AS often as our glorious Easter returns, our God and Father opens up again for His people on earth the source of rich and abundant comforting. For though the Lord’s gifts of grace are innumerable, and though all His Word is a staff for the pilgrim on earth that keeps him from stumbling and a light on his path, yet among the many deeds of the Lord’s almightiness there is nothing that in richness of comforting can be put on a line with the quickening of Christ from the dead.
“Who is he that condemneth?” asked the holy apostle (Rom. 8:34), and he answers: “It is Christ that died; what is more, that is also risen again.” And in his epistle to the church at Ephesus the selfsame apostle jubilates in “the exceeding greatness of the Lord’s power, which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead” (1:20). And if you have nothing yet when you have forgiveness of your sins except you are also justified before God, hear then how Christ was indeed delivered up for our sins, but is quickened for our justification. Yea, to express this more strongly still Paul even writes to the church at Colosse, “that in his resurrection Christ has spoiled hellish principalities and powers, has made a show of them openly, and by his resurrection from the dead has triumphed over them” (2:15).
This already tells us, what an altogether unique significance the resurrection has in the rich fulness of the work of grace, and that a child of God does not yet understand what it is that his Savior rose, so long as he does not glory in that resurrection, as the source of his comfort.
In that wondrous paradise, in which so much has been experienced of unfathomable depth, and of which after all we know so very little, there went forth a prophecy from the side of God, which is the mother of all prophecy and of all salvation, that has come according to the plan of this prophecy. And this prophecy was, that a conflict should arise of life and death between God’s people and Satan; that in that conflict Satan would cast down the woman’s seed by bruising His heel; but that after that that seed of the woman should bruise Satan’s head.
To such a conflict it would come, not between Satan and the world, nor yet between Satan and the loyal natural man. On the contrary by nature all that was born of the flesh, would make common cause with Satan, kneel down before Satan, and though it be unwillingly, yet would do according to Satan’s will. No, that conflict should originate exclusively between Satan and God’s people, for there could come no enmity, except God Himself first put it there; and in what heart has that enmity ever been put by God Himself, except He regenerated such a heart and as Da Costa sang: “begot again such a child of man unto a new comprehension”.
In that conflict things would go on strenuously, and the bitterness of that conflict, to speak after the manner of man, would endure endlessly; yea, that conflict still goes on; and no end can come to it before Christ returns upon the clouds and Satan is forever bound and cast into the lake of fire.
More still, in that struggle forces would seemingly be most unequal. Satan always the mighty one, who drew by far the greatest part of the children of men to his side; and over against this God’s people as a “little flock”, seven thousand who have not bent their knee to Baal, a Gideon’s band, the “worm Jacob”. Yea, in this conflict it was for no single moment to appear, as though by greater numbers, choicer talent or more efficient arms, God’s people, even if they did not win, yet could hold their own in the fray.
On the contrary, all power must be of God, from Him all counsel, unto Him all glory.
Only because He worked, no one would be able to resist; and the power in that conflict whereby He would keep His people standing, would be the power of His Word.
See, that Word is the only thing that God would give his people along on their pilgrim journey, the only weapon that the Lord would give His people in that bitter conflict.
In Paradise He does nothing yet. All things rather remain, after the fall, as they had been from the beginning. All His people receive is a Word. The word that Satan’s head shall be bruised.
A word of promise; a word of comfort; a word that offers guarantee for final triumph.
He who took that word, fastened himself to it, and believed that word of his God, he knew, that the end would be glorious, and by that blessed knowledge itself became invincible to Satan.
But also, he who rejected that word or left it alone, or in his unbelief contradicted it, he weakened and succumbed and was bound in the end to join the ranks of Satan.
And herein lies the antithesis from paradise on between the Lord’s people, and those that oppose them. For to that people the Lord’s Word has become the supreme jewel of their soul, the inheritance of their race. That Word they have heard; they have listened to it; it has sounded like music in the ear of their soul. It has become to them the word of spiritual magic, by which everytime they raised themselves up again. And never would their weariness bring them so low, but that strongly, as with piercing voice, that wondrous word of divine promise as an echo, to what God once spake, resounded again in their heart. Then they revived again; then they were comforted again; then they kindled again in holy enthusiasm, and then in the midst of most cruel suffering, they stood comforted with respect to that suffering.