For David speaketh concerning Him.
A prophetic panorama of the life of Jesus
These words of David show Jesus--
I. In His relation to the Father.
1. He had a constant recollection of God. “I saw the Lord always,” etc. In His early life He said, “Wist ye not that I must be about My Father’s business?” And when the end drew near He said, “I must work,” etc. His faithful people are in this respect like Him in their degrees.
2. He had a constant assurance of the Divine presence--“He is on My right hand.” He could speak to the Father anywhere, and be sure that He was always heard. It is granted also to His true disciples to have like gracious freedom of access.
3. He fully accepted and entered into the Divine purpose as to His life. He was not to “be moved.” The evils through which He had to pass would have shaken one less fixed in soul. So may each of us overcome in the day of conflict.
II. In a state of delight. “Therefore did My heart rejoice.” Of this delight note--
1. That it was reasonable. “Therefore.” Why? Because Jesus stood in a proper relation to God. Some seek delight when they are not right towards God. This is irrational.
2. Affected the whole man. The heart rejoiced, and the tongue was glad, and the flesh rested. So His servant Paul, though always sorrowful, was always rejoicing. Oh, blessed paradox!
3. Tinged the dark future with light. “My flesh also shall rest in hope.” An unknown experience lay before Him in prospect, and He naturally shrank from it; but such was His delight that He could steadily go forward to His appointed lot. He knew that no evil could befall Him, though He must pass through the kingdom of the dead. So are His servants upheld and comforted in death by thoughts of heaven.
4. Was brought to its fulness by His resurrection and ascension. “Ways of life” were made known to Jesus by experience when He laboured among men. When men thought He had gone finally in the way of death, the way of victorious life was made known in His resurrection. Thus was His joy enhanced in ways and degrees known only to Himself. And that joy reached its fulness when He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high. “Full of joy with Thy countenance.” His people are to sit with Him upon His throne, as He sits on the Father’s throne. Then “they shall hunger no more,” etc. Conclusion: See here--
1. The unity of Holy Scripture. Christ is its chief subject. Its main purpose is the setting forth of the truth concerning Him. Peter pointed out allusion to Him where it had not been previously seen; and from His Person there shines a light in which many obscurities disappear.
2. The privileges of those who are complete in Christ. By His grace they are brought into proper relations to God, and have thenceforward meat to eat which the world knows not of His salvation transcends all other good. (W. Hudson.)
Thou shalt not leave My soul in hell, neither wilt Thou suffer Thy Holy One to see corruption.
Christ’s descent into hell and rising again from the dead
St. Peter, in a short but notable sermon, demonstrates Jesus to be the Messiah. The Holy One of God, the Lord, the Christ.
1. From the miracles He did in His lifetime, they being witnesses of the same (Acts 2:22).
2. By the fulfilling of prophecy. In being not only rejected by His own, but crucified by them, according to the determinate counsel of God (Acts 2:23).
3. From the wonders He did, not in life only, but in death. He brake through the bonds of it; the grave could not detain His body, nor Hades His soul. And this according to prophecy and promise (Psalms 16:10), which is the apostle’s quotation and my text. In discussing this doctrine, I will show--
I. What is the meaning of Christ’s soul being in hell? For, with respect to His Godhead, we may say of Him in the words of the Psalmist (Psalms 139:7-8). But our discourse is of the soul of the Messiah, and that was for a while in hell; not in a state of torment. But the soul of the Messiah, when He gave up His ghost, passed into the receptacle of blessed souls, into that paradise where the redeemed and pardoned are lodged, and where with Him went the repenting thief on the cross (Luke 23:43). It is this receptacle of good souls, this paradise for those that die in Christ, that is called Hades; that is, an invisible state, a being, though in a remote region, which eye cannot reach or penetrate. I confess it is a hard matter to beat out of the vulgar heads the gross conception of the word hell, which sounds to them no other than horror, and blackness of darkness, and fire and brimstone. “A place very improper to look for the soul of Christ when departed out of His body, for Him and His betrayer Judas to meet in the same place. He that had by death purchased heaven for others, Himself after death to descend into hell. This, therefore, cannot be; no, is not the meaning of the word hell where Christ went. He came not near that abyss, nor was at all among those reprobated crew.” The true, easy, and natural sense of Hades is an invisible region. Objection: If Hades means paradise, why should Christ pray against His being left in Hades, as He hopes His body shall not see corruption? Answer: He doth not pray thus, as if it were not well with His soul in Hades, as to what He enjoyed. For His soul was the soul of the Messiah, the soul of a Redeemer, a soul that was to conquer death, and not to stay any considerable time from His body born of the Virgin Mary. He had work to do which other souls had not; He was to rise for others’ justification. He was to ascend into the holy of holiest, as the great High Priest of our souls; and therefore He must return to His body, that He may as God-Man in human flesh for ever enter into glory. As if He should say, Thou wilt not leave Me unto death; that is, My soul in separation. This would be the triumph of the devil.
