Chapter X
A going-’doivn star is not annihilated but shall appear again. O happy arid blessed death, that golden bridge laid over by Christ my Lord betwixt timers clay banks and heaven’’ s shores!
Tour sun is well turned and low; be nigh your lodging against night. We go one by one, out of this great market till the toivti be empty and the two lodging s heaven and hell, be filled. O thrice blessed are they v.’ho hold Christ v:ith their tears and prayers! — Samuel Rutherford.
It will be a resurrection. The same body which is put in the grave will come out. This is necessary to a resurrection. It is not an evolution, not a new creation, but a resurrection — a standing out and up into life again, the same body in form, substance, identity. The body is a being, a department of man’s marvelous nature. It is separable from the other part of man’s being, and will be separated by death. The body, its identity and being, is clear, unmistakable, well-defined, visible to eye, sensible to touch, much more tangible, visible, real to us than the soul. When death separates the spirit from the body and God says it shall return to dust, it will be so; and when God says, the body shall come out of the grave, out of its dust, the same thing we put in the grave.
The Word of God teaches that the same body which lived and died and lay in the grave will be raised — a literal resurrection, not a new creation, but a raising of the body from its grave and dust, an awakening from its long and undisturbed sleep.
The power of Christ over death was declared in the resurrection of Lazarus and his own triumph over the grave. These were prophecies, pledges, and patterns of our coming from the dead; and in each instance the same body which went into the grave came out. It shall be so with us.
The resurrection of the identical body that was laid in the grave is the doctrine of the Bible. This literal resurrection is the foundation stone of New Testament revelation. Nothing indicates our defection and driftings more than the views of the resurrection which are finding favor in high and low places among preachers, teachers, and people. With many, fiction and philosophy are substituted for the truth as it is in Jesus. We are inhaling our religious opinions from the tainted atmosphere of rationalism instead of the Bible. We are leaving Isaiah and David for Emerson or George Eliot. Robert Elsmere and John Ward preach to us instead of Paul and Peter. We have surrendered faith to philosophy, reduced revelation to reason, and deem ourselves wiser, if not better, than our fathers. Yq hesitate not to say that every departure in a less or remote degree from the orthodox doctrine that the resurrection is a literal raising of the body is a departure from the Bible and a lessening of the tenacity and strength of our personal faith.
“I believe in the resurrection of the body,” is Christendom’s universal creed. The orthodox explanation of this item of the creed is thus summed up by Bishop Pearson: “We can therefore not otherwise expound this article than by asserting that the bodies which have lived and died shall live again after death, and that the same flesh which is corrupted shall be restored. Whatsoever alterations shall be made shall not be of their nature but of their condition, not of their substance but of their qualities; which explication is agreeable to the language of the Scripture, to the principles of religion, to the constant profession of the Church against the Origenists of old and the Socinians of late.”
The Bible statement is direct, unmistakable in its meaning that these same bodies which have been the vehicles as well as the abode of the soul, its partner as well as its servant, shall be raised. The man is as much body as soul, and the Bible doctrine holds to the resurrection of the body — this body — its identity well maintained, and its dust rekindled to life and beauty. This same body, which has shared so fully in the trials and sorrows of this earthly life, shall share in all the ultimate triumphs or sorrows of the life to come.
In the eighth chapter of Romans we have this most expHcit statement: “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.” It is the mortal body, the dead body, which is to be quickened into life.
In the fifth chapter of First Thessalonians we have a prayer which has a strong bearing on this point: “And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The body is to be sanctified, set apart in all its uses and members to God, sealed as his property; and in that case to be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord — blameless, no cause for censure, the body kept pure, free from blame.
We have the word “preserved,” which
means guarding, watching, take care of, to
guard, to watch, to keep, as a prisoner is
kept with sleepless vigilance. Who is to guard the spirit? God. Who is to guard and keep the body? God. To keep till the coming of Christ. God is to watch over the body, keep it as he keeps the spirit. So God will guard the body’s sleeping dust till Jesus comes, and then bring it with him. Soul, spirit, body, kept by God’s power till Jesus comes! The common and simple meaning of Scripture is that the same body will be raised from the grave. There would be no triumphant strain, triumph would not be admissible, if the body was not delivered from death! “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” would have neither fitness nor place; but how appropriate the enrapturing notes of victory to a body laid low and humbled by the enemy death, and now released and all-victorious! The rigid Bible and orthodox view has been almost wholly surrendered by modern theology. The following will perhaps show the commonly received opinion. It is called the modern idea: ‘The modern doctrine repudiates this idea of a literal resurrection of the flesh. Yet it holds that the spirit has in another world some sort of organism through which it acts, and by which it has its connection with the material universe. What that organism is, and how it operates, no one pretends to know. Swedenborg held that there is in the human body a spiritual body, and that this spiritual organism rises at death, so that the soul is not yet clothed with an immortal tabernacle. This is one form of the modern doctrine of the resurrection of the body. In a sentence, then, the modern doctrine of the resurrection of the body, so far as that doctrine is in any form intelligently held, is that the spirit has in the other life a spiritual organism, and that this spiritual organism has some sort of connection, not by us understood, with the material organism which it possessed upon the earth.” 79