Resurrection with Christ 2
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II. We now change the subject for something more pleasant, and observe A MIRACLE, or dead men made alive. The great object of the gospel of Christ, is to create men anew in Christ Jesus. It aims at resurrection, and accomplishes it. The gospel did not come into this world merely to restrain the passions or educate the principles of men, but to infuse into them a new life which, as fallen men, they did not possess. I saw yesterday what seemed to me a picture of those preachers whose sole end and aim is the moralizing of their hearers, but who have not learned the need of supernatural life. Not very far from the shore were a dozen or more boats at sea dragging for two dead bodies. They were using their lines and grappling irons, and with hard rowing and industrious sailing, were doing their best most commendably to fish up the lost ones from the pitiless sea. I do not know if they were successful, but if so, what further could they do with them but decently to commit them to their mother earth? The process of education and everything else, apart from the Holy Spirit, is a dragging for dead men, to lay them out decently, side by side, in the order and decency of death, but nothing more can man do for man.
The gospel of Jesus Christ has a far other and higher task: it does not deny the value of the moralists efforts, or decry the results of education, but it asks what more can you do, and the response is, "Nothing." There it bids the bearers of the bier stand away and make room for Jesus, at whose voice the dead arise. The preacher of the gospel cannot be satisfied with what is done in drawing men out of the sea of outward sin, he longs to see the lost life restored, he desires to have breathed into them a new and superior life to what they have possessed before. Go your way, education, do your best, you are useful in your sphere; go your way, teacher of morality, do your best, you too are useful in your own manner; but if it comes to what man really needs for eternity, you, all put together, are little worth- the gospel, and the gospel alone, answers to mens requirements! Man must be regenerated, quickened, made anew, have fresh breath from heaven breathed into him, or the work of saving him is not begun. The text tells us that God has done this for his people, for those who trust in him. Let us observe the dry bones as they stir and stand before the Lord, and observing, let us praise the Lord, that according to his great love with which he loved us, he has quickened us together with Christ.
In this idea of quickening, there is a mystery. What is that invisible something which quickens a man? Who can unveil the secret? Who can track life to its hidden fountain? Brother, you are a living child of God: what made you live? You know that it was by the power of the Holy Spirit. In the language of the text, you trace it to God, you believe your new life to be of divine implantation. You are a believer in the supernatural; you believe that God has visited you as he has not visited other men, and has breathed into you life. You believe rightly, but you cannot explain it. We know not of the wind, where it comes or where it goes- so is every one that is born of the Spirit. He that should sit down deliberately and attempt to explain regeneration, and the source of it, might sit there until he grew into a marble statue, before he would accomplish the task. The Holy Spirit enters into us, and we who were dead before to spiritual things, begin to live by his power and indwelling. He is the great worker, but how the Holy Spirit works is a secret that must be reserved for God himself. We need not wish to understand the mode; it is enough for us if we partake of the result.
It is a great mystery then, but while it is a mystery it is a great reality. We know and do testify, and we have a right to be believed, for we trust we have not forfeited our characters, we know and do testify, that we are now possessors of a life which we knew nothing of some years ago, that we have come to exist in a new world, and that the appearance of all things is totally changed from what it used to be. "Old things have passed away, behold all things are become new." I bear witness that I am this day the subject of sorrows which were no sorrows to me before I knew the Lord, and that I am uplifted with joys which I should have laughed at the very thought of, if any one had whispered the name of them in my ears before the divine life had quickened me. This is the witness of hundreds of us, and although others disbelieve us, they have no right to deny our consciousness because they have not partaken of the like.
