T HE K I N G ’ S B U S I N E S S it reasonable to suppose that the spirit, while absent from the body, is, or ever will be, adequate to all the grand pos sibilities that the eternal future will un fold to the redeemed from among men? Is it not much more in accordance with sound reason, as well as with Scripture, to suppose that the saints cannot enjoy all that fulness of bliss and glory which is in store for them, until their spirits shall again have put on their earthly, yet, spiritualized and glorified, garbs? “ And is there not great reason to fear that the Church in these latter days does altogether too generally ig nore the resurrection of the body? When, on that memorable day of Pente cost, the apostles began to fulfill their public ministry, did they preach Christ and death? Because ‘it is appointed unto men. once to die’ (Heb. IX: 27), did they make use of that fact as the foun dation of all their arguments, to lead men to the immediate exercise of re pentance toward God, and of faith to ward our Lord Jesus Christ? When Peter stood up with the eleven he spoke to the multitude of the resurrection of our Lord, and of His coming again to execute judgment. Such, too, was most emphatically the twofold burden of his other notable discourse. And after ward, when the Sanhedrin had begun to utter its threatenings against the disci ples, forbidding them ‘to speak at all,’ or to ‘teach in the name of Jesus’ (Acts 4:18), it is recorded, as the result of a renewed outpouring of the Holy Spirit, that ‘they spake the word Of God with boldness’ (v. 31), the only particular subject of their preaching, which the pen of inspiration even stops to men tion, being recorded in the emphatic statement, that ‘the apostles with great power gave’ their testimony concern ing ‘the resurrection of the Lord Jesus’ (v. 33). “ But not only at the beginning of the proclamation of the glad tidings of a now finished work of atoning mercy,
355 was the doctrine of the bodily resurrec tion of the ascended Redeemer made prominent; everywhere throughout the book of the Acts, and in the apostolic writings, we are told that ‘Christ Jesus . . . died, yea rather . . . was raised from the dead’ (Rom. 8:34). “ ‘This event,’ says Bernard, ‘is pre sented by them, not simply as the seal of His teaching, or more generally (to use the poor and shrunken phrase of later times) as the proof of His divine mission; but as itself the cause and the commencement of that new world and eternal life, which was consciously “ the hope of Israel” , and unconsciously the hope of man.’ “ This statement is especially, though by no means singularly, true of the teachings of the great apostle to the Gentiles. Standing before the Jewish council ‘he cried out, Brethren, I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees: touching the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called, in question’ (Acts 23:6). What else was the meaning of this ut terance of that fearless and peerless champion of the truth of God, but that (n so far as the sect of the Pharisees of his day, still continued orthodox in re gard to those great doctrines of the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting, which underlie all the teachings of the ancient Hebrew Scrip tures from Genesis to Malachi, he had never ceased to be a Pharisee? At An tioch, in Pisidia, he declared to his Hebrew brethren that God, in the rais ing up again of the Lord Jesus, had ful filled ‘the promise made unto the fathers’ (Acts 13:32). And in his de fense before King Agrippa he once more affirmed the orthodoxy of his faith as to the Old Testament Scripture, and re ferring to ‘the promise made of God unto our fathers’- (Ch. 26:6), he adds, ‘Unto which promise our twelve tribes, earnestly serving God night and day, hope to attain. And concerning this hope I am accused by the Jews, O King!’
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker