May 12
4
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An undressing from his sins and infirmities
“They will go away to eternal punishment, but
the righteous to eternal life.” Matthew 25:46
There is an essential difference between the death of the
godly—and the death of the ungodly. Death comes to the
ungodly man—as a penal infliction; but to the righteous—
as a summons to his Father’s palace! To the sinner—it is
an execution; to the saint—it is an undressing from his
sins and infirmities! Death to the wicked is the King of
terrors. Death to the saint is the end of terrors—the
commencement of glory!
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Righteousness revealed
The gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ reveals the righteousness of God in the justifying work of Christ which He wrought for the elect and is credited to their account before God, and is imputed to them and imparted in them by the regenerating work of His omnipotent Spirit.
The gospel exalts the righteousness of Christ and condemns man’s self-righteousness. Paul says, “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for therein is the righteousness of God revealed”. God Almighty is just and righteous in accepting sinners clothed with the righteousness of their appointed Substitute. The righteousness of God is not revealed by the light of nature or by the works of man. Only the “good news” of the gospel of Christ reveals and declares this wondrous work and transaction.
Man has naught to accomplish or perform, therefore we glory in Christ and Him alone, and we are not ashamed – “To declare, I say, at this time His righteousness: that He might be just, and the Justifier of him which believeth in Jesus. Romans 3:26. In the gospel of Christ is the answer to the unanswerable question in Job 9:2 “I know it is so of a truth: but how should man be just with God?”
The glory of His righteousness is revealed to us and in us here by His Spirit by the preaching of the gospel, and will one day be revealed openly and universally for all to behold and wonder – “In those days shall Judah be saved, and Jerusalem shall dwell safely: and this is the name wherewith she shall be called, The LORD our righteousness.” Jer 33:16.
This is what the gospel is all about – He shall see of the travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied: by His knowledge shall My righteous servant justify many; for He shall bear their iniquities. Isa 53:11. We may rightfully be ashamed of any other so-called gospel. Any messenger with any other message is accursed of God – “As we said before, so say I now again, If any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed”. Galatians 1:9 Tommy Robbins
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THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE- John MacDuff.
“Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”
“I am the resurrection, and the life–he that believes in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.” John 11:25
“If a man dies, shall he live again?” has been the perplexed and perplexing question, the anxious, unsolved problem of the ages. When these eyes close in their mortal sleep, when dust has returned to dust, ashes to ashes, earth to earth, shall there be, can there be, a requickening from decay to vitality? Or is all to end in annihilation–dreamless oblivion? There is much to dim and darken. The very analogies of nature, beautiful as they are and so often quoted, are in themselves partial, unsatisfactory. Under the blaze of rigid, exacting truth, they are defective and misleading. The corn-grain, apparently without a spark of animation, as inert as the clods under which it is laid, is not dead but living. “Our Lord,” says Luther “has written the promise of the resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in spring time.” Yes; but these leaves come from no dead branch, or sapless trunk, or decayed root, but are nurtured by living though unseen forces within the apparent skeleton tree. The chrysalis, with the seeming torpor of death, has within it, also, the embryo, the same slumbering forces of life; its lustrous wings are not born of the worm and corruption. Not so that pulseless, rayless, inanimate mortal human body, the speedy prey of dissolution. There is resurrection, re-juvenescence for the flowers of spring which rim the loved one’s grave; but all else below seems to refute the fond dream of an afterlife, when, year after year, decade after decade, nothing save “everlasting silence reigns.”
“But come with Me,” says Christ, “and I will ease you of this burden also. I will reveal to you the secret hidden from ages and generations. I can take, as no other can, the bereft to the tombs of their loved ones, and whisper My own requiem and lullaby–In Christ, in peace. Rest with Me.
“ You who are bearing this heaviest and most crushing of life-sorrows, be comforted! You can write on every churchyard gate, you can carve on every stone in these realms of silence, “My flesh also shall rest in hope.”
Laying aside the natural arguments for the immortality of the soul (perhaps one of the strongest of which is the instinctive feeling within each of us of a hereafter), all uncertainty is swept away by the great word, and, subsequently, by the great deed, of our Divine Redeemer. He proclaims Himself here, when standing amid the memorials of death, as “the Resurrection, and the Life.” He proved and substantiated the assertion–first, in a subsidiary way, by the revivifying of His deceased friend; and, afterwards, far more by His own gigantic triumph over Death and Hades, when He came forth from the sepulcher a moral Conqueror. By that rising He has converted the graves of His people into “cemeteries” (sleeping places), “hospices” (houses of peace). The everlasting hills, to every pilgrim, are gilded with the light of un-setting suns. Our “loved and lost” are only lost to be loved again–
“Though down the long, dim avenues of the past
Their swift feet fled,
In His eternity the rooms are vast–
There wait they to be ours at last–
They are not dead!”
Glorious assurance! In Him, my once dying but now ever-living Lord and Head, Death is vanquished and the Grave spoiled. The last enemy only ushers into a blessed continuity of life. Christ, having overcome the sharpness of death, has opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers. A writer narrates that Marcia, a Roman matron, was inconsolable, mourning the irreparable loss of a son of great promise. Seneca, one of the sagest of pagan philosophers, whose counsel she sought, advised her to forget her grief “as the lower creation do.” His panacea was ‘oblivion’. “Go, bury your sorrow.” “Let the dead bury their dead.” Hear Him, who has opened a Hospice at the very mouth of the dark valley, speaking by the lips of His apostle–“But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren,
concerning them which are asleep, that you sorrow not, even as others who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him” (1 Thess. 4:13, 14).
No wonder the first Christians, on the walls of their catacombs, loved to portray the fabled Phoenix, the bird of Immortality, perched on the true Heavenly Palm; and that their loved greeting was not, “The Lord has died,” but, “The Lord has risen.”
“Hallelujah! dry the tear,
‘Jesus Christ is risen!’
Sound o’er every silent coffin–
‘Jesus Christ is risen! ‘Thrice blessed pledge, you mourners, keep,
Who for your loved departed weep,
Because He lives, they only sleep,
Hallelujah!”
May it be your earnest desire now, as risen with Christ, to seek those things that are above, where He sits at the right hand of God, that– “When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall you also appear with Him in glory.”
“This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose.” Isaiah 28:12