Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 721
Delivered on Sunday Morning, November 18, 1866, by C. H. Spurgeon, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington
“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” 1 Corinthians 15:26.
OUR Savior stooped to the lowest depths of degradation—He shall be exalted to the topmost heights of glory. “Being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Therefore God also has highly exalted Him, and given Him a name which is above every name.” Our Lord was trampled beneath the feet of all, but the day comes when all things shall be trampled beneath His feet. By so much as He descended, by so much shall He ascend. By the greatness of His sufferings may we judge of the unspeakable grandeur of His glory. Already sin lies beneath His feet, and Satan, like the old dragon bound, is there also.
The systems of idolatry which were paramount in the days of His flesh, He has broken as with a rod of iron. Where are the gods of Rome and Greece? Where are Jupiter, Diana, and Mercury? Let the moles and the bats reply. The colossal systems of idolatry which still dominate over the minds of men must yet come down. The truth as it is in Jesus must before long prevail over those ancient dynasties of error, for Jesus our Lord must reign from the river even unto the ends of the earth. In these last times, when sin in all its forms and Satan with all his craft shall be subdued, then Death itself, the unconquerable Death, the insatiable devourer of the human race who has swept them away as grass before the mower’s scythe—then shall Death who has feared the face of none, but has laid armies prostrate in his wrath, be utterly destroyed!
He who is immortality and life shall bring death of Death and destruction to the grave, and unto Him shall be songs of everlasting praise. Contemplate the glory of your Master, then, Believer! From the base of the pyramid, deep in darkness, He rises to the summit which is high in glory! From the depths of the abyss of woe He leaps to the tops of the mountain of joy. Anticipate His triumph by faith, for you shall partake in it! So surely as you share in His abasement, you shall also partake in His glory, and the more you shall become conformable unto Him in His sufferings, the more may you rest assured that you shall be partakers with Him in the glory which is to be revealed.
Come we now to the text itself. The text teaches us that Death itself is, at the last, to be vanquished by Christ. No, it is to be utterly destroyed by Him so that it shall cease to be! In handling the text, there are four things which at once strike you. Here is Death an enemy. But, secondly, he is the last enemy. Thirdly, he is an enemy to be destroyed, but, fourthly, he is the last enemy that shall be destroyed.
I. First, then, you have in our banquet of this morning, as your first course, BITTER HERBS—wormwood mingled with gall—for you have DEATH, AN ENEMY. It is not difficult to perceive in what respects Death is an enemy. Consider him apart from the Resurrection, apart from the glorious promises which spring up like sweet flowers sown by celestial hands upon the black soil of the tomb, and Death is preeminently an enemy. Death is an enemy because it is always repugnant to the nature of living creatures to die. Flesh and blood cannot love Death. God has wisely made self-preservation one of the first laws of our nature—it is an attribute of a living man to desire to prolong his life. “Skin for skin, yes, all that a man has will he give for his life.”
Life is our dearest heritage. To throw away life by suicide is a crime, and to waste life in folly is no mean sin. We are bound to prize life. We must do so—it is one of the instincts of our humanity, and he were not greater but less than man who did not care to live. Death must always, then, by creatures that breathe, be looked upon as a foe. Death may well be counted as a foe because it entered into the world and became the master over the race of Adam through our worst enemy, SIN. It came not in accordance to the course of nature, but according to the course of evil. Death came not in by the door, but it climbed up some other way, and we may therefore rest assured that it is a thief and a robber.
It was not in the natural constitution of humanity that man should die, for the first man, Adam, was made a living soul. Eminent physiologists have said that they do not detect in the human system any particular reason why man should die at fourscore years. The same wheels which have gone on for twenty, thirty, forty years might have continued their revolutions for a hundred years, or even for centuries, so far as their own self-renewing power is concerned. There is no reason in man’s body, itself, why it should inevitably return to the dust from which it was taken. Or if there is now such a reason, it may be traceable to the disease which sin has brought into our constitution. But, as originally formed, man might have been immortal—he would have been immortal.