Luke 20:36

THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME

‘Neither can they die any more.’

Luke 20:36

It is not to the Lord’s articulated references to the deathless future that we have to appeal alone. Into the whole tissue and texture of His sacred message enters the thought of ‘that world, and the resurrection of the dead.’ The same, of course, is the witness of the numberless suggestions in the words of Christ of the sacred significance of the human soul to the heavenly Father.

I. The significance of the victory over death.—Looked upon from the high point of sight, the Redeemer’s own victory over death appears at once as the most necessary and, in a deep sense, the most natural of His works. Setting it apart for the moment from its unspeakable significance for the forgiveness of our sins, we see it in a light most magnificent as the representative glorification of our own immortal nature. The Son of Man challenges the law of death by actually lying down under its iron grasp; but it is ‘not possible that He should be holden of it.’ He overcomes it. It is a victory whose character as fact is the most historical thing in history; to its actuality there come out as principal witnesses, but only principal, leading a ‘great cloud’ of testimony, the glory of the Lord’s Person, and the existence of the Lord’s universal Church. He Who died lived, to die no more. Transfigured, yet the same; embodied as truly as ever, in a body none the less real because now the perfect vehicle of His Spirit, He walked and talked with His own again. And as the proper, the inevitable sequel (for such it will be seen to be on reflection) of His Resurrection, He passed in Ascension into the light invisible. He went up thither, embodied still, leaving the promise (on His own Divine and human honour) to return again, and meantime lifting the hearts of His mortal brethren towards the heavens where He was gone. He would not, indeed, detach them for one moment from the duties at their feet, but He would invest with an ineffable air of heavenly dignity and heavenly hope the humblest factors, the most corporeal conditions, of their lot to-day. ‘As is the earthy one, such are they also that are earthy; as is the heavenly one, such shall the heavenly ones also be.’

II. Man not for time but for eternity.—This, in some faint and faltering outline, is the Christian revelation, the revelation by and in the Lord Jesus Christ, of the immortality of man. By word and by deed, by promise and by warning, by appeals to our mysterious personality, and to our awful conscience, by His own astonishing action in taking to Him our whole nature, and in it traversing and transcending death, He bids us men now know, without a doubt, that we are made not for time only but eternity. And He does this, such is the majestic balance and sanity of all He says and does, so as only to accentuate the importance of time. He dislocates no pure human relation. His doctrine, rightly understood, is the keystone of the bliss of the family and its precious charities. It is the law at once of liberty and duty in the social and in the civic and in the national domains of life. The very leaves of His immortal tree are for the healing of the nations, as they bring to Him their wounds (see illustration).

III. The inmost necessity of the future life.—In such a Presence and in such a prospect let us think, let us labour, let us pray, let us live and die. And do we ever pause or doubt in view of that amazing future when we, in Christ, shall ‘not be able to die any more’? Do we feel a misgiving of the soul, as though that long to-morrow would be too much for us, and we should at last even desire to sink out of ourselves into the dreamless sleep of a personless universe? Such thoughts have crossed the minds even of saints and sages in moments when they have been awfully conscious of the weight of life. But the question is raised almost altogether by imagination, and imagination working where it ought to rest—in regions unknown to us, but guaranteed to faith by God. And the answer to it lies assuredly in that great Scripture with which we began—‘Neither can they die any more’; ‘I am the God of Abraham.’ To know Him is the life eternal. To get a glimpse of Him is to see what makes immortality the inmost necessity—the sublime sine quâ non—of the living and transfigured soul. It has seen Him; and its being will be dear to itself for ever as the seer of that sight. To anticipate His Presence is the answer to every fear beside the timeless ocean of the coming life. For then, as now, the basis of our immortal personality will lie deep in our relation to the eternal Love. Not for one instant of the heavenly life shall we be asked to float in a void; we shall be borne upon the strong, calm tide of the life of God; we shall repose in all the depth and wonder of our being upon the everlasting arms; ‘Because I live, ye shall live also.’ ‘God shall be All, and in all’; not ‘All’ in the sense of being the shadowy and silent Sum of the shadows and silence of a Nirvana, but ‘All in all,’ the innumerable blessed ones who will be themselves for ever, but themselves supremely in this, that ‘they see His face, and His name is on their foreheads.’

Bishop H. C. G. Moule.

Illustration

‘It is Christ Who has been and is the Emancipator of the slave. It is He Who is the one real Giver to woman of her dignity, her prerogative, her glory; the weaker vessel, in His estimate, only because the more delicately perfect, the more sensitive to the lights and voices of the unseen life; and, therefore, how often the stronger, the far more heroic of the two types of the one humanity in holy purity and in the courage of self-forgetting love! It is He Who has sown in man’s troubled society the seed of an endless progress in a path of peace by revealing the greatness of man as he is related to God, and then by laying it on every man, in his Maker’s and Redeemer’s Name, to study always the rights of others and the duties of himself. It is He Who, by His articulation and embodiment of truth eternal and supernatural, has given to the natural its full significance, so that His followers, because they have seen Him That is invisible, because they have handled by faith the things not seen as yet, see in every concrete instance of humanity around them a thought of God. They look upon men, women, children, with eyes perfectly human in their perception of common needs and sins and tears and joys; but they see these things all the while with the sky of immortality above them, and so with a patience, a tolerance, a reverence, a love, which only Jesus Christ can teach. Yes, it is He, it is only He, blessed be His Name, Who gives to our mysterious existence its true continuity, its unity never to be dissolved, when we see it as re-created in Himself. It is only He Who so unveils eternity as to illuminate to-day.’