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Note —

I. THE REALITY OF THE RESURRECTION: "Christ being raised from the dead."

1. The resurrection asserts a truth not always learnt from Nature, viz., that the spiritual is higher than the material. There are no doubt abstract arguments which go to prove this; but the resurrection assures us that the laws of animal existence may be set aside in obedience to a higher spiritual interest.

2. The resurrection is not merely an article of the Creed; like Christ's eternal sonship, which belongs to another sphere, and is believed on account of the trustworthiness of Him who has taught it. But that Christ rose is a fact which depends on the same sort of testimony as any event in the life of Caesar; with this difference, that no one ever died to maintain that Caesar defeated Vercingetorix or Pompey. Our Lord was seen five times on the day that He rose, and six separate appearances are afterwards recorded; while it is implied that they were only a few of those which actually occurred. And when He was gone, His apostles went forth especially as "witnesses of His resurrection," and were prepared to attest its truth with their blood.

3. If this testimony concerned a political occurrence, or a fact of natural history, nobody would think of denying its cogency; and those who reject the resurrection quarrel, for the most part, not with the proof, but with the supposition that such a thing could ever happen. Look, they say, at the fixed order of nature; year after year it is what, within our memories, it always has been. When man dies his body mingles with the dust for good and all; he does not, so far as we can see, break the bonds of death. The fixed order of nature!

(1) Fixed by whom or what? By some fated necessity? But you know that you can speak, move, act, or the reverse, as you will. And surely this may be also true of the highest Being of all. For that such a Being exists, Nature assures you by its existence; and that He is an ordering and disposing Intelligence, the order and symmetry of Nature assure you too. The order of Nature, then, is fixed not by fate, but by a will which can at pleasure innovate upon it. The power to work miracles is implied in the power which created Nature.

(2) "God can work them," you say; "but will He? Are not miracles a libel upon His wisdom and far-sightedness? God in creation is the supreme engineer; it is only the unskilful workman who, having set his machine in motion, has to trust in his hand in order to correct some defect, or to communicate some new impulse for which no provision was made originally."(a) But the universe is something more than a machine; since it contains not merely matter, but free spirits, able consciously to yield or to refuse obedience to the true law of their being. A God is much greater than a supreme engineer. He is a moral governor, a father. His first care is for His intelligent offspring; and the universe was framed for them. If man had not been created, miracle might have been superfluous. But if the education and redemption of a rational soul be God's noblest purpose in creation, then we shall expect Him to make the world of matter instruct and improve us, by deviating, if need be, from its accustomed order, as well as by observing it.

(b) We may go further. The order of nature, no doubt, teaches the believer the precious lesson that order is a law of the Divine Mind. But for thousands upon thousands that order paralyses the spiritual sense. If we could watch a fellow creature continuing undeviatingly a single movement for twenty years, we should come to look at him also as a machine, instead of as a free agent. And so many, marking how undeviating God's work is, presume that it must always be what it has hitherto been; and such men gradually come to think of this visible scene as the whole universe of being. They drop out of mind that more wonderful world beyond it; they forget Him who is the King of this world as well as of that. Nay, there are times when the physical world lies like a weight, or like a nightmare, upon our thoughts; when we long for some higher promise of blessedness and perfection than any which a fixed order of Nature can give.

(c) Christ's resurrection breaks down the iron wall of uniformity which goes so far to shut out God. It tells us that matter is controlled by mind; that there is. a Being who is not bound by the laws of the universe; that He is their Master. God had said this before, but never so clearly as in the resurrection of our Lord. If ever interference with the order of the world was required it was here. When Jesus died the purest of lives seemed to have ceased to be. The holiest of doctrines appeared to have died away amid blasphemies. Apart from the question who the Sufferer was, there was the question whether a righteous God did really reign: and the resurrection was the answer. It was the finger of God visibly thrust down amid the things of sense; disturbing their usual order; bidding men know and feel that the truths which Christ has taught us about God and the soul are higher and deeper than any which are written on the face of Nature.

