1 Corinthians 15:54

VICTORY!

‘Death is swallowed up in victory.’

1 Corinthians 15:54

There are very few who do not sometimes think about the life beyond that which they are living now. It is an instinct of the human race. Death forces itself on us as a universal fact. And in all ages and in every land men have been guessing (how could they do more?) about what came next. But who can tell us about it? Where is it? What is it? What are its conditions? What its hopes, its joys, or its fears and sorrows? No traveller but One has come back to describe to us this unknown country.

It is the language of two later prophets that St. Paul has woven together in the closing sentences of that great chapter which is enshrined in our Burial Service, and which tells us more vividly than any other of the coming and Kingdom of Christ. For it is He only Who ‘has abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light.’ It is with Him that they who are ‘absent from the body’ are ‘at home.’ It is by Him that this body, so constantly humbled by its infirmities, shall be transformed into a body of glory such as His own. And ‘we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.’

I. Apart from Christ the future has no gleam of hope.—It is all dark. No sure word comes from anywhere else. The pretended intercourse with the departed which some have claimed is only one of those delusions which, we have been warned, will abound in the last days. The world’s greatest philosophers have nothing of their own to tell us. Science is silent. One of the best-known of modern thinkers, Herbert Spencer, writing to an intimate friend, said: ‘My own feeling. respecting the ultimate mystery is such that of late years I cannot even try to think of ultimate space without some feeling of terror.’ What a contrast to that triumphant cry, ‘Death is swallowed up in victory’! ‘Victory!’ Yes, for heaven is more than rest, more than relief, more than satisfaction, more than happiness; it is victory. Death itself—the last enemy—will be extinguished in the glory of the Coming King.

II. This is the hope, ‘sure and certain,’ as our Church bids us call it, with which we lay to rest those loved and cherished here, who have died in the Lord, whether it be some little one whose eyes have hardly opened upon this ‘troublesome world,’ or whether it be some honoured servant of God who has reached the ripeness of age, and spent many years in doing good. The promise is sure—‘them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him,’ and then ‘shall all be changed’; ‘corruptible must put on incorruption, and mortal must put on immortality’; ‘then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.’ For them death has no sting, for sin in its strength has been conquered by Christ. The condemnation which the holy law adjudged He has borne. The power which sin exerted in us He has overcome, and the joyful chorus of the redeemed will rise, ‘Thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.’ It is with such thoughts we comfort one another when death comes near to us or ours; with such thoughts we brace our spirits afresh to labours which we know will ‘not be in vain in the Lord.’

III. The future for the Christian is all victory, but a victory which has had its anticipations here.—The Christian’s first step to heaven starts with the passage from death to life. He is already in possession of the triumphant life that will last for ever. For him dying is not death. This fact more than any distinguishes his from all other forms of existence. He lives, he works, he hopes as one in sight of eternal victory. And this gives energy, stability, yea! perpetuity to all work that is done for God.

—Rev. Prebendary Fox.