The Testimony of Life.
The power and the will to sacrifice self is, after all, the grandest assurance of immortality. The things most essential to the being are those which we set about proving after,and not before,we believe. No man's belief in God rests on a demonstration. No man builds a scheme of life on the proof of the doctrine of immortality. A Divine something within moves him to live a life of which immortality is the only possible explanation.
I. The question has been often discussed, why belief in immortality plays so slight a part in the doctrinal system of the Jewish Church. It seems at first sight incredible that a legislator, so far-sighted and profound as Moses, should have overlooked so tremendous a means of influence as the idea of eternal rewards and punishments would afford. The true explanation is, I believe, a very simple one, and lies close at hand. It was because of the entire healthiness of their belief in it that they said so little about it, and made so little of it as an instrument of influence on men. This separation of the two worlds, as if they had different interests, which may possibly oppose or balance each other, is the sign of a by no means healthy spiritual state.
II. But when we are asked to believe that the horizon of sense and of time bounded the vision of these grand old heroes of the faith, we remind ourselves how they lived, and what they wrought, and ask ourselves how much such deeds, such lives involve. It is sheer idleness to ask us to believe that eternity meant less to these men than it means to us in our easy, luxurious, self-glorifying days. We know there is but one explanation of such lives, such deaths. They "endured as seeing Him who is invisible."
III. "But it shall turn to them for a testimony." The light of their lives shall shine through their forms, and reveal the inner glory in eternity. This is the eternal recompense, revelation the revelation of the Christlike spirit in a world where to be Christlike is to be glorious and blessed; where the scars of battle are marks of honour, and the martyr's brow is anointed like Christ's with the oil of joy and gladness through eternity.
J. Baldwin Brown, The Sunday Afternoon,p. 124.
Reference: Luke 21:13. J. M. Neale, Sermons in a Religious House,2nd series, vol. ii., p. 458.