Risen with Christ: Part I

“If ye then [or, since ye then] be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above.” — COL. iii. i.

‘“”INHERE are tracts of country in some regions of the world where the soil feels hot to the touch, the ground rings hollow to the foot, and groaning mountains belch forth flames, clouds of vapour, and streams of molten rock. There, where the “solid earth” seems an inappropriate expression, earthquakes occasionally occur, to bury, not houses only, but whole cities, in their yawning chasms. Unlike these, which are connected with ordinary volcanic agencies, was the earthquake that, with strange signs in the heavens, distinguished our Lord’s from all other deaths. It opened graves, not to bury the living, but set the dead free; and, wrenching the bars of death asunder, exposed to the eye of day the grim and silent tenants of the tomb.

So happened it when Jesus, God manifest in the flesh, gave up the ghost. Our earth was struck with terror. Seized with an extraordinary trembling, the rocks, in whose bowels the Jews hollowed out their tombs, were rent asunder; and such as had the curiosity and courage to look in, saw the dead — each lying in his stony chamber. They were waiting the hour of resurrection; nor could they rise till Christ had risen. A king goes foremost — not before, but after him his subjects; nor is it the feet but the head that rises first to the surface when a man, falling overboard, is buried in the sea. Such was the order of events on the morning of the third day. The angel, seated on the stone that he had rolled from the door, is silently waiting the issue with eyes fixed upon the tomb, when Jesus, untouched, unsummoned, awakes; and rising to put off shroud and face-cloth, passes forth into the morning air with the step of a conqueror. For this hour, for the joy set before Him, to redeem our souls from hell and our bodies from the grave, He had endured the cross and despised the shame; and He now lives to die no more. And as, so soon as the heart in a case of suspended animation resumes its functions, the blood begins to flow and pulses throb through all the body, even so they revive with Christ, who were to show forth the connexion between His resurrection and that of His saints at the final judgment. Prefiguring that great event, and leaving the graves the earthquake had opened, many saints arose. The evangelist St Matthew thus describes the scene: — “Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.” Our Lord’s ascent from the grave was a fit counterpart to His descent from the skies; both events being characterised by manifestations of the divinity that touched with resplendent glory the darkest mysteries of His life. He left heaven attended by a train of angels, and left the tomb with one hardly less, if not more remarkable — a band whom he had restored to life, and brought out of their graves. They, the strangest assembly ever met on earth, had “risen with Christ;” and so, in the plainest sense of the terms, St Paul might have addressed them, saying, “If ye then,” or since ye then, “are risen with Christ, seek those things which are above.”

Had the apostle addressed these words to that company, they could have had little interest, and no application to us. But the words occur in a letter he wrote to the church at Colosse; and were addressed to such as, far removed from the scene of this stupendous miracle, had no more share in it than we have. We shall therefore consider them as bearing on the whole Church of Christ, in every age as well as in every country of the world. Happily combining doctrine and practice, they present two distinct points for consideration; they delineate a character and enjoin a duty. Taking these in their order, let us consider —

Who are those that may be said to have risen with Christ

There is a churchyard where the passenger who reads the inscriptions on the tombs, that stand up amid the long rank grass beneath the shadow of waving elms and an old gray steeple, will find one to surprise him; which, though quaint in form, I doubt not is true in substance. Here, no angel flying through the heavens sounds a trumpet; no figure of old Time, with bald head, shoulders a scythe or shakes an hour-glass; no cross-bones rudely carved, nor sexton’s spade, nor grinning skull, give point to the trite “Memento Mori.” Stranger still, the monument which is raised to the memory and virtues of one person bears the date of more than one birth: with long years between, it says, speaking in name of the dead, I was born the first time on such a day, and born the second time on such another day of another year. Strange, indeed! Yet, had John Baptist’s disciples erected a monument to the memory of their murdered master, it might have recorded a more astounding fact; and, to those ignorant of the work of God’s Spirit, a more inexplicable riddle.

