Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1530
Delivered on Lord’s-Day Morning, March 28, 1880
“If you then are risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sits at the right hand of God. Set your affection on things abo ve, not on things on the earth.” Colossians 3:1,2.
THE resurrection of our Divine Lord from the dead is the cornerstone of Christian doctrine. Perhaps I might more accurately call it the keystone of the arch of Christianity, for if that fact could be disproved, the whole fabric of the Gospel would fall to the ground. If Jesus Christ is not risen, then is our preaching in vain and your faith is also in vain—you are yet in your sins. If Christ is not risen, then they which have fallen asleep in Christ have perished and we, ourselves, in missing so glorious a hope as that of Resurrection, are, of all men, the most miserable! Because of the great importance of His Resurrection, our Lord was pleased to give many Infallible proofs of it, by appearing again and again in the midst of His followers.
It would be interesting to search out how many times He appeared. I think we have mention of some 16 manifestations. He showed Himself openly before His disciples and did eat and drink with them. They touched His hands and His side and heard His voice and knew that it was the same Jesus that was crucified. He was not content with giving evidence to the ears and to the eyes, but even to the sense of touch He proved the reality of His Resurrection. These appearances were very varied. Sometimes He gave an interview to one alone, either to a man, as to Cephas, or to a woman, as to Magdalene. He conversed with two of His followers as they went to Emmaus and with the company of the Apostles by the sea. We find Him at one moment among the 11 when the doors were shut for fear of the Jews and at another time in the midst of an assembly of more than 500 brethren, who, years later, were, most of them, living witnesses to the fact.
They could not all have been deceived. It is not possible that any historical fact could have been placed upon a better basis of credibility than the Resurrection of our Lord from the dead. This is put beyond all dispute and question and it was done on purpose because it is essential to the whole Christian system. For this same cause the Resurrection of Christ is commemorated frequently. There is no ordinance in Scripture of any one Lord’s-Day in the year being set apart to commemorate the rising of Christ from the dead and for this reason every Lord’s-Day is the memorial of our Lord’s Resurrection. Wake up any Lord’s-Day you please, whether in the depth of winter, or in the warmth of summer and you may
sing—
“Today He rose and left the dead,
And Satan’s empire fell!
Today the saints His triumph spread, And all His wonders tell.”
To set apart an Easter Sunday for special memory of the Resurrection is a human device for which there is no Scriptural command. But to make every Lord’s-Day an Easter Sunday is due to Him who rose early on the first day of the week. We gather together on the first, rather than upon the seventh day of the week, because redemption is even a greater work than creation and more worthy of commemoration and because the rest which followed creation is far outdone by that which ensues upon the completion of redemption! Like the Apostles, we meet on the first day of the week and hope that Jesus may stand in our midst and say, “Peace be unto you.”
Our Lord has lifted the Sabbath from the old and rusted hinges whereon the Law had placed it long before and set it on the new golden hinges which His love has fashioned. He has placed our rest day, not at the end of a week of toil, but at the beginning of the rest which remains for the people of God. Every first day of the week we should meditate upon the
rising of our Lord and seek to enter into fellowship with Him in His risen life. Never let us forget that all who are in Him rose from the dead in His rising.
Next in importance to the fact of the Resurrection is the doctrine of the federal headship of Christ and the unity of all His people with Him. It is because we are in Christ that we become partakers of everything that Christ did—we are circumcised with Him, dead with Him, buried with Him, risen with Him because we cannot be separated from Him. We are members of His body and not a bone of Him can be broken. Because that union is most intimate, continuous and indissoluble, therefore all that concerns Him concerns us and as He rose, so all His people have arisen in Him! They are risen in two ways. First, representatively. All the elect rose in Christ in the day when He quit the tomb. He was justified, or declared to be clear of all liabilities on account of our sins by being set free from the prison of the tomb.
There was no reason for detaining Him in the sepulcher, for He had discharged the debts of His people by dying “unto sin once.” He was our Hostage and our Representative and when He came forth from His bonds we came forth in Him. We have endured the sentence of the Law in our Substitute. We have lain in its prison and even died under its death warrant and now we are no longer under its curse. “Now if we are dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him: knowing that Christ, being raised from the dead, dies no more; death has no more dominion over Him. For in that He died, He died unto sin once: but in that He lives, He lives unto God.”