CRITICAL NOTES
(1) Emphasis on “the dead,—the DEAD!—the DEAD!”
(2) “With what (kind of) body?” See Homiletic Analysis.
1 Corinthians 15:36.—Emphasis on “thou” (so R.V.); answers
(1). (John 12:24)
(2) is answered in 1 Corinthians 15:37-54. Not the body that shall be.—I.e., as the argument requires, quâ its physical constitution; “not the (kind of) body that,” etc. Bare.—I.e. “naked”; “a grain not yet clothed with that body that shall be” (Ellicott), 2 Corinthians 5:3; “the resurrection body shall be clothed with glory” (Evans).
1 Corinthians 15:38.—“The Apostle … uses the argument of analogy, not to solve what he leaves a mystery, but to obviate objection. The present world furnishes abundant analogies, but no resemblances of the future resurrection. Nothing in the buried flesh germinates as the life in a seed-corn; the new life is a direct creation. ‘God giveth,’ etc. Not that the disembodied spirit will form for itself a new vehicle, but that in the resurrection the spirit will have a spiritual—psychical—organism given to it, which in the wonder of Divine power will be to it the same organ it had in time.” (Pope, Compend. of Theol., 3:408.) “A body of its own (kind);” query, any more than this, here?
1 Corinthians 15:39.—There is room, then, for another kind of body than that which makes the difficulty of 1 Corinthians 15:35.
1 Corinthians 15:40.—Nothing to do in this verse with the astronomical “celestial bodies.” See Homiletic Analysis (Whole Chapter).
1 Corinthians 15:41.—Here, indeed, these come in, but only for a comparison in point of “glory” not of physical constitution.
1 Corinthians 15:42. So.—Wide diversity between old and new, boundless possibilities of variety, in kind and in degree of glory. It.—Must not be made too emphatic, so as to carry the weight of the Identity of the body. The nearest to a nominative to the verb is “the resurrection” (1 Corinthians 15:42).
1 Corinthians 15:43. Dishonour.—“Funeral pomp is but a mask biding the truth that the body carried to the grave has lost the rights of humanity. Instead of the kind attentions rendered to it a few days ago, it is left alone in the dark and silent grave, as the meanest living body would not be.” (Beet.) In power.—All “bodily” faculties intensified, perhaps with new faculties added.
1 Corinthians 15:44. Natural … spiritual.—As throughout, e.g., chap. 2. If there is a body for the πνεῦμα, as in fact there is, then the presumption is also that there will be a body for the ψυχή. A body in both cases adapted
(1) to its tenant, and
(2) to its world and environment; and further—
1 Corinthians 15:45.—Congruous with
(1) The living soul, Adam, and
(2) the life-giving spirit, the Last [not the Second] Adam (Genesis 2:7; John 5:21; John 6:63; John 11:25; John 14:6). Distinguish between the Old Testament historic quotation here and the New Testament prophetic supplement.
1 Corinthians 15:46.—A principle, perhaps as broad as creation, holding good in, e.g., 1 Corinthians 15:47.
1 Corinthians 15:47.—Note the true reading (R.V.). Of heaven.—As in the Litany: “O God the Father, of heaven,” where notice the comma.
1 Corinthians 15:48.—“The earthy (Adam, or man); the heavenly (Adam, or man).” (Sing. masc.)
1 Corinthians 15:49.— Romans 8:29; Philippians 3:21; 1 John 3:2; 2 Corinthians 3:18; 2 Corinthians 4:11. Notice the margin (R.V.), but prefer the text. Paul is not dealing with ethics, but with physiology (Evans).
1 Corinthians 15:50. This.—Viz. what follows. Flesh and blood.—Cf. “flesh and bone,” Luke 24:39
(but very little beyond the historical fact can safely be made out from that verse). Doth not.—Present tense, another (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:46) broad, general principle, fixed and enduring, as true morally as physically.
1 Corinthians 15:51. Tell, rather than “show.” A mystery.—A fact hitherto kept a secret, but not necessarily inapprehensible when, as now in this case, it is disclosed.
1 Corinthians 15:52.—“By a process not like the slow corruption and decay of death, but sudden, rapid, Divine” (Stanley). “In the midst of this world’s busy life, and without any previous warning, Christ will lay His hand upon the wheels of time, and they will stop at once and for ever” (Beet). Trumpet.—Cf. Exodus 19:16; Psalms 47:5; Zechariah 9:14; Isaiah 27:13. Also 1 Thessalonians 4:16; Matthew 24:31 (Revelation 8-9 :), (Stanley). Or, perhaps, “He shall sound the trumpet”
1 Corinthians 15:53. Put on.— 2 Corinthians 5:4; Isaiah 25:8 quoted.
1 Corinthians 15:55.— Hosea 13:14 quoted, or, more correctly, forms the mental starting-point of an (imitated) outburst of triumph. Hosea suggests, Paul sees (as it were) in prophetic prevision, a day of deliverance of the race from the power of death and Hades.