II. THE PERPETUITY OF CHRIST'S RISEN LIFE.

1. The resurrection was not an isolated miracle, done and over, leaving things as they had been before. The Risen Christ is not like Lazarus, destined again to be a tenant of the grave. Christ rises for eternity: "He dieth no more." His risen body is made up of flesh, bones, etc., but it has superadded qualities. It is so spiritual that it can pass through closed doors. It is beyond the reach of those causes which bring down our bodies to the dust. Throned in the heavens now, It is endowed with the beauty and glory of an eternal youth — "Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more."

2. Nor is this, in itself, a new miracle. The real miracle was that the sinless Christ should have died at all. Death was an innovation upon the true conditions of His existence; and the resurrection was but a return to His rightful and normal immortality. Adam died because he sinned. If Adam had not sinned he would not have died. But when the Second Head of our race appeared, cut off from the entail of corruption by His supernatural birth, and exhibiting in His life absolute conformity to eternal moral law, He was, by the terms of His nature, exempt from the law of death. In His case, death was a momentary innovation upon the true law of being. And therefore when He had paid the mighty debt which the human family owed to the deeply-wronged righteousness of God, life resumed its suspended sway in Him as in its Prince and Fountain (See Revelation 1:18; Acts 2:24).

3. Now observe how the perpetuity of the life of the Risen Jesus is the guarantee of the perpetuity of the Church.

(1) Alone among all forms of society, the Church is insured against dissolution. The Roman Empire seemed to our Lord's contemporaries destined to last forever. Since then it has vanished, and other kingdoms have in turn gone their way. Nor is there any probability that any one of the existing forms of civil government will last. And there are men who tell us that the kingdom of Christ is no exception to the rule. We Christians know that they are wrong, because Christ's Church draws strength from sources which cannot be tested by our political or social experience. For indeed she is endowed with Christ's own undying life (Matthew 28:20).

(2) But, although insured against dissolution, she is not insured against vicissitudes. Her Lord is Divine, but her members are human. She has not always triumphed; she has been corrupted, and division has followed, so that she no longer presents a united front to the powers of evil. And there have been times when it has seemed as if the world was right. But that which is so striking in her history is her power of self-restoration. The tendency to dissolution has clearly been arrested by an inward influence against which ordinary circumstances could not prevail. What is this but the presence of Him who, being raised from the dead, dieth no more? And who shall forecast the future? This only is certain — she will exist while the world shall last (Psalm 46:5, 6).

(3) It may indeed be said, "Why should I rejoice in the perpetuity of the Church? To me Christianity is a personal matter." Such isolated Christianity is not that of the New Testament. Christ came to found a Divine society, and the life of Christians comprises duties to, and privileges intimately bound up with that society. Glorious things are spoken of thee, thou city of God; because thou art the home of the living Christ; because, as in thy chequered story, thou traversest the centuries, thou dost always bear with thee, in thy assured and indestructible vitality, the certificate of thy Lord's deathless life.

III. THE SECRET AND MODEL OF PERSEVERANCE IN THE LIFE OF GODLINESS.

1. Christ risen from death, who dieth no more, is the model of our new life in grace. Just as He left His tomb on Easter morning, once for all, so should the soul, once risen, be dead indeed unto sin. There must be no hovering about the sepulchre, no treasuring the grave clothes, no secret hankering after the scent and atmosphere of the guilty past. You have great need to persistently set your affections on things above; that you desire passionately to live as those who are alive from the dead.

2. Not that God, having by His grace raised us from death, forces us whether we will or no to live on continuously. The Church has indeed received from the King of kings a charter of perpetuity. But to no mere section of the universal body, and much more to no single soul on this side the grave, is it said that "the gates of hell shall not prevail against" it. The examples of Judas, Demas, the Galatians, and Paul himself trembling lest he himself should be a castaway, are conclusive of this. No force is put upon us; no man is carried up to heaven mechanically if he prefers to go downwards, or even does not sincerely desire to ascend.

3. But how can we rejoice in our risen Lord if we are so capable, in our weakness, of being untrue to His example? I answer, because that life is the strength as well as the model of our own (Romans 8:11). The Risen Christ in us is "the hope of glory."

(Canon Liddon.)

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KJV: Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him:

WEB: But if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him;