Bible Commentaries
2 Timothy 1

Verse 10

Life and Immortality

Our Saviour Jesus Christ, who abolished death, and brought life and immortality (R.V, incorruption) to light through the gospel.— 2 Timothy 1:10.

1. It was during the whirlwind of the French Revolution, when it seemed as if all religious beliefs and restraints were to be cast off and thrown away, that the leading men, alarmed at what seemed to them a most dangerous menace to their political projects, made a concerted and remarkable appeal in support of the two great ideas, of a Supreme Being and of the immortality of the soul. These ideas, they said, are social and democratic. The denial or rejection of them is aristocratic, subversive of justice, order, and liberty; and Robespierre uttered his memorable sentence: “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.” If vice and virtue issue alike in nothingness, if the martyr and his murderer share the same fate, what foundation of justice remains? In this wholesale and common extinction all moral distinctions are confounded. All the higher motives and ideals of life are destroyed. There is no longer any security for human rights or human freedom. So forcibly they argued this matter that the National Convention proclaimed by acclamation the following decree: “The French people recognize the existence of a Supreme Being and the Immortality of the Soul.”

Tennyson said once to Bishop Lightfoot—“The cardinal point of Christianity is the life after death.” Certainly this is the cardinal point of Tennyson’s own faith. He believed no less strongly than Browning in the powerlessness of death to dissolve human personality. “I can hardly understand how any great imaginative man who has deeply lived, suffered, thought and wrought, can doubt of the soul’s continuous progress in the afterlife.” Tennyson is supremely the poet of Immortality; and the “intimations of immortality” were ever with him. This is his master-thought, and it was natural that he should approach Jesus Christ from this point. I think Paul’s words, “Jesus Christ who brought life and incorruption to light through the gospel,” summarize pretty accurately Tennyson’s view of the mission of Christ. Unlike Browning, who believed that the soul discovers “a new truth” in Christ, Tennyson held that Jesus Christ brought into the perfect light those truths concerning God and man of which we all have dim intuitions.

Tho’ truths in manhood darkly join,

Deep-seated in our mystic frame,

We yield all blessing to the name

Of Him that made them current coin;

For Wisdom dealt with mortal powers,

Where truth in closest words shall fail,

When truth embodied in a tale

Shall enter in at lowly doors.

And so the Word had breath, and wrought

With human hands the creed of creeds

In loveliness of perfect deeds,

More strong than all poetic thought;

Which he may read that binds the sheaf

Or builds the house, or digs the grave,

And those wild eyes that watch the wave

In roarings round the coral reef.

“Truth embodied in a tale” must surely refer to the historical manifestation of the Incarnate Word—“the revelation of the eternal thought of the universe.” And since God does reveal Himself to men, and men dimly and feebly apprehend the revelation, the Incarnate Word must fully and completely bring to light all that range of intuitions in which we recognize the self-communication of the Divine nature to our souls. We are to find our intuitions interpreted in the Incarnate Word—not, mark, in Christ’s teaching so much as in His life, His character, His person, for He wrought the “creed of creeds” “in loveliness of perfect deeds.” What Christ does for us is to interpret us to ourselves. He brings, by His own life, “life and incorruption to light.” 1 [Note: Richard Roberts, The Meaning of Christ, 81.]

2. At first sight the words of the text seem to express more than they can fairly be supposed to mean. The two statements made, taken absolutely, are contradicted—the first, by a fact in providence, daily before our eyes; the second, by a fact in history, apprehended by our understanding. Death is not “abolished” since the appearance of Christ; and the doctrine of “immortality” did not remain to be “brought to light” by His advent. Among both Jews and Gentiles, previous to His coming, there was the belief in a future, immortal life; and since His resurrection, death still reigns over the whole race, just as it reigned “from Adam to Moses,” or from Moses to Malachi. It is obvious, therefore, that the text must mean something less than it seems to say, or something different from its literal or conventional import. Now (1) the word which, in the passage before us, is rendered “abolished,” is rendered “destroyed” in the 14th verse of the second chapter of Hebrews. It is there said that Christ “took flesh and blood,” that, “through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.” We cannot be far wrong in inferring from this that Christ has “abolished” death in some sense similar to that in which He has “destroyed” the devil; that is to say, that, without literally annihilating either, He has so wrought against, and so far weakened and subdued them, as to restrain them from hurting those that are His. (2) Again, the word rendered “brought to light” does not so much mean to discover, or make known, as a new thing,—which is the ordinary meaning of the English phrase,—as to illustrate, clear up, or cast light upon a thing; it thus assumes the previous existence of that which is illustrated, but it asserts the fact of its fuller manifestation. Thus explained, the meaning of the text would amount to this, or may be thus paraphrased: Previous to the coming of Christ, the idea of immortal life stood before the human, or the Hebrew, mind like some vast object in the morning twilight; it was dimly descried and imperfectly apprehended, through the mist and clouds that hung upon or invested it. In like manner, Death, seen through that same darkness (for “the light was as darkness”), was something that appeared “very terrible,” and made many “all their lifetime subject to bondage.” The advent of the Messiah, including the whole of His teaching and work—the “appearing” of our Lord Jesus Christ, as “the light of the world,” and “the sun of righteousness”—was, to these spiritual objects, like the rising, on the natural world, of that luminary whose power and splendour symbolized His glory in prophetic song. To those who received Him, whose reason and heart He alike illuminated, the outward became clear and the inward calm; the shadows departed and fear was subdued; objective truth had light cast upon it that made it manifest, and “the king of terrors,” seen in the sunlight, was discovered to have an aspect that did not terrify.

I

Life and Immortality before Christ

1. Among the Gentiles.—It does not need any wide or minute survey of the religions of the ancient world to show that the doctrine of immortality was in sad need of reconstruction, and that the reconstruction could come only through a radical improvement in the world’s ideas concerning God. The primeval belief had assumed grotesque and extravagant forms which distressed the imagination and at the same time involved sinister reflections upon the supreme power and goodness of God.

The form in which we best remember the words of the text is that which is found in the Authorized Version, not “life and incorruption,” which is undoubtedly the true rendering of the word, and is consonant with other passages in Holy Scripture, but “life and immortality,” life and an endurance of that life onward for ever. In this latter form the thought rests more on the duration of the life; in the form which we have in the Revised Version, attention is directed more to the essential nature of the life—life in which there can be no element of death, because it is a life that is indissoluble and incorruptible. 1 [Note: C. J. Ellicott, Sermons at Gloucester, 154.]

(1) In ancient Egypt the immortality of the soul and its reunion with the body in a future resurrection were made contingent upon the preservation of the fleshly form from corruption by the art of the embalmer. Personal immortality was not thought of as the immediate gift of an infinite Being, from whose fiat life in all its types and gradations issued, but as conditioned in part by the skill of the physician, whose work preserved skin and bone from dissolution. The primitive races of the Nile valley must have held in some rough, crude way the theory of the modern materialist, that all thought and feeling depend upon physical structures and that mind is disabled, if not annihilated, when sundered from the material form through which it has been accustomed to operate. If the bodily shape is lost, the “Ka,” or spirit, with which it has been identified, must pass into final oblivion.

(2) The Assyriologist tells us that amongst the earliest populations of the Mesopotamian plains, the state of the dead was conceived of in pictures which were full of gloom and profound distress. For virtuous and degraded alike the underworld was wrapped about in thick darkness and dominated by universal pain. The possibility of reaching a state of spiritual beatitude there had scarcely entered into the dream of the men who founded those imposing civilizations. Perhaps the ruthless warriors who moulded the strong, primitive empires transferred to this mysterious hereafter the shadow of their own misdoing upon earth. Men of blood, drunk with the fanaticism of the sword, made many and cruel gods after their own likeness, and the most implacable of these truculent, blight-breathing gods swayed sceptres of dominion in the underworld. Neither the Semitic nor any other branch of the human race could have a right conception of the life beyond the grave until they had learned to worship a holy, a righteous, a humane God, who swayed His sceptre of dominion over all worlds. Such affrighting ideas received their death-blow when St. John saw in the hands of the gracious and triumphant Son of Man the keys of the grave and the underworld.

(3) In subsequent centuries this weird Babylonian view of immortality projected its gloom into the religions of India and the Far East, as well as into those of Greece and Rome. The doctrine of the transmigration of souls, with many purgatories interposed between each rebirth, spread far and near, filling the popular imagination with endless appalling dramas of changing destiny. In the absence of a benign, personal, supreme God the scheme of retribution became a rigid revolving mechanism of steel, from which all possibilities of pity and forgiveness were excluded. To a solitary hero or moralist once in a century death might mean gain, if the doctrine of reward and punishment should prove to be true; but for the many there was no outlook from death towards a land of promise but the descent into inevitable woe.

But the Greeks, though they dreaded the vagueness and shadowiness of the under world, which always seemed to them bereft of sunlight and concrete form, both dear to the Hellenic spirit, yet in their happier moments had a vivid conception of heaven as the abode of the departed heroes who had deserved well of God and men. What could be lovelier and simpler than Homer’s childlike faith? This is the promise to the hero Menelaus:—

But thee into plains Elysian, which lie at the world’s far end,

The seat of the judge Rhadamanthus, the immortal gods shall send.

