Psalms 73:26

Psalms 73:26

I. Life and immortality, we are told, were brought to light by the Gospel. But the immortality of the soul was not first taught and believed when our Lord confuted Sadducean unbelief, or when He consoled His faint-hearted disciples on the eve of His Passion. The doctrine of immortality runs through the Bible. It underlies the history of the creation and the fall of man. It is involved in the statement that man was created originally in the image of God.

II. The authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, Divine and infallible, is the true and sufficient basis of this doctrine in the Christian soul.

III. In contemporary literature the word "immortality" is clung to with a desperate tenacity which proves how, in spite of their theories, men shrink from resigning themselves to the naked idea of absolute annihilation. Some believe in the immortality of matter, others in that of force, others in that of thought, and others in that of moral effort.

IV. The only immortality which can aspire permanently to interest and influence mankind must assert that the life of the soul in perpetuity is an objective fact, altogether independent of our mental conceptions, nay even of our moral activities. A real immortality is an objective fact; it is also the immortality of a personal life.

V. The words of the text are in all ages the exulting voice of the conviction, of the instinct, of the sense, of immortality in the servants of God. He upholds them in being, and His eternity is to be the measure of their own endless life.

H. P. Liddon, University Sermons,1st series, p. 107.