For, contradiction in terms though it seems, the second birth in John’s as in Jeremiah’s case, went before the first — the Baptist being sanctified from his mother’s womb. There, a babe yet unborn, he rejoiced in God his Saviour; “Lo,” said Elizabeth to Mary, when the two cousins, both by and by to become mothers, met — “Lo, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in mine ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy.”

The history of every saint on being completed, which it shall not be till the final judgment, and heads mouldering in the dust are crowned with immortality, will contain a record of two births, of two deaths, and of two resurrections — the first visible, the second invisible; the subject of the one change, the body; the subject of the other, which is a matter of faith and not of sight, the soul of the believer. This second birth and first death, or resurrection, are one and the same event. Here let me pause to say, How important an event! and to ask, Have we any experience of it? This change of heart is the door to heaven, the hinge on which turns our eternal destiny; without it Jesus declares that no man, however virtuous or honest, can see the kingdom of God; promising to bestow it, God says, “O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves — a new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you;” and what God has promised in these, and many other no less gracious words, Ezekiel was privileged to see in vision — there, where the bones of a valley, once a battlefield, orderly arrange themselves into skeletons, and the naked skeletons get clothed with flesh, and no sooner does a wind from heaven come, sweeping along to stir their hair and kiss their lips, than every dead man, inspired anew with life, springs to his feet, and the valley, before so silent, echoes to the blare of trumpets, and is filled with “an exceeding great army,” — God’s host, bannered and marshalled, and eager for battle.

The words “risen with Christ,” which express the condition of such as are born of God’s Spirit and have passed through the first resurrection, are in complete harmony with all that Scripture and conscience reveal of our lost state by nature. The Word of God pronounces all men dead, “dead in trespasses and sins;” and the most cursory examination of the subject teaches us that more is meant by that expression than the fact, alarming as the fact is, that, until justified by faith in the righteousness of Jesus Christ, we all lie under condemnation. What does he think of, for example, who lies in a condemned cell, sentenced within so many days to be taken to the place of public execution, and hanged by the neck till he is dead? — of what he shall eat, or drink, or wherewithal he shall be clothed — of comforts with which to surround himself — of the pastimes and pleasures in which he may spend his numbered hours? No. By his grated window the wretched man sits, inditing petitions for pardon: when the world sleeps, and all but his beating heart is still, he creeps softly from his pallet to try the strength of the iron bars; unlike those who neither pray nor solicit the prayers of others, he engages every possible interest to intercede with the Crown on his behalf, nor leaves any means untried to make his pardon sure. But, till awakened and converted by divine grace, do men show any such anxiety for salvation: or put forth one earnest effort corresponding to his? If they did, who should be lost?

None. With pardon freely offered — to be got for the asking; with liberty proclaimed and prison doors flung open; with God not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to Him and live, it is not possible to account for sinners perishing otherwise than by the fact that men, while under the sentence are also under the insensibility of death. Think you that unless the body stretched on the funeral pile by the banks of the Ganges were dead, it would lie passive there, to be wrapped in flames and reduced to ashes? Alive, how the man would watch the torch’s fiery glare, and, perceiving it touch the pile, burst his bonds, spring from his bed, and fly for life! Much more, were men not “dead in trespasses and sins,” would they work out their salvation with fear and trembling — give all diligence to “make their calling and election sure.”

Besides being marked by insensibility, death is followed by corruption. It, not the glassy eye, nor marble brow, nor rigid form, nor heart that neither beats nor flutters, is the surest, saddest proof that life has fled: and so with the grand and bold imagery of inspiration, the prophet represents the dead as talking in their graves, saying “to corruption, Thou art my father; and to the worm, Thou art my mother and my sister.” And turning from the physical to the moral aspects of man’s case, alas! how much corruption is in his heart to prove him “dead in trespasses and sins.” Let the Holy Spirit, before he begins to cleanse it, open a sinner’s eyes to its depravity, show the man himself in the mirror of God’s Word, and he starts back from the glass, aghast at his own image; shocked to see that there is no grave so foul as man’s heart. “Ye shall loathe yourselves,” says God to His people, “ye shall loathe yourselves in your own sight for all the evils that ye have committed.” Need we wonder at such strong expressions? Why? Even saintly Ezra blushed to lift up his head: and Job, eminent above all the men of his time for uprightness, cried, “I abhor myself:” and St Paul, as if this greatest of apostles had been the greatest of sinners, feeling through the corruptions that clung to him like a living captive in a most horrible predicament — chained to one whom death had turned into a festering corpse, exclaims, “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” If it is so with renewed men, what must it be with those who are entire strangers to the grace of God — if such is the state of the green tree, how must it be with the dry?

