Christ, Christianity and the Bible

What then shall we say concerning this fact of death?

Shall we say it is a part of nature’s economy – as legitimate as birth? Because we know nothing of any pre-existent state and are content to go forward in life, shall we now balk and hesitate to discharge our functions or meet our opportunities, because we have no evidence of an after existence?

Is death really natural?

Absolutely it is not!

The whole being of man revolts against it, morally, intellectually and organically. Every law of nature in man is against it. Pain and suffering are its protest. To say that it is as natural as birth is to be guilty of pure bathos; even the worm crushed and quivering denies the sentiment. Schwann, the author of the cellular theory, says: “I really do not know why we die.”

There is no reason in nature.

The process which renews the body every seven years – so far as any law in nature shows – might go on indefinitely; there is no reason in itself why it should cease, and the soul within is never conscious of the added years. No one ever thinks of asking, “Why do we live?” Always, and involuntarily, we ask, “Why do we die?” Always we are seeking to continue life, inventing something to make it immune from death. To live, therefore, is natural. Not to live is unnatural. Being unnatural, it is an interference with nature. An interference with nature is superior to nature. That which is an interference of and superior to nature is a direct imposition upon nature. An imposition upon nature could not be possible without the permission and will of God. If God allows and wills it, then the imposition is for cause; being such, it is a judicial act, a judgment, and becomes, necessarily, a penalty. Penalty stands for violated law. Violated law is transgression. Transgression is sin. Sin, in final analysis, is lawlessness, and lawlessness is treason against Jehovah. Death is, therefore, an imposition of God, and is his penalty against the treason of sin.

This, then, is the explanation of death – it is the penalty of sin.

This is the definition which Christianity gives – as it is written: “By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men.” (Romans 5:12.)

Again it is written:

“It is appointed unto men once to die.” (Hebrews 9:27.)

In thus determining and defining death, Christianity reveals both its essence and its mission; for, through its Gospel, Christianity brings the good news that the issue of sin and death as between God and man has been settled by our Lord Jesus Christ; that he has settled it perfectly and forever according to the terms of divine righteousness by dying as a sacrifice for sin and as a substitute for sinners.

In order to be a substitute it was necessary that our Lord Jesus Christ should be a sinless man; otherwise, his death would be only his own execution under the penalty of sin, and could not avail either for himself or others. None of Adam’s race is sinless; a sinless person must be of another race. To be of another race and be human would require a new creation and would be a new and distinct humanity.

Our Lord Jesus Christ was sinless. He was, therefore, of a new and distinct humanity. In incarnation, God did not take the humanity of Adam into union with himself, the humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ was the repudiation of the humanity of Adam. By that incarnation God was saying: “I have tried the old humanity. I find nothing in it that responds to my claims. At its best it is sinful, only sinful and fit for judgment – the end of all flesh is come before me – and that end is death.”

The humanity of Christ is, therefore, not an evolution, but a new creation; it is not an invitation to the natural man, but a condemnation of him. It does not say to him, “Follow me, imitate me and you will be like me”; it says: “I am from above, ye are from below. I am from heaven and God – ye are from the earth. My humanity is as distinct from yours as the heavens are from the earth.”

Such a man is not an example, a copy to be set before men.

And never, not once, do the apostles so set him before the natural man. Always they set him before the natural man as the man who came into the world – not to live as an example – but to die as a sacrifice for men; as one who was fit to die because he was free from the stain and penalty of sin.

But in order that the death of Christ should be of infinite value, he must himself be an infinite person. The value of a deed depends upon the person who does it. The quality resides not alone in the act, but in the actor. The value of the death of our Lord Jesus Christ is not to be measured by its duration, but by himself – by what he was in himself; it does not depend upon the length of time in which as a substitute he suffered the punishment of those whose place he was taking, but the essential quality of his person. Did our Lord suffer but a moment of time on the cross, the value of his suffering as a satisfaction to the law, government and being of God would be infinite.

An infinite person is God.

Always as such do the apostles present our Lord Jesus Christ. Their testimony to his deity rings out like the blast of far-sounding trumpets. In terms that are precise, and so strong and clear that he who runs may read, they proclaim that he is God of God, very God of very God.

As God the Son, in co-operation with God the Father and God the Spirit, he who is presented to us as the Lord Jesus Christ, took a cell from the substance of the virgin Mary, made it a mould and with generating power wrought from it a real humanity – a new and distinct humanity – and united it to his eternal personality; so that he stands forth as the eternal God endowed with a human nature – with two natures, human and divine, in one body and one person forever – the infinite God-man.

Never do the apostles present him as a mere man. They present his humanity as the background for his deity. His humanity in its most literal revelation is always declared by them to be the revelation and the manifestation of God. Never do the apostles attempt to reason about the incarnation, with superb affirmation and sublime dignity they declare, “Without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness; God was manifest in the flesh.”

