'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 shared!
Hallucinations that lasted all through long talks, spread at
intervals over more than a month! Hallucinations that included eating
and drinking, speech and answer; the clasp of the hand and the
feeling of the breath! Hallucinations that brought instruction!
Hallucinations that culminated in the fancy that a gathered multitude
of them saw Him going up into heaven! The hallucination is on the
other side, I think. They have got the saddle on the wrong horse when
they talk about the Apostolic witnesses being the victims of
hallucination. It is the people who believe it possible that they
should be who are so. The old argument against miracles used to say
that it is more consonant with experience that testimony should be
false, than that a miracle should be true. I venture to say it is a
much greater strain on a man's credulity, to believe that _such_
evidence is false than that _such_ a miracle, _so_ attested, is true.
And I, for my part, venture to think that the reasonable men are the
men who listen to these eye-witnesses when they say, 'We saw Him
rise'; and echo back in answer the triumphant certitude, 'Christ is
risen indeed!'
There is another consideration that I might put briefly. A very
valuable way of establishing facts is to point to the existence of
other facts, which indispensably require the previous ones for their
explanation. Let me give you an illustration of what I mean. I
believe in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, amongst other reasons,
because I do not understand how it was possible for the Church to
exist for a week after the Crucifixion, unless Jesus Christ rose
again. Why was it that they did not all scatter? Why was it that the
spirit of despondency and the tendency to separation, which were
beginning to creep over them when they were saying: 'Ah! it is all
up! We _trusted_ that this had been He,' did not go on to their
natural issue? How came it that these people, with their Master taken
away from the midst of them, and the bond of union between them
removed, and all their hopes crushed did not say: 'We have made a
mistake, let us go back to Gennesareth and take to our fishing again,
and try and forget our bright illusions'? That is what John the
Baptist's followers did when he died. Why did not Christ's do the
same? Because Christ rose again and re-knit them together. When the
Shepherd was smitten, the flock would have been scattered, and never
drawn together any more, unless there had been just such a thing as
the Resurrection asserts there was, to reunite the dispersed and to
encourage the depressed. And so I say, Christianity with a _dead_
Christ, and a Church gathered round a grave from which the stone has
_not_ been rolled away, is more unbelievable than the miracle, for it
is an absurdity.
Then there is another thing that I would say in a word. Let me put an
illustration to explain what I mean. Suppose, after the execution of
King Charles I., in some corner of the country a Pretender had sprung
up and said, 'I am the King!' the way to end that would have been for
the Puritan leaders to have taken people to St. George's Chapel, and
said, 'Look! there is the coffin, there is the body, is that the
king, or is it not?' Jesus Christ was said to have risen again,
within a week of the time of His death. The rulers of the nation had
the grave, the watch, the stone, the seal. They could have put an end
to the pestilent nonsense in two minutes, if it had been nonsense, by
the simple process of saying, 'Go and look at the tomb, and you will
see Him there.' But this question has never been answered, and never
will be--What became of that sacred corpse if Jesus Christ did not
rise again from the dead? The clumsy lie that the rulers told, that
the disciples had stolen away the body, was only their acknowledgment
that the grave was empty. If the grave were empty, either His
servants were impostors, which we have seen it is incredible that
they were, or the Christ was risen again.
And so, dear brethren, for many other reasons besides this handful
that I have ventured to gather and put before you, and in spite of
the prejudices of modern theories, I lift up here once more, with
unfaltering certitude, the glad message which I beseech you to
accept: 'Christ is risen, the first fruits of them that slept.'
II. So much, then, for the first point in this passage. A word or two
about the second--the triumph in the certitude of that Resurrection.
As I remarked at a previous point of this discourse, the Apostle has
been speaking about the consequences which would follow from the fact
that Christ was not raised. If we take all these consequences and
reverse them, we get the glad issues of His Resurrection, and
understand why it was that this great burst of triumph comes from the
Apostle's lips. And though I must necessarily treat this part of my
subject very inadequately, let me try to gather together the various
points on which, as I think, our Easter gladness ought to be built.
First, then, I say, the risen Christ gives us a complete Gospel. A
dead Christ annihilates the Gospel. 'If Christ be not risen,' says
the Apostle, 'our preaching,' by which he means not the act but the
substance of his preaching, 'is vain.' Or, as the word might be more
accurately rendered, 'empty.' There is nothing in it; no contents. It
is a blown bladder; nothing in it but wind.
What was Paul's 'preaching'? It all turned upon these points--that
Jesus Christ was the Son of God; that He was Incarnate in the flesh
for us men; that He died on the Cross for our offences; that He was
raised again, and had ascended into Heaven, ruling the world and
breathing His presence into believing hearts; and that He would come
again to be our Judge. These were the elements of what Paul called
'his Gospel.' He faces the supposition of a dead Christ, and he says,
'It is all gone! It is all vanished into thin air. I have nothing to
preach if I have not a Cross to preach which is man's deliverance
from sin, because on it the Son of God hath died, and I only know
that Jesus Christ's sacrifice is accepted and sufficient, because I
have it attested to me in His rising again from the dead.'
