‘I delivered unto you first of all
that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according
to the Scriptures; 4. And that He was buried, and that He rose again the
third day according to the Scriptures.’—1 COR. xv. 3, 4.
Christmas day is probably not the
true anniversary of the Nativity, but Easter is certainly that of the
Resurrection. The season is appropriate. In the climate of Palestine the
first fruits of the harvest were ready at the Passover for presentation in
the Temple. It was an agricultural as well as a historical festival; and
the connection between that aspect of the feast and the Resurrection of
our Lord is in the Apostle's mind when he says, in a subsequent part of
this chapter, that Christ is ‘risen from the dead and become the first
fruits of them that slept.’
In our colder climate the season is
no less appropriate. The ‘life re-orient out of dust’ which shows itself
to-day in every bursting leaf-bud and springing flower is Nature's parable
of the spring that awaits man after the winter of death. No doubt, apart
from the Resurrection of Jesus, the yearly miracle kindles sad thoughts in
mourning hearts, and suggests bitter contrasts to those who sorrow, having
no hope, but the grave in the garden has turned every blossom into a
smiling prophet of the Resurrection.
And so the season, illuminated by
the event, teaches us lessons of hope that ‘we shall not all die.’ Let us
turn, then, to the thoughts naturally suggested by the day, and the great
fact which it brings to each mind, and confirmed thereafter by the miracle
that is being wrought round about us.
I. First, then, in my text, I would
have you note the facts of Paul's gospel.
‘First of all ... I delivered’ these
things. And the ‘first’ not only points to the order of time in the
proclamation, but to the order of importance as well. For these initial
facts are the fundamental facts, on which all that may follow thereafter
is certainly built. Now the first thing that strikes me here is that,
whatever else the system unfolded in the New Testament is, it is to begin
with a simple record of historical fact. It becomes a philosophy, it
becomes a religious system; it is a revelation of God; it is an unveiling
of man; it is a body of ethical precepts. It is morals and philosophy and
religion all in one; but it is first of all a story of something that took
place in the world.
If that be so, there is a lesson for
men whose work it is to preach it. Let them never forget that their
business is to insist upon the truth of these great, supernatural,
all-important, and fundamental facts, the death and the Resurrection of
Jesus Christ. They must evolve all the deep meanings that lie in them; and
the deeper they dig for their meanings the better. They must open out the
endless treasures of consolation and enforce the omnipotent motives of
action which are wrapped up in the facts; but howsoever far they may carry
their evolving and their application of them, they will neither be
faithful to their Lord nor true stewards of their message unless, clear
above all other aspects of their work, and underlying all other forms of
their ministry, there be the unfaltering proclamation—‘first of all,’
midst of all, last of all—‘how that Christ died for our sins according to
the Scriptures,’ and ‘that He was raised again according to the
Scriptures.’
Note, too, how this fundamental and
original character of the gospel which Paul preached, as a record of
facts, makes short work of a great deal that calls itself ‘liberal
Christianity’ in these days. We are told that it is quite possible to be a
very good Christian man, and reject the supernatural, and turn away with
incredulity from the story of the Resurrection. It may be so, but I
confess that it puzzles me to understand how, if the fundamental character
of Christian teaching be the proclamation of certain facts, a man who does
not believe those facts has the right to call himself a Christian.
Note, further, how there is an
element of explanation involved in the proclamation of the facts which
turns them into a gospel. Mark how ‘that
Christ
died,’ not
Jesus.
It is a great truth, that the man, our Brother, Jesus, passed through the
common lot, but that is not what Paul says here, though he often says it.
What he says is that ‘Christ
died.’ Christ is the name of an office, into which is condensed a whole
system of truth, declaring that it is He who is the Apex, the Seal, and
ultimate Word of all divine revelation. It was the
Christ
who died; unless it was so, the death of Jesus is no gospel.
‘He died for our sins.’ Now,
if the Apostle had only said ‘He died for us,’ that might conceivably have
meant that, in a multitude of different ways of example, appeal to our
pity and compassion and the like, His death was of use to mankind. But
when he says ‘He died
for our sins,’
I take leave to think that that expression has no meaning, unless it means
that He died as the expiation and sacrifice for men's sins. I ask you, in
what intelligible sense could Christ ‘die for our sins’ unless He died as
bearing their punishment and as bearing it for us? And then, finally, ‘He
died and rose ... according to the Scriptures,’ and so fulfilled the
divine purposes revealed from of old.
To the fact that a man was crucified
outside the gates of Jerusalem, ‘and rose again the third day,’ which is
the narrative, there are added these three things—the dignity of the
Person, the purpose of His death, the fulfilment of the divine intention
manifested from of old. And these three things, as I said, turn the
narrative into a Gospel.
So, brethren, let us remember that,
without all three of them, the death of Jesus Christ is nothing to us, any
more than the death of thousands of sweet and saintly men in the past has
been, who may have seen a little more of the supreme goodness and
greatness than their fellows, and tried in vain to make purblind eyes
participate in their vision. Do you think that these twelve fishermen
would ever have shaken the world if they had gone out with the story of
the Cross, unless they had carried along with it the commentary which is
included in the words which I have emphasised? And do you suppose that the
type of Christianity which slurs over the explanation, and so does not
know what to do with the facts, will ever do much in the world, or will
ever touch men? Let us liberalise our Christianity by all means, but do
not let us evaporate it; and evaporate it we surely shall if we falter in
saying with Paul, ‘I declare, first of all, that which received,’ how that
the death and resurrection were the death and resurrection of the Christ,
‘for our sins, according to the Scriptures.’ These are the facts which
make Paul's gospel.
II. Now I ask you to look, in the
second place, at what establishes the facts.
We have here, in this chapter, a
statement very much older than our existing written gospels. This epistle
is one of the four letters of Paul which nobody that I know of—with some
quite insignificant exceptions in modern times—has ever ventured to
dispute. It is admittedly the writing of the Apostle, written before the
gospels, and in all probability within five-and-twenty years of the date
of the Crucifixion. And what do we find alleged by it as the state of
things at its date? That the belief in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ
was the subject of universal Christian teaching, and was accepted by all
the Christian communities. Its evidence to that fact is undeniable;
because there was in the early Christian Church a very formidable and
large body of bitter antagonists of Paul's, who would have been only too
glad to have convicted him, if they could, of any misrepresentation of the
usual notions, or divergence from the usual type of teaching. So we may
take it as undeniable that the representation of this chapter is
historically true; and that within five-and-twenty years of the death of
Jesus Christ every Christian community and every Christian teacher
believed in and proclaimed the fact of the Resurrection.
But if that be so, we necessarily
are carried a great deal nearer the Cross than five-and-twenty years; and,
in fact, there is not, between the moment when Paul penned these words and
the day of Pentecost, a single chink in the history where you can insert
such a tremendous innovation as the full-fledged belief in a resurrection
coming in as something new.
I do not need to dwell at all upon
this other thought, that, unless the belief that Jesus Christ had risen
from the dead originated at the time of His death, there would never have
been a Church at all. Why was it that they did not tumble to pieces? Take
the nave out of the wheel and what becomes of the spokes? A dead Christ
could never have been the basis of a living Church. If He had not risen
from the dead, the story of His disciples would have been the same as that
which Gamaliel told the Sanhedrim was the story of all former
pseudo-Messiahs such as that man Theudas. ‘He was slain, and as many as
followed him were dispersed and came to naught.’ Of course! The existence
of the Church demands, as a pre-requisite, the initial belief in the
Resurrection. I think, then, that the contemporaneousness of the evidence
is sufficiently established.
What about its good faith? I suppose
that nobody, nowadays, doubts the veracity of these witnesses. Anybody
that knows an honest man when he sees him, anybody that has the least ear
for the tone of sincerity and the accent of conviction, must say that they
may have been fanatics, they may have been mistaken, but one thing is
clear as sunlight, they were not false witnesses for God.