Ah! there is a life for mortals which knoweth not any pain,

Where comes no snow, nor winter, nor down-rush of the rain;

But the Zephyr bloweth gently, where the kindly Ocean rolls,

And sends his breath to quicken those happy human souls.

( Odyss. iv. 563–568). 1 [Note: R. F. Horton.]

2. In modern speculation.—On the afternoon of October 30, 1793, twenty-one gentlemen of France, condemned to death, were confined in the Conciergerie prison in Paris. They were the Girondist leaders, the flower of the land. Their average age was twenty-two and a half years. All were guillotined next morning. That evening they had their last supper together and spoke of many things, now seriously, now gaily. Finally, as it grew late, Vergniaud, their chief orator, called them to order and said: “The only question which now remains to be considered is the immortality of the soul.” According to Nodier (who solemnly affirms the substantial correctness of his report) one of their number said: “The solution of that question is traceable in the heart of every honest man whose virtues have been sacrificed on earth. In God’s creation there is no imperfection, and if righteousness persecuted and innocence trampled under foot have no point of appeal before Him, the morality of this sublime creation is a chimera.” Another said: “The solution is indicated by nature in the intelligent instincts of the only organized being who conceives the need and desire of living again. That which nature has promised me, in giving me a presentiment of it, will be mine.” Another, Brissot, said: “It is traced by the reasonings of philosophy in the writings of Plato, and reason has never reached a higher point. That which philosophy has promised in the name of the great Architect of the worlds, I am going to find.” There was a Christian priest among them, and he said: “It is traced for the Christian by his faith, wiser than all philosophy, and that which faith has given me in the name of the Lord, I am going to possess in heaven.” These expressions constitute a résumé of the chief arguments which men have employed in support of the doctrine of personal immortality. Each of the first three—the moral, the psychological, the philosophical—has weight. Taken together, and strengthened by the argument from analogy, they have proved sound and strong enough to sustain many souls in some degree of faith and hope. The reasonings and sentiments which Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates at his last interview with his friends are most impressive and affecting. The Phaedo of Plato is a kind of prolegomenon to the gospel of the resurrection. But that Christian priest’s declaration is distinctly different in kind from the preceding arguments. It has no speculation in it. It rests on a belief that immortality has been brought to light in the gospel. If this be true, it confirms, completes, and crowns all other arguments.

3. In the Old Testament.—The ordinary belief on the subject of a future life shared by the ancient Hebrews was not that the spirit after death ceased to exist, but that it passed into the underworld, Sheol, the “meeting-place,” as Job describes it, “for all living,”—as well for the tyrant king of Babylon, at whose downfall the earth rejoiced, as for Jacob, or Samuel, or David,—where it entered upon a shadowy, half-conscious existence, devoid of interest and occupation, and not worthy of the name of “life”: “For Sheol cannot praise thee, death cannot celebrate thee: they that go down into the pit cannot hope for thy faithfulness.” But the darkness which thus shrouded man’s hereafter was not unbroken in the Old Testament; and there are three lines along which the way is prepared for the fuller revelation brought by the gospel. There is, firstly, the limitation of the power of death set forth by the prophets, in their visions of a glorified, but yet earthly, Zion of the future: “for as the days of a tree shall be the days of my people, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.” There is, secondly, the conviction uttered by individual Psalmists, that their close fellowship with God implies and demands that they will themselves personally be superior to death: “My flesh and my heart faileth; but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.” And, thirdly, we meet with the idea of a resurrection, though at first as a hope rather than as a dogma, and with the limitation that it is restricted to Israel. “Let thy dead live! let my dead bodies arise!” cries the dwindled nation in its extremity; and the prophet forthwith utters the jubilant response: “Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust: for thy dew is as the dew of lights, and the earth shall cast forth the Shades.” But the hope thus triumphantly expressed is limited by the context to Israel; and the same limitation is apparent in the vision of the dry bones in Ezekiel 37. Even in Daniel 12:2, the passage which speaks most distinctly, and teaches also a resurrection of the wicked, the terms are still not universal: “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” But this verse adds, for the first time, the idea of a future retribution, which also may be signified by the “judgment” to which the Preacher, in Ecclesiastes, more than once solemnly alludes. Such is the point at which the Old Testament leaves the doctrine of a future life.

“Sheol,” in general conception, corresponds to the Greek Hades, and must be carefully distinguished from “the grave.” The distinction is rightly preserved in the Revised Version. It is true there are particular phrases, as “to go down to Sheol,” the general sense of which is sufficiently represented by the English idiomatic expression “to go down to the grave”; and this has accordingly been retained in the Revised Version: but “Sheol” in such cases stands on the margin ( e.g., 1 Samuel 2:6, Isaiah 38:10), and elsewhere it is used in the text. Occasionally “hell” has been retained from the Authorized Version ( Isaiah 5:14; Isaiah 14:9; Isaiah 14:15); this, it need scarcely be said, is used (as in the Creed) in the old sense of the term, and not in that of a place of torment. The ordinary Hebrew belief was conscious of no distinction in the future lot of the righteous and the wicked. The impossibility of a return, or resurrection, from Sheol was also strongly felt ( Job 7:9 f., Job 14:7-12, Jeremiah 51:39; Jeremiah 51:57, Isa. 27:14) the possibility of another life entrances Job ( Job 14:14 f., R.V.), but he rejects it as incredible. 1 [Note: S. R. Driver, Sermons on the Old Testament, 95.]

4. Among the Jews at the time of Christ.—The Gospels open by revealing to us the Hebrew world and church previous to the infusion of the Christian element; and from them we learn that a future life, and even a resurrection of the dead, had then become a part of the prevalent and popular creed. There was a learned sect, indeed, distinguished by denying them. The Sadducees believed in nothing beyond the present life and material forms; they said “there was no resurrection,” or separate state—“angel or spirit”; but then there was another class, equally learned and more numerous, and having far greater influence with the people, who believed and taught “both” and all. The sister of Lazarus was not indebted to the teachings of Jesus, but to her previous creed, for the promptness with which she replied to His assurance that her brother should rise again, “I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” And this, there can be little doubt, was the general belief of the Jewish people (with the exception referred to), at, and immediately before, the coming of Christ. We find St. Paul, some years afterwards, not only referring to it as such, but describing it as the result of the revelations given through the prophets. “I stand and am judged for the hope of the promise made of God unto our fathers: unto which promise our twelve tribes, instantly serving God day and night, hope to come.… Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you, that God should raise the dead?” I believe “all things which are written in the law and in the prophets; and have hope toward God, which they themselves also allow, that there shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and unjust.”

The popular belief of the Jews at the time of Christ regarding the life to come was largely taken from certain Apocalyptic books, of which by far the most important was the Book of Enoch. Now in its eschatology, as in its Christology, the Book of Enoch is based essentially upon the Old Testament; it is an imaginative development and elaboration of elements derived thence. Of distinctively Christian truth, of the truths, that is, which centre in, or radiate from, the doctrine of the Incarnation, it does not exhibit a trace. Its resemblance to the writings of the New Testament is limited to externals. The utmost that can be said of it, in this respect, is that it may have lent to the Apostles, perhaps even to our Lord, certain figures and expressions in which they could suitably and conveniently clothe their ideas. But this is no more than what happened in numberless other instances, in which the teaching of both Christ and His disciples is cast in the mould of contemporary Jewish thought. Even where the resemblance appears to be closest, a careful comparison will disclose significant features of difference. The originality of the fundamental conceptions of Christianity is not impaired by the acknowledgment that Jewish thought, reflecting upon the Old Testament, may have provided symbols for their expression, or, in the case of less distinctive ideas, may even have reached them in anticipation. It remains that, in its full significance, the doctrine of a future life was first enunciated in the gospel; and that it was He who “abolished death,” who also was the first to bring “life and incorruption to light.”

II

The Difference which Christ made

1. There are three benefits which Christ brought in bringing life and incorruption.

(1) He gave certainty to the hope of life everlasting.—The sombre death-scene is changed by the revelation of Christ through the gospel. The best of the patriarchs never rose to a higher temper than that of placid, solemn resignation to the will of God. They died without the sense of triumph. Their gaze turned to the coming fortunes of their children in the Land of Promise rather than towards the dim realms into which they were passing. Stephen, Paul, and the generation which caught their spirit, anticipated the time of departure with joy and eager hope. A different atmosphere had been created, and over the riot of violence and brutality the Lover of human souls hovered, stretching out His arms to receive disciples into the fellowship of His immortal reign. The kindling of these new hopes had made a revolution. It is true saints sometimes suffer, and in their last days pass through moods of fierce depression, but He who holds the keys is in the shadows of the background and the desolation passes as His footsteps are heard moving in the dread silences. So has Jesus changed the outlook for all who accept His message and rest upon His work. He cannot betray our hope.

