conqueror. A Christian in full possession of his privileges is a man
whose very step ought to have in it all the elasticity of triumph, and
whose very look ought to have in it all the brightness of victory. And
just so far as a Christian suffers sin to struggle in him and overcome
his resolutions, just so far he is under the law. And that is the key
to the whole doctrine of the New Testament. From first to last the
great truth put forward is--The law can neither save you nor sanctify
you. The gospel can do both; for it is rightly and emphatically called
the perfect law of liberty.
We proceed to-day to a further illustration of this subject--of
Christian victory. In the verses which I have read out, the Apostle
has evidently the same subject in his mind: slavery through the law:
victory through the gospel. "The strength of sin," he says, "is the
law." God giveth us the victory through Christ. And when we are
familiar with St. Paul's trains of thinking, we find this idea coming
in perpetually. It runs like a coloured thread through embroidery,
appearing on the upper surface every now and then in a different
shape--a leaf, it may be, or a flower; but the same thread still, if
you only trace it back with your finger. And this was the golden
recurring thread in the mind of Paul. Restraint and law cannot check
sin; they only gall it and make it struggle and rebel. The love of God
in Christ, that, and only that can give man the victory.
But in this passage the idea of victory is brought to bear upon the
most terrible of all a Christian's enemies. It is faith here
conquering in death. And the apostle brings together all the
believer's antagonists--the law's power, sin, and death the chief
antagonist of all; and then, as it were on a conqueror's battle field,
shouts over them the hymn of triumph--"Thanks be to God, which giveth
us the victory, through our Lord Jesus Christ." We shall take up these
two points to dwell upon.
I. The awfulness which hangs round the dying hour.
II. Faith conquering in death.
That which makes it peculiarly terrible to die is asserted in this
passage to be, guilt. We lay a stress upon this expression--the sting.
It is not said that sin is the only bitterness, but it is the sting
which contains in it the venom of a most exquisite torture. And in
truth brethren, it is no mark of courage to speak lightly of human
dying. We may do it in bravado, or in wantonness; but no man who
thinks can call it a trifling thing to die. True thoughtfulness must
shrink from death without Christ. There is a world of untold
sensations crowded into that moment, when a man puts his hand to his
forehead and feels the damp upon it which tells him his hour is come.
He has been waiting for death all his life, and now it is come. It is
all over--his chance is past, and his eternity is settled. None of us
know, except by guess, what that sensation is. Myriads of human beings
have felt it to whom life was dear; but they never spoke out their
feelings, for such things are untold. And to every individual man
throughout all eternity that sensation in its fulness can come but
once. It is mockery brethren, for a man to speak lightly of that which
he cannot know till it comes.
Now the first cause which makes it a solemn thing to die, is the
instinctive cleaving of every thing that lives to its own existence.
That unutterable thing which we call our being--the idea of parting
with it is agony. It is the first and the intensest desire of living
things, to be. Enjoyment, blessedness, everything we long for, is
wrapped up in being. Darkness and all that the spirit recoils from, is
contained in this idea, not to be. It is in virtue of this
unquenchable impulse that the world, in spite of all the misery that
is in it, continues to struggle on. What are war, and trade, and
labour, and professions? Are they all the result of struggling to be
great? No, my brethren, they are the result of struggling _to be_. The
first thing that men and nations labour for is existence. Reduce the
nation or the man to their last resources, and only see what
marvellous energy of contrivance the love of being arms them with.
Read back the pauper's history at the end of seventy years--his
strange sad history, in which scarcely a single day could ensure
subsistence for the morrow--and yet learn what he has done these long
years in the stern struggle with impossibility to hold his being where
everything is against him, and to keep an existence, whose only
conceivable charm is this, that it _is_ existence.
Now it is with this intense passion for being, that the idea of death
clashes. Let us search why it is we shrink from death. This reason
brethren, we shall find, that it presents to us the idea of _not
being_. Talk as we will of immortality, there is an obstinate feeling
that we cannot master, that we end in death; and _that_ may be felt
together with the firmest belief of a resurrection. Brethren, our
faith tells us one thing, and our sensations tell us another. When we
die, we are surrendering in truth all that with which we have
associated existence. All that we know of life is connected with a
shape, a form, a body of materialism; and now that that is palpably
melting away into nothingness, the boldest heart may be excused a
shudder, when there is forced upon it, in spite of itself, the idea of
ceasing for ever.
The second reason is not one of imagination at all, but most sober
reality. It is a solemn thing to die, because it is the parting with
all round which the heart's best affections have twined themselves.
There are some men who have not the capacity for keen enjoyment. Their
affections have nothing in them of intensity, and so they pass through
life without ever so uniting themselves with what they meet, that
there would be anything of pain in the severance. Of course, with them
the bitterness of death does not attach so much to the idea of
parting. But my brethren, how is it with human nature generally? Our
feelings do not weaken as we go on in life; emotions are less shown,
and we get a command over our features and our expressions; but the
man's feelings are deeper than the boy's. It is length of time that
makes attachment. We become wedded to the sights and sounds of this
lovely world more closely as years go on.
Young men, with nothing rooted deep, are prodigal of life. It is an
adventure to them, rather than a misfortune, to leave their country
for ever. With the old man it is like tearing his own heart from him.
And so it was that when Lot quitted Sodom, the younger members of his
family went on gladly. It is a touching truth; it was the aged one who
looked behind to the home which had so many recollections connected
with it. And therefore it is, that when men approach that period of
existence when they must go, there is an instinctive lingering over
things which they shall never see again. Every time the sun sets,
every time the old man sees his children gathering round him, there is
a filling of the eye with an emotion that we can understand. There is
upon his soul the thought of parting, that strange wrench from all we
love which makes death (say what moralists will of it) a bitter thing.
Another pang which belongs to death, we find in the sensation of
loneliness which attaches to it. Have we ever seen a ship preparing to
sail with its load of pauper emigrants to a distant colony? If we have
we know what that desolation is which comes from feeling unfriended on
a new and untried excursion. All beyond the seas, to the ignorant poor
man, is a strange land. They are going away from the helps and the
friendships and the companionships of life, scarcely knowing what is
before them. And it is in such a moment, when a man stands upon a
deck, taking his last look of his fatherland, that there comes upon
him a sensation new, strange, and inexpressibly miserable--the feeling
of being alone in the world.
Brethren, with all the bitterness of such a moment, it is but a feeble
image when placed by the side of the loneliness of death. We die
alone. We go on our dark mysterious journey for the first time in all
our existence, without one to accompany us. Friends are beside our
bed, they must stay behind. Grant that a Christian has something like
familiarity with the Most High, _that_ breaks this solitary feeling;
but what is it with the mass of men? It is a question full of
loneliness to them. What is it they are to see? What are they to meet?
Is it not true, that, to the larger number of this congregation, there
is no one point in all eternity on which the eye can fix distinctly
and rest gladly--nothing beyond the grave, except a dark space into
which they must plunge alone?
And yet my brethren, with all these ideas no doubt vividly before his
mind, it was none of them that the apostle selected as the crowning
bitterness of dying. It was not the thought of surrendering existence.
It was not the parting from all bright and lovely things. It was not
the shudder of sinking into the sepulchre alone. "The sting of death
is _sin_."
Now there are two ways in which this deep truth applies itself. There
is something that appals in death when there are distinct separate
acts of guilt resting on the memory; and there is something too in the
possession of a guilty heart, which is quite another thing from acts
of sin, that makes it an awful thing to die. There are some who carry
about with them the dreadful secret of sin that has been done; guilt
that has a name. A man has injured some one; he has made money, or got
on by unfair means; he has been unchaste; he has done some of those
thousand things of life which leave upon the heart the dark spot that
will not come out. All these are sins which you can count up and
number. And the recollection of things like these is that agony which
we call remorse. Many of us have remembrances of this kind which are
fatal to serenity. We shut them out, but it will not do. They bide
their time, and then suddenly present themselves, together with the
thought of a judgment-seat. When a guilty man begins to think of
dying, it is like a vision of the Son of Man presenting itself and
calling out the voices of all the unclean spirits in the man--"Art
thou come to torment us before the time?"