What, then, about their competency?
Their simplicity, their ignorance, their slowness to believe, their stupor
of surprise when the fact first dawned upon them, which they tell not with
any idea of manufacturing evidence in their own favour, but simply as a
piece of history, all tend to make us certain that there was no play of a
morbid imagination, no hysterical turning of a wish into a fact, on the
part of these men. The sort of things which they say that they saw and
experienced are such as to make any such supposition altogether absurd.
There are long conversations, appearances appealing to more than one
sense, appearances followed by withdrawals, sometimes in the morning,
sometimes in the evening, sometimes at a distance, as on the mountain,
sometimes close by, as in the chamber, to single souls and to multitudes.
Fancy five hundred people all at once smitten with the same mistake,
imagining that they saw what they did not see! Miracles may be difficult
to believe, they are not half so difficult to believe as absurdities. And
this modern explanation of the faith in the Resurrection I venture
respectfully to designate as absurd.
But there is one other point to
which I would like to turn for a moment; and that is that little clause in
my text that ‘He was buried.’ Why does Paul introduce that amongst his
facts? Possibly in order to affirm the reality of Christ's death; but I
think for another reason. If it be true that Jesus Christ was laid in that
sepulchre, a stone's throw outside the city gate, do you not see what a
difficulty that fact puts in the way of disbelief or denial of His
Resurrection? If the grave—and it was not a grave, remember, like ours,
but a cave, with a stone at the door of it, that anybody could roll away
for entrance—if the grave was there, why, in the name of common-sense, did
not the rulers put an end to the pestilent heresy by saying, ‘Let us go
and see if the body is there’?
Modern deniers of the Resurrection
may fairly be asked to front this thought—If Jesus Christ's body was in
the sepulchre, how was it possible for belief in the Resurrection to have
been originated, or maintained? If His body was not in the grave, what had
become of it? If His friends stole it away then they were deceivers of the
worst type in preaching a resurrection; and we have already seen that that
hypothesis is ridiculous. If His enemies took it away, for which they had
no motive, why did they not produce it and say, ‘There is an answer to
your nonsense. There is the dead man. Let us hear no more of this
absurdity of His having risen from the dead’?
‘He died ... according to the
Scriptures, and He was buried.’ And the angels’ word carries the only
explanation of the fact which it proclaims, ‘He is not here—He is risen.’
I take leave to say that the
Resurrection of Jesus Christ is established by evidence which nobody would
ever have thought of doubting unless for the theory that miracles were
impossible. The reason for disbelief is not the deficiency of the
evidence, but the bias of the judge.
III. And now I have no time to do
more than touch the last thought. I have tried to show what establishes
the facts. Let me remind you, in a sentence or two, what the facts
establish.
I by no means desire to suspend the
whole of the evidence for Christianity on the testimony of the
eyewitnesses to the Resurrection. There are a great many other ways of
establishing the truth of the Gospel besides that, upon which I do not
need to dwell now. But, taking this one specific ground which my text
suggests, what do the facts thus established prove?
Well, the first point to which I
would refer, and on which I should like to enlarge, if I had time, is the
bearing of Christ's Resurrection on the acceptance of the miraculous. We
hear a great deal about the impossibility of miracle and the like. It
upsets the certainty and fixedness of the order of things, and so forth,
and so forth. Jesus Christ has risen from the dead; and that opens a door
wide enough to admit all the rest of the Gospel miracles. It is of no use
paring down the supernatural in Christianity, in order to meet the
prejudices of a quasi-scientific scepticism, unless you are prepared to go
the whole length, and give up the Resurrection. There is the turning
point. The question is, Do you believe that Jesus Christ rose from the
dead, or do you not? If your objections to the supernatural are valid,
then Christ is not risen from the dead; and you must face the consequences
of that. If He is risen from the dead, then you must cease all your talk
about the impossibility of miracle, and be willing to accept a
supernatural revelation as God's way of making Himself known to man.
But, further, let me remind you of
the bearing of the Resurrection upon Christ's work and claims. If He be
lying in some forgotten grave, and if all that fair thought of His having
burst the bands of death is a blunder, then there was nothing in His death
that had the least bearing upon men's sin, and it is no more to me than
the deaths of thousands in the past. But if He is risen from the dead,
then the Resurrection casts back a light upon the Cross, and we understand
that His death is the life of the world, and that ‘by His stripes we are
healed.’
But, further, remember what He
said about Himself when He was in the world—how He claimed to be the Son
of God; how He demanded absolute obedience, implicit trust, supreme love,
how He identified faith in Himself with faith in God—and consider the
Resurrection as bearing on the reception or rejection of these tremendous
claims. It seems to me that we are brought sharp up to this
alternative—Jesus Christ rose from the dead, and was declared by the
Resurrection to be the Son of God with power; or Jesus Christ has
not
risen from the dead—and what then? Then He was either deceiver or
deceived, and in either case has no right to my reverence and my love. We
may be thankful that men are illogical, and that many who reject the
Resurrection retain reverence, genuine and deep, for Jesus Christ. But
whether they have any right to do so is another matter. I confess for
myself that, if I did not believe that Jesus Christ had risen from the
dead, I should find it very hard to accept, as an example of conduct, or
as religious teacher, a man who had made such great claims as He did, and
had asked from me what He asked. It seems to me that He is either a great
deal more, or a great deal less, than a beautiful saintly soul. If He rose
from the dead He is much more; if He did not, I am afraid to say how much
less He is.
And, finally, the bearing of the
Resurrection of Jesus Christ upon our own hopes of the future may be
suggested. It teaches us that life has nothing to do with organisation,
but persists apart from the body. It teaches us that a man may pass from
death and be unaltered in the substance of his being; and it teaches us
that the earthly house of our tabernacle may be fashioned like unto the
glorious house in which He dwells now at the right hand of God. There is
no other absolute proof of immortality than the Resurrection of Jesus
Christ.
If we accept with all our hearts and
minds Paul's Gospel in its fundamental facts, we need not fear to die,
because He has died, and by dying has been the death of death. We need not
doubt that we shall live again, because He was dead and is alive for ever
more. This Samson has carried away the gates on His strong shoulders, and
death is no more a dungeon but a passage. If we rest ourselves upon Him,
then we can take up, for ourselves and for all that are dear to us and
have gone before us, the triumphant song, ‘O Death, where is thy sting?’
‘Thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus
Christ.’
‘After that He was seen of above
five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this
present, but some are fallen asleep.’—1 COR. xv. 6.
There were, then, some
five-and-twenty years after the Resurrection, several hundred disciples
who were known amongst the churches as having been eyewitnesses of the
risen Saviour. The greater part survived; some, evidently a very few, had
died. The proportion of the living to the dead, after five-and-twenty
years, is generally the opposite. The greater part have ‘fallen asleep’;
some, a comparatively few, remain ‘unto this present.’ Possibly there was
some divine intervention which supernaturally prolonged the lives of these
witnesses, in order that their testimony might be the more lasting. But,
be that as it may, they evidently were men of mark, and some kind of
honour and observance surrounded them, as was very natural, and as appears
from the fact that Paul here knows so accurately (and can appeal to His
fellow-Christians' accurate knowledge) the proportion between the
survivors and the departed. We read of one of them in the Acts of the
Apostles at a later date than this, one Mnason, an ‘original disciple.’
