The Dead in Christ
“The dead IN Christ.” — i Thess. iv. 16. “Them also which sleep IN Jesus.” — i Thess. iv. 14.
THOUGHTFUL divine of recent times, almost as if our Apostle’s monogram guided his pen, thus writes of “dying in the Lord” “It is the child of God falling asleep in the same arms of redeeming Love in which he was always embraced, and where he always was safe. In the peace of God.”
How blessed, alike for ourselves, and for those near and dear to us such a certainty! “We know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (2 Cor. V. i). How different the hesitating guesses of the noblest heathen, regarding “the land beyond the Stygian river:” such as we find in the utterances of Socrates and Plato, Tacitus and Cicero! One of these, in an epistle to a friend who had lost a relative, says,
Bishop M’llvaiue.
“If there be a life beyond death, he has gone to it.” All was vague and uncertain — a dreary, dreamy, groping in the dark: and their Elysium, when spoken of, is one crowded with materialistic images never touching the realm of the spiritual. Explorers of the Roman Catacombs, or of their subterranean treasures transferred elsewhere, have frequently noted the cheerless, hopeless form in which the grief of Pagan mourners is expressed. No divine loving Hand recognised; — no unerring Wisdom trusted when it cannot be traced. Inexorable Fate is spoken of as the alone deity presiding over human destiny! Here is the translation of one such inscription given by a well-known archaeologist from the Lapidariau Gallery: —” Caius Julius Maximus, aged 2 years and 5 months: —
“0 relentless Fortune, who delightest in cruel death; v:hy is Maximus so early snatched from us? He who used to he leloved in my bosom! This stone now marks his tomb. Behold his mother!”
How different the legend written by the Apostle on the catacombs of universal Christendom! — In Christo. “I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose * again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him” ( i Thess. iv. 13, 14), or, as these words, in accordance with the permitted alternative rendering of the original, may be translated — “Them also that are laid asleep ly Jesus”
How many thousands on thousands have had these utterances verified, for their unspeakable solace, since the Apostle penned them! To select illustrative cases were impossible: let one which at the moment presents itself suffice. Stand in thought beside the Great Luther, as we see him stooping, first over the death-bed of his loved daughter Magdalene, and then follow him in the mournful sequel of that life-sorrow. “Gracious God!” he exclaims, “if it be Thy will to take her hence, I am content to know that she will be with Thee ... I would fain keep my child, for she is very dear to me, if our Lord God would leave her with me. But His will be done. To her nothing better can happen... Thou dear one,” he exclaimed through his tears when all was over, and he gazed upon the coffin, “how well it is with Thee!... Thou shalt rise and shine like a star, yes, like the sun... You should be pleased,” added he to the bystanders, who had come to render the last offices of affection: “I have sent a saint to heaven.” As
Our word “Cemetery” {Koifxr]Trjpt.ou) was familiar to Pagan writers; Init, in its literal acceptation only, as an ordinary “sleeping-place.” Christianity stamped upon it a new and more sacred meaning, associating it with the believer’s last couch of rest when laid in the tomb, “in sure and certain hope of a resurrection to Eternal Life.” By being in Christ, the departure of the soul was no longer the gloomy *’ mors “of the heathen. In the words of St. Jerome — “Mors, non est mors, sed dormitio et somnus appellatur.” — See Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, p. 329, art. Cemetery.
they returned from the funeral, — “My daughter,” he said, “is now provided for, both in body and soul. We Christians have nothing to complain of. “VYe know it must be so. We are more sure of eternal life than anything else. For God, who has promised it to us for His dear Son’s sake, can never lie.” And, yet once more, in his silent, darkened home, from which the glory had departed, he thus writes a cherished friend: “I from my inmost heart crave that to me and all mine, to thee also and all dear to us, may be given a like hour of departure, that is truly to fall asleep IN THE Lord.” 1
But let us not, in the record of these and such like ‘reliquaries,’ be mistaken. In no respect dare the Christian, no, not the heroic Luther, speak lightly of the terrors of death. Indeed, even in that solemn passage of his life, he speaks of “quivering” under the foe. It is not poetry, but nature, that dictates the words —
“It is a dread and awful thing to die.”
