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I. THE BASIS OF THIS HOPE. How shall man be quite sure of a life beyond this?

1. By the resurrection of Christ. Christian hope differs from all other in that it rests neither upon any instinct of the heart, any inference from reason, or any promise sent from heaven, but upon a person. One is set before us who, born into the world, and living our chequered human life, has achieved victory over death. It is conceivable that this is not sufficient to assure us of our resurrection. We might argue that it is an exceptional distinction merited by a perfect character. And if Christ were only man the argument would have force. But His incarnation gives its proper significance to His resurrection. He is not a unit of the race singled out for favour, but one who, as equal with the Father, has power and right to take up the manhood into God. He took our nature, and therefore in all He does and is our nature has a share, that He might redeem, purify, exalt it. He did not merely reverse the sentence of death by an arbitrary annulling of it, but by the actual victory of life over death in the same nature which had become subject unto death. He thus became "a quickening Spirit."

2. By the communication of the life of Christ to all who believe in Him.

(1) Jesus is the Resurrection because He is the Life, and He imparts that life to us. "Because I live," etc. There is a sense in which the resurrection is begun here, because the germ of it is found in every renewed nature. A power has been put forth on man which must issue in His glorification. The resurrection, though sometimes described as a gift, is also to be regarded as the necessary development of the work of grace (John 5:26; John 6:57). Of the two-fold life of the Spirit here and the body hereafter, Christ is the source (John 10:17), and by communion with Him only is it sustained (John 6:51-54). That which is spiritual is in its very nature eternal. Death is but as the episode of a sleep. So essential is the connection between the life eternal and the resurrection that there are only two places in the New Testament in which the resurrection of the wicked is mentioned (chap. John 5:29; Acts 24:15).

(2) Sometimes the same truth is associated with the indwelling in our hearts of a Divine Person (Colossians 1:27; Romans 8:11). The resurrection follows from such inhabitation; those bodies, in which He has vouchsafed to make His tabernacle, are not destined to be left in corruption. If Christ sent the Holy Ghost to make our bodies His temple, then that Divine Visitant sheds His sanctifying influences upon the whole man. Every member of the body, eye, ear, hand, foot, all have been consecrated to God's service. One part of our nature is not left to curse and barrenness whilst the dew of heaven falls richly on the other.

II. SUCH A HOPE, CONSISTENT IN ITSELF AND SATISFYING THE DEEPEST NEEDS OF OUR NATURE, ESSENTIALLY DIFFERS FROM AND TRANSCENDS ALL PRE-CHRISTIAN HOPE.

1. What was the hope of the wisest pagan philosophers? At most a bare hope of continuance after death. But Christ gives us now the life that cannot die in the body that the body may be consecrated to God. Our souls and bodies are His, filled and pervaded with His life, and can never, therefore, perish.

2. What was the hope of the Jew? Kindling with ecstasy it rose above time and death, and laid its hand upon God with the conviction that He who was the Life of His children would be their portion forever. But the Jew had still the horror of death unvanquished, of the grave from which none had ever returned. The Christian is partaker of the Life of God which in human flesh overcame death, and therefore has the sure pledge that he will overcome.

III. THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE RESURRECTION COMMENDS ITSELF AS IN HARMONY WITH THE FACTS OF OUR NATURE. All experience shows how close is the union between soul and body. So far as observation extends, the material organism is destroyed by death, and yet as by an imperious necessity it enters into all our conceptions of another life: we would not be "unclothed but clothed upon." Does not all thought become action only through the instrumentality of the body? and does not the body express the beauty or ugliness of the unseen dweller within? How often, even after the soul has fled, there remains on the cold features of the corpse the living impress of that soul, as if it disputed the empire of death? It is almost as if the body were waiting for the return of its tenant?

IV. THE SPECULATIVE DIFFICULTIES WHICH BESET THE DOCTRINE. "How are the dead raised up," etc. The particles of which the body is composed may be scattered, and enter into the formation of plants, animals, men. How can each particle be disentangled and brought together again? We put no limits on the power of God. But such a process is as unnecessary as improbable. The same body may be raised though no single particle of the present body be found in it. What is necessary to the identity of the body? Not the identity of its material particles. These are in a state of perpetual flux. The body of our childhood is not the body of our youth, etc., and yet it is the same body in patriarch and infant. The only thing that we need to be assured is that the principle of identity, which governs the formation of the body in this life, shall govern it at the Resurrection. What, then, is this thing that remains ever the same, which never perishes in all the changes of the material organism? It escapes all. our investigations; we only see its manifestations; but that it is a reality all observation goes to show: and if, through all the changes of the body during this life, this principle continues in force, why may it not survive the shock of death? Why may not the same body, which was sown a natural body, be raised a spiritual body? There is everything in the analogies of nature to confirm it.

(Dean Perowne.)

Though He were dead. — View the text —

I. AS A STREAM OF COMFORT TO MARTHA AND OTHER BEREAVED PERSONS.

1. The presence of Jesus means life and resurrection. But what comfort is Christ's spiritual presence to us? He will not raise our loved ones? I answer that Jesus is able at this moment to do so. But do you wish it? Yes. Now, consider. Surely you are not so cruel as to wish the glorified back to care and pain. Lazarus could return and fill his place again, but not one in ten thousand could do so. I had rather that Christ should keep the keys of death than I. It would be too dreadful a privilege to be empowered to rob heaven of the perfect merely to give pleasure to the imperfect. Jesus would raise them now if He knew it to be right.

2. When Jesus comes the dead shall live, and living believers shall not die, we shall all be changed.

3. Even now Christ's dead are alive. They appear to die, but they are not in the grave, but with the Lord. "God is not the God of the dead," etc.

4. Even now His living do not die. There is a difference between the death of the godly and the ungodly. To the latter it comes as a penal infliction, to the former a summons to his Father's palace. Death is ours, and follows life in the list of our possessions as an equal favour.

II. AS A GREAT DEEP OF COMFORT FOR ALL BELIEVERS.

1. Christ is the Life of His people. We are dead by nature, but regeneration is the result of contact with Christ; "We are begotten again unto living hope by His resurrection." He is not only the Resurrection to begin with, but the Life to go on with. Anything beyond the circle of Christ is death.

2. Faith is the only channel by which we can draw from Jesus our life. "He that believeth in Me," not he that loves, serves or imitates Me. You want to conduct the electric fluid, and so you have to find a metal which will not create any action of its own: if it did so it would disturb the current. Now, faith is an empty handed receiver and communicator; it is nothing apart from that on which it relies, and therefore it is suitable to be a conductor for grace.

3. To the reception of Christ by faith there is no limit — "Whosoever," however wrong, weak, unfeeling, hopeless.

4. The believer shall never die.

(C. H. Spurgeon.)

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KJV: Then when Jesus came, he found that he had lain in the grave four days already.

WEB: So when Jesus came, he found that he had been in the tomb four days already.