So we get a glimpse into the
conditions of life in the early Church, interesting and of value in an
evidential point of view. But my purpose at present is to draw your
attention to the remarkable language in which the Apostle here speaks of
the living and the dead amongst these witnesses. In neither case does he
use the simple, common words ‘living’ or ‘dead’; but in the one clause he
speaks of their ‘remaining,’ and in the other of their ‘falling asleep’;
both phrases being significant, and, as I take it, both being traced up to
the fact of their having seen the risen Lord as the cause why their life
could be described as a ‘remaining,’ and their death as a ‘falling
asleep.’ In other words, we have here brought before us, by these two
striking expressions, the transforming effect upon life and upon death of
the faith in a risen Lord, whether grounded on sight or not. And it is
simply to these two points that I desire to turn now.
I. First, then, we have to consider
what life may become to those who see the risen Christ.
‘The greater part remain until
this present.’ Now the word
remain
is no mere synonym for living or surviving. It not only tells us the fact
that the survivors were living, but the kind of life that they did live.
It is very significant that it is the same expression as our Lord used in
the profound prophetic words, ‘If I will that he tarry till I come, what
is that to thee?’ Now we are told in John's Gospel that ‘that saying went
abroad amongst the brethren,’ and inasmuch as it was a matter of common
notoriety in the early Church, it is by no means a violent supposition
that it may be floating in Paul's memory here, and may determine his
selection of this remarkable expression ‘they remain,’ or ‘they tarry,’
and they were tarrying till the Master came. So, then, I think if we give
due weight to the significance of the phrase, we get two or three thoughts
worth pondering.
One of them is that the sight of a
risen Christ will make life calm and tranquil. Fancy one of these 500
brethren, after that vision, going back to his quiet rural home in some
little village amongst the hills of Galilee. How small and remote from
Him, and unworthy to ruffle or disturb the heart in which the memory of
that vision was burning, would seem the things that otherwise would have
been important and distracting! The faith which we have in the risen
Christ ought to do the same thing for us, and will do it in the measure in
which there shines clearly before that inward eye, which is our true means
of apprehending Him, the vision which shone before the outward gaze of
that company of wondering witnesses. If we build our nests amidst the
tossing branches of the world's trees, they will sway with every wind, and
perhaps be blown from their hold altogether by such a storm as we all have
sometimes to meet. But we may build our nests in the clefts of the rock,
like the doves, and be quiet, as they are. Distractions will cease to
distract, and troubles will cease to agitate, and across the heaving
surface of the great ocean there will come a Form beneath whose feet the
waves smooth themselves, and at whose voice the winds are still. They who
see Christ need not be troubled. The ship that is empty is tossed upon the
ocean, that which is well laden is steady. The heart that has Christ for a
passenger need not fear being rocked by any storm. Calmness will come with
the vision of the Lord, and we shall abide or ‘remain,’ for there will be
no need for us to flee from this Refuge to that, nor shall we be driven
from our secure abode by any contingencies. ‘He that believeth shall not
make haste.’
It is a good thing to cultivate the
disposition that says about most of the trifles of this life, ‘It does not
much matter’; but the only way to prevent wholesome contempt of the
world's trivialities from degenerating into supercilious indifference is,
to base it upon Christ, discerned as near us and bestowing upon us the
calmness of His risen life. Make Him your scale of importance, and nothing
will be too small to demand and be worthy of the best efforts of your
work, but nothing will be too great to sweep you away from the serenity of
your faith.
Again, the vision of the risen
Christ will also lead to patient persistence in duty. If we have Him
before us, the distasteful duty which He sets us will not be distasteful,
and the small tasks, in which great faithfulness may be manifested, will
cease to be small. If we have Him before us we have in that risen Christ
the great and lasting Example of how patient continuance in well-doing
triumphs over the sorrows that it bears, by and in patiently bearing them,
and is crowned at last with glory and honour. The risen Christ is the
Pattern for the men who will not be turned aside from the path of duty by
any obstacles, dangers, or threats. The risen Christ is the signal Example
of glory following upon faithfulness, and of the crown being the result of
the Cross. The risen Christ is the manifest Helper of them that put their
trust in Him; and one of the plainest lessons and of the most imperative
commands which come from the believing gaze upon that Lord who died
because He would do the will of the Father, and is throned and crowned in
the heavens because He died, is—By patient continuance in well-doing let
us commit the keeping of our souls to Him: and abide in the calling
wherewith we are called.
And, again, the sight of the
risen Christ leads to a life of calm expectancy. ‘If I will that He
tarry
till I come’ conveys that shade of meaning. The Apostle was to wait for
the Lord from Heaven, and that vision which was given to these 500 men
sent them home to their abodes to make all the rest of their lives one
calm aspiration for, and patient expectation of, the return of the Lord.
These primitive Christians expected that Jesus Christ would come speedily.
That expectation was disappointed in so far as the date was concerned, but
after nineteen centuries it still remains true that all vigorous and vital
Christian life must have in it, as a very important element of its
vitality, the onward look which ever is anticipating, which often is
desiring, and which constantly is confident of, the coming of the Lord
from Heaven. The Resurrection has for its consequences, its sequel and
corollary, first the Ascension; then the long tract of time during which
Jesus Christ is absent, but still in divine presence rules the world; and,
finally, His coming again in that same body in which the disciples saw Him
depart from them. And no Christian life is up to the level of its
privileges, nor has any Christian faith grasped the whole articles of its
creed, except that which sets in the very centre of all its visions of the
future that great thought—He shall come again.
Questions of chronology have nothing
to do with that. It stands there before us, the certain fact, made certain
and inevitable by the past facts of the Cross and the Grave and Olivet. He
has come, He will come; He has gone, He will come back. And for us the
life that we live in the flesh ought to be a life of waiting for God's Son
from Heaven, and of patient, confident expectancy that when He shall be
manifested we also shall be manifested with Him in glory.
So much, then, for life—calm,
persistent in every duty, and animated by that blessed and far-off, but
certain, hope, and all of these founded upon the vision and the faith of a
risen Lord. What have fears and cares and distractions and
faint-heartedness and gloomy sorrow to do with the eyes that have beheld
the Christ, and with the lives that are based on faith in the risen Lord?
II. So, secondly, consider what
death becomes to those who have seen Christ risen from the dead.
‘Some are fallen asleep.’ Now that
most natural and obvious metaphor for death is not only a Christian idea,
but is found, as would be expected, in many tongues, but yet with a great
and significant difference. The Christian reason for calling death a sleep
embraces a great deal more than the heathen reason for doing so, and in
some respects is precisely the opposite of that, inasmuch as to most
others who have used the word, death has been a sleep that knew no waking,
whereas the very pith and centre of the Christian reason for employing the
symbol are that it makes our waking sure. We have here what the act of
dying and the condition of the dead become by virtue of faith in the
Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
They have ‘fallen asleep.’ The
act of dying is but a laying one's self down to rest, and a dropping out
of consciousness of the surrounding world. It is very remarkable and very
beautiful that the new Testament scarcely ever employs the words
dying
and
death for the act of separating body and spirit, or
for the condition either of the spirit parted from the body, or of the
body parted from the spirit. It keeps those grim words for the reality,
the separation of the soul from God; and it only exceptionally uses them
for the shadow and the symbol, the physical fact of the parting of the man
from the house which here he has dwelt in. But the reason why Christianity
uses these periphrases or metaphors, these euphemisms for death, is the
opposite of the reason why the world uses them. The world is so afraid of
dying that it durst not name the grim, ugly thing. The Christian, or at
least the Christian faith, is so little afraid of death that it does not
think such a trivial matter worth calling by the name, but only names it
‘falling asleep.’
Even when the circumstances of that
dropping off to slumber are painful and violent, the Bible still employs
the term. Is it not striking that the first martyr, kneeling outside the
city, bruised by stones and dying a bloody death, should have been said to
fall asleep? If ever there was an instance in which the gentle metaphor
seemed all inappropriate it was that cruel death, amidst a howling crowd,
and with fatal bruises, and bleeding limbs mangled by the heavy rocks that
lay upon them. But yet, ‘when he had said this he fell asleep.’ If that be
true of such a death, no physical pains of any kind make the sweet word
inappropriate for any.
