Glorification in Christ
He redemption of the body! Not only is this the event towards which the universal longing of creation is directed, but the hope as involved in the return of the Lord Jesus to which all Christian doctrine points, and to which each Christian ordinance is divinely adjusted. The first light that is reflected in the face of the new-born disciple as he comes forth from the waters of burial with Christ, is a foregleam of this hope. “For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be in the likeness of his resurrectiony The last sound that lingers on our ears as the formula of the communion is repeated, is a refrain of this blessed hope:” For as often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, ye do show the Lord’s death He corned Upon every thirtieth verse of Gospel and Epistle, a ray of this hope falls either directly or obliquely; while throughout, duties and promises and beatitudes are turned to it and polarized by it as the supreme reward of faith. “Behold I come quickly, and my reward is with me.”
And yet is there not a strange tendency in the human mind to rest content with a less reward than God has promised; to satisfy our hopes with the anticipation of some shadowy and undefinable state of existence beyond the grave, when He has so clearly pledged the restitution of the present mode of being with the single element of sin and its consequences eliminated y A longing to be delivered from “the body of this death,” therefore, should not imply even a willingness to be forever delivered from the body. For as clearly as Christ is set forth as the destroyer of the flesh, the corruptible and mortal element of our nature, so clearly is He revealed as the Saviour of the body.
It is this hope only that gives a homelike realness to our future life; that peoples it with the same saints and the same Jesus whom we have known as residents of the earth; that makes certain to us indeed our own identity in that existence. And if we may not quite say tha * ve can conceive of nothing entered upon in separation from the body that is worthy to be called life,” we feel at least that the thought of being forever bereaved of that in which we have lived and toiled and suffered so much, would cast a shadow upon the sou! such as only the dread of annihilation could render darker. For such an issue would involve a twofold defeat: on the one hand, the casting down of man’s dearest hope in Christ, that of his final reconciliation to himself; on the other, an apparent partial triumph of evil over God in the eternal putting asunder of what in the beginning He so sacredly joined together.
But Christianity allows us not even a dreary speculation on this point. For while it does not silence the groaning of the soul to be free from what is now often a burden, it yet modulates the groan into a confession of faith, “Not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life.”
How intimately this hope, like all others of the gospel, is wrapped up in the person of
Jesus Christ; and how the sacred bonds of union that hold us to Him for every other blessing, bind us to Him in spite of death for the redemption of the body also, we shall see as we advance.
First of all, the believer’s dying is in the Lord. ^’ They which are fallen asleep in Christ’,’ is Paul’s exquisitely tender phrase; words suggestive not only of painless repose, but of a repose which is perpetually guarded and invested by his holy presence. They have fainted in his arms, and He holds and sustains and embraces them until the death trance shall be broken. “Lord, if they sleep they shall do well,” our hearts instinctively respond. For the very word is a prophecy of a better resurrection, and the state itself the peculiar purchase of our Redeemer for his own. “He giveth his beloved sleep.” All die. But only those who have lived in Him will sleep in Him, in the ccBmetcHum of the saints, in the true Machpelah of the redeemed which He has bought for them by his blood. Hence the deep significance of those words descriptive of the holy dead, as” those laid to sleep through Jesus I’ connecting, as
1 I Thess. iv. 14.
they do, the repose as well as the resurrection of the saints’ bodies directly with his mediation.
And the terms change not. They cover the entire state from the last gasp of dying breath to the joyful awaking of the resurrection morning. “The dead 17i Chist The words form a kind of epitaph in brief for the tomb of all the faithful, an epitaph which, if it does not answer every question of a curious mind concerning the departed, tells us the one thing that we long to know, that they are safe and shall live again. And so we may tell the story of the Christian’s burial no longer in that brief hollow phrase which to the ancients seemed the tenderest allusion that could be made to the deceased,” Non est!’ he is not; but in words like those of Bunyan’s, so fragrant of heart’s-ease and immortelle, — “The pilgrim they laid in a chamber whose window opened towards the su?t rising; the name of that chamber was Peace, wher-e he slept till the break of day.”
And as it is the unbroken union of the departed saints with their Saviour that constitutes their felicity and our warrant for sealing their tombs with that beatitude,” Blessed are
IQO J^’ CHRIST.
the dead which die in the Lord,” so it is through this union that they will be raised up at the appearing of the Lord. For the resurrection is the drawing of Christ’s members after Him, the prolonging and consummating of his own renewal from the dead in the persons of those who have been incorporated into his body. Thus it would seem to be an event not simply wrought upon them from without, but fashioned also from within.
