The Dead and their Future State.
The memory of the dead seems intended to serve as a kind of ladder for the living, whereon they may ascend from things seen to things unseen. As we grow older, and more imbued with the spirit of this world, it seems ordained that thoughts of death and the dead should grow proportionately stronger, so as to imbue us with the spirit of another world. As age brings us more and more within the danger of the infection of this world, death presses his keen antidote closer and closer to our lips.
I. Hopes concerning the dead are necessarily connected with opinions concerning the life after death; or, in other words, concerning the states commonly called heaven and hell. The great law of retribution upon which is based all the teaching of Christ is not to be violated, but to find its supreme fulfilment in the day of decision. Each man is to receive the things that he hath done in the flesh. What things we shall thus receive the senses cannot reveal to us. But if we confine ourselves to statements of probabilities, not about things but about the proportions of things, we seem to be within the province of sober reason.
II. Proceeding in this way we infer that it is improbable that the present diversity of human beings shall be hereafter merged in one monotonous identity. It seems more consistent with what we know of God's laws here, as well as with what we glean from the utterances of Christ Himself, to believe that the seeds sown below instinct with choice natures from the first, and exposed to diverse influences of earth, and rain, and air, and sunshine should not all blossom into the selfsame flowers, with every leaf and petal, every hue and streak, precisely similar. More likely that every present cause will be reproduced in some future effect. But, it may be urged, this continuity of cause and effect before and after death is a source of terror as well as of consolation. If we are to reap hereafter what we have sown here, how full of fear should be the harvest for many of us? Yes, this is a legitimate and wholesome fear; and the present tendency to put aside, as unworthy and unreasonable, the belief in a future judgment and punishment has been caused, in part perhaps, by a misconception of the means of judging and punishing. For judgment is not the mere utterance of an arbitrary verdict backed by brute force. To judge is to separate between truth and falsehood, between righteousness and unrighteousness; and the ideal judgment is that verdict which is pronounced by the judge with such a force of correction that the offender himself anticipates its utterance and confesses its justice. Such judgments and such punishments as these, what sane man can pronounce irrational, or afford to laugh at even as possibilities? What? Because we no longer confuse metaphor with literalism, because we cease to apprehend tangible flames in a material pit, does it follow that God's laws of cause and effect are to be suspended? that spiritual seed is to produce no spiritual fruit? that sin shall cease to bring forth sorrow, and ill-doing to breed remorse? We blaspheme God when we degrade His just mercy into a weak connivance at imperfection, as if for the sake of a little family circle He would put a veto on His Divine law of retribution, and nullify the fundamental principles of redemption, for the purpose of giving a few select favourites a pass into Paradise. Not in the seventh heaven of heavens, not in the bottom-most abyss of hell, can we hope to escape from law, or banish the presence of love. But do law and love preclude punishment? And does punishment cease to be awful because it is spiritual? How weak and sterile must be that man's imagination who can realise none but material punishment, and has never learned to dread a spiritual hell!
III. It may seem a paradox to speak of the fear of hell as being hopeful; but yet it is certain that, if you give up all fear of the future, you will inevitably end in giving up all hope also. It is not right nor reasonable that you should expect for yourselves, or for the great majority of your infinitely diversified and imperfect fellow-creatures, that, when you die, you will all immediately be transmuted into one identical perfect image. If you expect this, you expect what is not just, and you form a conception of an unjust and undiscriminating God. But if your conception of God is thus lowered your faith in Him is lowered also; and thus all your hopes of eternal communion with Him become pallid and faint. If we may be permitted without irreverence to use that phrase, we might say that, for those who really love God as a Father, there can be no hesitation in trusting both themselves and all the multitude of the human dead since the creation of the world to the uncovenanted mercies of God. And if, indeed, we have at any time realised, however faintly, but for one moment in our lives what it must be to be admitted into the circle of the eternal mercies, and into communion with the Everlasting Love, can it seem, even to the best and purest of us, other than the highest privilege after long and various stages of waiting, and working, and suffering at last, clinging like a child to the border of the garment of the Holy One of God, to be drawn in with Him into some inferior corner of the abode of the Presence, where one may sit down as it were upon sufferance, well pleased to catch a far-off glimpse of the splendour of the unapproachable throne?
E. Abbott, Church of England Pulpit,Nov. 1st, 1879.
There is a triumphant scorn, amounting almost to sarcasm, in the way in which that young man, sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment, addressed the three women that came early to the holy sepulchre at the rising of the sun. "Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified; He is risen: He is not here: behold the place where they laid Him."
I. I suppose that, to an angel's mind, "He is risen" would not express more wonder than the assertion of any of the processes of Nature. It could not and the angel knew it it could not be otherwise, for Christ could not but rise. "It was not possible," St. Peter says, "that He should be holden of it." Now remember that is not spoken about the soul; of that it would be obvious; but of the body it could not choose but rise. The whole doctrine of the Resurrection is a doctrine of the body. The future and eternal life of the soul was known almost universally before Christ. The heathen knew and talked of it. But with very few exceptions, indeed, neither Jew nor Gentile knew anything of the coming to life again of the body till Christ rose. He was the Firstfruit of that science.
II. It is in the nature and constitution and obligation of every human body that it must rise. When you bury a body you simply, and you literally, sow a seed. You were born to rise as much made to rise as any seed which you ever put into the ground. Resurrection is not properly a miracle. It is a grand, loving provision of the Counsel of God. And when we say of Christ, or say of any man, "He is risen," we only assert the necessary consequence of human being.
III. In the sight of God every believer is so united with Jesus Christ, that his whole being his body, soul, and spirit is a member of the body of Christ. In Christ, his Head, He died and suffered punishment upon the Cross. In Christ, his Head, he is buried. In Christ, his Head, he rises again at the last day. Therefore, where Christ goes he goes; whither Christ ascends he ascends; where Christ is he is. So that, in that He is risen, the whole Church is risen. And if so be you are a real living member in the mystical body of Christ, your resurrection and eternal life is so sure, that actually, in the mind of God, it was done that day when the angel said of you of you,as you were then in the mystical body of Christ, "He is risen." It is an absolute, historical past.
J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,5th series, p. 94.