We have here not only the
designation of the act of dying, but that of the condition of the dead.
They are fallen asleep, and they continue asleep. How many great thoughts
gather round that metaphor on which it is needless for me to try to
dilate! They will suggest themselves without many words to you all.
There lies in it the idea of repose.
‘They rest from their labours.’ Sleep restores strength, and withdraws a
man at once from effort on the outer world, and from communication from
it. We may carry the analogy into that unseen world. We know nothing about
the relations to an external universe of the departed who sleep in Jesus.
It may be that, if they sleep in Him, since He knows all, they, through
Him, may know, too, something—so much as He pleases to impart to them—of
what is happening here. And it may even be that, if they sleep in Him, and
He wields the energies of Omnipotence, they, through Him, may have some
service to do, even while they wait for their house which is from heaven.
But there is no need for, nor profit in, such speculations. It is enough
that the sweet emblem suggests repose, and that in that sleep there are
folded around the sleepers the arms of the Christ on whose bosom they
rest, as an infant does on its first and happiest home—its mother's
breast.
But then, besides that, the emblem
suggests the idea of continuous and conscious existence. A man asleep does
not cease to be a man; a dead man does not cease to live. It has often
been argued from this metaphor that we are to conceive of the space
between death and the resurrection as being a period of unconsciousness,
but the analogies seem to me to be in the opposite direction. A sleeping
man does not cease to know himself to be, and he does not cease to know
himself to be himself. That mysterious consciousness of personal identity
survives the passage from waking to sleep, as dreams sufficiently show us.
And, therefore, they that sleep know themselves to be.
And, finally, the emblem suggests
the idea of waking. Sleep is a parenthesis. If the night comes, the
morning comes. ‘If winter comes, can spring be far behind?’ They that
sleep will awake, and be satisfied when they ‘awake with Thy likeness.’
And so these three things—repose, conscious, continuous existence, and the
certainty of awaking—all lie in that metaphor.
Now, then, the risen Christ is the
only ground of such hope, and faith in Him is the only state of mind which
is entitled to cherish it. Nothing proves immortality except that open
grave. Every other foundation is too weak to bear the weight of such a
superstructure. The current of present opinion shows, I think, that
neither metaphysical nor ethical arguments for the future life will stand
the force of the disintegrating criticism which is brought to bear upon
that hope by the fashionable materialism of this generation. There is one
barrier that will resist that force, and only one, and that is the
historical facts that Jesus Christ died, and that Jesus Christ has risen
again. He rose; therefore death is not the end of individual existence. He
rose; therefore life beyond the grave is possible for humanity. He rose;
therefore His sacrifice for the world's sin is accepted, and I may be
delivered from my guilt and my burden. He rose; therefore He is declared
to be the Son of God with power. He rose; therefore we, if we trust Him,
may partake in His Resurrection and in some reflection of His glory. The
old Greek architects were often careless of the solidity of the soil on
which they built their temples, and so, many of them have fallen in ruins.
The Temple of Immortality can be built only upon the rock of that
proclamation—Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. And we, dear brethren,
should have all our hopes founded upon that one fact.
So then, for us, the calm, peaceful
passage from life into what else is the great darkness is possible on
condition of our having beheld the risen Lord. These witnesses of whom my
text speaks, Paul would suggest to us, laid themselves quietly down to
sleep, because before them there still hovered the memory of the vision
which they had beheld. Faith in the risen Christ is the anchor of the soul
in death, and there is nothing else by which we can hold then.
As the same Apostle, in one of
his other letters, puts it, the belief that Christ is risen is not only
the irrefragable ground of our hope that we, too, shall rise, but has the
power to change the whole aspect of our death. Did you ever observe the
emphasis with which He says, ‘If we believe that Jesus
died
and rose again, even so them also which
sleep
in Jesus will God bring with Him?’ His death was death indeed, and faith
in it softens ours to sleep. He bore the reality that we might never need
to know it, and if our poor hearts are resting upon that dear Lord, then
the flames are but painted ones and will not burn, and we shall pass
through them, and no smell of fire will be upon us, and all that will be
consumed will be the bonds which bind us. He has abolished death. The
physical fact remains, but all which to men makes the idea of death is
gone if we trust the risen Lord. So that, between two men dying under
precisely the same circumstances, of the same disease, in adjacent beds in
the same hospital, there may be such a difference as that the same word
cannot be applied to the experiences of both.
My dear friends, we have each of us
to pass through that last struggle; but we may make it either a quiet
going to sleep with a loved Face bending over our closing eyes, like a
mother's over her child's cradle, and the same Face meeting us when we
open them in the morning of heaven; or we may make it a reluctant
departure from all that we care for, and a trembling advance into all from
which conscience and heart shrink.
Which is it going to be to you? The
answer depends upon that to another question. Are you looking to that
Christ that died and is alive for evermore as your life and your
salvation? Do you hold fast that Gospel which Paul preached, ‘how that
Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was
buried, and that He rose again the third day, according to the
Scriptures’? If you do, life will be a calm, persevering, expectant
waiting upon Him, and death will be nothing more terrible than falling
asleep.
‘By the grace of God I am what I
am: and His grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain.’—1 COR.
xv. 10.
The Apostle was, all his life, under
the hateful necessity of vindicating his character and Apostleship. Thus
here, though his main purpose in the context is simply to declare the
Gospel which he preached, he is obliged to turn aside in order to assert,
and to back up his assertion, that there was no sort of difference between
him and the other recognised teachers of Christian truth. He was forced to
do this by persistent endeavours in the Corinthian Church to deny his
Apostleship, and the faithfulness of his representation of the Christian
verities. The way in which he does it is eminently beautiful and
remarkable. He fires up in vindication of himself; and then he checks
himself. ‘By the grace of God I am’—and he is going to say what he is, but
he bethinks himself, as if he had reflected; ‘No! I will leave other
people to say what that is. By the grace of God I am—what I am, whatever
that be. And all that I have to say is that God made me, and that I helped
Him. For the grace of God which was bestowed upon me was not in vain. You
Corinthians may judge what the product is. I tell you how it has come
about.’ So there are thoughts here, I think, well worth our pondering and
taking into our hearts and lives.
I. First, as to the one power that
makes men.
‘By the grace of God I am what I
am.’ Now that word ‘grace’ has got to be worn threadbare, and to mean next
door to nothing, in the ears and minds of a great many continual hearers
of the Gospel. But Paul had a very definite idea of what he meant by it;
and what he meant by it was a very large thing, which we may well ponder
for a moment as being the only thing which will transform and ennoble
character and will produce fruit that a man need not be ashamed of. The
grace of God, in Paul's use of the words, which is the scriptural use of
them generally, implies these two things which are connected as root and
product—the active love of God, in exercise towards us low and sinful
creatures, and the gifts with which that love comes full charged to men.
These two things, which at bottom are one, love and its gifts, are all, in
the Apostle's judgment, gathered up and stored, as in a great storehouse,
in Jesus Christ Himself, and through Him are made accessible to us, and
brought to bear upon us for the ennobling of our natures, and the
investing of us with graces and beauties of character, all strange to us
apart from these.
Now it seems to me that these two
things, which come from one root, are the precise things which you and I
need in order to make us nobler and purer and more Godlike men than
otherwise we could ever become. For what is it that men need most for
noble and pure living? These two things precisely—motive and power to
carry out the dictates of conscience.
Every man in the world knows enough
of duty and of right to be a far nobler man than any man in the world is.