And it is this God whom Christianity presents as coming down from the heaven of glory, and clothing himself with a new, a distinct, but a mortal humanity in which to die as an infinite substitute for guilty men, that through death, he might abolish death for men.

Having died as a sacrificial substitute, death considered as a penalty, and the guilt and demerit of sin which induced the penalty, have been set aside for all for whom his substitution avails.

Nor does Christianity leave us long in doubt as to those for whom the substitution obtains. In full and precise statement of doctrine it tells us that this substitution is on the behalf of, and for, all who individually claim our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross as a personal sacrifice for sin, and who by faith offer him to God as the sacrifice and sin offering which God himself has provided.

Thus it follows, that for every believer – death as a penalty has been abolished, brought to nought.

This is the first great and joyous proclamation of Christianity, Death has been abolished as a penalty for every believer.

It has been abolished de jure, not yet de facto.

The Christian still dies, but his death is no longer penal, it is providential and provisional.

In the hour of death the Christian is not seized as a culprit and hurried away to execution. On the contrary, when the hour of death sounds for him, a voice inspired from heaven assures him that he has reached the threshold of the “far better”; he arises and “departs,” that he may be “absent from his home in this body and present at his home with the Lord.” His death is not a defeat, but a begun victory, and, inasmuch as both soul and spirit are delivered from the underworld and the shades of death, he has the assurance that the penalty will yet be completely abolished concerning his body: it is both the assurance and the prophecy of it.

Christianity is, then, primarily, the good news, and the doctrinal demonstration, that death as a judicial sentence has been abolished for the Christian.

But Christianity is something more than the abolition of death – it is —

Second – The bringing in and revelation of life.

Through the Gospel, we are told, life has been brought to light.

In the nature of the case this cannot mean natural life.

There was no necessity that it should be brought into light.

It has never been in darkness.

It is manifest everywhere. Light and life are synonymous.

There is not a condition in which in some form or other it does not exist. While one class of life may not live in a certain environment, there are other forms to which this environment would be as a hotbed for their production. Life is, indeed, universal, and may be said to be omnipresent. You will find it in the deepest depths of earth, and in the highest reaches of air. It expands on the mountain top, it dwells in the sea; it is organized in the infusoria, it exists in the infinitesimal, and reveals itself at last, in the beauty of woman and the strength of man.

As natural life has always thus been in evidence; as it has never been in the dark at all, then the life which our Lord Jesus Christ has brought to light is not natural life – it is new life – a life unknown to the world before.

It does not come from the natural man. It is not produced by natural generation. It comes from our Lord Jesus Christ and by supernatural generation. It did not come from him while he walked the earth. At no time during his earthly career did a human being receive it. The disciples who followed him – he who leaned upon his breast at supper and was the disciple whom Jesus loved – knew nothing of it. This new and unique life was brought into the light only when that light shone from his empty grave. He gave it forth and communicated it to men only when, as the risen man, he ascended up on high. It comes from him as the second man, as the last Adam, that Adam to whom the first was only as the clay model to the completed statue, as concept is to consummation. It comes from him who is both God and man, in one body and one person forever; and who, as such, is the head and beginning of the new creation of God.

By him it is communicated to those who own him as their atoning sacrifice.

The instrument is the word of the Gospel.

The agent is the Holy Spirit.

The Word is preached – it falls into the heart of the believer as seed into the ground.

The Spirit quickens it – the new life is germinated.

That new life is the life and nature of the risen one, our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ, the man in the glory; it is the mind of him who is called Christ, and it is, therefore, in final term – “the mind of Christ.”

It is wrought, not in the soul, but in the spirit of the believer.

By no slow process does it enter – this life of the risen Lord – but by absolute fiat – the fiat of him who said – “Lazarus, come forth.”

It is fiat life.

Its entrance into a human being is as light flashes into darkness.

It is as instantaneous as when God of old said, “Let there be light,” and light burst over a world cataclysmically fallen into chaos.

It is as transforming as when morning awakens the sleeping earth and hill and dale, river and sea, shine forth in their beauty.

It is as startling as when Lazarus himself, obeying the voice of his Lord, rose from the dead and came forth.

Behold the illustration of it.

Here is a man who grovelled in the lowest animalism.

He was a husband and father. What a husband! and what a father!