Near a small Norman town there is a stream which local superstition has invested with magic virtue. It is said that whoever drinks of its waters will come back to end his life at Gisors. Many a conscript, on his last night at home, has bowed to take a deep draught from the stream and has then been hurried away to fight in wars of which he had little understanding. It is needless to say that amid the fevers of the tropics and on the fire-swept battlefield he has enjoyed no greater security from death than his comrades of other provinces. As the writer who gives the tradition says, “How often must these smiling waters have broken faith!” Jesus who abolishes death and destroys its power is no preacher of vain hopes. He does not beguile us with a pathetic romance. He knows the sure foundations upon which immortality rests, and He has verified His own message in those inscrutable realms from which we shrink back. “He that drinketh of the water that I shall give him, it shall be in him a well of water, springing up unto everlasting life.” 1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Strenuous Gospel, 244.]

A striking proof of the different outlook produced by the coming of Christ may be found in the contrast between the epitaphs of the early Christians and those of their pagan contemporaries. In place of hopeless resignation and grief there is glad confidence in the continued life of the departed, and in their safety and well-being. “Live in peace and pray for us.” “Pray for us because we know thou art in Christ.” “Thy spirit rest in God.” “In contrast to the pagan custom, even the noblest of the Christians recounted none of the honours of their offices and rank, except that the initials V. C. ( vir clarissimus) C. F. ( clarissima femina) were not uncommonly inscribed to indicate membership in the senatorial order. The Christian attitude was that of looking forward beyond the tomb rather than back over the course of earthly honour and success; recessit a saeculo became a familiar formula in the fourth century.” 2 [Note: W. Lowrie, Christian Art and Archœology, 67.]

(2) He made it applicable to practical life.—All the powerful and invigorating motives brought to operate on the Christian mind, to animate and to purify it, are drawn from the view given by Christ of the future world, and from Himself as connected with it—as securing it by His passion, preparing it by His power, adorning it with His presence, and filling it with His glory. In the Old Testament, motives for action are drawn from the grave—from its silence and darkness, its weary solitude, its lying beyond the region of “device” and “knowledge,” “wisdom” and “work.” The “fear that hath torment” and that drives to duty predominates over the love that enlarges the heart and makes obedience a joy. In the New Testament, the grave is almost lost in the vision of “the glory that is about to be revealed”; that glory breaks forth, gleams, and gushes over the path of the faithful, compelling them, as it were, to keep looking to the place where their Lord lives, and to rejoice in the prospect of living with Him. The resurrection of the dead; the transfiguration of the living; the “vile body” changed into the likeness of Christ’s “glorious body”; the earthy and corruptible image of the first man giving place to that of the second, “the Lord from heaven”; “the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ”; “the grace that is to be brought unto us,” when “we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is”; “our gathering together unto him”—these things, and such as these, are the constant burden (or the ceaseless joy, rather) of apostolic pens; the themes with which the writers glow and burn, to which they are continually referring with delight, and by which they endeavour to diffuse throughout the Church the atmosphere of spiritual health—the conservative element of practical obedience.

There is an old legend that after the crucifixion Peter went away, alone, and sat apart in utter misery. After that first outburst of bitter weeping outside Caiaphas’ palace, he had not shed a tear. His heart was full of the horror of his shame. At midnight of Saturday John came to Mary and said, “Mother Mary, I am afraid for Peter. He sits alone in the dark and will not speak, nor eat, nor weep, and his soul seems dead within him.” Then Mary took the seamless robe which the centurion had kindly given her, and said, “Take this to Peter.” So John took it and went back to Peter, whose room was then a little lighted by the coming dawn, and put the garment in his hands, simply saying, “It is His robe.” And after a little Peter buried his face in the well-known garment and wept like a child, penitently now, now bitterly. And, says the legend, it was at that same moment that the resurrection of Jesus took place! This legend enshrines a precious truth. 1 [Note: E. P. Parker, in The Hartford Seminary Record, xxiii. 94.]

(3) He gave it forth to the world.—So far as the Jewish belief rested upon the Scriptures of the Old Testament, it had something of a local and national aspect; Christ broke the fetters that bound the Book to the Jewish territory and the Hebrew people, and sent it forth as the inheritance of the world. So far as the belief sprang from general reasoning and logical probabilities, it was the same as any of the theories of the Gentiles—a thing that required Divine confirmation in order to its being invested with regal authority. By His utterances, whose words were “with power,” who “spake as never man spake,” who “gave himself a ransom for all,” and who came to be “the light of the world,” the doctrine He adopted, enlarged, and ratified was stamped with the character of universality, and was commanded to be carried to Jew and Gentile alike.

Whatever Christianity has done, or failed to do, this at least we need not fear to claim for it: that it has availed to plant the belief of our immortality among the deepest and most general convictions of our race: that it has borne even into the least imaginative hearts the unfailing hope of a pure and glorious life beyond the death of the body: that it has shot through our language, our literature, our customs, and our moral ideas the searching light of a judgment to come and the quickening glory of a promised Heaven; that it has sustained and intensified this hope through countless changes of thought and feeling in centuries of quickest intellectual development: and that it is now impossible to conceive the force which could dislodge from so many million hearts the axiom which they have learned from the gospel of the resurrection. 2 [Note: Bishop Francis Paget.]

Professor Ed. Gasc Desfosses writes: “A reason for believing in personal immortality to which a certain number of philosophers only accord a very limited credit, but which in my opinion is very important, is the argument furnished by moral anthropology, which may be termed an ethnographic (race) argument. Amongst all people, at all epochs of history (even at prehistoric times), from the rudest and least civilized tribes to those of the highest intellectual development, the belief in an after-existence is everywhere; often this belief is clothed in the most primitive forms, the most materialistic, if we may so express it. But after allowing for the special guidance which philosophical or religious systems, whatever they may be, can give to these beliefs, I think one can say that it is an indication of the existence of an instinct of a high order which is one of the characteristics of humanity. This is what the old traditional philosopher called ‘the proof of universal consent.’ If the name of science is given especially to all research based on facts, it can be said that this argument in favour of the immortality of the soul has a scientific value, as all its strength lies in establishing a fact which is universally human.” 1 [Note: R. J. Thompson, Proofs of Life after Death, 206.]

2. What were the means used by Christ to make life and incorruption part of His gospel? How did He accomplish it?

(1) By His words.—It is not that Christ dwells upon the delights of Heaven, thus fixing or stimulating the imagination, as has been done by founders of other religions. It is a striking fact, indeed, that our Lord never seemed ready to satisfy mere curiosity. It has been truly said that He alone could, if He would, have told us all, and yet that He refused to do so. He knew all; He knew also how much we could safely hear, how much it was good for us to know. But He did teach us of God, of His character, of His justice and holiness and mercy. He did teach us of man, of his value, his opportunity, the infinite reach and consequences of his actions. And both these teachings would be meaningless unless man were immortal. He did more; He placed before men an ideal of their life, an ideal to which conscience and the higher spiritual nature at once and involuntarily in every true soul responds—an ideal wholly inconsistent with the theory of man’s nothingness beyond the grave. He went further. Incidentally, but plainly, upon suitable occasions He referred in actual terms to our interest in an eternal world. God “is not a God of the dead,” He said, “but of the living: for all live unto him”; “In my Father’s house are many mansions.… I go to prepare a place for you”; “Father, I will,” He prayed, “that they whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am”; and other passages. Certainly for the Christian such teachings—and they might be almost indefinitely multiplied—leave no room for question but that we are immortal, that this life is but preliminary to another.

Jesus has two ways of teaching. There is His ethical teaching which every man and every woman can take and test for themselves and see if it is true. He has also His speculative teaching, the great beliefs that He has left us and to which He has pledged His word, and He practically says to us: “You can prove that part of My teaching and find it true. Very well, now you have to believe the part that you cannot prove to be true: you have to take a certain part upon My word.” 1 [Note: C. Silvester Horne.]

(2) By His deeds.—He gave proof that He held the “keys of death” by unlocking its portals and summoning back to human fellowship those who had passed beyond the reach of the voices of kindred. When He touched the bier at the gate of Nain and said, “Young man, I say unto thee, Arise,” and the dead man “sat up and began to speak”; or when to the man that had been dead four days He “cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth,” and “he that was dead came forth,” Jesus demonstrated that “those other living, whom we call the dead,” have not really ceased to live.

There is no one who can afford to look at the scene [the raising of Lazarus] with indifference. We have all to die, to sink in utter weakness past all strength of our own, past all friendly help of those around us. It must always remain a trying thing to die. In the time of our health we may say—

Since Nature’s works be good, and Death doth serve

As Nature’s work, why should we fear to die?

but no argument should make us indifferent to the question whether at death we are to be extinguished or to live on in happier, fuller life. If a man dies in thoughtlessness, with no forecasting or foreboding of what is to follow, he can give no stronger proof of thoughtlessness. If a man faces death cheerfully through natural courage, he can furnish no stronger evidence of courage; if he dies calmly and hopefully through faith, this is faith’s highest expression. And if it is really true that Jesus did raise Lazarus, then a world of depression and fear and grief is lifted off the heart of man. That very assurance is given to us which we most of all need. And, so far as I can see, it is our own imbecility of mind that prevents us from accepting this assurance and living in the joy and strength it brings. If Christ raised Lazarus He has a power to which we can safely trust; and life is a thing of permanence and joy. And if a man cannot determine for himself whether this did actually happen or not, he must, I think, feel that the fault is his, and that he is defrauding himself of one of the clearest guiding lights and most powerful determining influences we have. 1 [Note: M. Dods, The Gospel of St. John. i. 363.]