1 Corinthians 15:56.—As Romans 5:12-21 is a parallel in the experimental life to 1 Corinthians 15:12-19 and 1 Corinthians 15:45-49 in the physical, so Romans 7:7; Romans 8:4 is expository of this 1 Corinthians 15:56. [N.B.—This the earlier-written passage.] Sting.—Same word as goad (Acts [1 Corinthians 9:5] Acts 26:14).
1 Corinthians 15:58.—Observe “vain” again, and how “in the Lord” [“in Christ”] runs through the chapter. [“We look, not as theorists, but as believers, for a future life” (Isaac Taylor).]
HOMILETIC ANALYSIS.— 1 Corinthians 15:35-58
I. Two categories appear:—
1.
The First Adam—
The last Adam—
The first man.
The second Man.
Of the earth.
From heaven.
Earthy.
[The Lord (but note the better text).]
A soul.
A spirit.
A living soul.
A quickening Spirit.
Natural.
Spiritual.
2.
His race—
Bear the image of the earthy.
Bear … of the Heavenly.
Wear natural bodies.
Wear spiritual bodies.
3.
Their bodies are correspondingly—
Sown
Raised
Corruptible.
Incorruptible.
Dishonoured.
Glorified [glorious].
In weakness.
In power.
Natural [psychic].
Spiritual.
II. The second of these is not inconceivable, for
1. Death and dissolution form no “insuperable” barrier.—“You clever objectors—wonderfully clever!—how is it when you (emphatic) sow your seed? Are its death and dissolution an ‘insuperable’ barrier to the springing of the grain you hope to reap? This does not ‘prove’ the resurrection; but it is good enough to turn the edge of your objection. A reply as good as your difficulty. A reply just of the calibre of your thought, and of yourself.”
2. “ ‘What kind of bodies?’ How do I know? How can I tell? Can He Himself tell me, until I wear one, and my spirit finds its ‘spiritual body’ a vehicle congruous to its nature, flexible to its will, an instrument fitted for its every purpose? ‘Cannot conceive of such a body?’ What of that? If you were an intelligent fish, could you understand, think you, the body, the flesh, of a bird, or of a beast? Your experience and your imagination are not the measure of the possibilities, or even of the facts. Why not one more, one new, kind of material, where there are already so many used to make bodies? Do you really sweep the field, and know all that God can invent in variety of bodily organisations? See glory differing in kind from glory—celestial from terrestrial. See glory differing in degree from glory, as between star and star. ‘Cannot conceive with what kind of body?’ Perhaps the Maker of them all can, nevertheless. Better to wait and see what reserve of resource He has by Him. Cannot conceive does not equal Cannot be.”
HOMILETIC ANALYSIS.— 1 Corinthians 15:50-54
“This corruptible,” “this mortal.”—These words raise the question of The Identity of the Resurrection Body.
Introduction.—The one point which is most distinctly the peculiarity of Christian teaching as to the future state is the Resurrection of the Body. The Identity the one question perpetually interesting to the great mass of hearers and readers of Christian doctrine in regard to the Resurrection. [Some oldest creeds said expressly, “Of the Flesh.” Christianity the only religion which takes serious account of the body, or does it any honour, or regards holiness as possible in connection with it.] All is pure matter of revelation. Pure question of faith: “we believe in the Resurrection of the Body.” Now that the truth has been announced, various natural analogies may be imagined and pressed into the service of it. But certainly they never suggested it; the chrysalis-butterfly fact, for example, barely gave an uncertain suggestion of another after-life for man, but not for his body. Reason never dreamed of this unaided; now that it is revealed, it puts a tax upon faith beyond what is demanded by most truths of Christianity. At the mention of it the Athenian gentlemen and scholars on Areopagus burst out laughing, and would give no serious attention to anything further.
I. Wherein the identity consists.—A very difficult question to determine.
1. Study the identity of the body with which we are familiar. Spite of all incessant and manifold physical changes, every man would say that he has “the same body” to-day which he had as a boy twenty, fifty, years ago. For
(1) There has been an unbroken continuity between stage and stage of its growth and change. The successive stages have overlapped; there has been what in brickwork is called “a bonding” of the successive stages; old material has always co-existed with new. At no point has the soul’s house been pulled down entirely and entirely rebuilt de novo. The cottage of boyhood has been altered and enlarged piecemeal into the mansion-sized house of manhood. Even if the material of the early stages has all disappeared, yet at no point has there ever been a distinctly “new house.” “Same house” all along. And
(2) The home of the same tenant all along. The organism has been in unbroken connection with the same indwelling Man. The continuous instrument of the same immaterial part.
