(_a_) _By His teaching_.--Two things about mankind Christ took for
granted--sinfulness and immortality. He did not argue about this life
beyond; He took it for granted. No part of His teaching is explicable
on the supposition that all ends at the tomb. His basis for our
immortality is not our instinct but the character of God. On the bosom
of God's Fatherhood rests man's immortality. If God is our Father and
loves us as His children, then we are His and He is ours _forever_.
Death cannot break this tie of life and love which binds us to Him; it
cannot rob Him of His child. That God cannot be the God of the dead,
but of the living, is axiomatic. His personal relations are real and
are eternal.
The Christian faith is sufficient to give us certainty and comfort
concerning our departed. We are assured that the blessed dead are in
His safe keeping and through Him we are one with them in a union which
will one day be consummated in everlasting reunion and communion. Our
Christian watchwords are enough--"love in absence, trust in silence,
faith in reunion."
(_b_) _By His Life_.--To the eye that can see, His life is the supreme
argument for immortality. He lived such a life of fellowship with God
and so near to the frontier of eternity that the glory of it shone upon
and from His face. The longing for a life higher than the life of time
is answered in His life. Such a life could not be holden by death. It
is eternal. It has the quality now and always of everlastingness.
(_c_) _By His Resurrection_.--He confirmed the truth of what He taught,
and lived, by what He did. He rose again, transformed, not merely
resuscitated. He irradiated the spiritual land. It is no longer "an
undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns." The
empty tomb, the cumulative evidence of independent witnesses, the
transformation in the lives of believers, the institutions of the
Christian Church, its continued existence, the personal experience of
the power of a rising life in individual Christians throughout the ages
to the present time--are the attestations of the truth of the
Resurrection. The Christian Church is built and still rests on the
fact, luminous and sovereign, that Christ rose from the grave in
fulness and newness of power. To the life beyond, Christ's
resurrection gives reality and humanity and assurance. It confirmed
men's subjective aspirations, it changed them into "things most surely
believed." It makes every Christian certain of a higher life beyond
the grave.
2. Christ has _enriched_ the whole conception of immortality. In the
ancient, as in the savage world to-day, immortality or the continued
duration of life, was a dreary prospect, a sense of desolation rather
than a source of joy, an impoverishment of life, not an enrichment of
it; its scene was a shadowy realm of silence, where there is no voice
of praise nor human warmth and cheer. In some passages in the Old
Testament we find a loftier and clearer utterance. Through his faith
in God, Job reached the idea that death may not be the final word. The
righteous God would not abandon a righteous man. In revealed religion
this faith in a life beyond the grave rested not on any conceptions of
man's nature, but on the character of God, the Eternal Righteousness.
If he has called men into fellowship with Him, His faith is pledged to
them. The Psalmists won their sense of eternal security through their
present fellowship with God. Along this line of religious experience
of a living, holy and gracious God, the true hope of immortality
entered the world. Just as union with God guaranteed to the Psalmist a
life that would never end, so union with the Risen Saviour guarantees
to the Christian triumph over death. Christ has filled this elementary
thought of continued existence with moral content, because He has based
it on a true conception of God. The Christian hope is not merely
"immortality of the soul" but eternal life; and eternal life is not
merely an infinite prolongation of existence in a future state of
being; but is life at its highest and best, the life of fellowship, of
vision, of growing likeness to God, of ample service. It is life in
Christ. It is being with Christ, which is very far better than earthly
life at its worthiest. It is not the mere translation, but the
transformation of earthly values. This faith in immortality is moral
and spiritual; it implies enriched and elevated being, as worthy and
glorious as it is endless.
3.--Christ has so increased the _power_ of immortality, of the
Christian Hope, as almost to make it for the first time effective as a
source of courage, hope and consolation. He has turned the hope of
immortality into the Power of His Resurrection. All hopes exercise
some influence on those who hold them; yet apart from Christ the hope
of immortality has been less effective than we might expect. By His
Resurrection Christ has raised this yearning hope into a mighty present
power brought to bear on humanity. The Christian hope of immortality,
certain and rich in the possession of abundant life, gives breadth and
outlook to all human efforts. It inspires duty. Brought to bear on
our work, it makes effort worth while. If all we have striven to do
and yet failed to do is to be perfected in the eternal morning, we can
face our tasks with fresh courage. All social reconstructions that
deny or neglect the Christian thought of an endless life fail here.
Their scope is too limited; their outlook too narrow. The Christian
hope brings the power of endurance and victory to sorrowing hearts.
Death is not a leap in the dark, but the passing into a larger,
brighter room in the House of the One Father. In short, when this hope
of immortality is tested by life, it is verified by the loftiness of
the character it builds.
The rising life is the present demonstration of the risen life. All
low, worldly, unspiritual living tends to doubt in it. If we would
escape from doubt about the future, let us through the Living Christ
make life larger now. If we would overcome weakening uncertainty, let
us daily practice immortality. If we set our affections on things
above, our rising life will assure us that we shall live forever. One
of Gladstone's great exhortations was: "Be inspired with the belief
that life is a great and noble calling; not a mean and grovelling
thing, that we are to shuffle through as we can, but an elevated and
lofty destiny." This belief is created and can be maintained only by
viewing life in relation to God and immortality.
Every man should therefore put the question to himself: "If _I_ die,
shall I live again?" "What kind of life am I living now? Is it life
eternal, or life merely temporal? Is it a friendship with God which
death can never extinguish?" Only One Life has ever won open victory
over death. Only one kind of life ever can win it--that kind of life
which was in Christ, which _is_ in Christ, which He shares with all
whom faith makes one with Him.
"In the midst of life we are in death" such is the cry of bereaved and
dying humanity. But in Christ we are able to say: "in the midst of
death, we are in life." "God has given us eternal life, and that life
is in His Son." Can death touch that life? Never.