Death.
Death has been scoffingly called the preacher's commonplace, but a commonplace truth, like a commonplace person, is often only a name for one with whose appearance we are very familiar, and whose character we are too indolent to probe. We limit the word "dissipation" in our moral phraseology to one or two particular forms of self-destruction; but in scientific language our whole existence is one long dissipation of energy. Life is but an episode in the universe of dying.
I. Dying may be converted into a daily sacrifice, offered up to love. First, there is the very exuberance of life's energy and joy. Indulge that to the utmost in the lust of the flesh and as the pride of life, and its speedy end will be decay of the body, decay of the affections, decay of the mind; but sacrifice your flesh by discipline, in communion with your Lord, and you will gather daily fresh strength of body, and with it of mind and of affection, to be converted into fresh channels, and in its turn to be employed, not as an instrument of pleasure, but of usefulness and work.
II. Turn to the intellectual life, and you will find it fraught with the same double possibilities of death and sacrifice. Use thought as a means to pleasure, and it will crumble at your touch, and you will die murmuring the foolish murmur, "There is one end to the wise man and to the fool." Sacrifice it to the help of others, cost the sacrifice what it may, and Wisdom will be justified of her children, for they will have learned that she is a loving spirit.
III. For the life of thought carries us on once more to the life of love. Turn round upon and accept the limitations of love, and offer them in sacrifice, and by sacrificing overcome them. Christ has sacrificed life, and thought, and love to you, that you may receive back the love you gave Him with the addition of that infinite love which is His essence, and all the thought you gave Him made perfect in His infinite wisdom, and the life that you gave up to Him translated into His eternal life of glory.
J. R. Illingworth, Sermons,p. 1.
The text shows
I. That we must look higher than a natural agency for the account of the death of a single individual. Of course here, as in other departments of His administration, our Lord works by second causes. Disease, violence, and natural decay are His instrumentality. But who calls the instrumentality into play? Who sets it at work? Who first touches the hidden spring? Undoubtedly the great Redeemer. Death is a solemn thing, a thing of vast moment, and cannot be decreed except immediately by Him. The key is in His hand exclusively; the great summons goes forth from His presence, and is spoken by His lips. The Jewish doctors have a saying that there be three keys which God reserves exclusively for Himself: the key of rain, the key of birth, and the key of death. We Christians will accept the proverb, only observing that this authority is at present delegated to One who is Partaker at the same time of two whole and perfect natures of the manhood no less than of the Godhead.
II. Again, death is often regarded in the mass, and on a large scale, a view which derogates altogether from its awfulness and solemnity. Death is the transaction of an Individual with an individual, of Christ the Lord with one single member of the human family. For every individual the dark door turns afresh upon its hinges.
III. Death is no way the result of chance. The death of each person is predestined and forearranged. Christ Himself trod the dark avenue of death; He Himself passed into the realm of the unseen. There are His footsteps all along the path, even where the shadows gather thickest round it, as there were the footsteps of the priests all along the deepest bed of Jordan. "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me."
E. M. Goulburn, Occasional Sermons,p. 241.
The Keys of Hell and of Death: an Easter Day Sermon.
It is our risen Saviour's own grand chant of victory; it is our living Lord's own loving assurance to His Church of what that resurrection life shall be to us. And He puts to it His own "Amen." To every other truth we place that seal, but to this only He. And He only can who knows the power of that risen life. And therefore His own heart seals what His own hand hath done, that it may be His Church's portion: "Amen." "I am He that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death." You will observe that Christ uses an expression which confines this particular character of life to Himself: "I am He that liveth, and was dead," the One only "dead" who "lives."
I. It is the risen life of Christ to which we are united, and by which we live. The previous life of Christ on the earth was rather the life of substitution. The life which He took from this day is the representative life; that is, it is our life. Is not it a true Easter thought, a child of resurrection, that we ought to be happy, very happy, much happier than we are, if only for no other reason but because Jesus, the Jesus we copy, rose to happiness, and is a "Man of joy"? This day we commemorate the greatest triumph that the universe has ever seen. Into the great empire of the prince of darkness, Christ, Christ in His solitary strength, without man or angel, made His bold invasion; He penetrated into the very strongholds of his power; He crushed his "head"; He bore away the insignia of his kingdom; and when He came back again, this day, He held in His hand "the keys" of all Satan's empire. The door of paradise, so iron-bound by its once cruel devastator, was unlocked and thrown wide open. The sword which fenced it lay buried in His breast; and the power over all the deep and the horrid walls of eternal misery was vested in Jesus only. There is no prisoner but he who is "the prisoner of hope," no death but the death which is the seed of life, no sorrow that can pass the threshold of this little life, and no power to sin or fall again when once we enter there!
II. By the same power and pledge even now, it is He, and He alone, who can undo the iron shutters and the fast-bound chains of some dark, hard heart, and let in the light of truth and the sunshine of pardon and peace. It is He, and He alone, who can "bind the strong man" in a sinner's heart, and bid the man go forth into the free ranges of that large "liberty wherewith He makes His people free." And I love to know that it is He who holds already "the keys." For who so well as He, our Brother, who has gone through all life and all death, and has sympathy with all, and who has proved what it is to live in such a world as this, with all its sufferings and all its sorrows, and what it is to die, and to be buried, and to lie in the dark, cold tomb, and to come out of it to live again, and to walk our paradise, and to enter our heaven, and to live there that human life of which He trod every step in its proper order, from the cradle to the tomb and from the tomb to the throne who like Him could be a real presence in life, in death, in the grave, in paradise, in eternity, who can, in the exactness of His own perfect truth, say, "I am He that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death"?
