Resurrection with Christ

Next Part Resurrection with Christ 2

"But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions — it is by grace you have been saved." Ephesians 2:4-5

There have been conferences of late of all sorts of people upon all kinds of subjects, but what a remarkable thing a conference would be if it were possible of people who have been raised from the dead! If you could somehow or other get together the daughter of the Shunamite, the daughter of Jairus, the son of the widow at the gates of Nain, Lazarus, and Eutychus, what strange communings they might have one with another! What singular enquiries they might make, and what remarkable disclosures might they present to us! The thing is not possible, and yet a better and more remarkable assembly may be readily gathered on the same conditions, and more important information may be obtained from the confessions of its members. This morning we have a conference of that very character gathered in this house; for many of us were dead in trespasses and sins, even as others, but we hope that through the divine energy we have been quickened from that spiritual death, and are now the living to praise God.

It will be well for us to talk together, to review the past, to rejoice in the present, to look forward to the future. "You has he quickened who were dead in trespasses and sins;" and as you sit together, an assembly of men possessed of resurrection life, you are a more notable conclave than if merely your bodies and not your spirits had been quickened. The first part of this mornings discourse will be occupied with a solemnity in which we shall take you into the charnel house; secondly, we shall spend awhile in reviewing a miracle, and we shall observe dead men living; we shall then turn aside to observe a sympathy indicated in the text; and we shall close with a song, for the text reads somewhat like music- it is full of thankfulness, and thankfulness is the essence of true song; it is full of holy and adoring wonder; it is evermore true poetry even though expressed in prose.

I. Celebrate first a great SOLEMNITY, and descend into the charnel house of our poor humanity. According to the teaching of sacred Scripture, men are dead, spiritually dead. Certain vain men would make it out that men are only a little disordered and bruised by the fall, wounded in a few delicate members but not mortally injured. However, the word of God is very express upon the matter, and declares our race to be not wounded, not hurt merely, but slain outright, and left as dead in trespasses and sin. There are those who fancy that fallen human nature is only in a sort of syncope or fainting fit, and only needs a process of reviving to set it right. You have only, by education and by other manipulations, to set its life-floods in motion, and to excite within it some degree of action, and then life will speedily be developed. There is much good in every man, they say, and you have only to bring it out by training and example.

This fiction is exactly opposite to the teaching of sacred Scripture. Within these truthful pages, we read of no fainting fit, no temporary paralysis, butdeath is the name for natures condition, and quickening is its great necessity. Man is not partly dead, like the half-drowned mariner, in whom some spark of life may yet remain, if it be but fondly tendered, and wisely nurtured. There is not a spark of spiritual life left in man- manhood is to all spiritual things an absolute corpse. "In the day you eat thereof you shall surely die," said God to our first parents, and die they did- a spiritual death; and all their children alike by nature lie in this spiritual death- not a sham death, or a metaphorical one, but a real, absolute, spiritual death. Yet it will be said, "Are they not alive?"

Truly so, but not spiritually. There are grades of life. You come first upon the vegetable life; but the vegetable is a dead thing as to the vitality of theanimal. Above the animal life rises the mental life, a vastly superior life; the creature, which is only an animal, is dead to either the joys or the sorrows of mental life. Then, high above the mental, as much as the mental is above the animal, rises what Scripture calls the spiritual life- the life in Christ Jesus. All men have more or less of the mental life, and it is well that they should cultivate it -get as much as they can of it, that they should put it to the best uses, and make it subserve the highest ends. Man, even looked upon as merely living mentally, is not to be despised or trifled with, but still the mental life cannot of itself rise to the spiritual life, it cannot penetrate beyond that mystic wall which separates forever the mere life of mind from the life of that new principle, the Spirit, which is the offspring of God, and is the living and incorruptible life which he casts into the soul. If you could conceive a man in all respects like yourselves, with this one difference, that his soul had died out of him, that he only possessed his animal faculties, but had no intellectual faculties, so that he could breathe and walk, sleep and eat, and drink, and make a noise, but all mental power was gone, you would then speak of him as being entirely dead to mental pursuits.

