Resurrection the Key to the Life of Christ.
Resurrection is the natural, inevitable issue of the life of the Man of Sorrows, the Lord of glory. Unless the universal life is one great tragedy, that life which from the first moment of its conscious activity had looked on, though it would not press on, to Calvary, could not find the term of that conscious activity in the rock-hewn tomb, where loving hands laid the crucified body of their Lord.
I. It was the force supplied by faith in the resurrection and reign of the Man Christ Jesus, the Man who had led a sinless and absolutely self-sacrificing life on earth, and who rose in Divine strength to make the power by which He lived and died the conqueror of sin and selfishness in man it was just this force which lifted humanity out of the slough wherein it was fast settling, and gave to it a firm, rock-like foundation, on which it could build victoriously the temple of its higher life. It needed superhuman power, through the supernatural fact the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus to lay hold on the corrupt and dying world with a grasp strong enough to lift it, and to begin, by underbuilding it with a solid foundation of Divine truth, the work of its salvation.
II. None can read the great biography thoughtfully without feeling that the life which it portrays had the shadow of death on it from the first. And yet and this is the transcendently wonderful feature the atmosphere about it, the sentiment of it, was always of life, and never of death. There was no trace of habitual gloom hanging about the daily pathways of the Lord. All breathed the expression of vivid, intense, energetic, blessed, victorious life. Always the abiding thing, the victorious thing, the beautiful Divine thing, in the word and the work of the Man of Sorrows, is life. His life was entirely healthful, robust and hopeful, though Gethsemane and Calvary were clearly at the end of it. The life was never stronger, fuller, deeper in the springs than when He looked full face on death. What could such a life, what could such a death, as His mean but resurrection? Life was bursting through death as the agony deepened, and when, with the words, "It is finished," He gave up the ghost, the only thing that died was death.
J. Baldwin Brown, The Risen Christ the King of Men,p. 77.
References: John 3:13. Preacher's Monthly,vol. ix., p. 203; Spurgeon, Evening by Evening,p. 85; A. Barry, Cheltenham College Sermons,p. 344; H. Wace, Expositor,2nd series, vol. ii., p. 196. John 3:14. R. D. B. Rawnsley, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxxii., p. 141.