And it is not for want of clear convictions of duty, it is not for want of
recognised models and patterns of life, that men go wrong; but it is
because there are these two things lacking, motives for nobler service,
and power to do and be what they know they ought to be. And precisely here
Paul's gospel comes in, ‘By the grace of God I am what I am.’ That grace,
considered in its two sides of love and of giving, supplies all that we
want.
It supplies motives. There is
nothing that will bend a man's will like the recognition of divine love
which it is blessedness to come in contact with, and to obey. You may try
to sway him by motives of advantage and self-interest, and to thunder into
his ears the pealing words of duty and right and ‘ought,’ and there is no
adequate response. You cannot soften a heart by the hammers of the law.
You cannot force a man to do right by brandishing before him the whip that
punishes doing wrong. You cannot sway the will by anything but the heart;
and when you can touch the deepest spring it moves the whole mass.
You have seen some ponderous piece
of machinery, which resists all attempts of a puny hand laid upon it to
make it revolve. But down in one corner is a little hidden spring. Touch
that and with majestic slowness and certainty the mighty mass turns. You
know those rocking-stones down in the south of England; tons of weight
poised upon a pin point, and so exquisitely balanced that a child's finger
rightly applied may move the mass. So the whole man is made mobile only by
the touch of love; and the grace that comes to us, and says, ‘If ye love
Me, keep My commandments’—is, as I believe, the sole motive which will
continuously and adequately sway the rebellious, self-centred wills of
men, to obedience resulting in nobility of life.
The other aspect of this same great
word is, in like manner, that which we need. What men want is, first of
all, the will to be noble and good; and, second, the power to carry out
the will. It is God that worketh in us both the willing and the doing. I
venture to affirm that there is no power known, either to thinkers, or
philanthropists, or doctrinaires, or strivers after excellence in the
world—no power known and available which will lift a life to such heights
of beauty and self-sacrificing nobility, as will the power that comes to
us by communication of the grace that is in Jesus Christ.
I am perpetually trying to insist,
dear brethren, upon this one thought, that the communication of actual new
life is the central gift of the Gospel; and this new life it is, this
nature endowed with new desires, hopes, aims, capacities, which alone will
lift the whole man into unwonted heights of beauty and serenity. It is the
grace of God, the gift of His Divine Spirit who will dwell with all of us,
if we will, which alone can be trusted to make men good.
And now, if that be true, what
follows? Surely this, that for all you who have, in any measure, caught a
glimpse of what you ought to be, and have been more or less vainly trying
to realise your ideal, and reach your goal, there is a better way than the
way of self-centred and self-derived and self-dependent effort. There is
the way of opening your hearts and spirits to the entrance and access of
that great power, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, which will do in us
and for us all that we know we ought to do, and yet feel hampered and
hindered in performing.
Oh, dear friends! there are many of
you, I believe, who have more or less spasmodically and interruptedly, but
with a continual recurrence to the effort, sought to plant your feet
firmly in the paths of righteousness, and have more or less failed. Listen
to this Gospel, and accept it, and put it to the proof. The love of God
which is in Christ Jesus, and the life which that love brings in its
hands, for all of us who will trust it, will dwell in you if you will, and
mould you into His own likeness, and the law of the spirit of life which
was in Christ Jesus will make us free from the law of sin and death.
All noble living is a battle. Can
you and I, with our ten thousand, meet him that cometh against us with his
twenty, the temptations of the world and of its Prince? Send for the
reinforcements, and Jesus Christ will come and teach your hands to war and
your fingers to fight. All noble life is self-denial, coercion, restraint;
and can my poor, feeble hands apply muscular force enough to the brake to
keep the wheels clogged, and prevent them from whirling me downhill into
ruin? Let Him come and put His great gentle hand on the top of yours, and
that will enable you to scotch the wheels, and make self-denial possible.
All noble life is a building up by slow degrees from the foundation. And
can you and I complete the task with our own limited resources, and our
own feeble strengths? Will not ‘all that pass by begin to mock’ us and
say, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish’? That is the
epitaph written over all moralities and over all lives which, catching
some glimpse of the good and the true and the noble, have tried, apart
from Christ, to reproduce them in themselves. Frightful gaps, and an
unfinished, however fair structure end them all. Go to Him. ‘His hand hath
laid the foundation of the house, His hand shall also finish it.’ He who
is Himself the foundation-stone is also the headstone of the corner, which
is brought forth with shouting of ‘Grace! Grace unto it!’
I need not, I suppose, linger
to remind you what important and large lessons these thoughts carry, not
only for men who are trying to work at the task of mending and making
their own characters, but on the larger scale, for all who seek to benefit
and elevate their fellows. Brethren, it is not for me to depreciate any
workers who, in any department, and by any methods, seek, and partially
effect, the elevation of humanity. But I should be untrue to my own
deepest convictions, and unfaithful to the message which God's providence
has given it to me as my life's task to proclaim, if I did not declare
that nothing will truly
re-form
humanity, society, the nation, the city, except that which re-creates the
individual: ‘the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ’ entering into their
midst.
II. And so, secondly, and very
briefly, notice the lesson we get here as to how we should think of our
own attainments.
I have already pointed out that
there are two beautiful touches in my text. The Apostle traces everything
that he is, in his character and in his Christian standing and in his
Apostolic work and success, to that grace that has come down upon him, and
clothed his nakedness with so glorious a garment. And then, in addition to
that, he modestly, and with a fine sense of dignity, refrains from
parading his attainments or his achievements, and says, ‘It is not for me
to estimate what I am; it is for you to do it.’ True, indeed, in the next
verse he does set forth, in very lofty language, his claims to be in
nothing behind the very chiefest of the Apostles, and ‘to have laboured
more abundantly than they all.’ But still the spirit of that humble and
yet dignified silence runs through the whole context. ‘By the grace of God
I am—what I am.’
Well, then, it is not necessary for
a man to be ignorant, or to pretend that he is ignorant, of what he can
do. We hear a great deal about the unconsciousness of genius. There is a
partial truth in it; and possibly the highest examples of power and
success, in any department of mental or intellectual effort, are unaware
of their achievements and stature. But if a man can do a certain kind of
service there is no harm whatever in his recognising the fact that he can
do it. The only harm is in his thinking that because he can, he is a very
fine fellow, and that the work itself is a great work; and so setting
himself up above his brethren. There is a vast deal of hypocrisy in what
is called unconsciousness of power. Most men who have been chosen and
empowered to do a great work for God or for men, in any department, have
been aware that they could do it. But the less we think about ourselves,
in any way, the better. The more entire our recognition of the influx of
grace on which we depend for keeping our reservoir full, the less
likelihood there will be of touchy self-assertion, the less likelihood of
the misuse of the powers that we have. If we are to do much for God, if we
are to keep what we have already attained, if we are to make our own lives
sweet and beautiful, if we are to be invested with any increase of
capacity, or led to any higher heights of nobleness and Christlikeness, we
must copy, and make a conscious effort to copy, these two things, which
marked the Apostle's estimate of himself—a distinct recognition that we
are only reservoirs and nothing more—‘What hast thou that thou hast not
received? Why then dost thou glory as if thou hadst not received it?’—and
a humble waiving aside of the attempt to determine what it is that we are.
For however clearly a man may know his own powers and achievements, it is
hard for him to estimate the relations of these to his whole character.
So, dear brethren, although it is a
very homely piece of advice, and may seem to be beneath the so-called
dignity of the pulpit, let me venture just to remind you that self-conceit
is no disease peculiar to the ten-talented people, but is quite as rife,
if not a good deal rifer, among those with one talent. They are very
humble when it comes to work, and are quite contented to wrap the one
talent up in a napkin then; but when it comes to self-assertion, or what
they expect to receive of recognition from others, they need to be
reminded quite as much as their betters in endowment—‘By the grace of God
I am what I am.’