II. The occasion and reason of this article being inserted in our creed. Not that it was there at first, but it came in afterward, and that occasioned by a new heresy that started up in the Church; and therefore to obviate that this article was added as a truth provable from Scripture, that Christ went into Hades. The error was this, that Christ had no proper intellectual or rational soul. Which heresy was begun and propagated by one Apollonius and his followers. That the Word or the Divinity supplied the place of a soul, and that therefore He was not properly dead when His body was in the grave. But in opposition to this error, the Christians assert that Christ had a human soul, that it underwent all the offices of one in the body and out of the body. And when He was crucified, and by the pains of that disposed for a resignation of His Spirit, He gave it up to God, and waited upon His disposal of it. For all souls are to return to the Father of spirits, to be consigned to the state or place they are meet for. And the soul of the Messiah went to the apartment of separated souls, that is, of good and righteous ones.
1. That we are assured that we are when we go hence. And the disciples of Christ go to Paradise, as He did. I do not say they go into the heaven of heavens, for that Christ did not Himself until He reassumed His body. But when they are not as to mortal eye they shall be. “This day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise.” Thy soul and Mine shall go together to the assembly of the firstborn. The dissolution of our bodies shall not break off our being; the soul, the better part, is, even in the state of separation. They enter into rest, not a cessation of being or a rest of sleep. But they rest in hope, they live in a joyful expectation of a more glorious appearance. Our Saviour’s return to reassume His body gave an ocular demonstration of the immortality both of body and soul.
2. A God incarnate takes actual care both of our bodies and souls, in every state after we come into the body; in life, in death, and after death. A God incarnate, I say; for so was the Lord of glory that was crucified for us, that died, and rose again from the dead (John 10:17-18). And this power He exerts not only for Himself, but all His followers. He is with them in life, in death, in the body, and out of the body. He dwells with them by His Spirit while in the tabernacle of the flesh; and when out of the body they are with the Lord. He beams His light of glory into the regions they are in, for a while, as separate from the body. He never leaves them nor forsakes them. St. Stephen, under a shower of stones, looked up stedfastly into heaven, arid saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God (Acts 7:55). And some such like manifestations separate souls have of their glorified Saviour, which makes them wait with joy for a farther salvation.
3. That a separation hereafter will be ever made betwixt the righteous and unrighteous. Our Saviour in the state of separation had nothing to do with the damned; He gave them no visit. He went not into hell in this sense.
4. Nothing shall withhold us from returning unto the body when the time of reunion comes.
III. The incorruptibility of His body. It was not to see corruption. Though the soldiers gave Him His death wounds, yet they did not fester, nor His body see corruption. The immaculate Lamb was without spot; He was pierced, but He was not putrified; He was butchered, but not blemished. His body was cast into the grave, but it did not see corruption. Worms were neither His brothers nor sisters. His body was of a purer make, and had none of that taint that could attract such vermin. I shall represent to you some considerations why Christ’s body was not to see corruption.
1. Because He was in three days to reassume it, according to promise, and His own prediction. His body was not to be a mortal body as ours, to return to dust. That was the melancholy sentence passed on the posterity of Adam, but not to reach him that is the second Adam, who was though the son of Adam, as says St. Luke, yet not according to an ordinary generation. He had said, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again”; and He spake, says the text, of the “temple His body” (John 2:21).