(3) There has been a persistent form impressed upon it. Age, disease, accident, natural decay and recuperation, incessantly going on, have made great changes in size, height, etc. Yet many early marks, whether from birth or accident, have persisted through all stages. Something has remained unaltered or merely modified, which is peculiarly the man’s own. Like the man’s signature, the body has an individuality which perhaps, like it, expresses the man. Both change as the man changes, with years, and, to some extent visibly, in character. Seen most, this last, in the face. But the man has often had from the first a gait, a carriage, which has always been his own, individual and recognisable. [
(4) Analogies to these changes, and to the incessant motion and flux amongst constituent parts, whilst an identity of the whole remains unaffected, may be discovered. “New blade, new handle. Same knife?” may be trivial, and a quibble. But also: Perpetually renewed water in “the same river.” Constant change of the men in a regiment, by losses, retirements, recruiting, whilst the commanding officer remains the same, and in command of “the same regiment.” (Also the regimental “life” is continuous; the traditions, and the esprit de corps, keep up the regimental identity.) “The same Board,” “the same Body of trustees,” empowered to fill up vacancies in their number as they occur, till at last none of the original members remain.]
II. Considerations which require an identity of some kind.—
1. The whole man is redeemed. The body is an integral, indispensable part of manhood. A man is not made up of Soul and Spirit, to which the body is merely one of a number of vestments,—“coats,”—natural or artificial; it is not a mere accident of our earthly state. The Redeemer of Man wore, and took with Him into glory, an entire Humanity, its body with the rest. The body has its future, because it has its place in the redemption. It is the lowliest part of the threefold human nature; it waits longest for, and will receive last, its share in the glory secured for redeemed manhood in the eternal world; but it has its claim upon the Redeemer. On the body was set the Abrahamic form of the seal of that covenant between Jehovah and His “friend,” which is the surest basis of hope for Abraham’s immortality (Matthew 22:31-32, and || s). [There is a physical reception by the body of the seals and signs of the new, the Gospel, form of the same covenant and its contents of grace; the body is baptized with the physical element of water, it eats and drinks of a real supper of bread and wine.] The resurrection of an “identic body” is a necessary part of the greater fact of the resurrection and after-life of the whole man. To “raise” the same immaterial part and to provide it with a new body, would not be the restoration of the same man, the same person, after the dissolution wrought by death and the grave.
2. Christ’s identic resurrection body.—The great, palpable, popular stumbling-block and difficulty is no doubt the physical, chemical dissolution of the corpse into its primary elements, which again enter into new combinations in other organic structures. Christ’s body “saw no corruption.” The process which had set in, in the purely natural order, with His friend Lazarus, or with David (Acts 2:29-31), was not permitted to begin. He brought out of Joseph’s tomb a body which, whatever marvellous changes in the conditions of its life took place when it was reunited to Him in His risen life, was the same undissolved thing which had been reverently, lovingly deposited there on the Friday evening. In the body’s organised existence between death and resurrection there had been for Him no such break as death makes for us. Whatever, then, identity carries, and does not carry, in the case of His body, will be the facts about the identity of the resurrection body of His people. Further—
3. The “mystery,” the hitherto hidden and unknown fact, is here (1 Corinthians 15:51), authoritatively published by the Prophet Paul, that at the Lord’s coming the believers then living will be “changed” without previous death. [Or, as the speculations of some would require us to say, without any such perceptible or extended interval between the death and the “change” of the body as creates the popular, practical difficulty in connection with the raising of the bodies of the mass of human kind.] In their case, therefore, there is no break, even as brief as in their Lord’s case, in the continuity of the union between the same man and his physical part. In bodies which they have never quitted, but which undergo some transformation unknown as yet to us, they stand forth in that eventful Easter morning of the whole Church.
(2) and
(3) enable, and require, us to expect that the believers who “fall asleep” in the ordinary course, and whose bodies are dissolved by death and “see corruption,” shall be put into the same condition as their brethren who are changed without dying, and with bodies like their Lord’s risen and glorified body. Whatever He and those are, without the parting of soul and body, or the physical dissolution of the body, to that they who die must be elevated or restored. In whatever sense He wears to-day “the same body” which trode the fields of Galilee or the streets of Jerusalem; in whatever sense the “changed” saints will wear “the same body” which they never for an instant lost; in that sense do we require that our Resurrection body shall be “the same body” which we wore on earth, and for a while left behind in the moment of our dying. It was part of our Self; the whole, same, redeemed self must be forthcoming, when “God brings, with Jesus, them that sleep in [through] Jesus” and are now somewhere a precious deposit in His safe keeping, “hid, with Christ, in God.” More than this we cannot with confidence assert. How much this carries with it we do not know, and have hardly sufficient experience of anything analogous to guide us even in conjecture. The meaning and mode of the “change” are quite unknown to us. Paul speaks of being “clothed upon” in 2 Corinthians 5:2, just as here he speaks of “putting on incorruption.” In Romans 8:11 he is express that “our mortal bodies”—like Christ’s mortal body—are to be quickened, as here he says “this mortal must put on.” But the mode is no clearer for all this. The fact, both of the change of some and of the resurrection of the body of most, is matter of revelation on God’s side and of faith on ours. The fact cannot be ruled out as “impossible.” “Christ is risen;” there is no intrinsic impossibility, therefore, to bar the way of belief. The connection between the second, “the last, Adam,” and the new, regenerate human race of which He is the Head, removes any intrinsic improbability; indeed it makes it probable that His people shall rise, in soul and body sharing with, conformed to, the conditions of His own risen life.