If they have never tried it, what should they know about it? If there should be an assembly of blind men, and one of them should have his eyes opened, and begin to talk of what he saw, I can imagine the blind ones all saying, "What a fool that man is! There are no such things." "Here I have lived in this world seventy years," says one, "and I never saw that thing which he calls a color, and I do not believe in his absurd nonsense about scarlet and violet, and black and white; it is all foolery together." Another wiseacre declares, "I have been up and down the world, and all over it for forty years, and I declare I never had the remotest conception of blue or green, nor had my father before me. He was a right good soul, and always stood up for the grand old darkness. Give me a good stick and a sensible dog, and all your nonsensical notions about stars, and suns, and moons, I leave to fools who like them." The blind man has not come into the world of light and color, and the unregenerate man has not come into that world of spirit, and hence neither of them is capable of judging correctly. I sat one day, at a public dinner, opposite a gentleman of the gourmet species, who seemed a man of vast education as to wines and liquors, and all the viands of the table. He judged and criticized at such a rate that I thought he ought to have been employed by our provision merchants as the chief taster. He had finely developed lips, and he smacked them frequently. His palate was in a superb discerning condition. He was also as proficient in the quantity as in the quality, and disposed of foods and drinks in a most wholesale manner.
His retreating forehead, empurpled nose, and protruding lips, made him, while eating at least, more like an animal than a man. At last, hearing a little conversation around him upon religious matters, he opened his small eyes and his great mouth, and delivered himself of this sage utterance, "I have lived sixty years in this world, and I never felt or believed in anything spiritual in all my life." The speech was a needless diversion of his energies from the roast duck. We did not need for him to tell us that. I, for one, was quite clear about it before he spoke. If the cat under the table had suddenly jumped on a chair and said the same thing, I should have attached as much importance to the utterance of the one as to the declaration of the other.
And so, by one sin in one man and another in another man, they betray their spiritual death. Until a man has received the divine life, his remarks thereon, even if he be an archbishop, go for nothing. He knows nothing about it according to his own testimony; then why should he go on to try to beat down with sneers and sarcasms those who solemnly avow that they have such a life, and that this life has become real to them, so real that the mental life is made to sink into a subordinate condition compared with the spiritual life which reigns within the soul?
This life brings with it the exercise of renewed faculties. The man who begins to live unto God has powers now which he never had before: the power really to pray, the power heartily to praise, the power actually to commune with God, the power to see God, to talk with God, the power to receive tidings from the invisible world, and the power to send messages up through the veil which hides the unseen up to the very throne of God.
Now, the man instead of saying, "Is there a God?" feels that there is not a place where God is not, sees God in everything, hears him in the wind, discerns him in every creature that surrounds him. Now, the man instead of dreading God, and betaking himself to some outward form, ceremony, or other outward way of pushing God further off, puts away his ceremonies, casts away the beggarly elements which once might have pleased him, and draws near to his God in spirit, and speaks with him. "Father," says he, and God owns the kindred. I wish we all possessed this life, and I pray if we have it not, that God may send it to us, for if we have it not, the testimony of the word is that we are dead when most we seem to be alive.
I shall not, however, keep you longer upon this quickening, except to say that you may easily picture to yourself the inward experience of a man who receives new life from the dead. You may conceive it by the following picture. Suppose a man to have been dead, and to have been buried like others in some great necropolis, some city of the dead, in the catacombs.
An angel visits him, and by mercy's touch he lives. Now, can you conceive that mans first emotion when he begins to breathe? There he is in the coffin- he feels stifled, pent up. He had been there twenty years, but he never felt inconvenienced until now. He was easy enough, in his narrow cell, if ease can be where life is not. The moment he lives he feels a horrible sense of suffocation, life will not endure to be so hideously compressed, and he begins to struggle for release. He lifts with all his might that dreadful coffin lid! What a relief when the decaying plank yields to his pressure!
So the ungodly man is content enough in his sin, his covetousness, his worldliness, but the moment God quickens him, his sin is as a sepulcher to the living, he feels unutterably wretched, he is not in a congenial position, and he struggles to escape. Often at the first effort the great black lid of blasphemy flies off, never to be replaced. Satan thought it was screwed down fast enough, and so it was for a dead man, but life makes short work of it.
