'God, who is rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved
us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with
Christ.'--Eph. ii. 4, 5.
Scripture paints man as he is, in darker tints, and man as he may
become, in brighter ones, than are elsewhere found. The range of this
portrait painter's palette is from pitchiest black to most dazzling
white, as of snow smitten by sunlight. Nowhere else are there such sad,
stern words about the actualities of human nature; nowhere else such
glowing and wonderful ones about its possibilities. This Physician
knows that He can cure the worst cases, if they will take His medicine,
and is under no temptation to minimise the severity of the symptoms or
the fatality of the disease. We have got both sides in my text; man's
actual condition, 'dead in trespasses'; man's possible condition, and
the actual condition of thousands of men--made to live again in Jesus
Christ, and with Him raised from the dead, and with Him gone up on high,
and with Him sitting at God's right hand. That is what you and I may be
if we will; if we will not, then we must be the other.
So there are three things here to look at for a few moments--the dead
souls; the pitying love that looks down upon them; and the resurrection
of the dead.
I. First, here is a picture, a dogmatic statement if you like, about the
actual condition of human nature apart from Jesus Christ--'Dead in
trespasses.'
The Apostle looks upon the world--many-coloured, full of activity, full
of intellectual stir, full of human emotions, affections, joys, sorrows,
fluctuations--as if it were one great cemetery, and on every gravestone
there were written the same inscription. They all died of the same
disease--'dead _through_ sin,' as the original more properly means.
Now, I dare say many who are listening to me are saying in their hearts,
'Oh! Exaggeration! The old gloomy, narrow view of human nature cropping
up again.' Well, I am not at all unwilling to acknowledge that truths
like this have very often been preached both with a tone and in a manner
that repels, and which is rightly chargeable with exaggeration and undue
gloom and narrowness. But let me remind you that it is not the
Evangelical preacher nor the Apostle only who have to bear the
condemnation of exaggeration, if this representation of my text be not
true to facts, but it is Jesus Christ too; for He says, 'Except ye eat
the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man, ye have no life in
you.' And I think that be He divine or not divine, His words about the
religious condition of men go so surely to the mark that a man must be
tolerably impregnable in his self-conceit who charges _Him_ with
narrowness and exaggeration. At all events, I am content to say after
Him, and I pray that you and I, when we accept Him as our Teacher, may
take not only His gracious, but His stern, words, assured that a deep
graciousness lies in these, too, if we rightly understand them.
Let me remind you that the phrase of my text is by no means confined to
Christian teachers, but that, in common speech, we hear from all high
thinkers about the lower type of humanity being dead to the loftier
thoughts in which they live and move and have their being. It has passed
into a commonplace of language to speak of men being 'dead to honour,'
'dead to shame,' 'dead' to this, that, and the other good and noble and
gracious thing. And the same metaphor, if you like, lies here in my
text--that men who have given their wills and inmost natures over to the
dominion of self--and that is the definition of sin--that such men are,
_ipso facto_, by reason of that very surrender of themselves to their
worst selves, dead on what I may call the top side of their nature, and
that all that is there is atrophied and dwindling away.
Unconsciousness is one characteristic of death. And oh! as I look round
I know that there are tens, and perhaps hundreds, of men and women who
are all but utterly unconscious of a whole universe in which are the
only realities, and to which it becomes them to have access. You live,
in the physical sense, and move and have your being in God, and yet your
inmost life would not be altered one hair's-breadth if there were no God
at all. You pass the most resplendent instances and illustrations of His
presence, His work, and you see nothing. You are blind on that side of
your natures; or, as my text says, dead to the whole spiritual realm.
Just as if there were a brick wall run against some man's windows so
that he could see nothing out of them; so you, by your persistent
adherence to the paltry present, the material, the visible, the selfish,
have reared up a wall against the windows of your souls that look
heavenwards; and of God, and all the lofty starry realities that cluster
round Him, you are as unconscious as the corpse upon its bier is of the
sunshine that plays upon its pallid features, or of the dew that falls
on its stiffened limbs. Dead, because of sin--is that exaggeration? Is
it exaggeration which charges all but absolute unconsciousness of
spiritual realities upon worldly men like some of you?
And, then, take another illustration. Another of the signatures of death
is inactivity. And oh! what faculties in some of my friends listening to
me now are shrivelled and all but extinct! They are dormant, at any
rate, to use another word, for the death of my text is not so absolute a
death but that a resurrection is possible, and so _dormant_ comes to
express pretty nearly the same thing. Faculties of service, of
enthusiasm, of life for God, of noble obedience to Him--what have you
done with them? Left them there until they have stiffened like an unused
lock, or rusted like the hinges of an unopened door; and you are as
little active in all the noblest activities of spirit, which are
activities in submission to and dependence upon Him, as if you were laid
in your coffin with your idle hands crossed for evermore upon an
unheaving breast.
There is another illustration that I may suggest for a moment. Decay is
another characteristic and signature of death. And your best self, in
some of you, is rotting to corruption by sin.