III. Difficulties in the way of belief of the “identity” of the buried and the risen body.—These are to a large extent occasioned by a faulty statement of the doctrine which is demanded and established as above. In the endeavour to grasp or to imagine the mode of the body’s resurrection, and, still more, to present the fact clearly and vividly to the ignorant, the young, the new convert, or the heathen, a crude, literal restoration of the same particles, and even of the same hair, nails, bones, etc., has been insisted on. But this was only the over-elaboration of popular rhetoric and of undisciplined imagination. [As to the difficulty presented on that theory in the case of a body eaten by a cannibal, whose body also must rise again, it would be only fair to say that there would be no absolute “unthinkableness” or “impossibility,” unless on the supposition that some or all of the particles composing one body at the moment of its death were also the components of another body at the moment of its death; so that they would be wanted at the resurrection for the restoration and completion of two bodies at the same time. An eventuality against which, if He were pleased to make that one of the conditions of the resurrection, He could guard. It was a fair reply to say, “He can do whatever He wills, and whatever He says He will do.” But the underlying supposition which occasioned the objection was extreme in statement. N.B.—The cannibals of Fiji never found the “cannibal” argument an insuperable barrier to belief in a bodily resurrection. “What does God say He will do? That He can and will do.”]
HOMILETIC ANALYSIS.— 1 Corinthians 15:55-58
Triumph; Theology; Duty.
I. Does that seem a descending series, with a step yet lower to 1 Corinthians 16:1, “the collection”? If it be the stone-like drop of the lark, after her soaring, singing, jubilant ascent into an upper world of light and freedom, it has nevertheless her justification; she drops to her nest, her young, her motherly duty. No surer sign of a healthy spiritual life than the simple, easy, natural transition from level to level of thought and talk. Such a life indeed lifts all up to the spiritual level. In the Great House of the soul’s Life, it does not go downstairs, from the Chapel to the Study, or to the Dining-room or the Kitchen. These, it may be, are less stately and less richly adorned than that; but the soul passes from one to the other all on the same floor.
II. The connection between Triumph and a true Theology on the one side, and between a true Theology and Duty on the other, is very close, “Faith” lies very near to “The Faith.” Religion and dogma are very intimately connected. If religion be the Art of holy living, then is theology its Science. Theology is only the orderly statement of the facts and truths presupposed, whether in the hopes and joys, or in the duty and service, of religion. [Newton said he liked his Calvinism as he liked his sugar in his tea—in solution. Most men’s “ism” is to-day in solution in their teaching; and always was very much in solution in the thought of the bulk of Christian people. But Newton’s “sugar” distinctly “flavoured his tea”; it was unmistakably there, to anybody who knew the taste. Perhaps could have been extracted, weighed, exhibited in separate, orderly, crystalline form.] If, for instance, an earnest man is accustomed, as the very foundation of much of his religious life, to address himself in prayer to Christ, let him be asked and helped to express, in precise and ordered language, how he supposes that this “Christ” can hear his words and, much more, his unuttered thoughts; also, supposing that He can hear, how, and how far, he expects that Christ can help him in answer to his appeal; when he says at the end of his praying to the Father “for Christ’s sake,” what relation there is between Christ and the Father, and between Christ and himself, that “for Christ’s sake” should be a plea and a reason with God;—the answers will be a very important contribution to a Christology, whether a new one of his own or that of some other man or of some Church. Indeed, to answer Christ’s own question fully and precisely, “Whose Son is Christ?” goes down to some of the obscurest depths of Divine thought. Every saved sinner has an informal, unformulated, working “theory of the Atonement,” according to which he has laid hold of salvation; just as every preacher or Sunday-school teacher has an unformulated “theory of Inspiration,” which determines his treatment of the Word of God, and even his selection of texts. So here the shout of triumph will be thin and hollow, as the dying saint says, “O death, … thy victory?… thy sting?” if he have any misgiving whether, after all, death is not going to be the conqueror; whether, after all, he is not still “in his sins”; whether, after all, his Christ be not a mere great name of the past, the name of a man who long centuries ago yielded to death just as others do, and left His body to dissolve into dust, like other bodies.
