The power of His Resurrection is an expression which covers a wide
ground. There are several distinct and well-marked powers ascribed to it
in Paul's writings. It has a demonstrative force in reference to our
Lord's person and work. For He is by it 'declared to be the Son of God
with power.' That rising again from the dead, taken in conjunction with
the fact that He dieth no more, but is ascended up on high, and in
conjunction with His own words concerning Himself and His Resurrection,
sets Him forth before the world as the Son of God, and is the solemn
divine approval and acceptance of His work.
It has a revealing power in regard to the condition of humanity in
death. It is the one fact which establishes immortality, and which not
only establishes it, but casts some light on the manner of it. The
possibility of personal life after, and therefore, in death, the
unbroken continuity of being, the possibility of a resurrection, and a
glorifying of this corporeal frame, with all the far-reaching
consequences of these truths in the triumph they give over death, in the
support and substance they afford to the else-shadowy idea of
immortality, in the lofty place which they assign to the bodily frame,
and the conception which they give of man's perfection as consisting of
body, soul, and spirit--these thoughts have flashed light into all the
darkness of the grave, have narrowed to a mere strip of coast-line the
boundaries of the kingdom of death, have proclaimed love as the victor
in her contest with that shrouded horror. The basis of them all is
Christ's Resurrection; its power in this respect is the power to
illuminate, to console, to certify, to wrench the sceptre from the hands
of death, and to put it in the pierced hands of the Living One that was
dead, and is Lord both of the dead and the living.
Further, the Resurrection is treated by Paul as having a power for our
justification, in so far as the risen Lord bestows upon us by His risen
life the blessings of His righteousness. Paul also represents the
Resurrection of Christ as having the power of quickening our Spiritual
life. I need not spend time in quoting the many passages where His
rising from the dead, and His life after the Resurrection, are treated
as the type and pattern of our lives: and are not only regarded as
pattern, but are also regarded as the power by which that new life of
ours is brought about. It has the power of raising us from the death of
sin, and bringing us into a new life of the Spirit. And finally, the
Resurrection of Christ is regarded as having the power of raising His
servants from the grave to the full possession of His own glorious life,
and so it is the power of our final victory over death.
Now I do not know that we are entitled to exclude any of these powers
from view. The broad words of the text include them all, but perhaps the
two last are mainly meant, and of these chiefly the former.
The risen life of Christ quickens and raises us, and that not merely as
a pattern, but as a power. It is only if we are in Him that there is so
real a unity of life between Him and us that there enters into us some
breath of His own life.
That risen life of the Saviour which we share if we have Him, enters
into our nature as leaven into the three measures of meal; transforming
and quickening it, gives new directions, tastes, motives, impulses, and
power. It bids and inclines us to seek the things that are above, and
its great exhortation to the hearts in which it dwells, to fix
themselves there, and to forsake the things that are on the earth, is
based upon the fact that they have died, and 'their life is hid with
Christ in God.' Without that leaven the life that we live is a death,
because it is lived in the 'lusts of the flesh,' doing the desires of
the flesh and of the mind. There is no real union with Jesus Christ, of
which the direct issue is not a living experience of the power of His
Resurrection in bringing us to the likeness of itself in regard to our
freedom from the bondage to sin, and to our presenting ourselves unto
God as alive from the dead, and our members as instruments of
righteousness unto God. It is a solemn thought which we all need to
press upon our consciences, that the only infallible sign that we have
been in any measure quickened together with Christ and raised up with
Him is that we have ceased to live in the lusts of our flesh, doing the
desires of the flesh and of the mind. The risen life of Jesus may
indefinitely increase, and will do so in the measure in which we
honestly make it our life's aim to know Him and the power of His
Resurrection.
III. The experience of the power of Christ's Resurrection is inseparable
from the fellowship of His sufferings.