Ay! Dear brethren, when we think of these tragedies of suicide that are
going on in thousands of men round about us to-day, it seems to me as if
the metaphor and the reality were reversed; and instead of saying that
my text is a violent metaphor, transferring the facts of material death
and corruption to the spiritual realm, I am almost disposed to say it is
the other way about, and the real death is the death of the spirit; and
the outer dissolution and unconsciousness and inactivity of the material
body is only a kind of parable to preach to men what are the awful
invisible facts ever associated with the fact of transgression.
There are three lives possible for each of us; two of them involuntary,
the third requiring our consent and effort, but all of them sustained by
the same cause. The first of them is that which we call life, the
activity and the consciousness of the bodily frame; and that continues
as long as the power of God keeps the body in life. When He withdraws
His hand there comes what the senses call death. Then there is the
natural life of thinking, loving, willing, enjoying, sorrowing, and the
like, and that continues as long as He who is the life and light of men
breathes into them the breath of that life. And these two are lived or
died largely without the man's own consent or choice.
But there is a third life, when all that lower is lifted to God, and
thinking and willing and loving and enjoying and aspiring and trusting
and obeying, and all these natural faculties find their home and their
consecration and their immortality in Him. That life is only lived by
our own will and it is the true life, and the others are, as I said, but
parables, and envelopes, and vehicles, as it were, in which this life is
carried, that is more precious than they. In the physical realm,
separate the body from God, and it dies. In the natural conscious life,
separate the soul, as we call it, from God, and it dies. And in the
higher region, separate the spirit, which is the man grasping God, from
God, and he dies; and that is the real death. Both the others are
nothing in comparison with it.
It may co-exist with a large amount of intellectual and other forms of
activity, as we see all round about us, and that makes it only the more
ghastly and the sadder. You are full of energy in regard to all other
subjects, but smitten into torpor about the highest; ready to live, to
work, to enjoy, to think, to will, in all other directions, and utterly
unconscious and unconcerned, or all but utterly unconscious and
unconcerned, in regard to God.
Oh! a death which is co-existent with such feverish intensity of life as
the most of you are expending all the week at your business and your
daily pursuits is among the saddest of all the tragedies that angels are
called upon to weep over, and that men are fools enough to enact.
Brother! If the representation is a gloomy one, do not you think that it
is better to ask the question--Is it a true one? than, Is it a cheerful
one? I lay it upon your hearts that he that lives to God and with God is
alive to the centre as well as out to the finger tips and circumference
of his visible being. He that is dead to God is dead indeed whilst he
lives.
II. Now, notice, in the second place, the pitying love that looks down
on the cemetery.
'God, who is rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us.'
Thus the great truth that is taught us here, first of all, is that that
divine love of the Divine Father bends down over His dead children and
cherishes them still. Oh! you can do much in separating yourselves from
God through selfishness, selfwill, sensuality, or other forms of sin,
but there is one thing you cannot do, you cannot prevent His loving you.
If I might venture without seeming irreverent, I would point to that
pathetic page in the Old Testament history where the king hears of the
death, red-handed in treason, of his darling son, and careless of
victory and forgetful of everything else, and oblivious that Absalom was
a rebel, and only remembering that he was his boy, burst into that
monotonous wail that has come down over all the centuries as the deepest
expression of undying fatherly love. 'Oh! my son Absalom, my son, my son
Absalom! Oh! Absalom, my son, my son!' The name and the relationship
will well up out of the Father's heart, whatever the child's crime. We
are all His Absaloms, and though we are dead in trespasses and in sins,
God, who is rich in mercy, bends over us and loves us with His great
love.
The Apostle might well expatiate in these two varying forms of speech,
both of them intended to express the same thing--'rich in mercy' and
'great in love.' For surely a love which takes account of the sin that
cannot repel it, and so shapes itself into mercy, sparing, and
departing from the strict line of retribution and justice, is great. And
surely a mercy which refuses to be provoked by seventy times seven
transgressions in an hour, not to say a day, is rich. That mercy is
wider than all humanity, deeper than all sin, was before all rebellion,
and will last for ever. And it is open for every soul of man to receive
if he will.
But there is another point to be noticed in reference to this wonderful
manifestation of the divine love looking down upon the myriads of men
dead in sin, and that is that this love shapes the divine action. Mark
the language of our text, in which the Apostle attributes a certain line
of conduct in the divine dealings with us to the fact of His great love.
Because 'He loved us' therefore He did so and so. Now about that I have
only two remarks to make, and I will make them very briefly. The one is,
here is a demonstration, for some of you people who do not believe in
the Evangelical doctrine of an Atonement by the sacrifice of Jesus
Christ, that the true scriptural representation of that doctrine is not
that which caricaturists have represented it--viz. that the sacrifice of
Jesus Christ changed in any manner the divine heart and disposition. It
is not as unfriendly critics (who, perhaps, are not to be so much blamed
for their unfriendliness as for their superficiality) would have us to
believe, that the doctrine of Atonement says that God loves because
Christ died. But the Apostle who preached that doctrine and looked upon
it as the very heart and centre of his message to the world here puts as
the true sequence--Christ died because God loves. Jesus Christ said the
same thing, 'God so loved the world that He sent His Son, that whosoever
believeth on Him should be saved.'
