Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3389
“Verily, verily, I say unto you, the hour is coming when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live.” John 5:25.
I suppose that when a pearl-fisher is at the bottom of the sea and has gathered his bag full of oysters, he will sometimes see other oysters lying about which he would be very very glad to take up if he could. And I can imagine that when he has been safely taken into his boat and has put away what he gathered the first time, he will be rather anxious to descend again somewhere near that same spot to bring up those which he left behind. This, at least, is much like my own case. While reading the Chapter and preparing the sermon for this morning, I thought there were so many pearls in the text I could not say much about this particular verse so I felt inclined to return to the same spot at once to see if we might not fetch up some fresh gems!
Those of you who were present this morning will remember that we saw in the Chapter a three-fold gradation of life-giving in the Person of Christ. As here and there in the Old Testament dispensation, God had raised up some persons from the dead, so Christ, also, in the days of His flesh, had quickened whom He would—persons naturally dead He had restored to natural life. This is the first and, indeed, a very wonderful prerogative of live-giving for Christ to exercise to be able to raise Lazarus from the grave or to raise the young daughter of the ruler or to restore to the widow her departed son. The second form of life-giving is that described in the verse before us. He was constantly giving through His voice spiritual life to those who were spiritually dead. The third kind of life-giving we spoke of is that of the universal resurrection when all that are in the grave shall hear the voice of the Son of God and shall rise to judgment. It is to the second that we propose to direct our attention this evening—a form of life-giving which is going on now—not a matter of the past as was the raising of a few in Christ’s day. Not a matter of the future as the coming resurrection is, but a matter of the present—not so apparent to the eye and to the ear as either of those mysteries, in so much that it is to a great extent invisible except to the man who is a participator in it, but just as real, just as miraculous and, in many senses, even more marvelous and Divine! Christ is constantly raising the spiritually dead and giving them life. Oh that we may be enabled by God’s Spirit to open up this Truth of God to your understanding and may it be applied to your hearts! Our first endeavor shall be to describe—
I. What It Is to Be Spiritually Dead
“The hour is coming,” says the Savior, “and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God and they that hear shall live.” What is it to be spiritually dead? You all know what it is for the body to be physically dead. The soul has departed and has left the body incapable, insensible, unable to preserve itself. The soul was like salt to it—that being gone, it soon becomes putrid and obnoxious. Poor dead body! A most terrible and humiliating spectacle to see— especially to look upon it after it has been lying for a while in the grave. We have, most of us, heard what it is to be morally dead. It does not happen, I hope, to very many, but there are some who seem to be dead to all moral feeling of right and wrong between their fellow men—that is what I mean just now by morality. They have been so inured to theft, un-cleanness, drunkenness and, some few even to murder, that when they have been arrested, convicted, imprisoned— nothing seemed to move them to repentance! Even the dread of the last terrible penalty of the law has not sufficed to-bring from some of them any kind of emotion. Those who have been most earnest to arouse their conscience have felt the most painful conviction that their moral faculties were totally defunct. They have become callous, seared as with a hot iron. It is an awful spectacle to see a man morally dead—blind to reason, deaf to warning, numb to shame—thus morally dead. His passions raging without control, he becomes like some wild wolf of whom all the district is afraid! Like a raging lion going about in quest of prey whom every man dreads to encounter and whom some think it only right to slay. May none of us ever fall into such infamy! Alas, it might be! Step by step, little by little, men have become outcasts from society and found their lodging in the very lairs of corruption though they were born in better circumstances and trained with brighter prospects! May God grant we may never come to it ourselves!