III. So a right or wrong Theology will affect Duty.—(Discussed in part under 1 Corinthians 15:32; here needs only to be added:) No doubt as matter of high-level, theoretic virtue, men “ought” to be righteous and diligent and all that is good, for the very intrinsic rightness and betterness and nobleness of Good. So the children at school “ought” to do their lessons well for the reason that it is right, and duty, and the like; prizes or no prizes, they “ought” to be steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in their work. But the prizes, if illogical as a motive, and indefensible, are a very practical incentive to diligence, and a very real help to even a diligent scholar, when the lessons are hard and the play is tempting. God knows His scholars in the High School of life; and, grown men and women though they be, it will make a difference to them whether or not there are to be any marks and any rewards. He knows that average men and women will not go on year after year pitching the fruit of their labour into a moral Chat Moss, unless like George Stephenson they have the confident assurance that there is a bottom, and that by and-by there will be some solid result to show for their patient toil. They will, like the engineers of a Portland Breakwater, be content to see load after load of solid “labour” disappear beneath the surface of the ocean, if they too may hope that some day their toil will appear in solid result above the waters, none really lost. It is of the very essence of death’s “enmity” (1 Corinthians 15:26) that it cuts off abruptly, inopportunely, often disastrously, the plans and labour and hope of the man who is only “of the world,” and whose aims and desires go no further than the horizon whose radius is the thirty, forty, fifty years which may happen to be the probable remainder of his earthly sojourn. The Christian man has “hoped” that “in Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:19) death will only help forward the attainment of all his hopes and bring him a stage nearer to the fulfilment of the new and larger meaning he now sees in “Life,” besides putting him into more favourable conditions than were possible here for both growth and service. But if death is going to break off in mid-course all his plans also, and to frustrate all his hopes and purposes as it does those of the worldling; if he is going to find the first moment of eternity the first also of an eternal disillusion; or, worst of all, if Eternity is to be nothing, because he passes away into Nothing himself, and there is for him neither resurrection nor after-life,—well, then “the game is not worth the candle.” Who will “after the manner of men” fight with the beasts? Who will in ascetic gloom refuse to “eat and drink”? Why should not he take such pleasure as it is, seeing there is nothing better? Nothing at all at the end of all! Romans 7:13-24; Romans 7:7-12, are our 1 Corinthians 15:56 in résumé. Plant 1 Corinthians 15:56 in mind and heart; let prayer bring upon it the quickening Spirit; let experience develop and record the living germ of truth; it will grow into Romans 7:7-24. Death has no “sting” unless it borrow one from a guilty conscience. Sin finds its condemnation, and its provocation, in a positive commandment. “In Christ” death is only dying, and behind dying there is no proper death. “In Christ” the heart runs in the way of the commandment; it no longer conflicts with it, only to its own hurt and condemnation. And “labour in Christ” is the labour of Christ Himself in His member. It is really His own “labour.” How can His labour be “in vain”?
SEPARATE HOMILIES
1 Corinthians 15:38. “God giveth it a body.”
Introduction.—In regard to the special topic discussed in this chapter, this remark of Paul lifts the believer over the stumbling-block of the “How?” by referring him to one of the twin bases upon which the Saviour, more than a quarter of a century before, had set the doctrine of the Resurrection in His memorable discussion with the Sadducee scoffers of His day. “Ye do err,” He had said, “not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God,” i.e. His power makes it certain that He can, if He will, raise the dead. [It is not a thing incredible that God—God—should raise the dead (Acts 24:8).] And the Scriptures make it certain that He wills to do it (Matthew 22:29). All preliminary talk about “impossibility” is swept away so soon as in any real, operative sense God is taken account of; and any further question as to fact or probability is met if there is a positive declaration which is unquestionably from His mouth. But the words are suggestive of what belongs to a much wider field of discussion. To a Christian Theist it is as true of the universal natural order as of the spiritual, that “in all God is all” (1 Corinthians 15:28).
