Faith in Resurrection
Resurrection has been, from the beginning, an article of the faith of God’s people; and, being such, it was also the lesson they had to learn and to practice, the principle of their life, because the principle of a divine dispensation is ever the rule and character of the saints’ conduct. The purchase and occupation of the burying field at Machpelah tell us that the Genesis fathers had learned the lesson. Moses learned and practiced it, when he chose affliction with the people of God, having respect to the recompense of the reward. David was in the power of it, when he made the covenant, or resurrection promise; all his salvation and all his desire would be fulfilled in resurrection, though his house, his present house, was not to grow (2 Sam. 23). The whole nation of Israel was taught it, again and again, by their prophets, and by-and-by they will learn it, and then witness it to the whole world. The dry bones will live again, the winter-beaten teil tree will flourish again; for “what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?” (Rom. 11:1515For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead? (Romans 11:15)). The Lord Jesus, “the Author and Finisher of faith,” in His day, I need not say, practiced this lesson to all perfection. And each of us, His saints and people, is set down to it every day, that we “may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings” (Phil. 3:1010That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death; (Philippians 3:10)).
By the life of faith the elders obtained a good report. And so the saints in every age. For “without faith it is impossible to please Him”; that faith which trusts Him as a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him, which respects the unseen and the future. They, of whom the world was not worthy, practiced the life of faith, the life of dead and risen people (Heb. 11). Stephen before the council tells us the same. Abraham, Joseph, and Moses, in his account, were great witnesses of this same life; and he himself, at that moment, after the pattern of his master, Jesus, was exhibiting the strength and virtues of it, through the power of the Holy Spirit, and apprehending, through the same Spirit, the brightest joys and glories of it (Acts 7).
Learning Resurrection Power
Now, I believe that the leading purpose of the Book of Job is to exhibit this. It is the story of an elect one, in early patriarchal days, a child of resurrection, set down to learn the lesson of resurrection. His celebrated confession tells us that resurrection was understood by him as a doctrine, while the whole story tells us that he had still to know the power of it in his soul. It was an article of his faith, but not the principle of his life.
And a sore lesson it was to him, hard indeed to learn and digest. He did not like (and which of us does like?) to take the sentence of death into himself, that he might not trust in himself, or in his circumstances in life, or his condition by nature, but in God who raises the dead. “I shall die in my nest,” was his thought and his hope. But he was to see his nest plundered of all with which nature had filled it, and with which circumstances had adorned it.
Such is, I believe, the leading purpose of the Spirit of God in this Book. This honored and cherished saint had to learn the power of the calling of all the elect, practically and personally, the life of faith, or the lesson of resurrection. And it may be a consolation for us, beloved, who know ourselves to be little among them, to read, in the records which we have of them, that all have not been equally apt and bright scholars in that school, and that all, in different measures, have failed in it, as well as made attainments in it.
How unworthily of it, for instance, did Abraham behave, how little like a dead and risen man, a man of faith, when he denied his wife to the Egyptian, and yet how beautifully did he carry himself, as such, when he surrendered the choice of the land to his younger kinsman. And even our own apostle, the aptest scholar in the school, the constant witness of this calling to others, and the energetic disciple of the power of it in his own soul, in a moment when the fear of man brought with it a snare, makes this very doctrine the covert of a guileful thought (Acts 23:66But when Paul perceived that the one part were Sadducees, and the other Pharisees, he cried out in the council, Men and brethren, I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee: of the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question. (Acts 23:6)).
Encouragements and consolations visit the soul from all this. Happy is it to know, that our present lesson, as those who are dead, and whose life is hid with Christ in God, has been the lesson of the elect from the beginning — that on many a bright and hallowed occasion they practiced that lesson to the glory of their Lord, that at times they found it hard, and at times failed in it. This tale of the soul is well understood by us. Only we, living in New Testament times, are set down to learn the same lesson in the still ampler page, and after the clearer method, in which it is now taught us in the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.
J. G. Bellett