But to return to our resurrection in the vault: the man gasps a minute, and feels refreshed with such air as the catacomb affords him; but soon he has a sense of clammy dampness about him, and feels faint and ready to expire. So the renewed man at first feels little but his inability, and groans after power, he cries, "I want to repent; I want to believe in Jesus; I want to be saved."
Poor wretch! he never felt that before- of course he did not- he was dead; now he is alive, and hence he longs for the tokens, signs, fruits, and refreshments of life. Do you riot see our poor friend who has newly risen? He has slipped down from that niche in the wall, where they laid him, and finding himself in a dark vault, he rubs his eyes to know whether he really is alive, or whether it is all a dream, it is such a new thing; and as by the little glimmering of light that comes in, he detects hundreds of others lying in the last sleep, and he says to himself, "Great God! what a horrible place for a living man to be in! Can I be myself alive?" He begins to wander about, searching for a door, by which he may escape. He loathes those winding-sheets in which they wrapped him; he begins stripping them off; they are damp and mildewed; they do not suit a living man. Anon, he cries out; perhaps there is some passer-by who may hear him, and he may be delivered from his confinement. So a man, who has been renewed by grace, when he partly discovers where he is, cries out, "This is no place for me."
That giddy ball-room — why, it was well enough for one who knew no better. That ale-bench was suitable for an unregenerate soul — but what can an heir of heaven do in such places? Lord, deliver me. Give me light and liberty. Bring my soul out of prison, that I may live and praise your name. The man pines for liberty, and if, at last, he stumbles to the door of the vault and reaches the open air, methinks he drinks deep draughts of the blessed oxygen! How glad he is to look upon the green fields and the fresh flowers.
You cannot imagine that he will wish to return to the vaults again; he will utterly forsake those gloomy abodes; he shudders at the remembrance of the past, and would not for all the world undergo again what he has once passed through; he is tenderly affected at every remembrance of the past, and is especially fearful lest there should be others like himself newly quickened, who may need a brother's hand to set them at liberty; he loathes the place where once he slept so quietly. So the converted man dreads the thought of going back to the joys which once so thoroughly fascinated him. "No," says he, " they are no joys to me now. They were joys well enough for my old state of existence, but now, having entered into a new life, a new world, they are no more joys to me than the spade and shroud are joys to a living man, and I can only think of them with grief, and of my deliverance with gratitude.
III. I must pass on very briefly to the third point. The text indicates a SYMPATHY: "He has quickened us together with Christ." What does that mean? It means that the life which lives in a saved man is the same life which dwells in Christ. To put it simply- when Elisha had been buried for some years, we read that they threw a man who was dead into the tomb where the bones of Elisha were, and no sooner did the corpse touch the prophet's bones than it lived at once. Yonder is the cross of Christ, and no sooner does the soul touch the crucified Savior than it lives at once, for the Father has given to him to have life in himself, and life to communicate to others. Whosoever trusts Christ has touched him, and by touching him he has received the virtue of eternal life: to trust in the Savior of the world is be quickened through him.
We are quickened together with Christ in three senses: First, representatively. Christ represents us before the eternal throne; he is the second Adam to his people. So long as the first Adam lived the race lived, and so long as the second Adam lives the race represented by him lives before God. Christ is accepted, believers are accepted; Christ is justified, the saints are justified; Christ lives, and the saints enjoy a life, which is hid with Christ in God.
Next we live by union with Christ. So long as the head is alive the members have life. Unless a member can be severed from the head, and the body maimed, it must live so long as there is life in the head. So long as Jesus lives, every soul that is vitally united to him, and is a member of his body, lives according to our Lords own word, "Because I live you shall live also." Poor Martha was much surprised that Christ should raise her brother from the dead, but he said, as if to surprise her still more, "Whosoever lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?" This is one of the things we are to believe, that when we have received the spiritual life, it is in union with the life of Christ, and consequently can never die; because Christ lives, our life must abide in us forever.