III. And so, lastly, one word about
the responsibility for our co-operation with the grace, in order to the
accomplishment of its results.
‘The grace which was bestowed upon
me was not in vain,’ says Paul. ‘Not I, but the grace of God which was
with me, and so I laboured more abundantly than they all.’ That is to say,
God in His giving love; Christ with His ever out-flowing Spirit, move
round our hearts, and desire to enter. But the grace, the love, the gifts
of the love may all be put away by our unfaithfulness, by our
non-receptivity, by our misuse, and by our negligence. Paul yielded
himself to the grace that was brought to work upon him. Have you yielded
yourselves?
Paul said, ‘By the grace of God I am
what I am.’ He could not have said that, could he, if he had known that
the most part of what he was was dead against God's will and purpose? Has
God anything to do with making you what you are, or has it been the devil
that has had the greater share in it? This man, because he knew that he
had submitted himself to the often painful, searching, crucifying,
self-restraining and stimulating influences of the Gospel and Spirit of
Christ, could say, ‘God's grace has made me what I am, and I helped Him to
make me.’ And can you say anything like that?
Take your life. In how many of its
deeds has there been present the consciousness of God and His love? Take
your character. How much of it has been shot through and through, so to
speak, by the fiery darts of that cleansing, warming, consuming grace of
God? Are you daily being baptized in that Spirit, searched by that Spirit,
condemned by that grace? Is it the grace of God, or nature and self and
the world and the flesh that have made you what you are?
Oh, brethren I let us cultivate the
sense of our need of this divine help, for it does not come where men do
not know how weak they are, and how much they want it. The mountain tops
are high,—yes! and they are dry; there is no water there. The rivers run
in the green valleys deep down. ‘God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace
to the humble.’ Let us see that we open our hearts to the reception of
these quickening and cleansing influences, for it is possible for us to
cover ourselves over with such an impenetrable covering that that grace
cannot pass through it. Let us see to it that we keep ourselves in close
contact with the foundation of all this grace, even Jesus Christ Himself,
by desire, by faith, by love, by communion, by meditation, by
approximation, by sympathy, by service. And let us see that we use the
grace that we possess. ‘For to him that hath shall be given, and from him
that hath not’—not possessing in any real sense because not utilising for
its appointed purpose—‘shall be taken away even that he hath.’ Wherefore,
brethren, I ‘beseech you that ye receive not the grace of God in vain.’
‘Whether it were I or they, so we
preach, and so ye believed.’—1 COR. xv. 11.
Party spirit and faction were
the curses of Greek civic life, and they had crept into at least one of
the Greek churches—that in the luxurious and powerful city of Corinth. We
know that there was a very considerable body of antagonists to Paul, who
ranked themselves under the banner of Apollos or of Cephas
i.e.
Peter. Therefore, Paul, keenly conscious that he was speaking to some
unfriendly critics, hastens in the context to remove the possible
objection which might be made, that the Gospel which he preached was
peculiar to himself, and proceeds to assert that the whole substance of
what he had to say to men, was held with unbroken unanimity by the other
apostles. ‘They’ means all of
them;
and ‘so’ means the summary of the Gospel teaching in the preceding verses.
Now, Paul would not have
ventured to make that assertion, in the face of men whom he knew to be
eager to pick holes in anything that he said, unless he had been perfectly
sure of his ground. There were broad differences between him and the
others. But their partisans might squabble, as is often the case, and the
men, whose partisans they were, be unanimous. There were differences of
individual character, of temper, and of views about certain points of
Christian truth. But there was an unbroken front of unanimity in regard to
all that lies within the compass of that little word which covers so much
ground—‘So
we preach.’
Now, I wish to turn to that
outstanding fact—which does not always attract the attention which it
deserves—of the absolute identity of the message which all the apostles
and primitive teachers delivered, and to seek to enforce some of the
considerations and lessons which seem to me naturally to flow from it.
I. First, then, I ask you to think
of the fact itself—the unbroken unanimity of the whole body of Apostolic
teachers.
As I have said, there were wide
differences of characteristics between them, but there was a broad tract
of teaching wherein they all agreed. Let me briefly gather up the points
of unanimity, the contents of the one Gospel, which every man of them felt
was his message to the world. I may take it all from the two clauses in
the preceding context, ‘how that Christ died for our sins according to the
Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day
according to the Scriptures.’ These are the things about which, as Paul
declares, there was not the whisper of a dissentient voice. There is the
vital centre which he declares every Christian teacher grasped as being
the essential of his message, and in various tones and manners, but in
substantial identity of content, declared to the world.
Now, what lies in it? The Person
spoken of—the Christ, and all that that word involves of reference to the
ancient and incomplete Revelation in the past, its shadows and types, its
prophecies and ceremonies, its priesthood and its sacrifices; with all
that it involves of reference to the ancient hopes on which a thousand
generations had lived, and which either are baseless delusions, or are
realised in Jesus—the Person whom all the Apostles proclaimed was One
anointed from God as Prophet, Priest, and King; who had come into the
world to fulfil all that the ancient system had shadowed by sacrifice,
temple, and priest, and was the Monarch of Israel and of the world.
And not only were they absolutely
unanimous in regard to the Person, but they were unbrokenly consentient in
regard to the facts of His life, His death, and His Resurrection. But the
proclamation of the external fact is no gospel. You must add the clause
‘for our sins,’ and then the record, which is a mere piece of history,
with no more good news in it than the record of the death of any other
martyr, hero, or saint, starts into being truly the good news for the
world. The least part of a historical fact is the fact; the greatest part
of it is the explanation of the fact, and the setting it in its place in
regard to other facts, the exhibition of the principles which it
expresses, and of the conclusions to which it leads. So the bare
historical declaration of a death and a resurrection is transmuted into a
gospel, by that which is the most important part of the Gospel, the
explanation of the meaning of the fact—‘He died for our sins.’
If redemption from sin through the
death of a Person is the fundamental conception of the Gospel for the
world, then it is clear that, for such a purpose, a divine nature in the
Person is wanted. Your notion of what Christ came to do will determine
your notion of who He is. If you only recognise that His work is to teach,
or to show in exercise a fair human character, then you may rest content
with the lower notion of His nature which sees in Him but the foremost of
the sons of men. But if we grasp ‘died for our sins,’ then for such a task
the incarnation of the Eternal Son of God is the absolute pre-requisite.
Still further, our text brings out
the contents of this gospel as being the declaration of the Resurrection.
On that I need not here and now dwell at any length. But these are the
points, the Person, the two facts, death and resurrection, and the great
meaning of the death—viz. the expiation for the world's sins: these are
the things on which the whole of the primitive teachers of the Apostolic
Church had one voice and one message.
Now, I do not suppose that I need
spend any time in showing to you how the extant records bear out,
absolutely, this contention of the Apostle's. I need only remind you how
the opposition that was waged against him—and it was a very vigorous and a
very bitter opposition—from a section of the Church, had no bearing at all
upon the question of what he taught, but only upon the question of to whom
it was to be taught. The only objection that the so-called Judaising party
in the early Church had against Paul and his preaching, was not the Gospel
that he declared, but his assertion that the Gentile nations might enter
into the Church through faith in Jesus Christ, without passing through the
gate of circumcision. Depend upon it, if there had been any, even the most
microscopic, divergence on his part from the general, broad stream of
Christian teaching, the sleepless, keen-eyed, unscrupulous enemies that
dogged him all his days would have pounced upon it eagerly, and would
never have ceased talking about it. But not one of them ever said a word
of the sort, but allowed his teaching to pass, because it was the teaching
of every one of the apostles.