(3) By His death.—Christ Himself died; He too suffered as all the sons of men must suffer, the dark and sore abasement of death. And the sacred writers, not content with the simple statement of the fact, set it forth under a great variety of phrase, as if to impress upon us that in this, as in all things else, Christ was made like unto His brethren. He not only died, He “tasted death,” He became “obedient unto death,” death had “dominion over him.” For a time “death reigned” even over Him; the Lord of life bowed down before the lord of death. So, on the one hand, is it written. On the other hand we find language of quite another sort. Christ died, but “death no more hath dominion over him”; He died, but it was that “through death he might bring to nought him that had the power of death, that is, the devil.” “The last enemy that shall be abolished is death”; but he shall be abolished, for Christ must reign “till he hath put all his enemies under his feet.” Nay, says the Apostle, death is abolished; already death has surrendered to Christ the keys of Hades and joined the procession of His triumph.

There underlay His death and posture in death a threefold conviction. In the first place He was quite certain that death could not touch His personal existence. “Thou shalt be with me in Paradise.” “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” It was absolutely clear to His human spirit that in that moment when He bowed His head, and His spirit passed from His body, and His body lay a lifeless thing upon the cross, He would be living on. And the same conviction is borne in upon His disciples. “Whether we live, we live unto the Lord; or whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s.”

The second thought that comes to us is this, His absolute conviction that not only did it not touch His personality, but it could not touch His union with God. Whatever is involved in the changed conditions of life, one change there is not: as I live in my Father’s hands here, I shall live in my Father’s hands there. God will be to me then, only in a fuller sense than He is now, a supreme reality. “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”

And, thirdly, there is this conviction, that the life into which He is passing will be a life of peace and rest. “Thou shalt be with me in paradise.” With Me in paradise! What paradise means we cannot entirely grasp while we are still here in the body; and while all our knowledge comes to us as it does through the channels of this body, we cannot get a definite realization of what life is there. But we can get to this—that under those changed conditions the life of the Christian is the life of rest.

Those who die in the fear of God, and in the faith of Christ, do not really taste death; to them there is no death, but only a change of place, a change of state: they pass at once, and instantly, into some new life, with all their powers, all their feelings, unchanged—purified doubtless from earthly stains, but still the same living, thinking, active beings which they were here on earth. I say active. The Bible says nothing about their sleeping till the Day of Judgment, as some have fancied. Rest they may; rest they will if they need rest. But what is the true rest? Not idleness, but peace of mind. To rest from sin, from sorrow, from fear, from doubt, from care—this is the true rest. Above all, to rest from the worst weariness of all—knowing one’s duty, and yet not being able to do it. That is true rest; the rest of God, who works for ever, and yet is at rest for ever; as the stars over our heads move for ever, thousands of miles each day, and yet are at perfect rest, because they move orderly, harmoniously, fulfilling the law which God has given them. Perfect rest, in perfect work; that surely is the rest of blessed spirits, till the final consummation of all things, when Christ shall have made up the number of His elect. 1 [Note: Charles Kingsley, The Water of Life, 36.]

The flocks of God

Not only nothing lacked but knew that now

They nevermore could lack. The wolves of want

And Fear-to-Want might never leap the fence

Of those Elysian folds. No sheep need check

His venturous feet on whatsoever path

Invited him, for now no hireling, but

Their very David, shepherd, priest, and king

Protected them. Against their foes his rod

Of power might not fail, nor for themselves

His mercy’s crook. Therefore abiding joy

Was theirs, inherent as the noble calm

Of forest depths, of mountain-girded lakes

Or plains that have no fencing save the sky—

Joy like the barley loaves of Galilee

Most bless’d in being shared, increased by each

Participant until one separate heart

Might out-rejoice the throbbing universe. 1 [Note: A. Bunston, The Porch of Paradise, 18.]

(4) By His resurrection.—Our hope of immortality hangs on the risen Christ. One, and only one, do we know who has died whom yet death has been powerless to hold. Christ died, as our loved ones die; but while they come back to us no more, neither speak nor give us any sign, He broke the bonds of death, and showed Himself alive after His passion by many proofs. If Christ has not risen, if the gospel story ends with the cross, and Easter Day be struck out of our calendar, death’s cruel sway is still unbroken, the lord of life is death itself. But if Christ be risen, that iron reign is shattered, the risen Christ is lord of life and death alike. Apart from Him, man’s hope of immortality grows every day more faint and tremulous; with Him it is a hope both sure and steadfast, the anchor of the soul. For, be it remembered, Christ’s resurrection is no solitary incident. “When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death, thou didst open the kingdom of heaven to all believers.” Christ is “the firstborn from the dead,” “the firstfruits of them that are asleep”; and all who put their trust in Him shall share with Him His triumph.

The evidence for the eternal life, as that is revealed to us in Christ, is not to be found in considerations such as ancient and modern philosophy adduced from the nature of the soul, its immortality, its indivisibility, etc.; nor is convincing proof to be found in a bare authoritative message, nor in cases of alleged survival, nor even in the survival of Jesus of Nazareth; for if He had on the third day been resuscitated merely as Lazarus was, and had only shown Himself alive, there had been no thought, no proof, of the eternal life as He Himself explained it to us. The relevant evidence lies in the light shed by His resurrection life, by the character of that life, upon our life here, its aspirations, its incompleteness, its promise, and its hopes—there is, that is to say, a certain congruity between the eternal life as Christ is now declared to be living it and certain elements of our present life here. And when these are properly understood we begin to see in them the seeds of a great tree; and we take courage to believe that, though it be with us still only the day of small things, we are already in certain experiences within the eternal order.

In the risen Christ, as the evangelists have drawn the portraiture with the profound unconsciousness which makes their inspiration a reality to the student, we can faintly understand how the corruptible puts on incorruption; and how the mortal puts on immortality without ceasing to be what it has been hitherto. There is no anxiety on their part to reconcile the sharp contrasts which they record; there is no inclination to emphasize or to set forth the truths which they indicate, but when we compare and combine and ponder the scattered details of their narrative, every fragment is found to grow significant. Now in this trait and now in that, Christ is revealed wholly changed and wholly the same. In Him, the Representative of humanity, we see that the perfection of earthly life is undiminished by death, we see that what seems to be dissolution is only transfiguration; we see that all that belongs to the essence of manhood can exist under new conditions; we see that whatever be the unknown glories and the unimaginable endowments of the after life, nothing is cast off which rightly claims our affection and our reverence in this.

As to the evidential value of the Resurrection with regard to immortality, the relation here is, indeed, more vital than at first appears. The Christian hope is not merely that of an “immortality of the soul,” nor is “eternal life” simply the indefinite prolongation of existence in a future state of being. Keeping, however, at present to the general question of the possibility and reality of a life beyond the grave, it is to be asked what bearing the Resurrection of Jesus has as evidence on this. None whatever, a writer like Professor Lake will reply, for the physical Resurrection is an incredibility, and can prove nothing. Apparitional manifestations are possible, but even these can only be admitted if, first of all, proof is given of the survival of the soul by the help of such phenomena as the Society for Psychical Research furnishes. Others base on the natural grounds for belief in a future life supplied by the constitution of the human soul, eked out, in the case of recent able writers, by appeal to the same class of psychical phenomena. On a more spiritual plane, Herrmann and Harnack would argue that immortality is given as a “thought of faith” in the direct contemplation of Christ’s life in God. A soul of such purity, elevation, and devotion to the Father as was Christ’s cannot be thought of as extinguished in death.

Christ’s earthly history does not end as an optimistic faith would expect. Rather, it closes in seeming defeat and disaster. The forces of evil—the powers of dissolution that devour on every side—seem to have prevailed over Him also. Is this the last word? If so, how shall faith support itself? “We hoped that it was he which should redeem Israel.” Is not the darkness deeper than before when even He seems to go down in the struggle? Will it be doubted that, as for the first disciples, so for myriads since, the Resurrection has dispelled these doubts, and given them an assurance which nothing can overthrow that death is conquered and that, because Jesus lives, they shall live also? Jesus, who came from God and went to God, has shed a flood of light into that unseen world which has vanquished its terrors, and made it the bright home of every spiritual and eternal hope. It is open to any one to reject this consolation, grounded in sure historical fact, or to prefer to it the starlight—if even such it can be named—of dubious psychical phenomena. But will it be denied that for those who, on what they judge the best of grounds, believe the resurrection, there is opened up a “sure and certain hope” of immortality which nothing else in time can give? 1 [Note: J. Orr, The Resurrection of Jesus, 271.]