But my brethren, it is a mistake if we suppose that is the common way
in which sin stings at the thought of death. Men who have lived the
career of passionate life have distinct and accumulated acts of guilt
before their eyes. But with most men it is not guilty acts, but
guiltiness of heart that weighs the heaviest. Only take yesterday as a
specimen of life. What was it with most of us? A day of sin. Was it
sin palpable and dark, such as we shall remember painfully this day
year? Nay my brethren, unkindness, petulance, wasted time,
opportunities lost, frivolous conversation, _that_ was our chief
guilt. And yet with all that trifling as it may be, when it comes to
be the history of life, does it not leave behind a restless
undefinable sense of fault, a vague idea of debt, but to what extent
we know not, perhaps the more wretched just because it is uncertain?
My Christian brethren, this is the sting of sinfulness, the wretched
consciousness of an unclean heart. It is just this feeling, "God is
not my friend; I am going on to the grave, and no _man_ can say aught
against me, but my heart is not right; I want a river like that which
the ancients fabled--the river of forgetfulness--that I might go down
into it and bathe, and come up a new man. It is not so much what I
have done; it is what I am. Who shall save me from myself?" Oh, it is
a desolate thing to think of the coffin when that thought is in all
its misery before the soul. It is the sting of death.
And now let us bear one thing in mind, the sting of sin is not a
constant pressure. It may be that we live many years in the world
before a death in our own family forces the thought personally home.
Many years before all those sensations which are so often the
precursors of the tomb--the quick short cough, lassitude, emaciation,
pain--come in startling suddenness upon us in our young vigour, and
make us feel what it is to be here with death inevitable to ourselves.
And when those things become habitual, habit makes delicacy the same
forgetful thing as health, so that neither in sickness, nor in health,
is the thought of death a constant pressure. It is only now and then;
but so often as death is a reality, the sting of death is sin.
Once more we remark, that all this power of sin to agonize, is traced
by the Apostle to the law--"the strength of sin is the law;" by which
he means to say that sin would not be so violent if it were not for
the attempt of God's law to restrain it. It is the law which makes sin
strong. And he does not mean particularly the law of Moses. He means
any law, and all law. Law is what forbids and threatens; law bears
gallingly on those who want to break it. And St. Paul declares this,
that no law, not even God's law, can make men righteous in heart,
unless the Spirit has taught men's hearts to acquiesce in the law. It
can only force out into rebellion the sin that is in them.
It is so, brethren, with a nation's law. The voice of the nation must
go along with it. It must be the expression of their own feeling, and
then they will have it obeyed. But if it is only the law of a
government, a law which is against the whole spirit of the people,
there is first the murmur of a nation's disapprobation, and then there
is transgression, and then, if the law be vindicated with a high hand,
the next step is the bursting that law asunder in national revolution.
And so it is with God's law. It will never control a man long who does
not from his heart love it. First comes a sensation of restraint, and
then comes a murmuring of the heart; and last, there comes the rising
of passion in its giant might, made desperate by restraint. That is
the law giving strength to sin.
And therefore brethren, if all we know of God be this, that He has
made laws, and that it is terrible to break them; if all our idea of
religion be this, that it is a thing of commands and hindrances--Thou
shalt, and thou shalt not; we are under the law, and there is no help
for it. We _must_ shrink from the encounter with death.
We pass to our second subject--Faith conquering in death.
And, before we enter upon this topic, there are two general remarks
that we have to make. The first is, The elevating power of faith.