I. God gave man his present body.—The little child learns to say its catechism: “Q. Who made you? A. God made me.” And all he may afterwards learn of the physical processes of nature need not take the child’s answer out of the man’s mouth. Creationism or Traducianism, apart, as far as regards the immaterial element in us, it very soon becomes matter of obvious knowledge that a man’s body is no absolutely new beginning, no thing de novo fashioned and moulded by any literal “hand” or “fingers” of God; but that, on the other hand, there are many intermediate physical links of successive or predecessive generations of parentage between any individual of the race to-day and the body of “the first Adam.” If a man’s special line of study makes him acquainted with the minutiœ of the physiological processes between the primal cell and the new-born infant, if he come to know how very closely many of the earlier stages mimic or are allied to those of the starting into growth in the case of a vegetable germ; yet all his added detail of knowledge has made it no more difficult for him to say “God made me” than it is for the grown child or the man who merely sees, as far as all see, the physical organisation of the parents interposed between God the Creator and the new product of His power. What difficulty exists is to both men the same in kind. Merely to be able to follow the intervening links of the process into fuller detail, to be permitted to follow the Great Worker into the inner secrecy of His workshop, and understand better how exceedingly complex and beautiful are the methods He follows, is not to alter the nature of the question at all. It is merely breaking up the one obvious physical link into many, very many; but to see the simple fact that our parents have “given us” our body is as great or as little a difficulty, or as completely no difficulty at all, in the way of saying “God made me,” as to see the manifold, multiplied details and physical instruments of the Great Maker’s work. And so, too, if all that is claimed for what is popularly called “Evolution” were demonstrated; if the order of developed scheme and idea which it is manifestly possible to arrange out of the multiform creatures of earth’s geological and historical ages, an order leading up to, and at every stage more and more frequently suggesting, Man,—if this were demonstrably physically and historically a genealogical succession; if thus between the first living thing and his body of to-day the Christian man of science interposed an unbroken chain of physical antecedents and consequents, not even interrupted at an “Adam” of a “Genesis”;—he would still with full intelligence and reasonableness reply to his catechist, “God made me.” He again would know that his fuller acquaintance with the details of the process, and his belief that there had been no interposition of the power of God, de novo and ab extra, in the physical succession since the first living cell was endowed with Life, had made no difference in the essential shape of the question. The first modification from the simplicity of the child’s idea of a direct and immediate “making” by God to the necessary knowledge that the “making” had been mediate through human parentage, is the only modification in kind; all else is matter of completeness of understanding the mediating term. Between the Maker and the product there is more elaborate machinery; the thing is not so simply and directly “hand-made” as the little child supposed; but that is all. “God gave me my body: God made Me.” This leads further afield.
II. God is active, operative, everywhere, always in His creation.—“My Father worketh hitherto,” said the Son of God, in vindication of His own beneficent Sabbath labour. “Why should not men let healing alone on the Sabbath, and neither the patients come, nor the physician attend to them if they do come? Why not? Why should not I cease such work on the Sabbath? Because my Father does not. The healing of a woman, or the setting of a bone, or the growth of a body, does not cease on the Sabbath, and in all the ‘natural processes’ which are thus ceaselessly and continuously proceeding, He is at work. They are full of God. They are God at work, Sabbath and weekday.” And the Christian takes his view of God in Nature from His Master. [He does not shut Him out of history. He does not believe that when Bible history was completed, and the lives of Bible saints were ended, God ceased to work altogether, or to work as really and effectively in the history and the lives of our times. He uses the specimen cases of the Bible, authentically opened up and expounded, to show him how to believe in, and to look for, and to see, God in his own life, or in the history of which each morning’s newspaper is the latest chapter of continuation. “Worketh hitherto.”] The mind and heart of man can never be permanently satisfied, under normal conditions, to think of the glorious kingdom of the visible universe as without a throne or a Monarch, or with only an absentee or indifferent one; it postulates a Father and Head for such a family and such a home. It wants God near. The many shades and phases of Pantheistic thought find their charm and their strength in the answer to this demand. But they overdo it, and bring Him too near, confounding and identifying Work and Worker in one undistinguishable Subsistence. The phrase, at any rate, of another school, which spoke of an Anima Mundi, a Soul of the World, was nearer the truth, imperfect as all creaturely and human analogies must be. The Christian thinker does not confound his soul with his body. He can only speak of either in negations of the other; but he knows them distinct. And he asks himself whether all this great, this vast, physical frame of things stands in any similar relation to God as his own physical part does to his thinking, feeling, willing part. The only force of which he knows anything directly and really is will force, the force of his own will; and though the midmost meeting-place and link of connection between mind and body is veiled from him under thickest darkness, yet he knows how Will in him wields, and moves, and can mould, his physical part, and through it the physical around him. And then he asks whether he can say or think anything truer or wiser, or at any rate more probable, than that the One Will wields and moulds and moves all this vast physical frame of things, and that all the “forces” which we count and calculate and measure and use are but many variations of the putting forth of the One Force, that of the Will of Him who long ago made the matter of His universe, and from that time to this has never taken His hand off the thing He made. In the case studied above, suggested by Paul, he does not conceive that he is really any farther away from God because he sees the thing “machine-made” rather than directly “hand-made.” His Father “Who worketh hitherto” designed the machine, and made it, and works it, and has His hand upon it at every intermediate point between Himself and what He produces by it. The “design argument” loses none of its force to him, if even he should think that “natural selection” or any other combination of physical forces proves to be the method by which the Designer has effected His purpose. The Design is there. The “natural” is of God as really as the “supernatural”; the “miraculous” is the special for the purpose of Revelation; the “natural” is the ordinary, orderly method by which He chooses to proceed in Creation and Providence. If the Idea of Creation gets a physical embodiment, it is because “God giveth it a body, as it hath pleased Him.”