She who was his wife fled oftentimes at the very sound of his footsteps, shivering with the same fear, as though he who had solemnly sworn to love and protect her, were a mad brute intent on gratifying his own fierce lust, and ready with unchecked sensualism to trample her in the mire of his bestiality. A father, whose very name made the cheeks of the children grow white and their pulses almost to cease with terror. A drunkard, who drowned in his cup, not only wife and children and home and all outward decency, but every characteristic of truth and honesty and manhood of his own soul. A man, who through self-indulgence and the incessant yielding to unspeakable desires, had become little better than a human sewer, through whom the slime and indescribable filth of fallen and degraded humanity found its unhindered course. A human being, who had become a lazar spot, a walking pest, whose inmost thought rotted and putrified his own mind; and whose words without license were a poison and contagion to every one whose ears caught their unwelcome sound.

Mark the change in that man!

The wife now watches at the door with a gladsome smile to greet his return. The children, who once in their rags trembled with fear, now clean and wholesomely clad, and gay with laughter, gather at his knee, the moment he enters his home. He is himself well dressed. He holds his head erect, his eyes, no longer bloodshot, meet your gaze with frank and open glance. His tones are soft and modulated, his speech gentle. The Bible, the one book he always hated, is his constant study. His mouth once filled with cursings that might well have chilled the blood to hear, now give utterance to the voice of prayer and earnest thanksgiving. The church he never entered and always avoided has become the centre around which the best activities of his life are continuously moving. He who was once shunned, despised and feared, is now honored and respected of all.

The man has been transformed.

Those who saw him in former days and see him now might in all reason ask, “Is this he, or some other man?”

It is both he and yet another man. The same person, but possessing another character.

What is the secret of it all?

Let the answer be graven on every heart. He has received a new life, a new, a pure, a holy and spiritual life. He has received that life from above, from the second Adam, the Lord in heaven. He is now a twice-begotten man.

And herein is the glorious, distinctive feature of Christianity in so far as it touches a human soul.

To that soul it brings the good news that a new generation is possible; the good news that any human being may start over. The good news that, no matter how much you may be handicapped by your original genesis; no matter what the terrific law of heredity may have transmitted to you, you may be generated again. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, you may have a genealogy that shall carry your name above the proudest of earth; a genealogy by the side of which the bluest blood of most ancient kings shall be as the palest and poorest of plebeian stuff. This Gospel of Christianity brings the good news that you may receive from the throne of God life from God, as directly as did Adam when God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul. In an instant you may be recreated morally and spiritually, and have in you all the assets which, when fully capitalized by the grace of God, shall insure your sonship with God here, making you master over every disturbing and disquieting passion, and guaranteeing to you an eternal entrance into the endless inheritance of God, wherein you shall be, indeed, the heir of God and joint heir with our Lord Jesus Christ. In short, you may have the bequeathed ability to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

This is the life which our Lord Jesus Christ has brought to light.

The Gospel is the good news of this life of which the life giver himself has said, “I came that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly.” That is to say: “I came that ye might have this spiritual life and have it without limit here.”

And this Gospel of the new life brought to light by and through the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ is one of the elemental facts and forces which definitely answers the question – “What is Christianity?”

But Christianity is something more than the abolition of death as a penalty and the bringing in of a new and spiritual life. Christianity is through its Gospel – the good news that —

Third – Immortality has been brought to light.

The word here translated “immortality” is “incorruption”; but it signifies in final terms the fact of immortality; for, as mortality is identified with corruption and is its consequent, so immortality, which is the opposite of mortality, is the consequence of incorruption and is inseparable from it.

This word “immortality” is greatly misunderstood, and almost always misapplied.

It is continually applied to the soul. It is a common thing to hear or read the expression, “immortal soul.”

The truth is, that phrase cannot be found in Holy Scripture. The terms are misleading – their conjunction is false. Applied to the soul, the word “immortal” is a misnomer. Throughout Scripture the original word and idea relate to the body – never otherwise. The word “mortal” is never used of the soul; you never read in Scripture the expression, “mortal soul.” You will find the words “mortal body.” A mortal body has for its opposite an “immortal body.” A mortal body is subject to corruption and death. An immortal body is incorruptible and not subject to death – an immortal body can never die.

The mortal body is the scandal of the race and the open label of sin. A mortal body puts us in the category of condemned criminals awaiting execution. The scandal is not only moral, but organic. To be filled with disease, with pestilence, with fever, and then die and the body turned back to its component parts – this is a scandal in construction; as much a scandal as when a house not properly built falls down; a dead body, whether of man or dog, is the most shameful blot on the face of the earth, and with the gaping mouth of the graveyard, justifies the estimate and the declaration of the living God, that death is an “enemy,” not a welcome thing like birth and life —but an enemy. Such a scandal is it, indeed, that when our Lord Jesus Christ came to the grave of Lazarus, he was himself moved with indignation; for the words, “groaning within himself,” miss the true force. The Greek verb used signifies that he was inwardly filled with indignation and a sense of outrage at the sight of the grave and the announcement that the body of Lazarus was already corrupt. Whatever groaning came from his lips and whatever tears fell from his eyes as he wept – these were his protests against death and the grave; for he recognized this dead body not only as due to the penalty of sin, but as the work of him “who had the power of death, that is, the devil.” (Hebrews 2:14.)