Does not St. Paul’s emblem of the resurrection, the quickening of the grain that has died in the earth, furnish a beautiful suggestion of this truth y The springing up of the seed is not merely the result of a life given from the sunlight and the rain, but of a life evoked by these. Even so the resurrection of the just will be life answering to life, the life of God in man, responding to the call and yielding to the attraction of Him who is “the Resurrection and the Life.” “But if the Spirit of Him that raised tip yesus from the dead dzvell in yoUy He that raised up Christ from the dead shall quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth 17t you!’ This, the Spirit of life, is the vital bond that holds the bodies of the saints as well as their souls in union with the Lord, the bond on whose perpetuity every hope of restitution depends. And as close as are the links of logic by which the Apostle welds the believer’s resurrection to that of his Lord, it is after all that link of life,” in Christ,” on which all hangs suspended. “If we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them that sleep in Jestis will God bring with Him!’ How that other awakening, the resurrection of the unjust, is related to that of our Lord, we know not. But only they that are Christ’s at his coming will hear the Bridegroom’s voice, “And the dead in Christ shall rise first.” From the dust and from the deeps they will respond, the voice from beneath saluting the voice from above, “Thou shalt call and I will answer,” while in “that silence that terrifies thought” the others will remain, till God shall bring them forth to judgment.
And going beyond the event of the believer’s resurrection to the nature of the risen body, are any of those deep anxious questions which we are wont to put concerning it answered except in Christ y To many the declaration, “It is raised a spiritual body,” seems only to baffle the longing for knowledge that it would answer. For while one, seizing upon the word “spiritual,” floats away immediately into shapeless conceptions of an immaterial existence, and another, hearing the word “body,” cries out, “Nay! but flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” each returns from his misleading pursuit of the ♦ruth to press with redoubled eagerness the question, “With what body do they come?” But in Jesus Christ the question is answered. In his showing Himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs. He shows us as in a living mirror our own future bodies. For thus we reason.
“As He is, so are we in this world.” He is holy and righteous altogether. And because “he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit,” we know that holiness and righteousness, those divine features of the soul, once lost, are perfectly restored to us in Him.
“When He shall appear we shall be like Him.” But He will come as He went up, with a body of ‘^ flesh and bones.” And because of that divine kindredship in which “we are members of his body of his fleshy and of his bo7iesl’ we know without question that we shall receive back our bodies perfected in Him; no lineament of their identity lost, no finest tracing of their life-long discipline erased, despoiled of nothing but their corruption and mortality, and whether “blind from the prison-house, or maimed from the battle, or mad from the tombs,” sitting at last astonished at his feet, with perfect sight and soundness and beauty, because “fashioned like unto his glorious body.”
So then, while it is clear that the flesh in its present corruptible state cannot inherit the kingdom of God, it seems equally clear that in a transformed and glorified state it will inherit that kingdom. The translation of Enoch, says Dr. Owen, “is a divine testimony that the body itself is capable of eternal life!’ And so vital is this witness to God’s Church, that like Peter’s vision it has been thrice repeated before human eyes — in the Patriarchal age by Enoch, in the Prophetic age by Elijah, and in the Gospel age by Christ. And now, whatever hope concerning our future state may be obscure or uncertain, we need no longer falter in pronouncing this glad confession,” Yet in my flesh shall I see God!’
Nor is this testimony of God general merely In the risen Christ minute particulars are detailed. He ate and drank before his disciples. He revealed Himself to their sight as a veritable body, and to their touch as the same body with which they had been acquainted, by the attesting marks of his passion. And He showed also the mysterious spirituality of this body in its freedom from the restraints of matter, and its superiority to the ordinary laws of gravity and motion. And an eager faith easily translates these hints concerning our glorified life. The senses that have lighted up the world for us, though long quenched in the grave, have leave from the Son of man to rest in hope. Surely they shall be quickened for nobler offices than they ever yet have known, and in that restitution of all things even the material body will present its glorified members before its Creator with the confession, Of all that thou hast given me I have lost nothing, but Thou hast raised it up at the last day. With what finer vision and keener sense the eye shall open at that glad awakening; to what yet unimagined harmonies the ear shall be attuned; for what alert and tireless ministries the feet shall be prepared, who can tell? “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk and not faint.”