(5) By imparting new life to the believer.—The words spoken to Martha were spoken for us: “Whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die.” The resurrection life is begun already in the believer. A moral and spiritual resurrection has taken place—a rising out of the death of sin into the life of righteousness—which is the pledge of the bodily resurrection. “If the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwelleth in you, he that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall quicken also your mortal bodies through his Spirit that dwelleth in you.” In this case, therefore, death is “abolished.” The physical death must come in the order of nature; but it is a beginning rather than an ending, a process of life rather than of death. It is the folding up of the shifting tent that we may take up our abode in the enduring mansion. It is the doffing of the beggar’s rags that we may don the princely robes. It is the shuffling off of the mortal coil of flesh that the life within may have room to expand and may receive from God a “spiritual body” which may be a fit organ for the renewed spirit.

Grant that a precious memory may be longer and deeper and stronger than time, still when I think what that furious persecutor of Christ and that weak repudiator of his Master became in the course of their Christian experience,—and they are types of innumerable transformations of character since,—I feel sure that the change was not wrought in them by the power of the sacred memory of a dear, dead friend,—Paul had no such memory of Jesus,—but by their close touch and communion with the quickening spirit of a risen and living Lord. Pressing nearer, coming closer to Him, opening our inmost selves to His sweet influence, suffering Him to make His own impression upon us, who can say what He might work in us and make of us? What newness of life? What hope of glory?

Long time ago and far away,

One Easter morn at break of day,

Friar Francisco, strolling round

The monastery garden, found

Among the rose leaves at his feet

A clod of earth surpassing sweet.

Amazed to find a common bit

Of sod so sweet, he questioned it:

“ Whence, then, or how hast thou,” he cried,

Such fragrance?” and the clod replied:

“ I was a piece of common clay

Until God willed that where I lay

A lovely rose should bud and bloom.

I breathed and drank in its perfume.

If any fragrance I disclose

It is the sweetness of His rose.”

Francisco meekly bowed his head

And mused awhile: then knelt and said:

“ O Thou whose love embraces all

Thy works and creatures, great and small,

I am the clod! The Rose is He

Who loved and gave Himself for me.

By that immortal Flower of Thine

Breathe on this barren soul of mine;

Bestow its fragrance upon me,

The fragrance of its purity.”

Then, as responsive to his prayer,

Came, wafted on the morning air,

The music of the minster bell,

Of joyous choirs and organ’s swell

Francisco raised in glad surprise,

His radiant face and streaming eyes;

Rose from his knees and went his way,

The gladdest of glad souls that day,—

Risen with Christ! as he would say.

3. Last of all notice three great gains that come to us through faith in Him who brought life and incorruption to light.

(1) We obtain deliverance from the fear of death.—To all of us death has its aspect of terror. May we not say that to many of us it has its attitude of intense repulsion? We shrink from dying, and even if we do not our hearts fail us in the thought of what lies beyond. But our acquaintance with death, as we have stood at the death-bed of some of our dear ones, makes us shrink from dying. We sometimes feel that if the drawing of that last breath were with us, as with Christ, a willing act, we should never dare to draw that last breath, it is so awful. But with many there is not only this shrinking from dying, but also a shrinking from what lies beyond.

Now see what Christ has done for us. He has destroyed death and destroyed him who has the power of death. What does this mean? The word in the original does not mean that Christ has made death not to be. That is not true. What it means is this, that Christ has so dealt with death that He has taken out of it all its sting, all its power; men are not influenced by it as they were of old. They look upon it with new eyes; they see death transformed.

(2) We rise above the stoical or agnostic indifference to death.—The preacher of a secular ethic asserts that death is a part of the natural order and ought to be faced with fortitude. And sometimes a man, not in anywise imbruted by sin, meets it without a misgiving, and at the same time confesses no obligation to Jesus the Redeemer. We wonder at the calmness and good-humour with which Socrates drank his cup of hemlock and at the high mettle with which some men, not distinctly religious in spirit, face the end of life. We are amazed at the impassivity with which tens of thousands of Japanese throw away their lives in an outburst of loyalty and patriotism. Perhaps the courage of the man who is without a formulated Christian faith may be inspired by a vague sense of the benignity of the cosmic order. But sin puts a new aspect upon death and invests it with a portentous fatality in human fortunes. If unfallen man had been destined to pass through changes corresponding to physical death, his normal consciousness of God might have made such a crisis into a translation. A vague sense of sin bred the gloom and shrouding, terror-haunted shadows of the Babylonian underworld, and sin arms death with a noxious sting wherever a soul becomes burdened by a sense of demerit and transgression. Man might have died without any sign of trepidation or foreboding if his animal sleep had continued unbroken. When rational beings find out how far they have gone in a downward path, the terror of death starts up within them, and is in no sense a creation of theology. The heir of immortality trembles at the thought of his inalienable heritage. But in redeeming us Jesus took away the power of death. The cross declared the truth of man’s immortality; for if man had been one with the grass of the field Jesus would not have set Himself, at such a cost, to remove a blight on the bloom of the hour. His holy Passion inscribed a new value on human life. By destroying sin He changed a dark, soul-withering, wrathful underworld into a realm filled with peace, forgiveness, goodwill, and the fruits of righteousness.

Christ abolished death. It is so that the Apostles always speak concerning death. It is so always that they bear themselves in the presence of death. They will not crouch before it as a tyrant; neither are they content to stand erect before it, as in the presence of an equal; rather do they exult and triumph over it, as a conqueror over a crushed and broken foe.

(3) We gain new and vastly grander views of life.—Christ rescued the soul from the neglect and contempt that it received from the current Sadducaic teachers, who regarded it as a perishable property. He gave the world the faith which was destined to emancipate the slave, to overthrow feudalism, and to become an ever-living force in the raising and ennobling of mankind. And that faith was not only faith in God, but faith in man—faith in the dignity of man’s own nature, faith in the greatness of his origin and the sublimity of his destiny. It was this faith that begat a new note of earnestness in human affairs. The old heart of this world asked with wonder and hesitation: “If a man die shall he live again?” There were motives that should have bidden him live well even though he answered that question for himself with “an everlasting No.” But this truth remains. Teach a man that he came from God and to God he must return, and he will strive to be worthy of his ancestry and his destiny alike. Teach a man that he comes from dust, that he is but the product of matter, and must return whence he came—

Be blown about the desert dust,

Or sealed within the iron hills,—

and you must not wonder if his life is as low as its origin, and his thoughts do not rise above his circumstances. For the secret of the world’s highest endeavour has been the truth that Christ Jesus brought to light—

Life is real! life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

Was not spoken of the soul.

There is a beautiful passage in “Marius the Epicurean,” in which Walter Pater pictures a Pagan in the early days becoming accustomed to a Christian household, and a little gathering of people who formed one of the Christian Churches, and one thing that impressed itself upon his mind was this: There was the slave sitting beside the others, but the slave had a dignity in the Christian Church that the slave never had out of it, because the slave had laid hold of a great idea. He had received the keys of immortality, he was clothed with a new dignity, he realized the greatness of manhood, and those who were associated with the slave in the same church gave even to the slave the reverence and the respect which such manhood ought to command. 1 [Note: C. Silvester Horne.]

Louis xvi. and his beautiful and unfortunate queen died on the scaffold in the Place de la Revolution. The boy who ought to have inherited the throne of France, and who in fact, though he never reigned, has been numbered as Louis xvii. in the roll of monarchs, was left a prisoner. Evil had brought forth evil, as ever. An oppressed people had been roused to a spirit of devilish revenge. The child, it is said, was not only to be kept a prisoner and deprived of whatever rights he might be supposed to possess to the throne of his father, but all that was good in his nature was to be, if possible, destroyed. Evil men placed round him were to train his mind to evil thoughts, his heart to evil feelings, his lips to unlovely words. Naturally he suffered. But now and again, it is said, as his tormentors seemed to go beyond the limits of his endurance, or when God’s voice prevailed in his young soul against them, the unhappy boy would waken up to higher things, and exclaim in anguish, “I can’t say it, I can’t do it, for I was born to be a king!” 1 [Note: W. J. Knox Little, Sunlight and Shadow in the Christian Life, 53.]

Life and Immortality

Literature

Ashby (L.), To Whom Shall We Go? 133.

Bersier (E.), Twelve Sermons, 230.

Binney (T.), Sermons in King’s Weigh-House Chapel, i. 38.

Briggs (C. A.), The Incarnation of the Lord, 127.

Driver (S. R.), Sermons on the Old Testament, 72.

Ellicott (C. J.), Sermons at Gloucester, 153.

Hall (N.), Gethsemane, 314.

Hopps (J. P.), Sermons of Life and Love, 101.

Home (C. S.), The Doctrine of Immortality, 1.

Jackson (G.), Memoranda Paulina, 124, 129.

Jackson (J. O.), in Sermons for Home Reading, 177.

Lee (R.), Sermons, 374.

Little (W. J. K.), Sunlight and Shadow, 29.

Livesey (H.), The Silver Vein of Truth, 210.

Llewellyn (D. J.), The Forgotten Sheaf, 33.

Macdonnell (D. J.), Life and Work, 474.

Nixon (W.), Christ All and in All, 198.

Paget (F.), Faculties and Difficulties for Belief and Disbelief, 69.

Roberts (R.), The Meaning of Christ, 75.

Selby (T. G.), The Strenuous Gospel, 225.

Symonds (A. R.), Fifty Sermons Preached in Madras, 96.

Vaughan (C. J.), Christ the Light of the World, 201.

Yule (A.), Practical Christian Certainty, 67.

Christian World Pulpit, viii. 328 (W. Brock); xii. 296 (J. B. Brown); xviii. 396 (W. Bull); xxxi. 264 (R. F. Horton); xxxiii. 70 (J. B. Heard); xxxv. 310 (B. F. Westcott); lxv. 225 (C. S. Horne); lxvii. 260 (G. Body); lxxvii. 257 (G. A. Johnston Ross).

Churchman’s Pulpit: Easter Day and Season, vii. 346 (G. Jackson).

Hartford Seminary Record, xxiii. 89 (E. P. Parker).

Homiletic Review, liii. 217 (M. Dix); lxiii. 308 (S. P. Cadman).

Verse 12

The Practice of Assurance

I know him whom I have believed, and I am persuaded that he is able to guard that which I have committed unto him against that day.— 2 Timothy 1:12.

1. These words are a splendid declaration of St. Paul’s unflinching confidence in the Redeemer. They were spoken in full view of his approaching end. Earth, with its manifold openings of an eternal purposefulness, with its trials and temptations, its long courses of anxiety and sorrow, of suffering and pain, was already a closed book to the Apostle. The fight for Christ and holiness had been fought, the end had come, the course was finished, the faith had been kept. And now he is ready to be “poured out a libation on God’s altar in agonies and energies for his fellow-men.” The flash of the gleaming axe would be the signal for his manumission from the bondage of corruption into the longed-for presence of his Beloved Lord. Suffering for such a man, aged, weak, solitary, was no doubt exquisite and acute, but it was also ecstatic. Through it all, and in spite of all, his soul was stayed by the solace of his Lord. His venture of faith had not been miscalculated. “I know him whom I have believed, and I am persuaded that he is able to guard that which I have committed unto him against that day.”

2. Of some things—Apostle though he was, Divinely inspired man though he was—St. Paul frankly confesses himself ignorant. “For we know in part,” he writes in that incomparable 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians, “and we prophesy in part.” And a little farther on he repeats his confession of ignorance in slightly different words, saying, “Now we see in a glass darkly.” But it was not all ignorance with him. It was not all doubt, and perplexity, and mystery with him. There were certain things of which he was absolutely sure, of which he was as certain as he was of his own existence. And it was these certainties of the soul that made him the preacher he was. St. Paul never would have travelled as he did; he would never have toiled as he did; he would never have submitted to persecutions as he did, if all he had to give to men had been doubts, and criticisms and negations. There is nothing in negations to beget enthusiasm. Agnosticism breeds no missionaries or martyrs. St. Paul was impelled to preach, to travel from land to land to preach, to face any and every hardship in preaching, because he knew certain positive truths which it was of vital concern that all men should know. The “I know’s” of St. Paul make up a glorious list, and the “I know” of this text is one of the most glorious.

Archdeacon Farrar, it is said, once asked Robert Browning whether there were any lines in all the wide range of his poetry which most completely expressed what was fundamental in his thought and life. “Yes,” replied the poet, “and they are these:—

He at least believed in soul,

Was very sure of God.”

My father also was very sure of God, and was convinced that every man might enjoy a similar certainty if he really wanted to, and if he would tread the common road, beaten by the feet of generations of the pilgrims of faith, by which it may be reached.

This religious certainty, which I do not think was ever disturbed by intellectual doubt, was of course of inexpressible value to him in his ministry of the Gospel. Confirmed as it was by his own daily experience of the Grace and Power of God in Christ Jesus, it naturally imparted to his utterances that flaming intensity of conviction which so deeply impressed his hearers everywhere, and which was assuredly one great element in his evangelistic success. “Here is a man,” they felt, “who thoroughly believes every word he says. To him at least, the things he is speaking of are things that matter—matter supremely, matter infinitely. No other things compare with them for their practical importance. It is life and salvation to receive them; it is death and destruction to reject them.” There was never any hesitancy, or misgiving, or reserve, or qualification in his delivery of the momentous message given him to proclaim. He spoke as one entirely sure that he was telling men the absolute truth. 1 [Note: Henry Varley’s Life-Story, 242.]

“Not ours,” say some, “the thought of Death to dread;

Asking no Heaven, we fear no fabled Hell:

Life is a feast, and we have banqueted,

Shall not the worms as well?”

Ah, but the Apparition—the dumb sign—

The beckoning finger bidding me forego

The fellowship, the converse, and the wine,

The songs, the festal glow!

And ah, to know not, while with friends I sit,

And while the purple joy is passed about,

Whether ’tis ampler day divinelier lit

Or homeless night without:

And whether, stepping forth, my soul shall see

New prospects, or fall sheer—a blinded thing!

There is, O grave, thy hourly victory,

And there, O death, thy sting. 1 [Note: William Watson, Collected Poems, 81.]

3. The very ordering of the phrasing of the text is suggestive of the truth it contains. The text breaks up into three distinctive and primary parts: “I know him” … “whom I have believed” … “and I am persuaded that he is able to guard that which I have committed unto him against that day.” The middle term is explanatory of the two extremes; say rather that the middle term is the cause, of which the two extremes are the effects; that the middle is the germ, of which the extremes are the fruits. We begin with belief, and we pass to knowledge and persuasion: we begin with faith, and we advance to experience and assurance. “I know him” is a fruit: “I am persuaded” is a fruit: “whom I have believed” is the seed from which they have their birth.

I

St. Paul’s Faith

“Him whom I have believed.”

1. The Object of St. Paul’s faith was not a thing, but a Person. It was a belief, not in a religion, but in a Redeemer; a faith, not in Christianity, but in Christ; a trust, not in a plan of salvation, but in a Saviour; not in a creed, but in a Christ; and not a Christ only, but the Christ, the Christ of actual fact, the Christ of Scripture, the “God Man,” as set forth in the gospel, incarnate, atoning, risen, ascended, glorified. It was faith in Christ as a person; a trust of himself as a being to Christ as a Being. And hence he does not here say, “I know what I have believed,” but he says, “I know him whom I have believed.” And he does not even say as he might, “in whom,” but directly “whom.”

You may tear out the person of Mahomet from Mahometanism; and even from Buddhism—in spite of the great extent to which Buddhists have deified the master—you may tear out the person of the Buddha, and the religion remains intact; here the teaching is everything, the person of the teacher nothing, or next to nothing. But tear out the person of Christ from Christianity, and what have you left? Certainly nothing that we can recognize as Christianity. Christianity is not, like its rivals, a mere body of doctrine about God and human duty, which would be just the same whoever had first preached it, or if nothing were known as to the way in which it came into the world. Christian faith is the personal knowledge of a personal Saviour. 1 [Note: N. E. Swann, New Lights on the Old Faith, 60.]

An anecdote I have heard of Bengel’s last hours, illustrating his microscopic way of observing the very words of his Greek Testament, makes one almost smile. When he was dying, he quoted those well-known words of the apostle, in the immediate prospect of his death by Nero, “I know whom I have believed,” etc., and then said to the bystanders, “The apostle (you see) wouldn’t let even a preposition come in between himself and his Lord; for he doesn’t say, ‘I know upon whom’ (εἰ?ς ὃ?ν ), but ‘I know whom I have believed’ (οἶ?δα γὰ?ρ ᾧ? πεπίοτευκα )—the eye of his faith resting on the glorious object to whom he had ever trusted his all.” 2 [Note: W. G. Blaikie, David Brown, D.D., LL.D., 147.]

I remember a simple story that twined its clinging tendril fingers about my heart. It was of a woman whose years had ripened her hair, and sapped her strength. She was a true saint in her long life of devotion to God. She knew the Bible by heart, and would repeat long passages from memory. But as the years came the strength went, and with it the memory gradually went too, to her grief. She seemed to have lost almost wholly the power to recall at will what had been stored away. But one precious bit still stayed. She would sit by the big sunny window of the sitting-room in her home, repeating over that one bit, as though chewing a delicious titbit, “I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.” By and by part of that seemed to slip its hold, and she would quietly be repeating, “that which I have committed to him.” The last few weeks, as the ripened old saint hovered about the borderland between this and the spirit world, her feebleness increased. Her loved ones would notice her lips moving, and thinking she might be needing some creature comfort, they would go over and bend down to listen for her request. And time and again they found the old saint repeating over to herself one word, over and over again, the same one word, “Him—Him—Him.” She had lost the whole Bible but one word. But she had the whole Bible in that one word. 1 [Note: S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Service, 78.]

2. “Him whom I have believed,” says St. Paul. What is belief? What is it to believe Him? Christ Jesus makes certain claims. He claims to bring the secret key to every life. He claims that every life discovers itself in Him, and finds its completeness in Him. He claims that He supplies to every man the requisite light and atmosphere for the individual task. He claims that He reveals the face of the Eternal. He claims that He incarnates the love and goodness of the Godhead. He claims that by the love revealed in His humiliation He redeems from guilt and sin and moral impotence, and that He endows life with the strength and quietness of an immortal hope. These are the Master’s claims. What, then, is belief? Belief is just the willingness to receive the claims as a great hypothesis, and to subject them to the proof of actual life. Faith in religion is somewhat equivalent to experiment in science. Faith is not the heedless and thoughtless swallowing of dogma, but the reverent testing of a profession. Faith is not the blinding of the judgment, it is rather the application of the judgment to the superlative work of proving the “bona fides” of the Lord. Faith is not the laying of the powers to sleep; it is rather the arousing of the powers to the greatest task to which they can ever be addressed. Faith is not credulity; it is experiment. “Prove me now, saith the Lord.”

Hall Caine tells us that Rossetti was not an atheist, but simply one with a suspended judgment; in face of death his attitude was one of waiting, he did not know. Now the great work of Jesus Christ touching the doctrine of immortality was to convert it from a speculation into a certainty. The evidence for His resurrection, which carries with it the doctrine of our incorruptibility and immortality, is overwhelming; as one has said, it is the best authenticated fact in history. The Christian is one who knows. The Spirit of God has so opened up to our consciousness the truth of Christ’s teaching, the fact of His resurrection, that we are as satisfied of our continued and permanent existence as we are that we exist at all. The nearer we live to Christ, the more deeply we drink into His Spirit, the more the assurance of eternal life grows upon us. 1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson.]

II

St. Paul’s Experience

“I know him whom I have believed.”

1. St. Paul has made and is making the experiment. He has confided, ventured, believed, and he has staked his all upon the test, “Whom I have believed.” And with what result? “I know him!” There emerges a certain experience. “I know him!” It is a wealthy word, “I know!” It implies, in the first place, a faint perception of the outlines of things; “men as trees walking.” The impenetrable mist begins to yield something, and we discern outlines, and movements, little glimpses of road, a suggestion of sky-line, and some sense of gracious law and order. “I have believed.” “I know.” “Now I know in part.” Ah, but it is much more than dim perception of outline, it is the recognition of a Person. “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” That is it. The experiment which begins in trembling tests issues in a warm and loving companionship. Let the experiment be continued, and the recognition ripens into intimacy, into a holy and familiar friendship that nothing can dissolve.

Our knowledge of Christ is somewhat like climbing one of our Welsh mountains. When you are at the base you see but little; the mountain itself appears to be but one half as high as it really is. Confined in a little valley you discover scarcely anything but the rippling brooks as they descend into the stream at the base of the mountain. Climb the first rising knoll, and the valley lengthens and widens beneath your feet. Go up higher, and higher still, till you stand upon the summit of one of the great roots that start out as spurs from the sides of the mountain, you see the county, perhaps very many miles around, and you are delighted with the widening prospect. But go onward, and onward, and how the scene enlarges till at last when you are on the summit, and look east, west, north, and south, you see almost all England lying before you. Now, the Christian life is of the same order. When we first believe in Christ we see but little of Him. The higher we climb, the more we discover of His excellencies and His beauties. 1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]

2. Thus the ultimate ground of Christian certainty lies in the positive facts of Christian experience. We all know the value and authority of experience in other directions. No certainty is so absolute as that which comes in this way. The sights I have seen with my own eyes; the words I have heard with my own ears; the thoughts which have passed through my own brain; the pains and pleasures, the joys and sorrows which I have felt in my own heart—these facts to me are certain, as no other facts can be. And, in the realm of religion, experience brings with it the same certainty as it brings in any other sphere. There are some persons who try to disparage the value of experience in religious matters. They admit its importance in the ordinary regions of science, for ever since the days of Lord Bacon experiment has been the acknowledged test of truth. But, unlike Lord Bacon himself, they appear to think that it has no value, and no authority when we come to speak of spiritual things. And so, when a Christian appeals to his own experience, they smile at his childishness, as if he ought to know that experience really has nothing to do with the matter. But surely that is a very unscientific way of dealing with that great body of human experience which is furnished by the history of Christianity. The expert in chemistry or biology will not allow an outsider to criticize facts of which personally he knows nothing; and in like manner the man who knows nothing by experience of Jesus Christ and Christianity is really out of court—he has no proper claim to pronounce an opinion as to the facts. In the one case, as in the other, the principle holds good, Experto crede: Listen to the experts; let those speak who have had the experience. We claim, then, that Christian experience is an authentic fact; and that it is upon the solid ground of Christian experience that Christian certainty is built. How does a man know whom he has believed? How is he fully persuaded of Christ’s power to save him and to keep him? He knows, we answer, and is persuaded, by the experiences of his own heart and life.

The lesson of these uncertainties seems to be that Christ denies Himself to the man who seeks Him with the intellect only, but to those who search for Him with submissive wills and open hearts He grants spiritual illumination, and in the New Testament reveals Himself as the Saviour they need. Committing themselves to Him in utter obedience and trust, they find rest and peace, and in a bright experience have a clearer and more abiding evidence of the Risen Christ than the best attested document could give. “Even so, Father,” etc. Experience in the face of assaults from geology, biology, psychology, evolution—experience is and always will be the convincing evidence of Christianity. Amid the things that are shaken this remains. 1 [Note: John Brash: Memorials and Correspondence, 261.]

Lift up thine eyes to seek the invisible:

Stir up thy heart to choose the still unseen:

Strain up thy hope in glad perpetual green

To scale the exceeding height where all saints dwell.

Saints, is it well with you?—Yea, it is well.—

Where they have reaped, by faith kneel thou to glean:

Because they stooped so low to reap, they lean

Now over golden harps unspeakable.—

But thou purblind and deafened, knowest thou

Those glorious beauties unexperienced

By ear or eye or by heart hitherto?—

I know Whom I have trusted: wherefore now

All amiable, accessible tho’ fenced,

Golden Jerusalem floats full in view. 2 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Verses, 158.]

III

St. Paul’s Persuasion

“I am persuaded that he is able to guard that which I have committed unto him against that day.”

1. What has St. Paul committed to God? The Greek word means my deposit—“I am persuaded that he is able to guard my deposit.” The figure is, of course, obvious—a deposit put into the hands of a depositary with what appears to be sufficient security, a trust placed with an absolutely trustworthy trustee. What has been committed which he is sure will be carefully and safely kept? Some give elaborate reasons why it should be interpreted to mean his soul, or faith in immortality, or salvation, or the care of the Churches, or his converts who were a burden of love on his heart, and suchlike particular precious things for which St. Paul trusts God. But it does not mean any of those things, though it includes them all. The phrase is vague, and it is meant to be vague. “My deposit”—it means that St. Paul had committed to Him everything, and was persuaded that He was able to keep it all. The emphasis is not on what the deposit was, but on the fact that the deposit is safe. If you want one word for the deposit, the one word is himself. The deposit includes all that St. Paul had trusted God for. He trusts God for his soul, but no more than he trusts Him for his body. He trusts God for salvation hereafter, but no more than he trusts Him for his life here. He trusts Him for the converts and Churches, as he trusts Him for all personal cares. The word has no definite limits, and was not meant to have limits—“my deposit,” that which I have committed unto Him. The force of the sentence is in the fact that the deposit is safe where it is. It is in the right hands, and he need be neither afraid nor ashamed. It is the Guarantor he is thinking of, not the special things that have been guaranteed; the Trustee, not the different items of the trust.

You and I have one treasure, whatever else we may have or not have; and that is ourselves. The most precious of our possessions is our own individual being. We cannot “keep” that. There are dangers all round us. We are like men laden with gold and precious stones, travelling in a land full of pickpockets and highwaymen. On every side there are enemies that seek to rob us of that which is our true treasure—our own souls. We cannot keep ourselves. Slippery paths and weak feet go ill together. The tow in our hearts and the fiery sparks of temptation that are flying all round about us are sure to come together and make a blaze. We shall certainly come to ruin if we seek to get through life, to do its work, to face its difficulties, to cope with its struggles, to master its temptations, in our own poor, puny strength. So we must look for trusty hands and lodge our treasure there, where it is safe. 1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

“I had been thinking,” Brownlow North says, “probably for hours, about the plainly revealed but unexplained mysteries of God, and was no wiser; they still remained unrevealed and still unexplained, and all the fruit of my thinking seemed a headache.” After a time he began to think again, and said aloud to himself, “Brownlow North, do you think by your own reason or deep thinking you can find out God or know Christ better than the Bible can teach you to know Him? If you do not, why are you perplexing your brains with worse than useless speculations? Why are you not learning and holding on by what you learn from the Scriptures? You are shut up to one of two things, you must either make a god and a religion for yourself, and stand or fall eternally by it, or you must take the religion of Jesus Christ as revealed to you in His Word. You cannot receive a little of God’s teaching and a little of your own, you cannot believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and the wisdom of your own heart at the same time. Choose, then, now and for ever, by which you stand or fall.” He then struck his hand forcibly upon his open Bible, and said, “God helping me, I will stand or fall by the Lord Jesus Christ. I will put my trust in His truth, and in His teaching as I find it in the written Word of God; and doing that, so sure as the Lord Jesus Christ is the truth, I must be forgiven and saved.” After that he tells us he ceased to try to reconcile apparently opposing doctrines of Scripture, or those that were above his reason, submitting his intellect like a little child to the teaching of God’s Word and Spirit. 2 [Note: Moody Stuart, Brownlow North, 36.]