And that brings me to the second of the remarks which I wish briefly to
make--viz. this, that the Divine Love, great, patient, wonderful,
unrepelled by men's sin, as it is, has to adopt a process to reach its
end. God by His love does not, because He cannot, raise these dead souls
into a life of righteousness without Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ
comes to be the channel and the medium through which the love of God may
attain its end. God's pitying love, because 'He is rich in mercy,' is
not turned away by man's sin; and God's pitying love, because 'He is
rich in mercy,' quickens men not by a bare will, but by the mission and
work of His dear Son.
III. And so that is the last thing on which I speak a word--viz. the
resurrection of the dead souls.
They died of sin. That was the disease that killed them. They cannot be
quickened unless the disease be conquered. Dear brethren, I have to
preach--not to argue, but to preach--and to press upon each soul the
individual acceptance of the Death of Jesus Christ as being for each of
us, if we will trust Him, the death of our death, and the death of our
sin. By His great sacrifice and sufficient oblation He has borne the
sins of the world and has taken away their guilt. And in Him the inmost
reality of the spiritual death, and its outermost parable of corporeal
dissolution, are equally and simultaneously overcome. If you will take
Him for your Lord you will rise from the death of guilt, condemnation,
selfishness, and sin into a new life of liberty, sonship, consecration,
and righteousness, and will never see death.
And, on the other hand, the life of Jesus Christ is available for all of
us. If we will put our trust in Him, His life will pass into our
deadness; He Himself will vitalise our being, dormant capacities will
be quickened and brought into blessed activity, a new direction will be
given to the old faculties, desires, aspirations, emotions of our
nature. The will will tower into new power because it obeys. The heart
will throb with a better life because it has grasped a love that cannot
change and will never die. And the thinking power will be brought into
living, personal contact with the personal Truth, so that whatsoever
darknesses and problems may still be left, at the centre there will be
light and satisfaction and peace. You will live if you trust Christ and
let Him be your Life.
And if thus, by simple faith in Him, knowing that the power of His
atoning death has destroyed the burden of our guilt and condemnation,
and knowing the quickening influences of His constraining love as
drawing us to love new things and make us new creatures, we receive into
our inmost spirits 'the law of the spirit of life' which was in Christ
Jesus, and are thereby made 'free from the law of sin and death,' then
it is only a question of time, when the vitalising force shall flow into
all the cracks and crannies of our being and deliver us wholly from the
bondage of corruption in the outer as well as in the inner life; for
they who have learned that Christ is the life of their lives upon earth
can never cease their appropriation of the fulness of His quickening
power until He has 'changed the body of their humiliation into the
likeness of the body of His glory, according to the working whereby He
is able to subdue even all things unto Himself.'
Brethren! He Himself has said, and His words I beseech you to remember
though you forget all mine, 'He that believeth in Me, though he were
dead, yet shall he live, and he that liveth and believeth in Me shall
never die.' 'Believest thou this?'
'THE RICHES OF GRACE'
'That in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His
grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.'--Eph. ii. 7.
One very striking characteristic of this epistle is its frequent
reference to God's purposes, and what, for want of a better word, we
must call His motives, in giving us Jesus Christ. The Apostle seems to
rise even higher than his ordinary height, while he gazes up to the
inaccessible light, and with calm certainty proclaims not only what God
has done, but why He has done it. Through all the earlier portions of
this letter, the things on earth are contemplated in the light of the
things in heaven. The great work of redemption is illuminated by the
thought of the will and meaning of God therein; for example, we read in
Chapter i. that He 'hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in
Christ, according as He hath chosen us in Him,' and immediately after we
read that He 'has predestinated us unto the adoption of children by
Jesus Christ according to the good pleasure of His will.' Soon after, we
hear that 'He hath revealed to us the mystery of His will, according to
His good pleasure which He purposed in Himself'; and that our
predestination to an inheritance in Christ is 'according to the purpose
of Him who worketh all things after the counsel of His own will.'
Not only so, but the motive or reason for the divine action in the gift
of Christ is brought out in a rich variety of expression as being 'the
praise of the glory of His grace' (1-6), or 'that He might gather
together in one all things in Christ' (1-10), or that 'we should be to
the praise of His glory' (1-12), or that 'unto the principalities and
powers in heavenly places might be known by the Church the manifold
wisdom of God.'
In like manner our text follows a sublime statement of what has been
bestowed upon men in Jesus, with an equally sublime insight into the
divine purpose of thereby showing 'the exceeding riches of His grace.'
Such heights are not for our unaided traversing; it is neither reverent
nor safe to speculate, and still less to dogmatise, concerning the
meaning of the divine acts, but here, at all events, we have, as I
believe, not a man making unwarranted assertions about God's purposes,
but God Himself by a man, letting us see so far into the depths of Deity
as to know the very deepest meaning of His very greatest acts, and when
God speaks, it is neither reverent nor safe to refuse to listen.