2. His body was not to see corruption because He was the second Adam, and was not under the guilt of the first. He was the Lord from heaven and the Lord of glory; and His body was to be a glorious body. His body was never stained by sin or sickness, and His death wounds only opened a passage for His Spirit; but the cabinet, though broken or bruised, was not disjointed. The temple was destroyed without dislocation of any part. The first Adam brought in sin and death into the world; the second, life and immortality. An argument which the apostle pursues, in 1 Corinthians 15:47, “The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second Man is the Lord from heaven.” Our natures, as derivative from a sinner, are decreed to death and dissolution, and must sink into the same principle of which they are compounded, but the second Man is the Lord from heaven--the Lord of life and immortality. And therefore, in verse 45, the apostle styles Him a quickening Spirit, keeping His body tenantable, though He went out of it; and not only so, but He was Lord of His own body, and none other had power and dominion over it. None, nor anything, could assault His body laid up as in a repository for His returning.
3. His body was not to see corruption because He was, as the Christian High Priest, to enter into the Holy of Holiest, as the first fruits of the dead. So our apologist, St. Peter, verse 29, etc. This spiritual High Priest must enter into the Holy of Holiest, with all His body and soul clean, and clear, pure and perfect, radiant and glorious; the true regalia that adorned the investiture of this High Priest. The Christian High Priest was to be a freeman, not a prisoner. He was not to enter with shackles, but rather with the armature of a glorious Victor (Ephesians 6:13).
The doctrinal part of this sermon speaks comfort to us all that should enliven us and fill us with joy in believing.
1. The same Lord Jesus that raised and reassumed His own body, shall raise ours, and make them like His glorious body (Philippians 3:21).
2. Because Christ is our Lord, He hath redeemed our bodies by His precious blood, and He sacrificed His body for ours, and we have dedicated our bodies to Him, and He is Lord of our bodies. Not only our souls, but our bodies are redeemed by Him from the grave, and here is the state of the dead.
3. That Christ raised His own body. But I am not preaching to infidels, but believers: and we know that because Christ is risen we also shall arise, and our bodies shall be made like Christ’s body. For--
4. Christ will do this great work by taking away all those corruptible qualities and infirmities to which our bodies are liable, both living and dead. That this vile body may be refined, and free from decay, being made like the glorified body of Jesus after the resurrection.
5. The instrument by which our Lord shall effect this wonder, even by His omnipotence. “Why,” says the same apostle, “should it be thought impossible that God should raise the dead?”
6. We conclude that a spiritual resurrection in this life must precede the blessed and glorious resurrection to eternal life. It is for the sake of a raised mind that the body shall be like Christ’s glorious body; for we must not expect to have a part in the resurrection of the just, unless in this life we commence such men. (W. Allen, D. D.)
Thou hast made known to me the ways of life.--
The experience and prospect of a real Christian
This exulting language (quoted from Psalms 16:11) may be adopted by those who believe in Christ, and have a lively sense of interest in His salvation.
I. The language of devout gratitude. “Thou hast made known,” etc. Compared with such a communication, every other kind of knowledge is insignificant. The ways which are worthy to be called “ways of life” are “made known” by none except the Almighty. The “life” to which they lead us is the life of faith, holiness, and peace in the present world, and the life of inconceivable excellence and delight in the world to come. “The ways of life” may therefore justly be called “the ways of God.” He has prepared these ways; in the gospel He reveals them; and, by the influence of His Spirit, He conducts into them. Nor are these “ways” merely “made known” to a Christian--he occupies them, and recommends them; they are his delight; in them he meets God, and communes with Him. Thus he grows in grace and likeness to the Divine image.
II. The language of devout expectation. “Thou shalt make me,” etc.
1. Christians already find that sin has lost its commanding influence; but they anticipate its entire extinction and their complete deliverance from all evil.
2. Christians anticipate a removal out of the world.
3. Christians anticipate the successful termination of their conflict with invisible principalities and powers.
4. Christians anticipate eternal intercourse with each other, and with all the angels of God.
5. Hence we are led to the richest view of the prospect with which Christians are indulged--they anticipate a vision all Divine. “Thou shalt make me full of joy with Thy countenance.” (O. A. Jeary.)