2. Now such a committal involves a definite act. Everything is handed over to the Lord. The body is presented to Him as a living sacrifice. Henceforth “to live is Christ and to die is gain.” All the keys of the life are handed over to Him; every room of the personality is at His disposal. A new sense of proprietorship is awakened. I am not my own, I am bought with a price; I am His poem—His workmanship; all my faculties, feelings, passions, powers, opportunities are not really mine; they are His, although entrusted to my care.

We can—within certain limits, at any rate—answer each one of us for himself the question, “What shall I do with my life?” And the many answers which are given to that question resolve themselves, in principle, into three. The first is something to this effect: “I will do nothing in particular with it. I will let matters drift. I have no distinct object; and all effort is unwelcome. If nothing is done, all may, after all, come right.” A second answer runs thus: “While I have it I will make the best of it. It gives me many opportunities of present enjoyment; I will turn them to account. I will extract from the moments as they pass as many pleasurable sensations as they can be made to yield. There will be an end to this, I know; pleasure soon palls, and time passes with relentless speed. But I will do as the old pagan bids; I will snatch joyfully the gifts which the present hour offers me, and will leave stern questions about the future to take care of themselves.” A third answer to the question, What shall I do with my life? is this: “I will give it to God.” This is the investment which a Christian makes. St. Paul made it at his conversion. St. Paul’s question, “What wilt thou have me to do?” addressed to our Lord Jesus Christ, marks the first step in this great change; and when St. Paul had begun, it was not the way of an intense and thorough character like his to do things by halves; he gave himself to God’s guidance and disposal without reserve. He felt that he was not his own; he was bought with a price. He felt that Christ had died for all, with this purpose among others, “that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them.” 1 [Note: H. P. Liddon, Sermons on Some Words of St. Paul, 279.]

3. The first act of committal in the hour of awakened faith is only the blessed beginning of a still more blessed lifelong habit of never-failing trust. The truly believing soul goes on believing and committing, until that day when the final settlement takes place. And then, when that day has come, and every man receives his own at the hand of the Righteous Judge, it is that it may be laid again, with all the increase it has gained, at the feet of Jesus, to be kept by Him, and used by Him, and be His only and wholly—to whom all is due—for all eternity.

Madame Guyon, the author of A Short and Easy Method of Prayer, died in 1717, at the age of sixty-nine. Her long life had been one of unceasing trust and communion with God, through many vicissitudes and persecutions in the dark age of Louis xiv. In one of her poems she wrote—

Yield to the Lord with simple heart

All that thou hast, and all thou art;

Renounce all strength but strength Divine;

And peace shall be for ever thine;

Behold the path which I have trod—

My path till I go home to God.

A short time before her death she wrote a will, from which the following passage is an extract. It is an affecting evidence of the depth of her piety, and that she relied on Jesus Christ alone:—

“In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”

“This is my last will and testament, which I request my executors, who are named within, to see executed.

“It is to Thee, O Lord God, that I owe all things; and it is to Thee, that I now surrender up all that I am. Do with me, O my God, whatsoever Thou pleasest. To Thee, in an act of irrevocable donation, I give up both my body and my soul to be disposed of according to Thy will. Thou seest my nakedness and misery without Thee. Thou knowest that there is nothing in heaven, or in earth, that I desire but Thee alone. Within Thy hands, O God, I leave my soul, not relying for my salvation on any good that is in me, but solely on Thy mercies, and the merits and sufferings of my Lord Jesus Christ.” 1 [Note: T. C. Upham, Life of Madame Guyon, 498.]

4. A quiet committal of ourselves to God is the only thing that will give us quiet hearts amidst the dangers and disappointments and difficulties and conflicts which we have all to encounter in this world. That trust in Him will bring, in the measure of its own depth and constancy, a proportionately deep and constant calm in our hearts.

We boarded a liner at Liverpool and were soon in the midst of a throng of strangers. We were travelling steerage and our bunks and belongings were open to all below, and this gave us some anxiety as we had no safe place to keep what little money we had—when we came on deck we were continually worried thinking that it might be stolen. The wide open sea and the pleasures of the deck we could not enjoy, and every now and again one of us would be going down below to see that all was safe. This anxiety continued for four days, and then we heard that the purser took care of valuables left with him, so we decided to ask him to take charge of our money. He told us we were late, and that people usually came to him at the start of the voyage. We said we were sorry to be late, but we thought better now than not at all. So he took our money and locked it in the great safe, telling us to come to him and get it again before we landed. He spoke kindly and sent us away with light hearts. The rest of the voyage we were able to enjoy to the full, entering into everything with never a care or worry. Life was altogether different, its joy had returned again, and all because we had confidence in the purser. We knew whom we had trusted, and were persuaded that he was able to keep that which we had committed unto him against the day of our landing in the new country at the port of Quebec. 1 [Note: James Whillans.]

5. “I am persuaded.” The original word is stronger than “persuaded” has come to be with us. It implies an irrefragable conviction. “I am absolutely certain that He is able to keep my deposit”—what I have put into His hands—“and to keep it against that day.” “I am persuaded!” The experiment has succeeded, and the initial trembling has passed into final calm. The loose uncertainty has consolidated into firm assurance, and the Apostle now quietly confronts the massed and mighty antagonists of the night with unflinching courage and cheer. “Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof.” “I am persuaded!” The quiet, fruitful, glorious confidence of it! The Apostle had risked his all upon the venture; he had committed everything to the proof! “I am persuaded that he is able to guard my deposit,” “that which I have committed unto him against that day.”

Her soul was enveloped in thick darkness, and her temptations against Faith, ever conquered but ever returning, were there to rob her of all feeling of happiness at the thought of her approaching death. “Were it not for this trial, which is impossible to understand,” she would say, “I think I should die of joy at the prospect of soon leaving this earth.” By this trial the Divine Master wished to put the finishing touches to her purification, and thus enable her not only to walk with rapid steps, but to run in her little way of confidence and abandonment. Her words repeatedly proved this. “I desire neither death, nor life. Were Our Lord to offer me my choice, I would not choose. I only will what He wills; it is what He does that I love. I do not fear the last struggle, nor any pains—however great—my illness may bring. God has always been my help. He has led me by the hand from my earliest childhood, and on Him I rely. My agony may reach the furthest limits, but I am convinced He will never forsake me.” 1 [Note: Sœur Thérèse of Lisieux, 204.]

6. And of what is he persuaded? That “he is able to guard (A.V. keep) that which I have committed unto him against that day.” The word rendered in the A.V. to keep is often used for guarding as armed men do. God, as it were, mounts guard on what we put into His hands. He comes to us in no mere metaphor, but in the deepest reality of the spiritual life, to guard us, to deliver us from our own evil and from outward evils, to be a wall of fire around us, and to keep us “against that day,” with all its mysteries and terrors. Our hearts and anticipations go beyond the dark end of life; and we think of all the mysteries which, though they be magnificences, strike a chill of strangeness into our hearts, and we wonder what is to befall us out yonder in the darkness where we have never been before and about which we know little except that the throne is to be set, and the books opened. St. Paul says to us, “He is able to keep against that day.” So guarded in life, shielded from all real evil, preserved from temptation and from snares, brought unharmed through the hurtling of the pitiless storm of death, and shepherded in the fold beyond the flood, the soul that is committed to Him is safe. In that act of giving ourselves utterly up to God, lie the secret of blessedness and the guarantee of immortality. He is not going to lose the treasures committed to His charge. He prizes them too much. His hand will not let the deposit entrusted to Him slip, and He will say at the last what Christ said in the Upper Room, only with a diverse application, “That which thou hast given me I have kept, and none of it is lost,” and our souls will be safe in His hands.

What was it that Duncan Mathieson once proposed that they should write upon his tombstone when he died? It was the one word “Kept.” When the grey hairs came on him, and he looked backward over the road he had trod, it was not his prayers, his tears, his toils, that shone conspicuous, though all were there; it was the keeping power of God. There had been fears within and fightings without; there had been war unceasing with principalities and powers; dark foes unseen had thronged him and had tempted him, and had sought his overthrow. But he was more than conqueror in Christ who loved him. When a young man he had given himself to Christ. Right onward from that hour he had been kept. 1 [Note: G. H. Morrison, The Oldest Trade in the World, 56.]

Now wilt me take for Jesus’ sake,

Nor cast me out at all;

I shall not fear the foe awake,

Saved by Thy City wall;

But in the night with no affright

Shall hear him steal without,

Who may not scale Thy wall of might,

Thy Bastion, nor redoubt.

Full well I know that to the foe

Wilt yield me not for aye,

Unless mine own hand should undo

The gates that are my stay;

My folly and pride should open wide

Thy doors and set me free

’Mid tigers striped and panthers pied

Far from Thy liberty.

Unless by debt myself I set

Outside Thy loving ken,

And yield myself by weight of debt

Unto my fellow-men.

Deal with my guilt Thou as Thou wilt,

And “hold” I shall not cry,

So I be Thine in storm and shine,

Thine only till I die. 2 [Note: Katharine Tynan.]

The Practice of Assurance

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