For Easter Morning

“I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death; O death, I will be thy plagues, O grave, I will be thy destruction.” Hosea xiii. 14

COR long ages it must have almost seemed as if God had forgotten His challenge. “Death reigned from Adam to Moses,” from Moses to David, who “died and was buried;” and from David to Christ. One of the earliest chapters of the Bible (Gen. v.) is a cemetery of the old world through which we walk, remarking the inscriptions that record the names and ages of the world’s grey fathers; and in the case of each the monotonous announcement follows, “and he died.”

The generations of mankind spring smiling and beautiful on mother earth, like the clover crops of successive years as if to defy, or with their charms, to fascinate the tyrant -reaper. But all to no avail. Xerxes sits upon his throne on the shores of the Hellespont, whilst the myriads of his army pass before him in battle array; and he weeps in the presence of the inevitable certainty that in a hundred years not one of them shall be left. ‘’All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass; he withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away.”

There were only two exceptions to the dread monotony of death — the rapture of Enoch, and the ascension of Elijah; they were like the early crocus or aconite, which announces the coming of the spring. All the rest died. At last He came in human form who had been fore-announced as Death’s death, the destined fulfiller of the promise of Paradise. At least He will not succumb. He will not see death! Or if they meet, before one glance of His eyes, “which are as a flame of fire,” surely death will wan as the moon when smitten by sunlight! But contrary to all that we might have thought, it was not so. He, too, the Prince of Life, the One who had spoken of Himself as invested with the power of resurrection, who Himself was the Fountain of Life, having entered the lists with the fell tyrant, allowed Himself to be led as a lamb to the slaughter and after hours of human anguish, closed His eyes, yielded up His spirit, and hung a corpse upon the tree. And it might have seemed therefore that none, not even God, could break the thrall of death.

Such was the appearance; but not the fact. We are reminded of the old Greek story that when the city of “1Ro more Beatb-” 35

Athens was doomed to supply each year a tribute of youths and maidens to the monster of Crete, the hero Theseus embarked with the crew, and accompanied the victims that he might beard the dreadful ogre in his den, and slaying him, forever free his native city, from the burden under which it groaned. So Christ through death abolished death, and “destroyed him that had the power of death, that is the devil, and delivered those who through fear of death were all their life-time subject to bondage.’’ Here was fulfilled the divine announcement, uO! death, I will be thy plagues.”

Nor is this all. In the last vision vouching to man of the ascended Christ, the keys of death are said to hang at His girdle, and He has the power to shut so that no one can open, and to open so that no one can shut.

Nor is even this all. The day is not far distant when all His saints “that are in their graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth;” then shall be fulfilled the saying that is written, “Death is swallowed up in victory;” and then shall it be manifest that God has ransomed His people from the power of the grave; so that not a hoof shall be left behind, nor a single fragment of the mystical body of Christ separated from all the rest. Nor is even this all. The world of men is to particpate in the resurrection power of death’s victor. When God enters into conflict with His foes, He shows them no quarter; He yields to no feelings of compunction, “repentance is hid from His eyes.” There is not a single unit of the human race, who has passed through death in connection with the first Adam, who shall not share in the resurrection power of the second. “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” They shall come from the ages before “TEbou art with me-” 37

the flood; from the foot of the pyramids, where the slaves of the Pharaohs mingled their dust with the bricks they mad6; from the earliest scenes of life, and from the latest; from the most enlightened races of mankind, and the most degraded; from the most warlike and the most peaceful tribes; cathedral vaults shall spilt and give up their contents; Marathon, Austerlitz, and Waterloo, shall add their contributions; the sea shall give return of the harvest sown through the centuries. Babylon, Nineveh, London, New York, shall spring to their feet, and march before the irresistible decree of Him who died in weakness, but who shall then despoil death of its prey, and compel him to disgorge.

Nor is this all. All enemies are to be put beneath His feet. The last enemy to be destroyed by Emmanuel shall be death itself. In what its destruction shall consist we do not know; except that in that world which the King who sits upon the throne shall create, we are told, “There shall be no more death.” No funeral cortege shall wind its way over the golden pavement; no cypress tree shall grow beside the river of life; no sob of mourner shall mingle with the songs of the redeemed; not a flower shall fade; not a leaf shrivel; not a babe languish — for ever and for ever and all the spiritual constituents of death, which have accompanied the dissolution of the body, shall in the case of those who have accepted eternal life by faith in Jesus, be forever obliterated, or made the channels through which rivers of unending bliss shall eternally flow.

How gloriously then will God realize the words that glisten before our eyes this Easter morning! Already in the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead we see that the empire “present with the %ovb:9 39

of Death is doomed. Panic, dating from the first Easter morning, has reigned through all its realm, as some weak nation trembles before the steady and inevitable advance of an irresistible foe. And that panic shall be justified by the result.

But in the meanwhile, is there no comfort for us who are compelled to live in the valley shadowed by Death? There is, because He goes beside us; and the psalmist, who had spoken of Him in the third person, addresses Him in the second as that shadow comes nearer: “He restoreth my soul; Thou art with me.” And if that blessed experience is to be ours of which the apostle spoke, that we should be alive and remain till the coming of the Lord, then there awaits us a still more blessed participation in the victory of which we have been thinking, for we which are alive and remain till His coming shall be caught up

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to meet Him in the clouds, this corruption putting on incorruption, this mortal putting on immortality, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. Not ours the pangs of dissolution then; but the bright swift translation !This earthly house transmuted into the heavenly, flesh and blood unto ethereal element; the body dropped from the opening glories of the spiritual, as the chrysalis case from the butterfly! Oh, who can wonder at the eager desire of the apostle that this might become his lot! (2 Cor. v.)

And if this should not be the case, and we were doomed to go down, each alone, to die, yet even then we need not be without solace. Death is abolished! The wasp struck its sting into the cross of the dying Lord, and lost it there, and is now stingless forever. The poison fang of the viper has been extracted, Goliath beheaded by his own sword. The teeth of the lion have “present wftb the Xor&/’ 41

been drawn. And for this reason the apostles always speak of a believer’s death as being but a sleep. Death is not to be more dreaded than sleep, its twin.

In all likelihood we shall be quite surprised when we have passed through the dark portal, that was so slight and easy an experience. We dread it now, because we do not really believe that Christ’s death has made it all so different. If we believed this, it would give us great confidence. But whether we believed or not, we shall find it so. A step; a moment; a passage across the Bridge of Sighs; a transition from darkness to light; a birth — that is all. Absent from the body, present with the Lord. No moment of unconsciousness or oblivion! The veil rent, the shell broken, the iron gateway passed whilst the light and air of the eternal morning break on the emancipated spirit!