Dear brethren, on the fact of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is
suspended everything which makes the Gospel a gospel. Strike that
out, and what have you left? Some beautiful bits of moral teaching, a
lovely life, marred by tremendous mistakes about Himself and His own
importance and His relation to men and to God; but you have got
nothing left that is worth calling a gospel. You have the cross
rising there, gaunt, black, solitary; but, unless on the other side
of the river you have the Resurrection, no bridge will ever be thrown
across the black gulf, and the Cross remains 'dead, being alone.' You
must have a Resurrection to explain the Cross, and then the Life and
the Death tower up into the manifestation of God in the flesh and the
propitiation for our sins. Without it we have nothing to preach which
is worth calling a gospel.
Again, a living Christ gives faith something to lay hold of. The
Apostle here in the context twice says, according to the Authorised
Version, that a dead Christ makes our faith 'vain.' But he really
uses two different words, the former of which is applied to
'preaching,' and means literally 'empty,' while the latter means 'of
none effect' or 'powerless.' So there are two ideas suggested here
which I can only touch with the lightest hand.
The risen Christ puts some contents, so to speak, into my faith; He
gives me something for it to lay hold of.
Who can trust a _dead_ Christ, or who can trust a _human_ Christ?
That would be as much a blasphemy as trusting any other man. It is
only when we recognise Him as declared to be the Son of God, and that
by the Resurrection from the dead, that our faith has anything round
which it can twine, and to which it can cleave. That living Saviour
will stretch out His hand to us if we look to Him, and if I put my
poor, trembling little hand up towards Him, He will bend to me and
clasp it. You cannot exercise faith unless you have a risen Saviour,
and unless you exercise faith in Him your lives are marred and sad.
Again, if Christ be dead, our faith, if it could exist, would be as
devoid of effect as it would be empty of substance. For such a faith
would be like an infant seeking nourishment at a dead mother's
breast, or men trying to kindle their torches at an extinguished
lamp. And chiefly would it fail to bring the first blessing which the
believing soul receives through and from a risen Christ, namely,
deliverance from sin. If He whom we believed to be our sacrifice by
His death and our sanctification by His life has not risen, then, as
we have seen, all which makes His death other than a martyr's
vanishes, and with it vanish forgiveness and purifying. Only when we
recognise that in His Cross explained by His Resurrection, we have
redemption through His blood, even the forgiveness of sins, and by
the communication of the risen life from the risen Lord possess that
new nature which sets us free from the dominion of our evil, is faith
operative in setting us free from our sins.
So, dear friends, the risen Christ gives us something for faith to
lay hold of, and will make it the hand by which we grasp His strong
hand, which lifts us 'out of the horrible pit and the miry clay, and
sets our feet upon a rock.' But if He lie dead in the grave your
faith is vain, because it grasps nothing but a shadow; and it is vain
as being purposeless; you are yet in your sins.
The last thought is that the risen Christ gives us the certitude of
our Resurrection. I do not for a moment mean to say that, apart from
the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the thought, be it a wish or a
dread, of immortality, has not been found in men, but there is all
the difference in the world between forebodings, aspirations, wishes
it were so, fears that it might be so, and the calm certitude that it
is so. Many men talked about a western continent, but Columbus went
there and came back again, and that ended doubt. Many men before, and
apart from Jesus, have cherished thoughts of an immortal life beyond
the grave, but He has been there and returned. And that, and, as I
believe, that only puts the doctrine of immortality upon an
irrefragable foundation; and we can say, 'Now, I know that there is
that land beyond.' They tell us that death ends everything. Modern
materialism, in all its forms, asserts that it is the extinction of
the personality. Jesus Christ died, and went through it, and came out
of it the same, and I will trust Him. Brethren, the set of opinion
amongst the educated and cultured classes in England, and all over
Europe, at this moment, proves to anybody who has eyes to see, that
for this generation, rejection of immortality will follow certainly
on the rejection of Jesus Christ. And for England to-day, as for
Greece when Paul sent his letter to Corinth, the one light of
certitude in the great darkness is the fact that Jesus Christ hath
died, and is risen again.
If you will let Him, He will make you partakers of His own immortal
life. 'The first fruits of them that slept' is the pledge and the
prophecy of all the waving abundance of golden grain that shall be
gathered into the great husbandman's barns. The Apostle goes on to
represent the resurrection of 'them that are Christ's' as a
consequence of their union to Jesus. He has conquered for us all. He
has entered the prison-house and come forth bearing its iron gates on
His shoulders, and henceforth it is not possible that we should be
holden of it. There are two resurrections--one, that of Christ's
servants, one that of others. They are not the same in
principle--and, alas, they are awfully different in issue. 'Some
shall wake to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting
contempt.'
Let me beseech you to make Jesus Christ the life of your dead souls,
by humble, penitent trust in Him. And then, in due time, He will be
the life of your transformed bodies, changing these into the likeness
of the body of His glory, 'according to the working whereby He is
able even to subdue all things unto Himself.'