The Keys of Hell and of Death.
I. Looking back upon His incarnate course below, our Lord testifies that He, the Eternal, Living One, died in the verity of His human nature. The solemnity and grandeur of this allusion to His death and the wonderful way in which it is connected with His person as the fountain of life conspire to make this testimony of the ascended Lord unspeakably impressive. We cannot but be struck with the fact that, in His review of His past among men, our Lord makes His having died sum up all. It is impossible to do justice to the risen Saviour's words unless we make them the measure of the design of the Incarnation itself. God became man that the Living One might become the dead.
II. "Behold, I," the same who died, "am alive for evermore." Undoubtedly there is here an undertone of triumph over death, such as becomes Him who by dying conquered the last enemy. It is as if the Lord, who confesses that He was dead, asserts that notwithstanding He still and ever lives. In virtue of His essential life, He could not be holden of death, but continued in His incarnate person to live evermore. Having died for mankind, He now lives to be Lord over all, or, as St. Paul says, "Christ both died and rose and revived that He might be Lord of the dead and the living." His own testimony is, "I am alive for evermore." It is His eternal encouragement to His troubled Church and to every individual member of it.
III. No Christian dies but at the time when the Lord appoints. There is a sense in which this is true of every mortal, but there is a very special sense in which the death of His saints is cared for. Their life is precious to Him, and He will see that without just cause it shall not be abridged by one moment. To him who is in Jesus there can be no premature end, no death by accident, no departing before the call from above. The Lord Himself, and in person, opens the door and receives the dying saint.
W. B. Pope, Sermons and Charges,p. 19.
Love in the Glorified Saviour.
I. When the Man of sorrows had ceased to walk in sorrow, and He that was acquainted with grief had all tears for ever wiped from His eyes, do we find that He in any degree laid aside His human sympathies, that He had less love, less compassion, less feeling, for our infirmities? Because, as it seems to me, this was an important crisis in His course. He is lifted far above all personal yearning for human companionship. Receiving the homage of the principalities and powers in the heavenly places, does He still invite to Him, will He still give rest to, the weary and the heavy-laden? This demand of our backward, unready, wayward souls He has fully satisfied. He called Mary by her name, and entrusted her with words of comfort to those whom He still knew as His brethren: that He was ascending to His Father and their Father, to His God and their God. Nor was this the only proof given of His love and sympathy on that memorable day: "Go your way; tell His disciples and Peter that He goeth before you into Galilee."
II. We have in the risen Saviour all that our hearts can desire. Not one of His human sympathies has been lost by His resumption of glory; not one of the attributes of Divine omnipotence has been limited by His taking human nature into the Godhead. He remains as He was even when on earth: perfect man. He is in communion with our whole nature. Not a sigh is uttered by any overburdened heart which He does not hear; not a sorrow in the wide world but it touches Him. And herein is the great lesson for our infinite consolation and encouragement: that the Son of God, high as He is above all might, and majesty, and power, is not too high to be a dear Friend to every one among us; that love can never die; that among the glories of the Godhead itself it is uneclipsed, not obscured, but is highest in the highest, and of men, and of angels, and of God Himself, is the brightest crown and the most blessed perfection.
H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons,vol. iv., p. 189.
The Living Christ.
This sublime apocalypse is the climax of revelation. It carries us forward from narrative to prophecy, from facts to truths, from present conditions to permanent issues. It crowns the story of redemptive agencies with a vision of redemptive achievements. It is a book of completions, of finishing touches, of final results. It takes up the broken threads of history, and weaves them into the fabric of eternity. It turns our gaze from what has been and is around us, to what is and shall be before us. Above all, it advances our thought from the Christ of history to the Christ of eternity. It translates for us the Man of sorrows into the crowned and conquering Lord of a supreme spiritual empire.
I. This text is Christ's new introduction of Himself to the Church militant, an introduction of Himself from above to His disciples left below. It is the revelation of Himself in His lordship, clothed with the authority and resource of spiritual empire. On His head are many crowns; in His hands are the keys of mastery; to His service yield all God's powers. But I want you to note that right in the centre of this shining vision the old familiar Christ of the Gospels is made clearly discernible. Not only does He introduce Himself as the Living One with the keys, but as the One who became dead, the One therefore who lived and moved within the range of men's observation. Christ was not content to show Himself in His glory, endowed with the splendour of Divine power. He was careful to claim His place on the field of history, to reaffirm His identity as the Son of man, to revive the facts of His incarnate life, and to link what He is in heaven to what He was on earth. The human brow is visible through the Divine halo. The hand that grasps the sceptre bears the nail-marks of the tragedy. His eyes, albeit that John saw them as flaming fires, recall the tear-drops which fell at Bethany and over Jerusalem. And it is the Christ Himself that throws into promise these lineaments of His humanity. He permits us to look at His crown, but while as yet we turn to look at it He lifts before us the vision of His cross, He unveils for us the splendours of His throne, ay, and He bids us to look at the steps which led up to it and at the inscriptions which they bear, and the heavenly writing spells Bethlehem, Nazareth, Gethsemane, Calvary, Olivet.
II. The historic Christ, who lived, spake, worked, died, and rose again in our midst, is our ultimate ground of verification for the great spiritual truths and hopes which inspire and quicken us today. We are asked to believe that it is possible for us to be just and to believe in lofty and generous thoughts of God and man which today happily fill the Church we are told we can believe these apart from history; we can accept them as sentiments kindled in us by the direct operation of the Spirit of God. There is a truth in the assertion, but only a half-truth. For in the last analysis of things my faith in these high truths about God and about man runs back for verification to the life God lived amongst us and the sacrifice which He wrought in our behalf.
III. But the text tells us we must not stop there, that the Christ of history is only the beginning, that the cross of Christ is only the finger-post that Christ is yonder and lives, that Christ is here inside and lives, and that the faith of Christ bids us turn from distant history when we have built upon it to find Christ here and now, a living presence in our own hearts and in the world. The grand and fatal blunder of evangelical theology is that it stops with the cross of Calvary, stops before Christ. It forgets that He rose again and lives; it forgets that, while by His death we are reconciled to God, it is by His life that we are saved. It forgets, or is only beginning now adequately to remember, that, while our great structure of faith rests upon solid foundations on the earth, it builds and caps its towers away up in the heavens. It will not do for you and me to stand on the slopes of Olivet gazing up at the departing Christ, or our conception of Christ and of His Gospel, and our character, experience, and hope, will suffer disastrous impoverishment. The men of Galilee had all the facts of Christ's life, and after the Resurrection they had some appreciation of their meaning and scope. But they had no adequate Gospel, they had no large and compelling Christian life, until the Christ of eternity revealed Himself unto them. Although Christ's last words to His disciples were, "All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth; go ye out and preach," He immediately checked Himself and said, "Not yet; not yet: tarry ye in Jerusalem until ye be endued with power from on high." And that power was the vision of Christ, that pentecostal baptism of the risen Lord, that personal experience of Christ's return and indwelling.
C. A. Berry, British Weekly Pulpit,vol. iii., p. 49.
References: Revelation 1:17; Revelation 1:18. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xviii., No. 1028; W. Cunningham, Sermons,p. 187; W. Brock, Christian World Pulpit,vol. x., p. 312; A. M. Fairbairn, Ibid.,vol. xxix., p. 97; Homiletic Magazine,vol. x., p. 269.