I am far from asserting, though sin, like a poison carried along in the blood, has affected in a sense our entire nature, that the unconverted are without amiable, excellent, and valuable properties. I have seen flowers of lovely hue and fragrant odour clinging to the walls of a crumbling ruin, and I have seen such beauty lingering on the face of the dead as went far to deprive death of its repulsive aspect, and make it difficult to believe that life had fled. Such are the graces that belong to fallen humanity. They adorn, but cannot redeem it — pleasing man, but not propitiating God. If our Lord’s body in the grave, to borrow an illustration from it, might be regarded as the type of a soul “dead in trespasses and sins,” these natural virtues are but the fine linen in which Joseph wrapped the sacred form, the bed of spices on which with tender hand he composed the mangled limbs. What availed the snowy fabric of the loom, and fragrance that filled the sepulchre? Death was there — the dear form was cold; the eyes were fixed and filmy; silent the voice that hushed the tempest and cheered the weeping penitent; powerless the hand at whose touch blind eyes opened and old sores were closed; and, with its features muffled in a napkin, low on the cold ground lay the head that had lain in the bosom of God. Thus Jesus was under the insensibility as well as the sentence of death; and so remained till, after three days and nights, as the Jews expressed it, life returned to the lifeless body, and His heart with all other organs resumed its functions. Then He rose; declared by His resurrection to be the Son of God with power. And they who are risen with Him, undergoing a greater change than the saints who had their graves opened at His death, and their life restored at His resurrection, are those whose souls once dead in sin have become alive through grace. Your way to spiritual life opened up, perhaps, by convictions that have rent the rocky heart and shaken soul and body too, as earthquakes shake a trembling world, have you risen to newness of life? Then cast off, like grave-clothes, the habits of sin. In the strength of heavenly grace, burst its bonds, and go forth to enjoy the light and walk in the liberty of the sons of God.

For on those who have thus risen with Christ is The duty enjoined — seek those things which are above, or as St Paul more fully expresses it in words we shall by and by consider, Set your affections on things in heaven, and not on things on earth.

When the doctrine of a resurrection was first revealed, it dazzled all eyes and blinded some. Reason started at the strange announcement; and treating its great preacher with undisguised contempt, the Athenians sneered — asking, as they curled the lip and pointed to St Paul, “What doth this babbler say?” To throw some light on that mystery, he employed the similitude of such familiar objects as corn-seed, which is cast on the soil, and, though when buried in the furrow a dry, sapless, lifeless-looking thing, rises to push aside the clods, and clothe the fields with verdure, and fill the barns of the husbandman with golden sheaves. In other realms of nature, science finds a still more remarkable similitude in the insects that, sporting in sunbeams and flitting from flower to flower, give life to the air and beauty to the scene. Once creeping worms, after a while they wove a shroud and wrapped it round them, and, dropping from bush or tree, sought a grave in the earth, where they lay entombed till spring winds thawed and summer beams warmed the soil, and at the appointed time shuffled off their shroud, and rose into the sunny air on silken wings — in form, in food, in tastes, in habits so different, that it might be said, “Old things have passed away, and all things are become new.”

