2 Timothy 1:10,11

LIFE AND INCORRUPTION

‘Life and Incorruption.’

2 Timothy 1:10 (R.V.)

The more we contrast the conceptions of the life after death in the two Testaments, the more certain does it become that the life and incorruption of which our text speaks is absolutely a New Testament conception, and that it was Christ, and especially His Resurrection, that converted the dim and confused hopes of existence after death into the certainties of a true life in a true and incorruptible body.

I. And yet men often think and speak as if our hope of immortality and of a true life after death could be maintained independently of the historical fact that Christ rose again from the dead, and took again the body which had hung upon the cross. There are indeed, I fear, indications that this inability to recognise the certain and vital truth that not only our own future—the future of the individual—but the future of this world in which we dwell—yea, verily, and of the whole universe—are bound up with the fact of the Lord’s resurrection—there are indications, I say, that the ability to realise this is increasing rather than diminishing.

II. But it is on real union with Christ that the life and in-corruption which He brought to light alone can be vouchsafed to us. Our life is then bound up with His life. As His body was laid in the tomb, so will ours be laid in the chambers of the grave. As He, in soul and spirit, vouchsafed to enter the waiting world of the departed, so shall we enter that mystic realm. As He rose with His own veritable body, so shall we rise with our own bodies as those bodies shall have become inwardly fashioned during our earthly pilgrimage, by our deeds in the body, and by the tenor of our whole life and conversation.

—Bishop Ellicott.