There is nothing in all this world that ever led man on to real
victory but faith. Faith is that looking forward to a future with
something like certainty, that raises man above the narrow feelings of
the present. Even in this life he is a greater man, a man of more
elevated character, who is steadily pursuing a plan that requires some
years to accomplish, than he who is living by the day. Look forward
but ten years, and plan for it, live for it; there is something of
manhood, something of courage required to conquer the thousand things
that stand in your way. And therefore it is, that faith, and nothing
but faith, gives victory in death. It is that elevation of character
which we get from looking steadily and for ever forward, till eternity
becomes a real home to us, that enables us to look down upon the last
struggle, and the funeral, and the grave, not as the great end of all,
but only as something that stands between us and the end. We are
conquerors of death when we are able to look beyond it.
Our second remark is for the purpose of fixing special attention upon
this, that ours is not merely to be victory, it is to be victory
through Christ "Thanks be to God which giveth us the victory through
our Lord Jesus Christ." Victory brethren, mere victory over death is
no unearthly thing. You may get it by infidelity. Only let a man sin
long enough, and desperately enough to shut judgment altogether out of
his creed, and then you have a man who can bid defiance to the grave.
It was so that our country's greatest infidel historian met death. He
quitted the world without parade and without display. If we want a
specimen of victory apart from Christ, we have it on his death-bed. He
left all this strange world of restlessness, calmly, like an unreal
show that must go to pieces, and he himself an unreality departing
from it. A sceptic can be a conqueror in death.
Or again, mere manhood may give us a victory. He who has only learned
not to be afraid to die, has not learned much. We have steel and nerve
enough in our hearts to dare anything. And after all, it is a triumph
so common as scarcely to deserve the name. Felons die on the scaffold
like men; soldiers can be hired by tens of thousands, for a few pence
a day, to front death in its worst form. Every minute that we live
sixty of the human race are passing away, and the greater part with
courage--the weak, and the timid, as well as the resolute. Courage is
a very different thing from the Christian's victory.
Once more brethren, necessity can make man conqueror over death. We
can make up our minds to anything when it once becomes inevitable. It
is the agony of suspense that makes danger dreadful. History can tell
us that men can look with desperate calmness upon hell itself when
once it has become a certainty. And it is this after all, that
commonly makes the dying hour so quiet a thing. It is more dreadful in
the distance than in the reality. When a man feels that there is no
help, and he must go, he lays him down to die, as quietly as a tired
traveller wraps himself in his cloak to sleep. It is quite another
thing from all this that Paul meant by victory.
In the first place, it is the prerogative of a Christian to be
conqueror over Doubt. Brethren, do we all know what doubt means?
Perchance not. There are some men who have never believed enough to
doubt. There are some who have never thrown their hopes with such
earnestness on the world to come, as to feel anxiety for fear it
should not all be true. But every one who knows what Faith is, knows
too, what is the desolation of Doubt. We pray till we begin to ask, Is
there one who hears, or am I whispering to myself?--We hear the
consolation administered to the bereaved, and we see the coffin
lowered into the grave, and the thought comes, What if all this
doctrine of a life to come be but the dream of man's imaginative mind,
carried on from age to age, and so believed, because it is a venerable
superstition? Mow Christ gives us victory over that terrible suspicion
in two ways--first, He does it by His own resurrection. We have got a
fact there that all the metaphysics about impossibility cannot rob us
of. In moments of perplexity we look back to this. The grave has once,
and more than once, at the Redeemer's bidding, given up its dead. It
is a world fact. It tells us what the Bible means by our
resurrection--not a spiritual rising into new holiness merely--that,
but also something more. It means that in our own proper identity, we
shall live again. Make that thought real, and God has given you, so
far, victory over the grave through Christ.
There is another way in which we get the victory over doubt, and that
is by living in Christ. All doubt comes from living out of habits of
affectionate obedience to God. By idleness, by neglected prayer, we
lose our power of realizing things not seen. Let a man be religious
and irreligious at intervals--irregular, inconsistent, without some
distinct thing to live for--it is a matter of impossibility that he
can be free from doubts. He must make up his mind for a dark life.