III. God gave Adam a body.—Did even the early Italian painters, of the simplest ages of faith, really believe literally in the grand, bearded, old-man-like Creator Whom they represented bending over a newly made body moulded with His literal fingers out of dust? After the days of his childhood, no simplest, most old-fashioned believer in a distinct creation of Adam’s body ever so conceived of it. They knew and believed that “no man hath seen or can see” God. Even they, believing in a direct and immediate new beginning with the body of “the first Adam,” did not seriously and literally think that if they had been present at its formation their eyes would have beheld any visible Modeller, with literal hands shaping “the dust of the earth.” If they had at all pursued the matter so far, they would at most have expected to see a body growing into shape before them, in similar fashion to that so vividly described by Huxley. “Of all the perennial miracles [Nature] offers to the student’s inspection, perhaps the most worthy of admiration is the development of a plant or of an animal from its embryo. Examine the recently laid egg of some common animal, such as a salamander or a newt. It is a minute spheroid in which the best microscope will reveal nothing but a structureless sac, enclosing a glairy fluid, holding granules in suspension. But … let a moderate supply of warmth reach its watery cradle, and the plastic matter undergoes changes so rapid, and yet so steady and so purposelike in their succession, that one can only compare them to those operated by a skilled modeller upon a formless lump of clay. As with an invisible trowel, the mass is divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller portions, until it is reduced to an aggregation of granules not too large to build withal the finest fabrics of the nascent organism. And then, it is as if a delicate finger traced out the line to be occupied by the spinal column, and moulded the contour of the body; pinching up the head at one end, the tail at the other, and fashioning flank and limb into due salamandrine proportions, in so artistic a way that, after watching the process hour by hour, one is almost involuntarily possessed with the notion, that some more subtle aid to vision than an achromatic, would show the hidden artist, with his plan before him, striving with skilful manipulation to perfect his work.” (Huxley, Lay Sermons, 260, 261.) The Christian scientific observer believes that under the lens of his microscope he actually is beholding Creative Power and Will mysteriously meeting, touching, moulding, Matter. God is there giving the salamander a body.
IV. God giveth the risen man His body.—We thus return to our starting-point. There is no real difficulty in the question, “How can the dead—the dead, the dead! do you see them?—be raised? With what (kind of) body do they come from their grave?” That they will come forth—all of them, and not only those “in Christ”—is for His disciples conclusively settled by one word of the Master. They “know this Scripture” (John 5:28-29) [where “in the graves” is in very precise and defining contrast with “the dead” of “the hour that now is” in 1 Corinthians 15:25]. “How?” What need to ask “how”? The closest students have not exhausted yet the whole range of the variety of His methods, nor seen any suggestion of a limit to many and startlingly novel possibilities of new methods, or of new exertions of the old, the one, power. As He gave the buried body, so He must, and will, give the raised-up body. Whether working on His accustomed lines or in His sovereign freedom and mastery striking out new ones for Himself, it is but the One Worker. And as there has never yet arisen a demand for which He has not made adequate provision, so for the new demand of the new life, and the new environment of the new world, He may either make a new thing altogether, or modify the old thing and the old type, “as it pleases Him.” That is all that can be said. To the intellect or the heart which does not know our God that is to say nothing. To the intellect that acknowledges Him, and to the heart that believes in and loves Him, that is enough. “God giveth” to the seeds of His human sowing “their body,” “their own,” appropriate “(kind of) body,” “spiritual bodies” for spiritual men, who are to dwell in a spiritual world, for ever one with Him who “was made a quickening Spirit.”
HOMILETIC SUGGESTIONS
1 Corinthians 15:26. The Sub-final Act in the Drama of Human History.
I. “The last enemy” met and subdued by—
II. “The last Adam.”—Sentence of deposition was long ago passed against the usurping power. [Cf. John 12:31; couple with it the Temptation in the Wilderness; and Luke 10:18.] It has struggled to keep its hold on the race; but every soul “fallen asleep,” “not seeing death,” has been a blow to its prestige, a defeat in detail. Now Death shall never seize another individual of the race; this shall no longer be a mortal stock. The other Death—the only real “Death”—shall still hold its captives, and shall hold them eternally, for there shall be no more dying hence forward.
1 Corinthians 15:31. “I die daily.”
I. Physically.—From the first moment of life we begin to die. For thirty or forty years the forces which make for life and recuperation outweigh and hold in check the forces which make for waste, decay, death. But after that point the balance turns against life; life fights a losing battle. Dying daily, dying from the first, we die at last.