An image of the change on our bodies when this poor dust shall hear the trumpet, and mortality put on immortality, this is not less, but perhaps more, an image of the change wrought in our souls when the Spirit renews them at the second birth and first resurrection. Then, at least, in their dominant power, old things have passed away; and, in their bud and germ at least, all things have become new. The Bible, for example, so soon as a man is converted, reads like a new book; the Sabbath bell rings out new sounds;

Jesus, once despised, but now invested with new and attractive graces, is prized as the chiefest among ten thousand and altogether lovely — every feeling and affection leaving its old channel, flows in a new and opposite direction; and loving what once he hated and hating what once he loved, shunning what once he sought and seeking what once he shunned, the years the renewed man spent in sin seem to him like a strange, and guilty, and frightful, and horrid dream. Yet, though perfect in nature, this holy change is imperfect in degree — many being the hostile influences to which believers are exposed here; many the temptations that assail their virtue; many the difficulties that impede their course; many the conflicts they have to maintain against the lovs of the world and the remaining corruption of their hearts. Therefore St Paul urges them to withdraw their affections from things on earth, and, as those that have risen from sin to the enjoyment of a new life, to set them on things above.

Thus to rise and soar, though by no means easy, is a duty to which God’s people will give earnest heed if they consult only their present happiness. The ivy which throws its arms around a hollow and rotten tree dooms itself to be crushed; and they are laying up suffering for a future day who allow affections which should be trained to the skies to be entangled with perishing earthly objects. God will not permit His redeemed ones to perish; but to save their souls He will sink their treasures — cast away the cargo to keep the ship afloat. If they choose Sodom, He will burn them out of it; to deliver them from idolatry, He will destroy their idols; and when precepts fail to teach it, He will teach them by bitter experience that “he builds too low, who builds beneath the skies.” Startled by the whirring of a scared bird, the fall of a leaf, even their own shadow which the moon, shining through a glade of the forest, projects on the path, they may fear robbers who carry their fortune on their persons; but he who has his wealth in the banker’s safe, walks light-hearted through the gloom of night, and whistles as he goes — careless though thieves be thick as forest leaves. Even so, the man who has his treasure in heaven is, in a sense and measure at least, prepared for the worst that can befall; nor, when misfortune comes to take away his wealth, or disease to take away his health, or calumny to take away his reputation, or death to pluck wife or child from his loving arms, has he to raise the old, bitter cry, “Ye have taken away my gods, and what have I more?” He who has his affections set on things above is like one who hangs on by the skies; and, having a secure hold of these, could say though he saw the world roll away from beneath his feet, “My heart is fixed, my heart is fixed, O Lord, I will sing and give praise!”

I do not say, notwithstanding all its sins and sorrows, but that there is much good in God’s world. It is a good servant, though, like fire and water, a bad master; useful as a staff, though in the heart a tyrant’s rod; good beneath a man’s feet, though on his back a burden to make a saint groan, like Atlas. Be careful, therefore, by setting your affections on things above, to keep the world in its own place. Allow it to thrust itself in between you and God, and Christ, and holiness, and heaven, and it shall be with your souls as with our planet when the moon rolls in between us and the sun; though vastly inferior to that glorious luminary, yet blotting out all beauty, hushing the voice of song, turning day into sudden night, and striking terror into all nature, it wraps the world in the darkness of a cold eclipse. It matters little how much of the world is in our hands, if it is kept out of our hearts, and care be taken that neither business nor pleasures make us forget that heaven, not earth, is our home. Would that heaven had such a place in our thoughts as home has in the hearts of boys about holiday time, of soldiers when the weary war draws to a close, of exiles looking to see the ship sail round the headland which is to convey them and their fortunes from a foreign shore. As I have seen the twittering swallows, when their time of migration drew near, sit on house-tops pruning their pinions, and wheel in mazy circles through the air to try and to strengthen their powers of flight, so, living above and looking beyond this world, let us prepare for our departure — daily, prayerfully, assiduously cultivating that holiness which is the unfailing characteristic of believers, and which, perfected on their arrival at the gates of heaven, shall be their highest happiness and brightest crown.