Doubts can only be dispelled by that kind of active life that realizes
Christ. And there is no faith that gives a victory so steadily
triumphant as that. When such a man comes near the opening of the
vault, it is no world of sorrows he is entering upon. He is only going
to see things that he has felt, for he has been living in heaven. He
has his grasp on things that other men are only groping after and
touching now and then. Live above this world, Brethren, and then the
powers of the world to come are so upon you that there is no room for
doubt.
Besides all this, it is a Christian's privilege to have victory over
the fear of death. And here it is exceedingly easy to paint what after
all is only the image-picture of a dying hour. It is the easiest thing
to represent the dying Christian as a man who always sinks into the
grave full of hope, full of triumph, in the certain hope of a blessed
resurrection. Brethren, we must paint things in the sober colours of
truth; not as they might be supposed to be, but as they are. Often
that is only a picture. Either very few death-beds are Christian ones,
or else triumph is a very different thing from what the word generally
implies. Solemn, subdued, full of awe and full of solemnity, is the
dying hour generally of the holiest men: sometimes almost
darkness.--Rapture is a rare thing, except in books and scenes.
Let us understand what really is the victory over fear. It may be
rapture or it may not. All that depends very much on temperament; and
after all, the broken words of a dying man are a very poor index of
his real state before God. Rapturous hope has been granted to martyrs
in peculiar moments. It is on record of a minister of our own Church,
that his expectation of seeing God in Christ became so intense as his
last hour drew near, that his physician was compelled to bid him calm
his transports, because in so excited a state he could not die. A
strange unnatural energy was imparted to his muscular frame by his
nerves overstrung with triumph. But brethren, it fosters a dangerous
feeling to take cases like those as precedents. It leads to that most
terrible of all unrealities--the acting of a death-bed scene. A
Christian conqueror dies calmly. Brave men in battle do not boast that
they are not afraid. Courage is so natural to them that they are not
conscious they are doing anything out of the common way--Christian
bravery is a deep, calm thing, unconscious of itself. There are more
triumphant death-beds than we count, if we only remember this--true
fearlessness makes no parade.
Oh, it is not only in those passionate effusions in which the ancient
martyrs spoke sometimes of panting for the crushing of their limbs by
the lions in the amphitheatre, or of holding out their arms to embrace
the flames that were to curl round them--it is not then only that
Christ has stood by His servants, and made them more than
conquerors:--there may be something of earthly excitement in all that.
Every day His servants are dying modestly and peacefully--not a word
of victory on their lips; but Christ's deep triumph in their
hearts--watching the slow progress of their own decay, and yet so far
emancipated from personal anxiety that they are still able to think
and to plan for others, not knowing that they are doing any great
thing. They die, and the world hears nothing of them; and yet theirs
was the completest victory. They came to the battle field, the field
to which they had been looking forward all their lives, and the enemy
was not to be found. There was no Foe to fight with.
The last form in which a Christian gets the victory over death is by
means of his resurrection. It seems to have been this which was
chiefly alluded to by the Apostle here; for he says, "when this
corruptible shall have put on incorruption ... _then_ shall come to
pass the saying which is written, Death is swallowed up in victory."
And to say the truth, brethren, it is a rhetorical expression rather
than a sober truth when we call anything, except the resurrection,
victory over death. We may conquer doubt and fear when we are dying,
but that is not conquering death. It is like a warrior crushed to
death by a superior antagonist refusing to yield a groan, and bearing
the glance of defiance to the last. You feel that he is an
unconquerable spirit, but he is not the conqueror. And when you see
flesh melting away, and mental power becoming infantine in its
feebleness, and lips scarcely able to articulate, is there left one
moment a doubt upon the mind, as to _who_ is the conqueror in spite of
all the unshaken fortitude there may be? The victory is on the side of
Death, not on the side of the dying.