(Notes of an Address.)
ALL must pass away here, the stamp of death is on everything, but marvelous the power that the gospel gives to face it all! To nature death is terrible, and there is sadness in the thought even of the fading of a flower, not to be expressed. Seeing flowers in the room of a sick one, and feeling that both are fading and dying, and the hand that gathered shall gather no more. Yet the grace of God comes in just there in all the sweetness of the gospel, giving His dying children to realize and to know all the brightness of their future home in heaven. What if all the power of the enemy is brought before us at the grave, have we not all in Christ to uphold and lift us above everything?
We are all passing on, going home if we are the “children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.”
We have to look upon heaven as a home to which we are on our way, and so to have hold of the hope of the gospel with one hand as to let go of the world with the other.
The gospel brings eternal realities before the soul, and shows how we ourselves are linked with them. Oh, how bright the glory of God burning in the lamp of the believer’s future!
To have hold of Christ is to have hold of the resurrection and the life. He is the power and the spring of life. He spake, as it were, upon the tombs of us all in this vast charnel house. We see in Him the God of creation and the God of resurrection; He who could people earth out of nothing, and raise the dead out of nothing by one and the same power.
The very fact of our Creator being presented to us as a man, how marvelous! To have Him who “spake, and it was done,” down on this earth in our form, God “manifest in the flesh.” To have Him up there on the throne of God, a man still, and able up there to be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; to know there is nothing for us in all our sorrows, but gathering round this tender-hearted, risen Jesus — how blessed a thought!
Alas! alas! how we do shut out God from His creation. How would you have your Creator manifested to you in this vast charnel house, where pining sickness and misery meet the eye on all sides? If you don’t know your God, you may know Him by His having been manifested down here; and when He manifested Himself it was to meet the condition in which the world was.
Mark Him in this death scene. He. “the resurrection and the life,” weeping with the weepers! Mary does not go to the grave but to Christ.
There is something so marvelously blessed in the fact of God in human form down here to weep with man, and by almighty power and love to turn man’s sorrow into joy — to see Him going further still, to give life to the dead, and entering the house of mourning for that purpose.
Here we read, when Jesus saw this poor woman weeping, He groaned in spirit, anguish choked His utterance. God in human form placed Himself beside man, and wept with him. It was worth, as it were, an ocean of tears to see these precious drops. It was through the human nature of Christ the heart of God was let out — “JESUS WEPT.”
JOHN W.