II. Voluntarily.—For Christ’s sake Paul held life as not worth more than a day’s purchase. “Always bearing about the dying,” etc. (2 Corinthians 4:10; observe the forcible Greek word).
III. Experimentally.— Galatians 6:14. What does the world matter to a crucified man hanging there in death? It can do no more for him; he cares no more for it.
IV. Believingly.—In hope of a better life.—Suggested by J. L.
1 Corinthians 15:31-32. “When will you die?”
I. The ignoble life says, “Tomorrow we die!”—This is the reckless temper which makes men take their full fling of riot and carouse, when the city is swept with the plague [Athens, London]; or when the enemy is at the gate [Babylon (Daniel 5), Jerusalem beleaguered by the Assyrians (the original of this quotation, Isaiah 22:13)]; the carouse and gambling in the condemned cell on the morning of the execution. “We die to-morrow; so ‘go it’ to-day!” Or at best the temper which adjourns unpleasant things till “to-morrow.” The characteristic word of the Spaniard is Man̄ana, “to-morrow.” The “natural” heart in man says “To-morrow” in regard to the claims of Christ (Acts 24:25), to difficult duties, to preparation for death. It shirks the irksome, the serious, the religious. “We must die; then let it be to-morrow.”
II. The noble life says, “I die daily—to-day.—The nobler type, even in regard to natural character and to secular matters, faces at once the un-pleasing, the difficult, the obligatory; to “shunt” things into to-morrow’s “siding” is no manly discharge of today’s life-work. There are Christian “shufflers” as well as secular; or “happy-go-lucky” souls, who never fully face the Cross in their religious life. Souls like Paul—and he is like the Master—“take up their cross daily.” When the hardest, sorest trial to nature is thus met and dealt with, character has then gained in manliness and strength. There is a subtle paralysis in having a vague terror in the background, or an unfulfilled, outstanding obligation hanging over one’s head. How many lives are noble because of a daily crucifixion of self and of all evil! None but their Crucified Lord knows how keen is the anguish as they hang upon the daily Cross within, for His sake. Themselves driving in the nails, waking every morning to the Cross they find prepared for them, which they accepted long ago. “Mortify your members,” etc. (Colossians 3:5). [Also observe how Paul almost ventures to parallel with that of Christ his own daily dying in its effects to others. “Bearing about … the dying … in order that the life … in you.”]
1 Corinthians 15:32. “What advantageth, it met?”
I. Seeing that the dead do rise, then what advantageth it? Principally there is a future life for me. For this stands or falls with the resurrection of the dead. So then, as Dean Alford said, in a letter printed in his Life: “When we have one moment said ‘Good night!’ here, the next we shall be met with the welcome, ‘Good morning!’ ” Then (as 1 Corinthians 15:58) I do not labour or suffer with the paralysing fear that all my labour is “putting money into a bag with holes,” “grinding the wind,” “ploughing upon the rock,” or whatever be the illustration of useless, fruitless labour.
II.
1. If the dead do not rise [though for the moment, in “most miserable,” and “Let us eat and drink,” Paul may adopt the tone, and speak with the verdict, of mere natural men, careless or desperate, yet even he would say, “Profitable for the life that now is”], if virtue is better than vice, benevolence than selfishness, truth than falsehood, then there is yet, as even a few noble heathen felt, still an advantage.
2. But this will not stand the “hard wear” of the world, of the poor, or tempted, or evil-disposed. A man soon sinks below the level where there is any advantage in being righteous for its own sake. He may easily sink low enough to escape the scourge of conscience, and to enjoy the “eating and drinking” of the sensuous, sensual life.
3. Yet if our faith be a delusion, it is one that serves well the purposes of life. Faith in God and Immortality and a Saviour has wrought, as nothing else has done, for thousands whom nothing else would have touched, peace of conscience, righteousness of life, confidence in face of the future, victory over fear of death.
III. Conclusion.—
1. “Try our way, sinner!”
2. “Try your way, sinner? No. Listen to another ‘What advantageth?’ (Luke 9:25).” [Loyola won Xavier, the teacher of philosophy at Paris, by an incessant repetition of his question, “What shall it profit a mam?” etc. Threw himself into his every pursuit; into disputations, into amusements; accommodated himself to every merriest mood; went with him for long walks; and every conversation led up to the refrain, “What shall it profit?” etc. Xavier lost his money and his pupils by his self-indulgence and folly. Loyola regained for him pupils and popularity, and came back amidst all the applause and excitement with his burden, “What shall it profit?” Again Xavier squandered all. Loyola begged for him, and brought him a purse, and again pressed his question, “What shall it profit a man?” Read this fully, and the account of Xavier’s death on the shores of China, in Stephen, Eccles. Biogr. “If the dead rise not,” what did it all advantage Xavier?]