WHAT is life? Can the scientists tell us? At best their definitions are but negative, and are so beggarly that by reason of their very poverty they proclaim on the housetops their utter ignorance of the subject. Says one of the greatest of popular scientific writers, “Life is the sum total of the forces that resist death.”
What is death? That stage of the decay of nature when animation is suspended. The debt of nature, as many poetically term it. Such explanations are a mere juggling with words, and add not one iota to the knowledge of the meanest peasant. What is life? What is death? Apart from revelation nothing is known about either. True, a man lives, and we know he lives, for he thinks and acts. True, man dies, for who has not seen the outward signs of the awful mystery of the soul leaving the body. Between the feeblest expression of life and death there is a great gulf fixed. I have seen a woman dying, with just a spark of life fluttering around that great citadel of the human constitution the heart. A few hours later I beheld her dead. What a mighty change! What is life? What is death? Life is communicated by God. Death is the wages of sin.
Yet not always is death feared. Look at this picture. An aged man lying in a Roman prison, chained to soldier gaolers, forsaken by friends, with the executioner’s ax gleaming before his eyes. He had labored hard and long in God’s service. He had toiled night and day—now making tents, at another time tossed to and fro on an angry sea; enrapt in inky darkness, comforting the hearts of many, as he spoke of God and His providential care; standing on Mars Hill proclaiming in trumpet tones the gospel to the learned and the curious; beaten and thrown into an inner prison in Philippi; founding churches; traveling in Missionary enterprise with his life in his hand. And now he draws near, aged and infirm, to the end of his rough pilgrimage, and the roughest bit is yet to come, and he knows it.
As he looks backward and forward has he any regrets.? Has he grown cynical as to the world and its ways? Is he pessimistic as he thinks of his abounding labors, and their apparent failure? In a Roman prison, alone and unbefriended, looking forward to death under the cruelest of the Roman emperors―that living monster, Nero―is his faith in God weakened? Nay, his end is a magnificent triumph of the power of Christianity.
See! He puts pen to paper, and sends a message to his beloved Philippian Church. Is there a regret in it? A weak note? Despair? Disappointment? Nay, his heart palpitates with joy, and throbs with ardent hope.
To one sentence alone would I call your attention― “To me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”
Here is the mystery of life and death solved. Not from a scientific point indeed, but in deep true reality. Life was one glorious piece of living, for it was Christ. Did his back smart as he lay dungeon-bound in Philippi? True, but he sings and praises God. ‘Tie a scene of holy triumph. The noisome prison is a holy spot, for the presence of the Master is there, just as long centuries before a form like unto the Son of God walked with the three, Hebrew witnesses for God in the furnace heated seven times. Better far walk on a bed of burning cinders with Jesus, than lie on a bed of down without Him; better far be in Philippi’s gaol with smarting back with Him, than sleep the gaoler’s sleep of callous indifference.
Christ! CHRIST!! CHRIST!!! was the motto of the great apostle’s life, and death was GAIN; though it came by the way of the executioner’s ax or sword.
Said a poor dying woman with kindling face to me the other day, her voice barely a whisper: “People ask me, if I am ready to die. I tell them, I am ready to live. ‘Tis life, not death, that awaits me. True, my soul will shortly “leave this poor, weak body, but it is life.” Another triumph of Christianity in that lonely cottage overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. The sea and sky outside that cottage door are lovely, the palm trees gracefully bow before the gentle breeze, nature is in het kindliest mood, yet the dying saint’s heart is beyond and above it all. Ah, Christ has been het solace in life, and will be her gain in death.
The great apostle could say, “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” Reader, fill in your life, and tell me your prospect in death. The drunkard, with bleared eye, and blotched face, and twitching nerve, and befuddled brain, and thick voice, proclaims by his miserable life, “For me to live is drink.” Is that not so, drunkard? And to die? What? Answer! Hell. Yes, hell lies at the end of the drunkard’s life. “No drunkard shall inherit the kingdom of heaven.”
Ask that giddy, gay, empty-headed, pleasure-loving young lady, the question, What is life? Hear her answer. She may blush as she replies, but at any rate she is honest, “For me to live is pleasure.” Said a young lady at the close of a gospel meeting to a trained nurse by her side, “Nurse, I couldn’t give up the theater―I would die if I had no theater.” Poor slave of pleasure! And to such to die? What? Answer! Hell. ‘Tis an awful word. Said a young lady in surprise to a preacher, “Why, I thought it was only young men, who have sown their wild oats, that go to hell.” Ah, Christless, pleasure-loving young ladies are journeying thither. The pleasures of sin―and we do not deny there is pleasure in it-are inseparably and irrevocably linked up with the wages of sin―DEATH. Pleasure now, death by-and-by.
Ask that man a business what life is for him. Why is he chained to the desk from early morning till late at night? Why does he refuse a holiday, and grudge the national ones, grumbling that they throw business out of gear? Why does he toil for money, money, MONEY, as if this life were all, and there was no soul, and no hereafter? “Actions speak louder than words,” says the proverb. If this be so, and it is, his loud, constant cry is, “For me to live is business!”
A business man submitted himself to examination at the hands of a medical expert. “You must take a prolonged holiday, a long nerve and brain rest, absolute quiet, and you may recover your tone,” was the physician’s advice.
“I cannot,” said the business-slave; “business could not go on without me.”
But it did. He continued to toil at the office, and ere long the overstrained constitution gave way. He took ill and died. And then? What? Hell, a money-lover’s, idol-worshipper’s hell. Mammon was his god, but it could not save him.
We turn to a lady, and inquire, “What is your life, madam?” She promptly and proudly replies, “For me to live is religion!” The answer sounds well, enough, but it is the most awful we have received yet. There are more going to hell by way of the cushioned pew and the chancel rails than through sin, or pleasure, or business. Many today put the church before Christ, creed before salvation. Such are awfully deceived; for self-deception is the most terrible of all deceptions.
I have traveled over a few hundred miles in the United States of late, and have asked many the reason of the hope that is within them. Almost without exception they have replied to my ques, Lion, Are you saved? by the miserable reply, “I belong to the church.” Yes; they belong to a church, but not to Christ; have turned over new leaves, but have never turned to God; have been baptized, but have never been converted; take the sacrament, but have never taken Christ.
Oh, Christless professor, beware! Is that all you can say, “For me to live is religion”? “And to die?” Answer that. Face it. Hell, not heaven, lies before you—loss, not gain, awaits you; and what a loss! The loss of your one precious immortal soul forever! To be forever in hell is an awful eternity! Drunkard, pleasure to lover business-slave, empty religionist, come to Christ. And then through grace you will be able in measure to reecho the marvelous words of Paul, and say, “For me to live is CHRIST, and to die is GAIN!”
“Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou, shalt be saved.”
“When the day of salvation is drawing a close,
When thy guilt shall weigh thee to the ground;
When thy heart throbs in terror before eternal woes,
Oh! then no Saviour can be found.
Now there’s One—resource for the guilty―
Jesus! Jesus saith, “Come unto Me”;
Still mercy’s bloodstained lintel thy door of hope may be!
O sinner! Jesus died for thee.”
A. J. P.