To the question of the identity of the resurrection body with that in which we now dwell, do we not see the answer most delicately outlined in those two phrases of Paul’s illustration of the grain, “Thou sowest not that body that shall bel’ and, “to every seed his own body” f Nowhere in nature is there such an approach to literal sameness between two objects as between the seed and its product The same vital substance has been taken up from the old kernel and curiously transmuted into the new, decay and corruption only being left behind. Every minutest peculiarity of form and taste and color has been exactly reproduced. The seed that dies is not the seed that shall be, but there is such identity between them that the two cannot possibly coexist as separate units, the second having its being only in the ceasing of the first to be.
If then our hope of physical identity in the life to come seems to be discouraged by the words, ‘• not that body that shall be,” do not the other words, “to every seed its own body;’ satisfy our deepest longings? They seem to assure us that we shall again be” at hovie in the body,’’ and not strangers for a single moment, looking back to a tabernacle which has been put off, and lost to us, and to which we have said an eternal farewell; and that we shall feel ourselves possessed of the same familiar self, in spite of all the mortal and perishable that has fallen away in our transformation. And by this inalienable personality we shall be known, as well as know. The fashion of the countenance, on which all human recognition depends, will be altered indeed, but perhaps only by the unearthly glory that shall transfigure it. Stephen filled with the Holy Ghost was Stephen still, though they that “looked steadfastly on him saw his face as it had been the face of an angel.”
And not alone the man whose earthly countenance was moulded by the impress of long years of trial and discipline, but even the infant that only looked for a troubled moment upon life and then died, has an inviolable seaJ of individuality which death cannot efface.
“One look sufficed to tell me they were mine, My babes, my blossoms, my long parted ones; The same in feature and inform as when I bent above their dying pillow last Yet beaming with the likeness of their Lord.^’*
Does it not give a certain dignity and worth to human being, that the tiniest body and the briefest span of earthly Ufe is a title-deed to the resurrection? “As we have borne the image of the earthy y we shall bear the image of the heavenly.” And the seed of humanity that barely broke the shell of non-existence and then fell into the earth to die, because it is a seed, must be quickened after Christ the first-fruits.
With such hopes as these set before us, what is there left for us to desire concerning our future t We do not say that the dread of death is taken away. He is a real enemy to be met, and no mere disarmed and powerless foe to be despised. There may be victory in his presence, but it is the victory of hope, the triumph seen from afar, giving exultation in present defeat, and enabling him who s now overthrown to cry, “Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy; though I fall I shall arise.” But with the most heroic facing of his terrors, and with the sturdiest endurance of his pain, as he rends from us the garment of our mortality, we are as yet victims and not victors.
But “when this mortal shall put on immortahty,” then will “death be swallowed up in victory.” For then we shall not only have broken forever from his dominion, but we shall have reconquered from him the very spoils of which he robbed us; while, in a body at length exalted from its sorrowful humiliations and reconciled to itself after a life-long warfare, we lead our own captivity captive. “In Adam all die.” Not only all persons but all holy relations have felt the death shock of sin; and the sharp disuniting sentence that has sundered man from God, has not less truly sundered man from himself But “in Oirist shall all be made alive.” The bridal of the Church to her Lord will be also the bridal of the soul to her body, the redeemed spirit and the redeemed flesh brought at last to rejoice together in perfected harmony. It is this hope that bridges the chasm of death, and enables the heart to bound across it in triumph
Is the timid cry of any yet in bondage to the fear of death,” Who am I that I should tomfort myself with such a hope? Who am
I that I should be counted worthy to attain the resurrection of the dead? “There is but one answer: “lam the Resurrection and the Life.”
“Live in Christ;’ said the dying John Knox, “live in Christ, and you need not fear the death of the flesh.”
“Help, O Lord our God, that the joyful day of thy Holy Advent may come, that we may be redeemed from this evil, envious world, the devil’s kingdom, and be set free from the bitter torments that we suffer both from without and from within; both from wicked men and from our own conscience. Destroy this old Adam, that we may be clothed with another body that is not disposed to evil and excess as this is, but which, redeemed from all infirmity, shall be made like unto thy glorious body, our Lord Jesus Christ, so that at last we may attain our full and glorious redemption.” Amen.