Only at the Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ Will Redemption be
Complete and the Blood of the Cross be Justified
OUR Lord Jesus Christ did not come into this world that He might go
through the unspeakable horror of the cross; He did not hang on that
brutal and torturing instrument of death as the criminal of the
universe; He did not receive the down sweep of the essential
antagonism of a holy God against the sin He represented; He did not
cry the cry of the lost, "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken
me?"; He was not flung out like a derelict thing into the black,
starless night of God's inexorable law, measureless wrath and
indignation where His humanity unanchored and alone was forsaken
both by God and man; He did not hang there in the torment of His
body, suffering all the agony the most exquisitely wrought, nerve
-centered body of the universe could suffer of physical pain and
anguish; God did not make Him to be sin and treat Him as the
blackest and most repulsive thing in existence; He did not lay upon
Him the weight and demerit of a world's guilt that He might suffer
in His innocence, His purity and innate sinlessness on behalf of the
vilest outcast this side of Gehenna, the lake of fire, just that He
might keep us from lying, cheating, swearing, getting drunk, giving
ourselves up to immorality, licentiousness and sensualism; He did
not send Jesus Christ His only begotten and well-beloved Son to die
a spectacle to heaven, to earth and hell that He might make us
merely decent and right and morally correct in our relations to one
another. All that is involved in the fact of redemption just as
fragrance is involved and included in the rose, as harmony is
expected to be a part of music and rhythm as well as metre a part of
verse and song.
Cleanness and morality are involved quantities in a Christian. The
moment the new life of the risen Christ is wrought in a believer and
he is linked up by the Holy Ghost to the glorified body of the Son
of God he has in him all the impulse and power of the highest
morality, the most exalted purity, the rarest spirituality and the
discernment of spiritual things. All that is self-evident--but the
Son of God came into this world and went through the amazing tragedy
and sacrifice of the cross to do something more than to make us
merely moral and good. He came into the world, He died the
foreordained death of the cross that He might deliver us from death
and the grave.
Death is the blackest and most shameful blot on the face of the
earth, the grave the most repulsive of scandals, drawing the trench
of its corruption and stain round the girdle of the globe.
To bring a human being into the world, give him no choice of father
or mother, of place, of time and circumstance, endow him with a
brain to think, a heart to feel and love and then set him face to
face with death, hide from him the hour of his going like a criminal
who knows not the hour of his execution; to allow the old to live
till they are withered, shrivelled and helpless, a burden to others
and a still greater burden to themselves, cursing the fact they must
live and yet afraid to die; to take a young man in the splendour of
his youth, on the threshold of assured success, snatch him away
without warning from the parents devoted to him, the wife who loves
him and the children dependent on him; and then leave them both, the
decrepit and useless old and the needed young to drop into the
tongueless silence of the grave, that silence broken only by the
sound of the clods as they fall on the coffin lid or the plash of
tears, or the choking sob; to allow the living whose hearts are torn
and twisted and smashed by the robbery that death brings upon them
to stand there and strangle themselves with the unanswered and
unanswerable questions: "Whence," "What," and "Whither," and then
say all this is the work of a good, a compassionate, a tender and
loving God, and that death is as natural as birth?
Nay!
Those who say and teach that death is as natural as birth are guilty
of pure unintellectualism and are unwarranted deniers of the facts.
The birth of a child is like the coming of the dawn. It is like the
note of a new and joyous song. It is the revelation of a new world,
a world of life, of hope, of promised and larger activities. No one
who is sane and true and wise will deliberately seek to hinder
birth; but death! ah! everything is against death and by right
against it.
Every fibre in the body repudiates death. Pain is the protest of
life against it and the scout that brings in news of its approach.
The brain, the mind, the heart shiver at it, not merely because of
the native fear at the unknown, but at the mockery it makes of life,
the uselessness of living a time, at the longest, so brief, so full
of disappointment and bitterness, a life where plans are never
accomplished nor hopes fulfilled, where tears and sorrow outweigh
laughter and song.
Every remedy taken from materia medica, every operation of the
surgeon's knife that adds even a day to the sufferer's existence,
every hospital, every precaution and invention to prevent accident,
all the genius exercised by man to conserve health and strength are
a protest against death and a proclamation that it is unnatural, a
discord and a wrong.
Every human being who has the slightest pulse of sentiment, who is
not sunken in the soddenness of moral unconsciousness feels that
death is the shadow shutting out the sun of day and hiding the stars
of night, the false note that breaks the lilt in any song, the thief
who takes the treasure no money can replace, the mocker who bids us
readjust our days and live as though those whom we have loved and
lost had never been a part of us, so that their going has put more
of death in those of us who remain to live than life--even the brute
beast feels and knows death is--an enemy.