If I had time, or if it were
necessary, it would be easy to point you to the records that we have left
of the Apostolic teaching, in order to confirm this unbroken unanimity. I
do not need to spend time on that. Proof-texts are not worth so much as
the fact that these doctrines are interwoven into the whole structure of
the New Testament as a whole—just as they are into Paul's letters. But I
may gather one or two sayings, in which the substance of each writer's
teaching has been concentrated by himself. For instance, Peter speaks
about being ‘redeemed by the precious blood of Christ as of a Lamb without
blemish and without spot,’ and declares that ‘He Himself bare our sins in
His own body on the tree.’ John comes in with his doxology: ‘Unto Him that
loved us, and loosed us from our sins in His own blood’; and it is his pen
that records how in the heavens there echoed ‘glory and honour and thanks
and blessing, for ever and ever, to the Lamb that was slain, and has
redeemed us unto God by His blood.’ The writer of the Epistle to the
Hebrews, steeped as he is in ceremonial and sacrificial ideas, and having
for his one purpose to work out the thought that Jesus Christ is all that
the ancient ritual, sacerdotal and sacrificial system shadows and
foretells, sums up his teaching in the statement that Christ having come,
a high priest of good things to come, ‘through His own blood, entered in,
once for all, into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for
us.’
There were limits to the unanimity,
as I have already said. Paul and Peter had a great quarrel about
circumcision and related subjects. The Apostolic writings are wondrously
diverse from one another. Peter is far less constructive and profound than
Paul. Paul and Peter are both untouched with the mystic wisdom of the
Apostle John. But, in regard to the facts that I have signalised, the
divinity, the person of Jesus Christ, His death and Resurrection, and the
significance to be attached to that death, they are absolutely one. The
instruments in the orchestra are various, the tender flute, the ringing
trumpet, and many another, but the note they strike is the same. ‘Whether
it were I or they, so we preach.’
II. Now, let me ask you to consider
the only explanation of this unanimity.
Time was when the people, who did
not believe in Christ's divinity and sacrificial death, tortured
themselves to try and make out meanings for these epistles, which should
not include the obnoxious doctrines. That is nearly antiquated. I suppose
that there is nobody now, or next to nobody, who does not admit that,
right or wrong, Paul, Peter, John—all of them—teach these two things, that
Christ is the Eternal Son of the Father, and that His death is the
Sacrifice for the world's sin. But they say that that is not the
primitive, simple teaching of the Man of Nazareth; and that the unanimity
is a unanimity of misapprehension of, and addition to, His words and to
the drift of His teaching.
Now, just think what a huge—I was
going to say—inconceivability that supposition is. For there is no point,
say from the time at which the Apostle who wrote the words of my text,
which was somewhere about the year 56 or 57 A.D.,—there is no point
between that period, working backwards through the history of the Church
to the Crucifixion, where you can insert such a tremendous revolution of
teaching as this. There is no trace of such a change. Peter's earliest
speeches, as recorded in Acts, are in some important respects less
developed doctrinally than are the epistles, but Christ's Messiahship,
death, and Resurrection, with which is connected the remission of sins,
are as clearly and emphatically proclaimed as at any later time. So these
points of the Apostolic testimony were preached from the first, and, if in
preaching them, the witnesses perverted the simple teaching of the
Carpenter of Nazareth, and ascribed to Him a character which He had not
claimed, and to His death a power of which He had not dreamed, they did so
at the very time when the impressions of His personality and teaching were
most recent and strong. It seems to me, apart altogether from other
considerations, that such a right-about-face movement on the part of the
early teachers of Christianity, is an absolute impossibility, regard being
had to the facts of the case, even if you make much allowance for possible
errors in the record.
But I would make another remark. If
misapprehension came in, if these men, in their unanimous declaration of
Christ's death as the Sacrifice for sin, were not fairly representing the
conclusions inevitable from the facts of Christ's life and death, and from
His own words, is it not an odd thing that the same misapprehension
affected them all? When people misconceive a teacher's doctrine, they
generally differ in the nature of their misconceptions, and split into
sections and parties. But here you have to account for the fact that every
man of them, with all their diversity of idiosyncrasy and character,
tumbled into the same pit of error, and that there was not one of them
left sane enough to protest. Does that seem to be a likely thing?
And what about the worth of the
teacher's teaching, that did not guard its receivers from such absolute
misapprehension as that? If the whole Church unanimously mistook
everything that Jesus Christ had said to them, and unwarrantably made out
of Him what they did, on this hypothesis, I do not think that there is
much left to honour or admire in a teacher, whose teaching was so
ambiguous, as that it led all that received it into such an error as that
into which, by the supposition, they fell.
No, brethren; they were one, because
their Gospel was the only possible statement of the principles that
underlay, and the conclusions that flowed from, the plain facts of the
life and the teaching of Jesus Christ. I am not going to spend time in
quoting His own words. I can only refer to one or two of them very
succinctly. ‘Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’
‘As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of
Man be lifted up.’ ‘My flesh is the bread which I will give for the life
of the world.’ ‘The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to
minister, and to give His life a ransom for many.’ ‘This is My body broken
for you; take, eat, in remembrance of Me.’ ‘This is My blood, shed for
many for the remission of sins; this do ye, as often as ye drink it, in
remembrance of Me.’ What possible explanation, doing justice to these
words, is there, except ‘Jesus Christ died for our sins according to the
Scriptures’? And how could men who had heard them with their own ears, and
with their own eyes had seen Him risen from the dead and ascending into
heaven, do otherwise than eagerly, enthusiastically, at the cost of all,
and with unhesitating voice of unbroken unanimity, ‘so preach’?
I quite admit that in Christ's
teaching in the gospels you will not find the articulate drawing out into
doctrinal statement of the principles that underlay, and the conclusions
that flow from, the historical fact of Christ's propitiatory death. I do
not wonder at that, nor do I admit that it is any argument against the
truth of the divine revelation which is made in these doctrinal
statements, to allege that we find nothing corresponding to them in Jesus
Christ's own words. The silence is not as absolute as is alleged, as the
quotations which I have made, and which might have been multiplied, do
distinctly enough show. Even if it were more absolute than it is, the
silence is by no means unintelligible. Christ had to offer the Sacrifice
before the Sacrifice could be preached. He Himself warned His disciples
against accepting His own words prior to the Cross, as the conclusive and
ultimate revelation. ‘I have many things to say unto you, but you cannot
carry them now.’ There was need that the Cross should be a fact before it
was evolved into a doctrine. And so I venture to say that the unanimity of
the preaching is only explicable on the ground of that preaching in both
its parts—its assertion of Jesus’ Messiahship and of His propitiatory
death—being the repetition on the housetop of the lessons which they had
heard in the ear from Him.
III. Note, briefly, the lesson from
this unanimity.
Let us distinctly apprehend
where is the living heart of the Gospel—that it is the message of
redemption by the incarnation and sacrifice of the Son of God. There
follows from that incarnation and sacrifice all the great teaching about
the work of the Divine Spirit in men, dwelling in them for evermore. But
the beginning of all is, ‘Christ died for our sins according to the
Scriptures.’ And, brethren, that message meets, as nothing else meets, the
deepest needs of every human soul. It is able, as nothing else is able, to
open out into a whole encyclopædia and universe of wisdom and truth and
power. If we strike it out of our conception of Christianity, or if we
obscure it as being the very palpitating centre of the whole, then
feebleness will creep over the Christianity that is
minus
a Cross, or does not see in it the Sacrifice for the world's sin. You may
cast overboard the sails to lighten the ship. If you do, she lies a log on
the waters. And if, for the sake of meeting new phases of thought,
Christian churches tamper with this central truth, they have flung away
their means of progress and of power.
