02.02. Life and Immortality Brought to Light

LIFE AND IMMORTALITY BROUGHT TO LIGHT.

We have just seen how feeble and glimmering was the light of eternal hope in the pre-Christian world; too faint and uncertain to be a strong power and consolation when the great horror of darkness came down upon the dying soul. Men might submit themselves to the inevitable decree with philosophic resignation, but there was no glorious hope in death. The sublimest height of the old-world faith was reached when the Psalmist could exclaim, "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil." There was no voice in all the ancient world except that of a, prophet who caught a glimpse of a brighter morning and put in words the hope of a better age, which could cry in triumphant exultation, "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory now?"

It was a new era which dawned upon the world’s hopes when the Man of Calvary entered upon his work. A new key-note is at once discovered in history, when we open the pages of the New Testament. "He hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel." From some cause, the old fears have passed away, and the world is stepping to the music inspired by a new hope. The first martyr of the church, in the crisis of his fate, has a vision of the opened heavens and the Risen Lord, and dies with prayers upon his lips for his murderers. The mightiest apostle of the new religion, in the midst of a life of "weariness and painfulness," of want, suffering and ceaseless persecution and peril of death, could exclaim: "Our light affliction which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. . . . For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." And when his weary course was run to the end, out of the depths of his Roman prison he could look serenely at the scaffold and the headman’s axe prepared for him, and speak with radiant hope of the "crown of righteousness" which would soon, rest upon his immortal brow. If I had to choose a single sentence which would compress within its limits the attitude of the new dispensation with reference to death and a future life, it would be that of the voice from heaven, "Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors, and their works do follow them." From that time onward saints could be found who cheerfully accepted the crown of martyrdom, and rejoiced that they were counted worthy to suffer somewhat for a Savior who had filled their souls with glorious hope. Nor is it difficult to account for this blessed hope which had been begotten in human hearts. The one all-sufficient explanation is the gospel of Jesus Christ. The world had other great religious teachers before the Man of Nazareth, such as Moses, Buddha, Zoroaster and Confucius, but never had a teacher, Jew or Gentile, inspired or uninspired, appeared upon the earth who had dared to take upon his lips other than the timid, hesitating, lisping words of mortal man. It was a new era when one in the flesh, as the Son of Man, could declare in language only fitting for Divine lips, "I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE." Never before had there been One walking among mortals who could claim the high prerogative of holding the keys of death and Hades, and the power to deliver man from their dominion. Never before had prophet or sage spoken such mighty words as, "The hour is coming in which all that are in their graves shall hear the voice of the Son of Man, and shall come forth; they that have done good, to the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil, to the resurrection of damnation;" "He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and he that liveth and believeth in me shall never die;" "I am the Bread of Life;" "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life;" "Hereafter shall ye see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven."

Such Godlike words might possibly have been held to be the wild ravings of a crazy enthusiast had they not been spoken by one who was Godlike in every feature, in life, in teachings, in death, and in the mighty transforming power he has wrought in the history of our race. "Never did man speak like this man." "He speaks as one who has authority, not as the scribes." Never has the earth seen a teacher of such equipoise, seemingly such a master of every subject; never at a loss, never confused, never mistaken, apparently in possession of the keys of all knowledge, and familiar with every mystery. "In him was no darkness at all," and to him all, whether past, present or future, in this world or the world to come, was clear as the sunlight of heaven. It would be utterly impossible that a character so peerless in the judgment of all the world, unbelieving as well as believing, should speak wild and foolish words on the subject of death and future existence. It is contrary to all the probabilities that one who had analyzed the human heart and life as had never been done before by mortal man, one who has been demonstrated by the wisdom and experience of eighteen centuries, to have spoken calm, deliberate, unerring truth on ninety-nine subjects out of the hundred, should have indulged in idle, vain, blasphemous and false boastings on the hundredth theme. Is it conceivable that the lips, which the universal judgment of man declares to be the lips of embodied truth, were defiled by falsehood when they declared to man the words of Eternal Hope!

There is another aspect in which Christ and the Gospel differ from all other teachers and their systems. There has been no founder of any other religion who, while still a living teacher, staked his religion upon his triumph over death, and from whose tomb a church sprang into existence, and into power, buoyant with the hope of immortality demonstrated by his own resurrection from the dead. Judaism left Moses sleeping in the lonely sepulcher of Mount Nebo. No Chinese or Buddhist Bible tells how the stone was rolled away from the sepulcher of Confucius or Gautama, and how they rose again to cheer their despairing disciples by their presence and by the promise of a like victory over the grave. As far as the dim legends of Zoroaster tell us, when he died he went to the same "towers of silence" as all his followers. The Mohammedan, borrowing a hope from Christianity, believes that his Prophet is in Paradise, but has never dared to affirm that he has been seen by mortal vision since his body was placed in the tomb at Mecca. And in more recent times, though Mormonism adores the murdered Joseph Smith as a saint, a prophet and a martyr, as well as the founder of their faith, they have never risked the proclamation of his resurrection from the dead. In contrast with all other religions of humanity, Christianity bounded into existence big with the hope of immortality, and pointed to the empty tomb and to the Risen Lord as the demonstration of its hope. Peter, a craven while his Lord was in the hands of his enemies, has now been transformed by some new element into a hero, and fifty days after the tragedy of the cross, declares to the men who had crucified his Master, "Him . . whom ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain, God hath raised up. . . . Whereof we all are witnesses;" and the Twelve who fled in terror when their leader was seized, "all witness with great power of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus." The burden of every sermon was the resurrection of the Savior, and eternal life. So it was in the first sermon; so it was again in the discourse at the Beautiful Gate. The one thing that turned upon the church the rage of the Sadducean rulers was that "they were grieved that the apostles taught the people, and preached through Jesus the resurrection from the dead." Indeed, the gospel, which in its mighty workings wrought out a church whose progress could not be stayed by sword or fagot, or by all the might of Sanhedrim or Cæsar, was the gospel of a Risen Lord. That was the "old Jerusalem gospel," and it was no less the gospel which wrought out the transformation of the Gentile world. "I delivered unto you," writes the greatest of the apostles to a Gentile church which he had founded, "first of all that which I also received, 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." The faith of Christianity that "Christ is the Resurrection and the Life, and that he rose from the tomb as the first fruits of them that slept," is a full explanation of the new hope, joy and inspiration which came into human life from the tomb of our Lord.