But if we are to live separate from the world like oil among water — though in it, not of it — how, it may be asked, since men only do well what they do with a will, are we, with affections fixed on things above, to perform aright the secular, ordinary duties of life? If our hearts are engrossed with heavenly things, how are we to obey this other, and equally divine, commandment, “Whatsoever” — be it to sweep a floor or reform a state, hold the helm of a ship or of a nation — “whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might” — a way of doing ordinary work, let me observe, not more conducive to our temporal advantage than creditable to our religious profession. “With might” implies that the heart is engaged along with the head and hand; and having, though two hands, but one heart which, like the living child for whom the mothers wrangled, to divide were to destroy, how can we do things apparently so incompatible as to set our affections on the things of heaven and yet engage with “might” in the secularities of earth?

The two are perfectly consistent. Man standing between the celestial and terrestrial worlds is related to both; and resembling neither a flower which, springing from the dust and returning to it, belongs altogether to the earth, nor a star which, shining far remote from this lower sphere, belongs altogether to the heavens, our hearts may be fitly likened to the rainbow that, rising into heaven but resting on earth, is connected both with the clods of the valley and the clouds of the sky.

Let this familiar example show how Christians may have their affections set on things above, and yet give diligent attention to the duties of their earthly calling. With the salt tear standing in his eye, with a mother’s precious counsels and a father’s pious prayers, a youth leaves home for a distant colony. At the foot of the ladder he looks to its topmost round; resolved to climb, step by step, up to wealth and honour. For this end he saves with an economy that allows no waste; works with an energy that never wearies; submits without shrinking to trials and hardships; arid throws himself into his duties with a zeal that merits fortune and commands success. People, and especially his fellows whom he leaves lagging far behind, fancy that his affections, like its trees, have taken root in that foreign soil, and that his heart is wholly engrossed with the cares and business of his post. They know no better. His heart is not there. It is at home — its affections, like an elastic chain, stretching unbroken over all the lands that lie and broad seas that roll between. Visions of his father’s house float around his couch; the forms of loved ones move in his nightly dreams: where palm-trees wave, he longs to see the hills of dusky pines, and thinks, when the nightingale sings from orange groves, of the larks that carol, soaring over his native fields. Fond memory dwells on the past; fancy stretches away into the future; and he sets store on honours and wealth, chiefly for the pleasures they will yield to loved ones at home. Home is the centre around which his hidden life keeps turning; the dear word stands engraven on his heart: his settled purpose, his daily thought is one day to go home. And yet, whether his office in that distant land be to sit at the head of a council, or march at the head of an army, to manage a business, to hold a pen or guide a plough, whatever his hand findeth to do he does it with all his might.

Even so should it be with us in our earthly pilgrimage. So far from doing our earthly duties worse, we do them better by having our affections set on things above — the hope of rest strengthening us for labour: the example of Christ inspiring us with ardour; and no fears of ultimate disappointment clouding our prospects and weakening us by the way. One, long an exile, returns to his native land; but not to home. Ah! he finds no home. The voices are silent he hoped to hear; the cold grave holds those he hoped to see; his old friends are in the dust, nor live but in his dreams: and turning away from a generation that stare coldly on his gray hairs, he repairs to the churchyard, and, sitting down on a father’s or mother’s grave, weeps over the ruins of fondly cherished hopes — this the verdict on all his toil, and exile, and wealth, and honours, Vanity and vexation of spirit! But where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God, we shall find more than hope ever anticipated, imagination fancied, or love desired. Who after long years of exile goes up to the door of his old home, approaches it with a beating heart; knocks with a trembling hand. He knows not what has happened in his absence: an empty chair may meet his eye, and to the questions that tremble on his lips the only answer may be, Dead — all dead! How different his fortune who knocks at heaven’s happy gate! It opens on scenes of surpassing glory. Arrayed in robes of light, long missed and long mourned ones hasten to meet him at the door; and lead him up through lines of shining angels to the throne where Jesus, his Saviour, seated in glory at the right hand of God, bends on him looks of ineffable affection, and bids him Welcome to the bliss of Paradise.