Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1067
“Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you, that God should raise the dead?” Acts 26:8.
CONCERNING the souls of our believing friends who have departed this life we suffer no distress, we feel sure that they are where Jesus is and behold His Glory according to our Lord’s own memorable prayer. We know but very little of the disembodied state, but we know quite enough to rest certain beyond all doubt that—
“They are supremely blest,
Have done with sin,
And care, and woe,
And with their Savior rest.”
Our main trouble is about their bodies, which we have committed to the dark and lonesome grave. We cannot reconcile ourselves to the facts that their dear faces are being stripped of all their beauty by the fingers of decay and that all the insignia of their manhood should be fading into corruption. It seems hard that the hands and feet and all the goodly fabric of their noble forms should be dissolved into dust and broken into an utter ruin.
We cannot stand at the grave without tears—even the perfect Man could not restrain His weeping at Lazarus’ tomb. It is a sorrowful thought that our friends are dead, nor can we ever regard the grave with love. We cannot say that we take pleasure in the catacomb and the vault. We still regret, and feel it natural to do so, that so dreadful a ban has fallen upon our race as that it should be “appointed unto all men once to die.” God sent it as a penalty and we cannot rejoice in it. The glorious doctrine of the resurrection is intended to take away this cause of sorrow! We need have no trouble about the body any more than we have concerning the soul.
Faith being exercised upon immortality relieves us of all trembling as to the spirits of the just. And the same faith, if exercised upon resurrection, will, with equal certainty, efface all hopeless grief with regard to the body, for though apparently destroyed, the body will live again—it has not gone to annihilation. That very frame which we lay in the dust shall but sleep there for awhile and, at the trump of the archangel, it shall awaken in superior beauty, clothed with attributes unknown to it while here. The Lord’s love to His people is a love towards their entire manhood—He chose them not as disembodied spirits, but as men and women arrayed in flesh and blood. The love of Jesus Christ towards His chosen is not merely an affection for their better nature but towards that, also, which we are apt to think their inferior part.
In His Book all their members were written—He keeps all their bones and the very hairs of their head are all numbered. Did He not assume our perfect manhood? He took into union with His Deity a human soul, but He also assumed a human body—and in that fact He gave us evidence of His affinity to our perfect manhood, to our flesh and to our blood, as well as to our mind and to our spirit. Moreover, our Redeemer has perfectly ransomed both soul and body. It was not partial redemption which our Kinsman effected for us.
We know that our Redeemer lives, not only with respect to our spirit but with regard to our body so that, though the worm shall devour its skin and flesh, yet shall it rise again because He has redeemed it from the power of death and ransomed it from the prison of the grave. The whole manhood of the Christian has already been sanctified. It is not merely that with his spirit he serves his God, but he yields his members to be instruments unto righteousness to the glory of his heavenly father. “Know you not,” says the Apostle, “that your bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit”? Surely that which has been a temple of the Holy Spirit shall not be ultimately destroyed!
It may be taken down, as the tabernacle was in the wilderness, but taken down to be put up again! Or, to use another form of the same figure, the tabernacle may go but only that the temple may follow. “We know that if this earthly house
of our tabernacle were dissolved we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” My Brothers and Sisters, it would not be a complete victory over sin and Satan if the Savior left a part of His people in the grave! It would not look as if He had destroyed all the worlds of the devil if He only emancipated their spirits. There shall not be a bone, nor a piece of a bone of any one of Christ’s people left in the grave at the last. Death shall not have a solitary trophy to show—his prison shall be utterly rifled of all the spoil which he has gathered from our humanity.
The Lord Jesus in all things shall have the pre-eminence and even as to our materialism He shall vanquish death and the grave, leading our captivity captive. It is a joy to think that as Christ has redeemed the entire man and sanctified the entire man, He will be honored in the salvation of the entire man, so our complete manhood shall have it in its power to glorify Him! The hands with which we sinned shall be lifted in eternal adoration. The eyes which have gazed on evil shall behold the King in His beauty. Not merely shall the mind which now loves the Lord be perpetually knit to Him and the spirit which contemplates Him delight forever in Him, and be in communion with Him—but this very body which has been a clog and hindrance to the spirit and an arch rebel against the sovereignty of Christ—shall yield Him homage with voice, and hands, and brain, and ears and eyes! We look to the time of resurrection for the accomplishment of our adoption, to wit, the redemption of the body!