefest among ten thousand, thou art altogether lovely. If, in one sense, we cannot say, There is none upon earth that I desire beside thee, we would say, there is none on all the earth that I desire before thee, nor deem equal to thee. Blessed Lord, thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women. To thee, as the sun of my firmament, may the moon and stars make obeisance; to thee, as the needle to its pole, may my trembling heart be ever turning; to thee, as the waters seek the ocean, may my desires be ever flowing. Bend every sheaf to Joseph’s! Jesus, the best be thine, the honour thine, the glory thine, the kingdom thine. The feast to thee, the fragments to others. This ever be my question, not What can I spare from myself for Christ, but What can I spare from Christ for myself? Be thou preferred above my chief joy. In all things have thou the preeminence!