J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,p. 126.
The Life of the Ascended Christ.
I. It is very hard for us to realise the truth that Christ lives the same in will and nature as when He stilled the waves on Galilee and raised the widow's son from the dead, not because His living still is a mystery before which the stubborn reason refuses to bow, but only because, in spite of His Gospel and the many triumphs of the Christian faith, the world is still so heathen. The wheat grows, and with it the tares, and the tares grow rank and strong, and the harvest is not yet. But such discouragements to faith have always been since Christ first came on earth, and our remedy against the overwhelming mass of evil that is in the world lies in our individual personal warfare against it. Stand idle in the world's market-place, and everything is dark, and hope has fled. Take service under the Master of the vineyard against one evil influence, lay but one idol in the dust, feel that the kingdom of righteousness numbers you also among its subjects, and then, though a cloud has before hid the ascended Saviour from your sight, lo! the vision of Stephen is repeated: you see the heavens open and Jesus standing on the right hand of God.
II. Should a visitor go his way and say, "I came to see how Christ looked in a Christian country, and I found many spurious Christs and many miscalled gospels, but the Christ of St. Luke and St. John I did not find," why he speaks but idle words; for wherever there is at work the Spirit of righteousness there is the Son of man, the ascended, the ever-living Christ, not in the sects, not in our little systems, which are born and perish in a day, not in the petty cobwebs men may spin, but in a million inarticulate prayers, in the numberless acts, and words, and thoughts of righteousness and love that every day go up to heaven from obscure saints, men and women struggling to be true and good against temptations to be bad of which we can form no idea. "Behold, I am alive for evermore."
A. Ainger, Sermons in the Temple Church,p. 310.
The God-Man in Glory.
The glorified humanity of Christ in heaven is the source of encouragement and stimulus to His people amid the trials and conflicts of earth. Not to John only, but to all His people, and not in reference to any one source of fear, but in reference to the whole of their spiritual conflict, Christ says, "Fear not: I am He that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore."
I. The position of the believer here is one of conflict. Christ, it is true, has called him to peace. But this peace is peace with God; peace of conscience; peace in the prospect of judgment and eternity; peace in the order and harmony of a restored moral nature. It is not peace with sin; it is not peace with Satan; it is not peace with the empire of darkness. All these are the enemies of God and of Christ, and no man can enter into a covenant of peace with God through Christ without finding himself by that very act placed in a position of antagonism to all the powers and principles of evil. Hence the Christian life is constantly compared to a warfare, for which believers are to be constantly prepared, and in which they are steadfastly to persist.
II. Why is the human nature of Christ exalted to the throne of heaven? (1) He is there as the assurance of the acceptance of His work. The work of Christ was the work which the Father had given Him to do, and it was in human nature that He undertook to do it. He is there because He finished the work which the Father had given Him to do. (2) Christ is in heaven in human nature to attest the perpetual sufficiency of His one sacrifice. He has offered His body unto God as a living sacrifice, and now there is no more offering for sin. (3) Christ is in heaven in glorified human nature as the pledge and promise of the final redemption of all that are His. (4) He is not only in the heavenly glory in our nature, but He is there in that nature to prosecute the work of our final redemption.
W. L. Alexander, Christian Thought and Work,p. 273.
I. How is the perpetuity of Christ in heaven connected with the work of our justification? The priesthood of Christ being perpetual, yet employing but a single sacrificial act, it must consist in a constant reference to that sacrifice of which His own blessed person stands in heaven as the undying memorial. The interests of the universe are dependent on His fiat, yet, amidst all those complicated interests, He is still a Man and busy for men. The human heir of eternal life is regarded as something altogether peculiar and consecrated. Angels look forward with eager interest to the hour when they who by so singular a connection are now "one in Christ" shall enter into the visible unity of His eternal kingdom.
II. But in relation to His overthrow of sin the eternal life of Christ is yet more distinctly the fountain of blessing to us in being the immediate source, not only of justification, but of holiness, not only of gracious acceptance into the favour of God, but of all the bright train of inward graces by which that favour effectuates itself in us. On Christ's life is suspended the prostration of moral evil in the universe. It shall continue to exist, but only as the dark monument of His triumph; it shall exist, but in chains of feebleness and defeat.
III. Christ is alive as the eternal Conqueror and Antagonist of sin and death. Christ, Himself exalted to glory, fixes the barriers to the energies of pain and death; annihilates not the foe, but imprisons him; makes him the accursed minister of His own dread vengeance, and publicly manifests to the universe that, if misery exists, it exists only as a permitted agent in the awful administration of God. He, the source of life, is still predominant over all and known to be so, known yet more deeply to be so as the life He gives is mantling around Him into intenser glory. Life and happiness again are one, for happiness is bound up in the very essence and nature of the life that Christ bestows; they are inseparable as substance and quality, as the surface and its colour.
W. Archer Butler, Sermons Doctrinal and Practical,1st series, p. 164.
References: Revelation 1:18. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xv., No. 894; J. Baldwin Brown, Christian World Pulpit,vol. viii., p. 389; Preacher's Monthly,vol. vii., p. 220.