Then we also live together with Christ as to likeness. We are quickened together with Christ, that is, in the same manner. Now Christ's quickening was in this way- He was dead through the law, but the law has no more dominion over him now that he lives again. So you, Christian, you are cursed by the old law of Sinai, but it has no power to curse you now, for you are risen in Christ. You are not under the law; its terrors and threatenings have nothing to do with you. Of our Lord it is written, "In that he lives," it is said, "he lives unto God." Christs life is a life unto God. Such is yours also. You are not henceforth to live unto the flesh to mind the things of it; but God who gave you life is to be the great object of your life; in him you live, and for him you live. Moreover, it is said, "Christ being raised from the dead dies no more; death has no more dominion over him."
In that same way the Christian lives; he shall never go back to his spiritual death- having once received divine life, he shall never lose it. God plays not fast and loose with his chosen; he does not save today, and damn tomorrow. He does not quicken us with the inward life, and then leave us to perish. Grace is a living, incorruptible seed, which lives and abides forever. "The water that I shall give him," says Jesus, "shall be in him a well of water springing up unto everlasting life." Glory be to God, then, you who live by faith in Christ live an immortal life, a life dedicated to God, a life of deliverance from the bondage of the law; rejoice in it, and give your God all the praise!
IV. And this brings us to the last word, which was A SONG. We have not time to sing it, we will just write the score before your eyes, and ask you to sing it at your leisure, your hearts making melody to God. Brethren and sisters, if you have indeed been thus made alive as others are not, you have first of all, in the language of the text, to praise the great love of God, which is great beyond all precedent. It was love which made
him breathe into Adam the breath of life, and make poor clay to walk and speak; but it is far greater love which makes him now after the fall has defiled us, renew us with a second and yet higher life. He might have made new creatures by millions out of nothing. He had but to speak, and angels would have thronged the air, or, beings like ourselves, only pure and unfallen, would have been multiplied by myriads upon the greensward.
If he had left us to sink to hell as fallen angels had done before us, who could have impugned his justice? But his great love would not let him leave his elect to perish. He loved his people, and therefore he would cause them to be born again. His great love with which he loved us, defied death, and hell, and sin. Dwell on the theme, you who have partaken of this love! He loved us, the most unworthy, who had no right to such love: there was nothing in us to love, and yet he loved us, loved us when we were dead. Here his great love seems to swell and rise to mountainous dimensions:love to miserable sinners, love to loathsome sinners, love to the dead and to the corrupt! Oh, heights and depths of sovereign grace, where are the notes which can sufficiently sound forth your praise? Sing, O you redeemed, of his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins!
And cease not you to praise God, as you think of the riches of his mercy, for we are told that he is rich in mercy, rich in his nature as to mercy, rich in his covenant as to treasured mercy, rich in the person of his dear Son as to purchased mercy, rich in providential mercy, but richest of all in the mercy which saves the soul. Friends, explore the mines of Jehovah's wealth if you can. Take the key and open the granaries of your God, and see the stores of love, which he has laid up for you. Strike your sweetest notes to the praise of God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love with which he has loved us.
And let the last note and the highest and the loudest of your song be that with which the text concludes, "By grace are you saved." O never stammer there; brethren and sisters, whatever you do- never be slow to say this, "If saved at all, I am saved by grace; grace in contradistinction to human merit, for I have no merit; grace in contradistinction to my own free will, for my own free will would have led me further and further from God. Prevailing grace brought me near to him."
Do bless and magnify the grace of God, and as you owe all to it cry, "Perish each thought of pride," consecrate yourself entirely to the God to whom you owe everything. Desire to help to spread the savor of that grace which has brought such good things to you, and vow in the name of the quickening Spirit, that he who has made you live by faith shall, from this day until you enter into heaven, have the best of your thoughts, and your words, and your actions, for you are not your own; you have been quickened from the dead, and you must live in newness of life. The Lord bless you, dear friends; if you have never spiritually lived, may he give you grace to believe in Jesus this morning. And if you are alive already, may he quicken you yet more and more by his eternal Spirit until he brings you to the land of the living on the other side of the Jordan. Amen.
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