God the Security: Resurrection

Had Jesus Christ delivered no other declaration than the following, “Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation,” He had pronounced a message of inestimable importance and well worthy of that splendid apparatus of prophecy and miracle with which His mission was introduced and attested — a message in which the wisest of mankind would rejoice to find an answer to their doubts and rest to their inquiries.

—S. T. Coleridge.

The bringing back of the dead is one of the great distinctive and gloriously magnificent and triumphant facts of the gospel — its glory, the crown and seal of its divinity. If the dead rise not, its scepter is departed, its prophecies and promises have failed, its luster is dimmed and tarnished, its melody turned to discord and shame. The resurrection is to the world what the minstrel was to Elisha. All prophecies, all visions of beauty, the hand of the Lord — all are in it. If the dead rise not, then are we most miserable, tuneless, and dead — neither inspiration, vision, prophecy, nor God with us. This great fact is iterated and reiterated by new statement, by figure, and by type. It is the theme which checks the sigh, comforts the mourner, makes strong the weak, lights the fires of immortality and eternal life amid the darkness and ravages of earth’s graveyards, spans the dark abyss of death with the golden bridge of an eternal reunion, spirit and body both in heaven.

A simple setting will show how large a place the resurrection of the body had in the preaching, experience, hopes, and comforts of the New Testament Christians.

Jesus Christ had in his person the power of the resurrection. He was the incarnation of the resurrection. Yet outside of his person there was the fact of the resurrection. The power in him, his resurrection applied, brings into life again all the dead. “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” How clear and strong is the statement about the Holy Spirit in us, whose indwelling gives to us the pledge and verity of the resurrection as well as the earnest of heaven! “But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you.”

So we come into sympathy with struggling, groaning, oppressed creation about us, which has in its very groans the prophecy of its resurrection. Nature in this says that the divine word is but a figure of us looking with oppressed and eager groanings to the future. uFor the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope. Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body. For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.”

This is the prophecy, poetry, and bloom of Christ’s system. The future is its glory. The resurrection is the rich jewel of the gospel. The Holy Spirit inspires nature and fills man with this glorious resurrection hope. The more we have of the power of the Spirit’s inworking, the deeper and stronger are the convictions of the resurrection; and the richer, sweeter, more assured the consciousness of our salvation by hope, the more profound the certainty of the adoption of these bodies into the glorious familyhood of the heavenly home.

The Sadducees denied the resurrection of the dead. That which inflamed and grieved them and aroused them to unite with the enemies of the disciples was that the disciples taught and preached through Jesus the resurrection from the dead. Apostolic teaching and preaching broadened the resurrection from the personal resurrection of Jesus to the universal fact of the resurrection of the dead. As certainly as Jesus had been raised from the dead, so certainly would all the dead be raised.