He might be a most vigorous and well-developed animal, but his manhood would be dead. It would be of no use explaining a proposition to him, or working out a problem on the black board for his instruction, or offering him even the simplest school-book, for if he had no mind to receive, how could you impart? Now, spiritually, this is the condition of every unregenerate man. It is of no use whatever, apart from the Spirit of God, to hope to make the man understand spiritual things, for they are spiritually discerned, says the apostle. The carnal mind cannot understand the things which be of God- when best trained it has no glimmering of the inward sense of spiritual things; it stumbles over the letter and loses the real meaning, not from lack of mental capacity, but from the absence of spiritual life. O sons of men, if you would know God, "You must be born again;" "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God," he cannot understand it, he cannot know it. The carnal man cannot understand the things which are of God, which are eternal and invisible, any more than an ox can understand astronomy, or a fish can admire the classics. Not in a moral sense, nor a mental sense, but in a spiritual sense, poor humanity is dead, and so the word of God again and again most positively describes it.

Step with me, then, into the sepulcher-house, and what do you observe of yonder bodies which are slumbering there? They are quite unconscious. Whatever goes on around them, neither occasions them joy nor causes them grief. The dead in their graves may be marched over by triumphant armies, but they shout not with them that triumph. Or, friends they have left behind may sit there, and water the grass upon the green mound with their tears, but no responsive sigh comes from the gloomy cavern of the tomb.

It is thus with men spiritually dead: they are unaffected by spiritual things. A dying Savior, whose groans might move the very adamant, and make the rocks dissolve, they can hear of all unmoved. Even the all-present Spirit is undiscerned by them, and his power unrecognized. Angels, holy men, godly exercises, devout aspirations, all these are beyond and above their world. The pangs of hell do not alarm them, and the joys of heaven do not entice them. They hear after a sort mentally, but the spirit-ear is fast shut up, and they do not hear. They are unconscious of all things which are of a spiritual character: eyes have they, but they see not, and ears, but they hear not.

You can interest them in the facts of geology, or the discoveries of art, but you cannot win their hearts to spiritual emotions and pursuits, because they are as unaware of their meaning as an oyster is unacquainted with the dis-establishment of the Irish church. Carnal men blunder over the first words of spiritual knowledge as Nicodemus did who, when he was told that he must be born again, began to enquire, "How can a man be born again when he is old?" or, like the woman of Samaria, who, when she was told of living water, could not understand the spiritual truth, and exclaimed in wonder, "You have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep: from where then have you that living water?" Men are spiritually unconscious of spiritual truth, and so far dead to it.

Observe that corpse: you may strike it, you may bruise it, but it will not cry out; you may pile burdens upon it, but it is not weary; you may shut it up in darkness, but it feels not the gloom. So the unconverted man is laden with the load of his sin, but he is not weary of it; he is shut up in the prison of God's justice, but he pants not for liberty; he is under the curse of God, as it is written, "Cursed is every one that continues not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them," but that curse causes no commotion in his spirit, because he is dead. Well may some of you be peaceful, because you are not aware of the terrors which surround you.

A man totally deaf is not startled by thunder-claps; if totally blind, he is not alarmed by the flashing of the lightning, he fears not the tempest which he does not discern. Even thus is it with you who are at ease in your sins, you cannot discern the danger of your sin, you do not perceive the terror that rises out of it, else let me tell you there would be no sleep to those wanton eyes, no rest to those giddy spirits; you would cry out in grief the very moment you received life, nor would you rest until delivered from those evils which now ensure for you a sure damnation. Oh! were you but alive, you would never be quiet until you were saved from the wrath to come. Man remains unconscious of spiritual things, and unmoved by them because, in a spiritual sense, he is dead.

Invite yonder corpse to assist you in the most necessary works of philanthropy. The pestilence is abroad, ask the buried one to kneel with you and invoke the power of heaven to recall the direful messenger; or, if he prefers it, ask him to assist you in purifying the air and attending to sanitary arrangements. You ask in vain, however needful or simple the act, he cannot help you in it. And in spiritual things, it is even so with the graceless.

The carnal man can put himself into the posture of prayer, but he cannot pray; he can open his mouth and make sweet sounds in earth-born music, but the true praise he is an utter stranger to. Even repentance, that soft and gentle grace which ought to be natural to the sinful, is quite beyond his reach. How shall he repent of a sin, the weight of which be cannot feel? How shall he pray for a blessing the value of which he has no power to perceive? How shall he praise a God in whom he feels no interest, and in whose existence he takes my delight? I say that to all spiritual things, the man is quite as unable as the dead are unable to do natural works and services of daily life. "And yet," says one, "we heard you last Lords day tell these dead people to repent and be converted." I know you did, and you shall hear me yet again do the like. But why speak I to the dead thus, andtell them to perform actions which they cannot do?

Because my Master bids me, and as I obey my Master's errand, a power goes forth with the word spoken, and the dead start in their sleep, and they wake through the quickening lower of the Holy Spirit, and they who naturally cannot repent and believe, do repent and believe in Jesus, and escape from their former sins and live. Yet, believe me, it is no power of theirs which makes them thus start from their death-sleep, and no power of mine which arrests the guilty, slumbering conscience- it is a divine power which God has yoked with the word which he has given forth when it is fully and faithfully preached. Therefore have we exercised ourselves in our daily calling of bidding dead men to live, because life comes at the divine bidding.

But dead they are, most thoroughly so, and the longer we live the more we feel it to be so; and the more closely we review our own condition before conversion, and the more studiously we look into our own condition even now, the more fully do we know that man is dead in sin, and life is a gift, a gift from heaven, a gift of undeserved love and sovereign grace, so that the spiritually living must, every one of them, praise God and not themselves.

One of the saddest reflections about poor dead human nature is what it will be. Death in itself, though a solemn matter, is not so dreadful as that which comes from it. Many a time when that dear corpse has first been forsaken of the soul, those who have lost a dear one have been fain to imprint that cold brow with kisses still. The countenance has looked even more lovely than in life, and when friends have taken the last glimpse, there has been nothing revolting, but much that was attractive. Our dead ones have smiled like sleeping angels, even when we were about to commit them to the grave.

Ah! but we cannot shake from us a wretched sense of what is sure to be revealed before long. It is only a matter of time, and corruption must set in, and it must bring with it its daughter putridity, and by-and-by, the whole must be so noxious that if you had kept it above ground so long, you would vehemently cry with Abraham, "Bury my dead out of my sight! For the natural and inevitable result of death is corruption. So it is with us all.

Some are manifestly corrupt, ah, how soon, while yet they are youths we see them plunging into detestable vice. They are corrupt in the tongue with lying words and lascivious speaking; corrupt in the eye with wanton glances; corrupt certainly at heart, and then corrupt thoroughly in life. There are many about us in the streets every day the stench of whose corruption compels us to put them out of society, for we are very decent; even those who are dead themselves are very scrupulous not to associate with those who are too far gone in corruption. The dead bury their dead, and roll the stone and put away the debauched and dissolute. We do not ask the rotten sinners into our households, because they might corrupt us too fast; and we flatter ourselves that we are so much superior, whereas they are only a stage or two ahead in a race which all unregenerate men are running.

This corruption, though not developed in all to the same extent visibly, will be plain enough at the last in the next world. When God finds us dead, be will cast us out where the worm dies not, and the fire is not quenched. What will be the development of an unregenerate character in hell, I cannot tell, but I am certain it will be something which my imagination dares not now attempt to depict, for all the restraints of this life which have kept men decent and moral will be gone when they come into the next world of sin; and as heaven is to be the perfection of the saints holiness, so hell will be the perfection of the sinners loathsomeness. And there will he discover, and others will discover, what sin is when it comes to its worst. "When lust has conceived, it brings forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, brings forth death;" and this, dear hearer, do we solemnly remind you will be your portion forever and ever, unless God be pleased to quicken you. Unless you be made to live together with Christ you will be in this world dead, perhaps in this world corrupt, but certainly so in the next world, where all the dreadful influences of sin will be developed and discovered to the very full, and you shall be cast away from the presence of God and the glory of his power. There can be no death in heaven, neither can corruption inherit incorruption, and if you have not been renewed in the spirit of your mind, within those pearly gates you can never have your portion, and where the light of heaven shines in perpetual noonday, your lot can never be cast. Weigh these thoughts, I beg you; if they are not according to this book reject them, but as they most certainly are, refuse them at your peril, but rather let them take possession of your spirit, and lead you to seek and find eternal life in Christ Jesus the Lord.

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