Nor does God Himself leave us in any doubt about it.
He says death is an enemy; even as it is written:
"The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death."
And since in itself it is an enemy, it is, necessarily, the work of
an enemy.
It is the work of an enemy who has the power of death.
He who has the power of death is--the Devil; even as it is written:
"Him that had the power of death, that is, the devil."
The Son of God came into the world that He might destroy the Devil
and his work of death.
He came to abolish death and bring life and immortality to light.
He came to make us something more than--just moral.
He came to make us--immortal.
There is only one man in the universe who has immortality; and that
man is He who is our Lord Jesus Christ, very God and yet true and
actual man.
There is not an immortal human being on earth to-day.
There is no such thing as an immortal soul.
But here I bid you halt!
Let no one take up this statement and go hence and say I teach the
final annihilation of the soul.
He who should go forth and say that would be, after what I shall
further tell you, a robber of truth and character.
On this round earth at this hour there is no man who has spoken
more, written more and, under God, done more to rebuke and smite
this slavering, slobbering, unintellectual and Devil-inspired
deception known as Russellism, Christadelphianism and Seventh Day
Adventism than the man who now speaks to you.
I affirm here that by the will of God the soul must exist forever
whether it be in heaven or in hell; but, I say to you the preacher
who seeks to deny and overthrow the doctrine of annihilation by
defending the immortality of the soul is beaten before he begins. He
has his pains for his labour. He can find no such expression as
"immortal soul" in the Bible nor any such doctrine taught there.
Above all, he is guilty of excuseless philological blundering. The
soul is immaterial. Immortal is applied to that which is material.
The words, "immortal," and "immortality" are never applied in the
New Testament to the soul--never! but always and exclusively to the
body.
To be immortal means to have a deathless, incorruptible body like
unto that of the Son of God.
This, and this alone--as related to man--is Scriptural immortality.
The Son of God came into the world to give this boon of immortality
to men.
This is the supreme objective of redemption.
Till that objective is obtained redemption is not complete and the
blood of the cross is not justified.
Do you call the redemption of Paul complete so long as his body lies
mingled with the dust of the highway by the banks of that yellow
Tiber where he was slain?
Do you call complete the redemption of those you love and I love so
long as the Devil like the strong man armed with the law holds the
mortgage on their bodies and keeps them in his dark and worm-filled
house--the grave?
It is true, blessedly true, thank God, the moment a believer dies he
is absent from his home in the body and immediately present at his
home with the Lord in the third heaven, in the beautiful country of
Paradise, in the Holy City, the place prepared.
It is true the dear departed ones are clothed with the white robe of
immaculate light woven on the unjarring looms of heaven, a temporary
clothing which preserves their form and makes them visible and
recognizable to one another; but with it all they are disembodied,
and in spite of the comfort and the consolation of it, in spite of
the fact that their state is "far better" than this at its best,
still they are souls whose vehicle is no longer body, but spirit
(wherefore after death they are sometimes spoken of as spirits);
nevertheless, the Son of God did not come to make us eternal, even
if happy--ghosts.
If Christians should continue to die and should remain as white
clothed ghosts in heaven forever they would be an incongruous
environment and abiding scandal to the immortality of the Son of God
Himself. A living, immortal man shining in a glorified human body
surrounded by bodiless souls forever! What a contradiction that
would be, what a scandal, indeed. It would be the declaration that
the Son of God had power to rise from the dead, make His own body
immortal, impervious to death, but in respect to those for whom He
died and who died trusting in His promise He either did not have the
power or did not care to keep His promise.
Such a conclusion in either member of the proposition is impossible.
It is impossible, for no such postulate as inability or
faithlessness can be laid against the Son of God.
By His own immortality as the first-fruits of them that slept, as
the ordained forerunner and sample of all those whom He has redeemed
He is, and in the nature of things, under bonds to give immortality
to each, to raise the dead and transfigure the living in His
likeness.
As the dead can be raised and the living changed only when He is
personally present then He must come to this world again to give
that immortality of which seated on yonder throne in heaven He is
the promise and the pledge.
He made this promise by the grave of Lazarus.
Standing there with His cheeks wet with tears of sorrow over the one
He loved and in profound sympathy with the grief-stricken sisters,
groaning in Himself, not merely as one who was under the spell of
sorrow and heartache, but full of "indignant protest" (this is the
meaning of the word "to groan") against the havoc of death as the
work of that being whom we so familiarly call "Devil," without
stopping to measure his dignity, malignity and power, He said:
"I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me, though
he were dead, yet shall he live: