Part 5 (1/2)
Faith cleaves unto it, counting every grain With an exact and most particular trust, Reserving all for flesh again.
GEORGE HERBERT.
It is good to think of Michael, the archangel, disputing with the devil about the body of Moses. The dispute was over a grave. The Most High had himself performed the funeral rites of his servant; for, we read, ”The Lord buried him.” We naturally think of the archangel as placed in charge of the precious dust.
Some great commission, connected with the resurrection of the dead, appears to be held by the chief spirit of the angelic world. ”For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and the trump of G.o.d.” The burial of each and every body which is destined to the resurrection of the just, is, therefore, not improbably an object of interest with him who, under the G.o.d-man, will have the supervision of the last day. With a view to that harvest of the earth, he will now see the furrows made, the seed planted, the hill prepared. He will have a care that every thing lies down, whether by seeming accident, or by violence, or by design, in just the place from which the arranging mind of Him who is Lord both of the dead and of the living, has appointed it to come forth. Every circ.u.mstance attending that event, the great object of hope in heaven and on earth,--our resurrection,--is of sufficient importance to be the subject of thought and preparation on the part of Christ, himself the first fruits of them that slept.
The care of the patriarchs concerning their burial places is like one of those premonitions in an antecedent stratum of geology, or species of animals, of a coming manifestation;--a prophesying germ, a yearning, created by Him who, with all-seeing wisdom, establishes antic.i.p.ations in the moral, as well as in the natural, world, concerning things with regard to which a thousand years are with him as one day.
Not on earth alone, as it seems, is an interest felt in the death and burial of the righteous.
For when the leader of Israel in the wilderness went up to the hill top to die, the two great angels, of heaven and h.e.l.l, met and contended over his grave.
Denied the privilege of burial in the promised land, Moses may have appeared to Satan so evidently under the frown of G.o.d, as to encourage his meddlesome efforts to inflict some injury upon him, through dishonor done to his remains. Perhaps he would convey them back to Egypt, a gift to the brooding vengeance of the Pharaohs, who would gratify their anger by preserving that body in the house of their G.o.ds;--thus showing their spiteful satisfaction at the disappointment of the prophet whom Jehovah would not permit to enter that promised land, in hope of which the great spoiler had led away the bondmen of Egypt.
Perhaps the devil would gratify the desire of some idolatrous nation, craving new objects of wors.h.i.+p, by leading them to canonize this Hebrew chief; and thus make of the lawgiver and prophet of Israel a false G.o.d.
Perhaps he could even prevail on some of the Israelites themselves, if not the whole of them, to wors.h.i.+p this revered form; or might he but have the designation and the custody of his grave, he would, perhaps, fix it where it would be most convenient for the nation to a.s.semble, at stated times, for some idolatrous rites.
But the great vicegerent of the resurrection was there. To him the body of a saint is suggestive of the last day; it is a special a.s.signment by Christ, an official trust, to the archangel. Bodies of saints are, therefore, most precious to him. Particles of the precious metal are not more precious to the miner, pearls to the diver, ivory to the Coast-merchant, and the sh.e.l.l-fish to the maker of Tyrian purple. The body of each saint is an unfinished history of redemption; a destiny of indescribable interest and importance belongs to it. Any subaltern angel may have charge of winds and seas, of day and night, of summer and winter; but only the archangel is counted meet to have charge, and to keep watch and ward, over the bodies of saints as they sleep in Jesus.
”He disputed about the body of Moses.” It was a dispute characterized on the part of the archangel more by act than word. Words are hushed in great encounters. Debate with a pirate, a body-s.n.a.t.c.her, would be folly; no arguments, therefore, were wasted, on the top of Nebo, by Michael, over the grave of Moses. ”The Lord rebuke thee,” was his retort; his heavenly form stopping the way, his baffling right arm hindering the accursed design, were the invincible logic of that dispute.
O prince of angels, watchman, herald, master of the guard, at the resurrection of the just,--comptroller, now, of that treasury which receives and keeps their precious forms,--from whose lips that signal is to come which millions on millions are to hear, and live,--what images of glory and terror fill thy mind in the antic.i.p.ation of that moment when thy dread commission is to be fulfilled! Is not that ”trumpet” sometimes taken into thy hand? Dost thou not place it to thy lips, but quickly lay it aside, and patiently and joyfully watch the swelling number of the graves of saints? Funerals of those who fall asleep in Jesus, to thee are pleasant scenes; they are spring-work, planting times, for thy harvest, O chief reaper! While, with bursting hearts, we turn from the new-made mound, one more glorified body, in antic.i.p.ation, is added to thy charge.
Smiling at our sorrow, in joyful thought of the change to be witnessed in and around that sepulchre when the family circle shall there put on incorruption, thou canst not pity us except as we pity the brief sorrows of children. If the devil should approach that spot, to work some unknown, and, to us, inconceivable, harm to that body,--be it the body of the humblest saint, one of those little ones who believe in Jesus, or of those infants whose angels do always behold the face of G.o.d,--thou, mighty cherub, wouldst be there, and, if need be, with a band of angels, ”every one with his sword upon his thigh, because of fear in the night;”
and Nebo and its ”dispute” would reappear. Poor, dying, mouldering body!
hast thou the archangel himself for thy keeper? Not only so:
”G.o.d, my Redeemer, lives, And often from the skies Looks down and watches all my dust, Till he shall bid it rise.”
Nor is it strange, since we read, ”The body is for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.” ”Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you?”
To rise from the dead seems to have been something more to Paul than going to heaven, or than being in heaven. He knew that he was to spend the interval between death and the resurrection in heaven; but beyond even this, he had a joy which he felt was essential to the completeness of the heavenly state.
See the proof of this in the following words: ”If by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead.”
Since he was destined, like all of Adam's race, to come forth from his grave, he needed to make no effort whatever merely to rise from the dead; that was inevitable, and irrespective of character. Besides, he represents this object for which he strove as something which required effort, which cannot be said of merely rising from the grave.
Paul had been permitted to know, by personal observation, what the rising from the dead implies. Caught up into Paradise, we may suppose that he had seen the patriarch Enoch, and the prophet Elijah, with their glorified bodies; the presence of which in heaven, we may imagine, has ever served to enhance the happiness of that world, by holding forth, before the eyes of the redeemed, the sign and pledge of their future experience when they shall receive their bodies. For it is not presumptuous to suppose that the sight of Enoch and Elijah has been, and will be, till the last trumpet sounds, a source of joyful expectation to the inhabitants of heaven, leading them to antic.i.p.ate the final day with intense interest, as the time when they will be invested, like those honored saints, with all the capacities of their completed nature, which nature, while the body lies buried, is in a dissevered state. If Paul, when in heaven, saw and felt the power of this expectation in the minds of glorified saints, no wonder that the resurrection of the body seemed to him, ever after, to be the crown of Christian expectation and hope.
More than all, he had seen the man Christ Jesus, in his glorified body; who on earth had said, ”I am the resurrection and the life”--himself an ill.u.s.tration of it, whom alone the grave has yielded up to die no more.
He is, therefore, to saints in heaven, a far more interesting object than Enoch and Elijah, who never died. ”For now is Christ risen from the dead, and is become the first fruits of them that slept.” This sight, of Christ in heaven, must have had unutterable interest for Paul, from the a.s.surance that Christ will ”change our vile body, that it may be fas.h.i.+oned like unto his glorious body;” for ”we know that when he shall appear,” Paul himself tells us, ”we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.” This knowledge, obtained in the heavenly world, may have led the apostle to think of the resurrection as the crown of all his expectations and hopes.
It is noticeable that the writers of the New Testament, and Jesus himself, refer chiefly to the resurrection and the last day as sources of comfort, and also of warning. Now this is made a princ.i.p.al ground of belief, with many, that there is either no consciousness between death and the resurrection; or, that none have gone to heaven, nor to h.e.l.l, but to intermediate places, seeing that final rewards and punishments are, in so many instances, wholly predicated of the last day.
But those who believe that the souls of the righteous are, at their death, made perfect in holiness, and do immediately pa.s.s into glory, see proof, in all this prominence which is given to the last day, and to the resurrection, that the sacred writers regarded the resurrection and final judgment as the great consummation, towards which souls, in heaven and in h.e.l.l, would be looking forward with intense expectation and interest; that neither will the joys of heaven nor the pains of h.e.l.l be complete, till the account of our whole influence upon the world, extending to the end of time, is made up, and the body is added to the soul. When Paul comforts the mourners of Thessalonica, he bids them to ”sorrow not as they that have no hope; for,” (and now he does not speak of heaven, and of souls being already there, as the source of consolation, but) ”if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them, also, that sleep in Jesus will G.o.d bring with him;” and he proceeds to speak of the resurrection,--not of the speedy reunion of friends after death, but of the departed as coming with Christ at the last day. This, instead of being an argument against the immediate departure of souls to heaven, arises from the desire to employ the strongest possible proof that the pious dead are not only safe, but are greatly honored. ”Resurrection” was an abounding subject of thought, argument, and ill.u.s.tration in those days; the state of the dead between death and the last day, is comparatively disregarded by the apostles, while their minds were full of the great question of the age--the Resurrection. This fullness of thought and constant occupation of mind about the resurrection, as the cardinal doctrine of Christian hope, explains the apparent belief of the apostles, in some pa.s.sages, that the final day was near. This the apostle Paul expressly denies, in the second chapter of the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians. But a greater event, looked at in the same line of vision with an intermediate and smaller object, will, of course, have the prominent place in our thoughts. The less will be held subordinate to the greater; perhaps we shall seem to underrate the less, in our exalted conceptions of that which rises beyond and above. We shall see, as we proceed, why the expectation of the last day seemed to occupy the thoughts of apostles as the paramount object of expectation.
It is perfectly obvious that, at the resurrection, the bodies of the just will be endued with wonderful susceptibilities and powers. This is rendered certain by the great mystery of G.o.dliness,--G.o.d manifest in the flesh. The greatest honor which could be conferred upon our nature, and the greatest testimony to its intrinsic dignity, and to its being, in its unfallen state, in the image of G.o.d, is bestowed upon it by the incarnation of the Word. True, there was a necessity that the Redeemer should be made like unto us, however inferior human nature might be in the scale of creation; still, unless there had been such intrinsic dignity and excellence in our sinless nature, as to make it compatible for the second Person in the G.o.dhead to be united with it, we cannot suppose that this union would have been permanent; it would have fulfilled a temporary purpose, and then have ceased.
Perhaps we slightly err if we think of Christ's a.s.sumption of human nature as, in any respect, an incongruous act of humiliation. For man was made in the image of G.o.d; so that when Christ was made flesh, without sin, he took upon himself that which, in some sense, was congruous with his divine nature. His humiliation consisted, in part, in his doing this; but more especially in his doing this for such a purpose--for sinners; ”in his being born, and that in a low condition, made under the law, undergoing the miseries of this life, the wrath of G.o.d, and the cursed death of the cross, in being buried and continuing under the power of death for a time.” Had there been no inherent congruity between our nature and the divine, the human nature of Christ, having accomplished its purpose of suffering and death, would have been left in the grave. ”But now is Christ risen from the dead;”
the body and the human soul, which were disunited when he hung upon the cross, now const.i.tute the same man, Christ Jesus. ”The only Redeemer of G.o.d's elect is the Lord Jesus Christ, who, being the eternal Son of G.o.d, became man, and so was, and continues to be, G.o.d and man, in two distinct natures and one person, forever.” The latter part of this answer of the a.s.sembly's Shorter Catechism is thus substantiated by the New Testament: ”When he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.” In other words, he will be, when he appears, that which he now is--will remain the same until his second coming. After that, he will remain as he was before: ”Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever.” He is represented as holding an eternal relation to the redeemed in his glorified nature: ”The Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters.” We might, indeed, suppose that the man Christ Jesus would have an eternal recompense for his sufferings and death in an everlasting union with the G.o.dhead; nor can any one think, with satisfaction, of a severance between his two natures, and of a consequent humiliation, or deposition, of that human nature, which, at the great day, will, for so long a time, have sustained such a connection with the divine nature. For our present purpose, however, which is to show the intrinsic dignity of the human nature, it would be enough that it has been in such connection with the G.o.dhead, and has pa.s.sed through such scenes, and sustained such vast responsibilities.