Though the last enemy, and a vanquished enemy, death is still an enemy, which no stoical resolution can transform into an angel of light. He is the closer of the portals of busy existence, — the silencer of the shuttles of life’s busy loom, — the extinguisher of fond hopes, — the witherer of tender buds, — the severer of loving bonds, — the separator of chief friends, brother
* See Luther’s “Watchwords for the Warfare,” passim.
sundered from brother, sister from sister; parent from child, child from parent; putting stern denial on anypermanent “union here of hearts.” Even the death-bed of the maturest, ripest saint, can claim no exemption from the inevitable accompaniments: the pain, and languor, and weakness; the feeble ’ touch of the vanishing hand; ’ the trembling whispers of the voice that is so soon to be still; the conscious opening, on the earthward side, of the dark Gate and its close on silent hinges. Yes, on every lip, the mourning wail is the same —
“To know that prayers, and time, and pain
Can the lost love no more regain;
Than bid the hours of dying day
Gleam in their midnight-noon again!”
The dead past cannot bury its dead. The dead present cannot fill the vacant chair or bring back the absent guest to the vacant souL The following snatches from the wild coronachs of Ossian — that strange Classic of mountain -lands — are only specimen-dirges of wide humanity: — “How many be there of my heroes, the chief of the race; they that were cheerful in the hall when the sound of the shells arose! No more shall I find their steps on the hearth: no more shall I hear their voice in the chase! Pale, silent, are they who were my friends;... and there, far remote, I shall be unknown. No bard shall hear of me, no grey cairn shall rise to my renown. ... It is the voice of Alpin, the son of Song, mourning for the dead. Bent is his head of age, red his tearful eye. Alpin, thou son of Song, why alone on this silent hill? Why complainest thou as a blast in the wood, as a wave on the lonely shore? My tears are for the dead: my voice for those who have passed away. Tall thou art on the hill; fair among the sons of the vale. But thou shalt fall like Morar; the mourner shall sit on thy tomb. The hills shall know thee no more; thy bow shall lie in the halls unstrung!”
Paul is represented as speaking of death as a departure. In the original, the simile is rather that of a vessel that is about to set sail.i In one sense the Apostle’s metaphor cannot be dissociated from sadness. “Set sail” — the Vessel long familiar to us, as it rode at anchor in life’s harbour, with the scenes of stirring existence around. Now, its cable is unloosed, its anchor is weighed. Friends crowd the pier to wave the last farewell, as with canvas set, it departs on the mysterious voyage to the “undiscovered country” from which there is no return! But let our Apostle finish his unfinished sentence. “Having a desire to depart” (to set sail), “and to be with Christ, which is far letter!” Immediately all is changed. The vessel is chartered for a nobler Haven; “mortality is swallowed up of life.’*” This is the only one aspect,” says Bishop EUicott, using the familiar monogram,” in which death does not seem absolutely intolerable, and that is, dying
2 Tim. iv. 6, 6.v6.w(xi.%. — See Barnes’ Commentary in loc.
IN Christ: dying in Him who trod the death-realm before us; — dying in Him who tasted death, that whether we live or die, whether we remain clothed or unclothed, we should never be separate from His sympathy and love.” His people were one with Him in the Easter triumph of the ever-memorable morning, when at the entrance to His tomb “the stone was rolled away;” — the glorious evidence that He had risen. They thereby received a pledge of their own resurrection-life — their own triumph over death: — “He that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies “(Rom. viii. 1 1 ). To revert to that other familiar and significant simile of our Apostle we have already alluded to in a recent chapter — the Kedeemer was” the first-fruits of them that slept “(i Cor. XV. 20). We there saw that as the earliest gatherings of the fields of Palestine were of old carried with pomp and joy to the Jewish temple, antl waved as an offering before the Lord, — the pledge alike of coming vintage and harvest: So has Christ — the first sheaf of the immortal harvest — been taken to the heavenly altar- courts — the earnest of the fruit of His own soul- travail yet to follow. /” I myself cannot die. I live in Christ; and though, at His call, I may enter on a new and untried state of being, I shall but part with my earthly tenement, * as a bird escaped from the snare of the fowler,’ to rejoice in my deliverance
“Destiny of the Creature,” p. “jy from a cumbrous body, that clogs the free and full exercise of all my powers. As the husk of the chrysalis I shall cast it aside, and rise out of it to soar above the dark clouds and mists of earth into the pure and serene atmosphere of heaven, where dwell only those who are holy and heavenly — the perfected spirits of the redeemed.^ “)
“Memorials of a Quiet Life,” ii. 290.