Let me say again, and in a word
only, that the considerations that I have been trying to submit to you in
this sermon, show us the limits within which the modern cry of ‘Back to
the Christ of the Gospels,’ is right, and where it may be wrong. I believe
that in former days, and to some extent in the present day, we evangelical
teachers have too much sometimes talked rather about the doctrines than
about the Person who is the doctrines. And if the cry of ‘Back to the
Christ’ means, ‘Do not talk so much about the Atonement and Propitiation;
talk about the Christ who atones,’ then, with all my heart, I say, ‘Amen!’
But put the Person in the foreground, the living-loving, the dying-loving,
the risen-loving Christ, put Him in the foreground. But if it is implied,
as I am afraid it is often implied, that the Christ of the Gospels is one
and the Christ of the epistles is another, and that to go back to the
Christ of the gospels means to drop ‘died for our sins according to the
Scriptures,’ and to retain only the non-miraculous, moral and religious
teachings that are recorded in the three first gospels, then I say that it
is fatal for the Church, and it is false to the facts, for the Christ of
the epistles is the Christ of the gospels: the difference only being that
in the one you have the facts, and in the other you have their meaning and
their power.
So, lastly, let this text
teach us what we ourselves have to do with this unanimous testimony. ‘So
we preach, and so ye believed.’ Brother! Do you believe
so?
That is to say, is your conception of the Gospel the mighty redemptive
agency which is wrought by the Incarnate Son of God, who was crucified for
our offences, and rose that we might live, and is glorified that we, too,
may share His glory? Is that your Gospel? But do not be content with an
intellectual grasp of the thing. ‘So ye believed’ means a great deal more
than ‘I believe that Christ died for our sins.’ It means ‘I believe in the
Christ who did die for my sins.’ You must cast yourself as a sinful man on
Him; and, so casting, you will find that it is no vain story which is
commended to us by all these august voices from the past, but you will
have in your own experience the verification of the fact that He died for
our sins, in your own consciousness of sins forgiven, and new love
bestowed; and so may turn round to Paul, the leader of the chorus, and to
all the apostolic band, and say to them, ‘Now I believe, not because of
thy saying, but because I have seen Him, and myself heard Him.’
‘But now is Christ risen from the
dead ... the first fruits of them that slept.’—1 COR. xv. 20.
The Apostle has been contemplating
the long train of dismal consequences which he sees would arise if we only
had a dead Christ. He thinks that he, the Apostle, would have nothing to
preach, and we, nothing to believe. He thinks that all hope of deliverance
from sin would fade away. He thinks that the one fact which gives
assurance of immortality having vanished, the dead who had nurtured the
assurance have perished. And he thinks that if things were so, then
Christian men, who had believed a false gospel, and nourished an empty
faith, and died clinging to a baseless hope, were far more to be pitied
than men who had had less splendid dreams and less utter illusions.
Then, with a swift revulsion of
feeling, he turns away from that dreary picture, and with a change of key,
which the dullest ear can appreciate, from the wailing minors of the
preceding verses, he breaks into this burst of triumph. ‘Now’—things being
as they are, for it is the logical ‘now,’ and not the temporal one—things
being as they are, ‘Christ is risen from the dead, and that as the first
fruits of them that slept.’
Part of the ceremonial of the
Passover was the presentation in the Temple of a barley sheaf, the first
of the harvest, waved before the Lord in dedication to Him, and in sign of
thankful confidence that all the fields would be reaped and their blessing
gathered. There may be some allusion to that ceremony, which coincided in
time with the Resurrection of our Lord, in the words here, which regard
that one solitary Resurrection as the early ripe and early reaped sheaf,
the pledge and the prophecy of the whole ingathering.
Now there seem to me, in these
words, to ring out mainly two things—an expression of absolute certainty
in the fact, and an expression of unbounded triumph in the certainty of
the fact.
And if we look at these two things,
I think we shall get the main thoughts that the Apostle would impress upon
our minds.
I. The certainty of Christ's
Resurrection.
‘Now
is
Christ risen,’ says he, defying, as it were, doubt and negation, and
basing himself upon the firm assurance which he possesses of that
historical fact. ‘Ah!’ you say, ‘seeing is believing; and he had evidence
such as we can never have.’ Well! let us see. Is it possible for us,
nineteen centuries nearly after that day, to catch some echo of this
assured confidence, and in the face of modern doubts and disbeliefs, to
reiterate with as unfaltering assurance as that with which they came from
his glowing lips, the great words of my text? Can we, logically and
reasonably, as men who are guided by evidence and not by feeling, stand up
before the world, and take for ours the ancient confession: ‘I believe in
Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, dead, and buried. The third day He rose again from the
dead’? I think we can.
The way to prove a fact is by the
evidence of witnesses. You cannot argue that it would be very convenient,
if such and such a thing should be true; that great moral effects would
follow if we believed it was true, and so on. The way to do is to put
people who have seen it into the witness-box, and to make sure that their
evidence is worth accepting.
And at the beginning of my
remarks I wish to protest, in a sentence, against confusing the issues
about this question of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ in that fashion
which is popular nowadays, when we are told that miracle is impossible,
and
therefore there has been no Resurrection, or that
death is the end of human existence, and that
therefore
there has been no Resurrection. That is not the way to go about
ascertaining the truth as to asserted facts. Let us hear the evidence. The
men who brush aside the testimony of the New Testament writers, in
obedience to a theory, either about the impossibility of the supernatural,
or about the fatal and final issues of human death, are victims of
prejudice, in the strictest meaning of the word; and are no more logical
than the well-known and proverbial reasoner who, when told that facts were
against him, with sublime confidence in his own infallibility, is reported
to have said, ‘So much the worse for the facts.’ Let us deal with
evidence, and not with theory, when we are talking about alleged facts of
history.
So then, let me remind you
that, in this chapter from which my text is taken, we have a record of the
Resurrection of Jesus Christ, older than, and altogether independent of,
the records contained in the gospels, which are all subsequent in date to
it; that this Epistle to the Corinthians is one of the four undisputed
Epistles of the Apostle, which not the most advanced school of modern
criticism has a word to say against; that, therefore, this chapter,
written, at the latest, some seven and twenty years after the date of the
Crucifixion, carries us up very close to that event; that it shows that
the Resurrection was
universally
believed all over the Church, and therefore must have then been long
believed; that it enables us to trace the same belief as universal, and in
undisputed possession of the field among the churches, at the time of
Paul's conversion, which cannot be put down at much more than five or six
years after the Crucifixion, and that so we are standing in the presence
of absolutely contemporaneous testimony. This is not a case in which a
belief slowly and gradually grew up. Whether we accept the evidence or
not, we are bound to admit that it is strictly contemporaneous testimony
to the fact of Christ's Resurrection.
And the witnesses are reliable and
competent, as well as contemporaneous. The old belief that their testimony
was imposture is dead long ago; as, indeed, how could it live? It would be
an anomaly, far greater than the Resurrection, to believe that these
people, Mary, Peter, John, Paul, and all the rest of them, were
conspirators in a lie, and that the fairest system of morality and the
noblest consecration that the world has ever seen, grew up out of a fraud,
like flowers upon a dunghill. That theory will not hold water; and even
those who will not accept the testimony have long since confessed that it
will not. But the Apostle, in my context, seems to think that that is the
only tenable alternative to the other theory that the witnesses were
veracious, and I am disposed to believe that he is right. He says, ‘If
Christ be not risen, then, are we’ the utterly impossible thing of ‘false
witnesses to God,’ devout perjurers, as the phrase might be paraphrased:
men who are lying to please God. If Christ be not risen, they have sworn
to a thing that they know to be untrue, in order to advance His cause and
His kingdom. If that theory be not accepted, there is no other about these
men and their message that will hold water for a minute, except the
admission of its truth.
The fashionable modern one,
that it was hallucination, is preposterous. Hallucinations that five
hundred people at once