Even though the Christian as to soul and spirit be delivered from death; even though he does not go down to Hades, but at death is safely housed and at home with God in heaven – yet the fact that this body, which was not only the dwelling place of his soul, but the temple and shrine of the Holy Spirit, should become a banquet for worms, a thing of repulsive decay, a residuum of forgotten dust, is a scandal, even to the Christian, and gives emphasis to the shame of death.

The Son of God came into the world to remove this scandal.

He died and rose again, not only that he might have power and authority to give a new and spiritual life to men, a character befitting them for the high things of God, he died and rose again that he might have power and authority to give an immortal body to all who would receive from him this new and spiritual life.

He brought this immortality to light when he rose from the dead.

He brought it to light by rising from the dead in the body in which he had died.

If our Lord Jesus Christ did not rise from the dead in the body in which he died, then immortality in the New Testament sense of the word has never been brought to light.

But he did so rise.

He made that clear on the first Sunday night after his resurrection.

The disciples were gathered together in the room.

The supper table was spread.

No one cared to eat.

The story had been going all day that Jesus had risen.

The women said so. They persisted that they had seen and talked with him.

Two men claimed, also, to have seen him, walked, talked and broken bread with him, that very afternoon.

The disciples did not believe it.

They were afraid to believe it lest it should prove to be untrue.

Then, suddenly, he stood in the midst.

They thought it was his ghost.

This was a proof to them that he had not risen; for a ghost is a disembodied thing.

He was a ghost – he was disembodied – therefore he had not risen.

So they felt – each one of them.

They did not say it – but they thought it.

He knew their thoughts.

He asks them why these thoughts arise in their hearts. He upbraids them for their unbelief.

He tells them plainly, a ghost does not have flesh and bones.

He says, “I have flesh and bones.”

They are still silent.

Then he stretches out his hands towards them. He shows them his feet.

There are great marks in them – there is around these marks as the stain of blood, or of wounds whence blood had flowed.

Still they do not speak. They are afraid to believe; it is too good to be true.

He says to them, “Handle me and see – take hold of my feet – feel me – examine me for yourselves.”

They are as immovable and speechless as men changed into stone.

He turns upon them quickly and says, “Have you anything to eat?”

They point to the untasted supper.

Then comes the climax.

He goes to the table.

He sits down.

He eats before them.

It is of record that he did eat broiled fish and an honeycomb.

Either this is the worst fable ever palmed off on the church of Christ – on the credulity of aching human hearts – or it is the truth of God.

Call it the truth of God – then the body in which our Lord Jesus Christ rose was the body in which he died.

That body, stamped and sealed with the stigmata of the cross, is the living, quivering definition, and indisputable demonstration of immortality. Immortality is the living again in a body which was dead and dieth no more; or, it is the change of the body in which we now live into an incorruptible, glorious body which shall never die.

In that body which he raised from the dead, and which never saw corruption, our Lord Jesus Christ now sitteth at the right hand of God.

He is there as the vision and standard of immortality.

He is there as the forerunner, the prototype, the sample and prophecy of immortality for the Christian.

Until the Christian is made immortal his redemption is not complete.

The Christian who dies is transported to heaven.

His estate there as compared to this is “far better.”

But “far better” is not the “best.” It is only a comparative.

The superlative requires that the Christian shall have a body. Without a body the Christian is neither a complete human being nor a perfect son of God.

The divine ordination is “spirit, soul, and body.”

Unless the Christian receives an immortal body the victory of our Lord Jesus Christ over death and over him who has the power of death (that is the Devil) is not complete.

Satan as the strong man armed holds the goods and keeps them secure within his house.

The instrument with which he is armed is the law. That law which requires that it shall be “appointed unto men once to die.” The goods are the bodies of the saints, and the house is the dark and dismal grave.

O the pitifulness of it! that our Lord Jesus Christ should possess the Christian as a ghost in heaven, and the Devil hold his blood-bought and spirit-sealed body in the grave.

A risen Christ in an immortal body, surrounded by disembodied Christian ghosts in heaven forever – that is a concept too hideously grotesque to consider.

An immortal Christ who redeemed his own body from the power of the grave, but is unable to deliver the bodies of those for whom he died – to think it is blasphemy! to believe it – impossible!

If the Devil be the strong man armed, the risen Lord is the one “stronger than he,” who has met and equalled all the demands of the law, and by his death nullified its ultimate power over the bodies of those for whom he died.