Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1329
“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” 1 Corinthians 15:26.
DURING four previous Sabbaths we have been following our Lord and Master through His great achievements. We have seen Him as the end of the Law, as the Conqueror of Satan, as the Overcomer of the world, as the Creator of all things new. And now we behold Him as the Destroyer of death. In this and in all His other glorious deeds, let us worship Him with all our hearts! May the Spirit of God lead us into the full meaning of this, which is one of the Redeemer’s grandest Characters. How wonderfully is our Lord Jesus one with man! For when the Psalmist David had considered “the heavens, the work of God’s fingers,” He said, “Lord, what is man—that You are mindful of him, or the son of man that You visit him?”
He was speaking of Christ. You would have thought he was thinking of man in his humblest estate, and that he was wondering that God should be pleased to honor so frail a being as the poor fallen son of Adam. You would never have dreamed that the glorious Gospel lay hid within those words of grateful adoration! Yet, in the course of that meditation David went on to say, “You made Him to have dominion over all the works of Your hands, You have put all things under His feet.” Now, had it not been for the interpretation of the Holy Spirit, we would still have considered that he was speaking of men in general, and of man’s natural dominion over the brute creation, but behold, while that is true, there is another and a far more important Truth of God concealed within it, for David, as a Prophet, was all the while chiefly speaking of the Man of men, the model Man, the second Adam, the Head of the new race of men!
It was of Jesus, the Son of Man, as honored of the Father, that the Psalmist sang, “He has put all things under His feet.” Strange, was it not, that when he spoke of man, he must of necessity speak also of our Lord? And yet, when we consider the thing, it is but natural and according to truth. It is only remarkable to us because in our minds we too often consider Jesus and man as far removed and too little regard Him as truly one with man. Now, see how the Apostle infers from the Psalm the necessity of the Resurrection, for if all things must be put under the feet of the man, Christ Jesus, then every form of evil must be conquered by Him and death among the rest. “He must reign till He has put all enemies under
His feet.”
It must be so and, therefore, death itself must ultimately be overcome. Thus out of that simple sentence in the Psalm, which we would have read far otherwise without the light of the Holy Spirit, the Apostle gathers the doctrine of the Resurrection. The Holy Spirit taught His servant, Paul, how, by a subtle chemistry, he could distil from simple words a precious fragrant essence which the common reader never suspected to be there. Texts have their secret drawers, their box within a box, their hidden souls which lie asleep till He who placed them on their secret couches awakens them that they may speak to the hearts of His chosen.
Could you ever have guessed Resurrection from the eighth Psalm? No, nor could you have believed, had it not been told you, that there is fire in the flint, oil in the rock and bread in the earth we tread upon! Man’s books have usually far less in them than we expect, but the Book of the Lord is full of surprises! It is a mass of light, a mountain of priceless revelations. We little know what yet lies hidden within the Scriptures. We know the form of sound words as the Lord has taught us and by it we will abide—but there are inner store houses into which we have not peered—chambers of Revelation lit up with bright lamps, perhaps too bright for our eyes at this present time.
If Paul, when the Spirit of God rested upon Him, could see so much in the songs of David, the day may come when we, also, shall see still more in the Epistles of Paul and wonder at ourselves that we did not understand better the things which the Holy Spirit has so freely spoken to us by the Apostle. May we at this time be enabled to look deep and far and behold the sublime glories of our risen Lord!
To the text, itself, then—death is an enemy. Death is an enemy to be destroyed. Death is an enemy to be destroyed last—“the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.”
I. DEATH AN ENEMY. It was so born, even as Haman the Agagite was the enemy of Israel by his descent. Death is the child of our direst foe, for, “sin, when it is finished, brings forth death.” “Sin entered into the world and death by sin.” Now, that which is distinctly the fruit of transgression cannot be other than an enemy of man. Death was introduced into the world on that gloomy day which saw our fall and he that had the power of it is our arch enemy and betrayer, the devil—from both of which facts we must regard death as the manifest enemy of man.