We must not suppose that Paul's solemn and awful words here trench in
the smallest degree on the solitary unapproachableness of Christ's
death. He would have answered, as in fact he does answer, the appeal of
the prophetic sufferer, 'Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto
my sorrow' with the strongest negative. No other human lips have ever
tasted, or can ever taste, a cup of such bitterness as He drained for us
all, and no other human lips have ever been so exquisitely sensitive to
the bitterness which they have drunk. The identification of Himself with
a sinful world, the depth and closeness of His community of feeling with
all sorrow, the consciousness of the glory which He had left, and the
perpetual sense of the hostility into which He had come, set Christ's
sufferings by themselves as surely as the effects that flow from them
declare that they need no repetition, and cannot be degraded by any
parallel whilst the world lasts.
But yet His Death, like His Resurrection, is set forth in Scripture as
being a type and power of ours. We have to die to the world by the power
of the Cross. If we truly trust in His sacrifice there will operate
upon us motives which separate and detach us from our old selves and the
old world. A fundamental, ethical, and spiritual change is effected on
us through faith. We were dead in sin, we are dead to sin. We have to
blend the two thoughts of the Christian life as being a daily dying and
a continual resurrection in order to get the whole truth of the double
aspect of it.
It may be a question whether the Apostle is here referring to outward or
inward and ethical sorrows, but perhaps we should not do justice to the
thought unless we extend it to cover both of these. Certainly if his
theology was but the generalising of his experience, he had ample
material in his daily life for knowing the fellowship of Christ's
sufferings. One of his most frequently recurring and most cherished
thoughts is, that to suffer for Christ is to suffer with Christ, and in
it he found and teaches us to find strength to endure, and patience to
outlast any sorrows that may swoop upon us like birds of prey because we
are Christians. Happy shall we be if Christ's sufferings are ours,
because it is our union with Him and our likeness to Him, not to
ourselves, our sins, or our worldliness, that is their occasion. There
is an old legend that Peter was crucified head downwards, because he
felt himself unworthy to be as his Master. We may well feel that nothing
which we can ever bear for Him is worthy to be compared with what He has
borne for us, and be the more overwhelmed with the greatness of the
condescension, and the humility of the love which reckon our light
affliction, which is but for a moment, along with the heavy weight which
He bore, and the blessed issue of which outlasts time and enriches
eternity.
But there is another sense in which it is a worthy aim of our lives that
our sufferings may be felt to be fellowship with His. That is a blessed
sorrow which brings us closer to our Lord. That is a wholesome sorrow of
which the issue is an intenser faith in Him, a fuller experience of His
sufficiency. The storm blows us well when it blows us to His breast, and
sorrow enriches us, whatever it may take away, which gives us fuller and
more assured possession of Jesus.
But when we are living in fellowship with Jesus, that union works in two
directions, and while on the one hand we may then humbly venture to feel
that our sufferings for Him are sufferings with Him, we may thankfully
feel, too, that in all our affliction He is afflicted. If His sufferings
are ours we may be sure that ours are His. And how different they all
become when we are certain of His sympathy! It is possible that we may
have a kind of common consciousness with our Lord, if our whole hearts
and wills are kept in close touch with Him, so that in our experience
there may be a repetition in a higher form of that strange experience
alleged to be familiar in hypnotism, where the bitter in one mouth is
tasted in another.
So, what we ought to make our aim is that in our lives our growing
knowledge of Christ should lead to the two results, so inexorably
intertwined, of daily death and daily resurrection, and that we may be
kept faithful to Him so that our outward sufferings may be caused by our
union with Him, and not by our own faithlessness, and may be discerned
by us to be fellowship with His. Then we shall also feel that He bears
ours with us, and sorrow itself will be calmed and beautified into a
silent bliss, as the chill peaks when the morning strikes them glow with
tender pink, and seem soft and warm, though they are grim rock and
ice-cold snow. Then some faint echo of His history 'who was acquainted
with grief' may be audible in our outward lives and we, too, may have
our Gethsemane and our Calvary. It may not be presumption in us to say
'We are able' when He asks 'Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of'?
nor terror to hear Him prophesy 'Ye shall indeed drink of the cup that I
drink of,' for we shall remember 'joint-heirs in Christ, if so be that
we suffer with Him, that we may be also glorified together.'