The subject dwelt upon by the Apostle in the preceding
passage, not unnaturally leads him to a prolongation of the same theme. The
wailing and travail-pangs of material nature and of the irrational creation,
have their climax in the groans of the human spirit and its cry for
deliverance. Though these have already claimed our consideration, we shall
so far pursue the topic, in connection with the "adoption" and
"redemption" now brought before us--a new Antiphon, in the deeper,
sadder music of which the voiceless material world can only very partially
participate.
In the first part of the verse to which our thoughts are
here invited, we have, what may be called (carrying out the simile of our
volume), "The Harp on the Willows." In the second, that Harp is taken
down, and its broken strings renewed, in order to warble one fresh and
superlatively glorious strain in the believer's Song.
(V. 23) "And not only they, but ourselves also, which
have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within
ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body."
"THE FIRST FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT."
No ceremony of the Jewish nation was more imposing or picturesque than when
(some time during the interval between the Feast of Pentecost and
Tabernacles) groups of Israelites, from different parts of the land, were
seen approaching the Temple with their offering of "first fruits." These
were carried in baskets--from the golden basket of the prince or chief, to
the wicker one of the peasant. A sacrificial ox with gilded horns and
crowned with an olive branch, preceded by pipe and tabret, formed part of
the procession. Each member of these little companies, with his basket on
his shoulder, was met in the Temple area by Levites singing an appointed
Psalm of welcome; while the officiating priest waved the offering before the
altar, on the steps of which it was finally placed by the worshiper before
returning to his home.
Such, in our present verse, is the typical reference to a
custom whose occurrence, during his residence in Jerusalem, must have been
familiar to the Apostle, as well as to many of those to whom he now wrote.
The spiritual life, begun on earth, is only the pledge of
the far nobler, fuller life beyond; its first feeble pulsations. The basket
of first fruits graciously bestowed by Him who is the divine Agent in their
sanctification--"the Spirit who bears witness with their spirits, that they
are the children of God"--is laid by them on the steps of the earthly altar,
as the pledge of the great harvest and harvest-home of glory; that
reaping-time of heavenly bliss, when the words of the evangelical prophet
will obtain their true and everlasting fulfillment--"They rejoice before You
according to the joy in harvest, and as men rejoice when they divide the
spoil" (Isa. 9;3). Most commentators on the passage have been led to quote
the Apostle's parallel one in the Epistle to the Ephesians--"And now you
also have heard the truth, the Good News that God saves you. And when you
believed in Christ, he identified you as his own by giving you the Holy
Spirit, whom he promised long ago. The Spirit is God's guarantee that he
will give us everything he promised and that he has purchased us to be his
own people. This is just one more reason for us to praise our glorious God."
(Eph. 1;13, 14). The one verse interprets the other.
From neither, however, are we to infer, that the
believer's adoption is in itself, in the present state, partial and
incomplete--a blessing only to be received in heaven. Not so. The words, in
the immediately preceding context, distinctly assert--"The Spirit Himself
bears witness with our spirits, that we ARE the children of God." But,
though complete in kind, it is partial in degree; and these first
fruits--the graces and virtues of the new life (confessedly imperfect) which
the Holy Spirit has wrought in the soul, are the pledges of a perfected
state, when the bud of earth, liable to be nipped and blighted with hail and
frost and storm, will expand into full flower; when the sips at the earthly
fountain, will be followed by full draughts from "the river of the water of
life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb."
All the graces manifested in the present economy of being are only heralds
and harbingers--voices crying in the wilderness--"When that which is perfect
has come, then that which is in part shall be done away" (1 Cor. 13;10).
It is under the acute--the terrible consciousness of this
present shortcoming, that believers are here represented as "groaning within
themselves." "Groaning;"--a word, in the original, expressive of deep
anguish and depression. "We that are in this tabernacle groan, being
burdened." And though, as we have seen in our last, there are manifold other
causes for suffering and heart-pang, the deepest--most intense to God's
children--are the pangs of conscious sin--the pangs of grieving that Holy
Spirit of God whereby they are "sealed unto the day of Redemption;"--the
pangs of daily offending the Father who has adopted them and the Son who has
redeemed them. True, most true, the Christian--the member of the ransomed
family--is the owner of a peace which passes understanding--a peace which
the world with all its treasures cannot give, and which the world with all
its tribulations cannot take away.
The Apostle, near the close of this same Epistle to his
Roman converts, speaks of them as being filled with "peace and joy in
believing;" "abounding in hope through the power of the Holy Spirit" (Rom.
15;13). But this can be said only relatively in a world of evil. We are
encroaching on what has been already dwelt upon in previous pages, when we
repeat that the new life of the spirit does not release or disentangle from
the old temptations. The spell of these, the fascination of these, may be
broken--but the demons of unbelief and passion still wield their iron
weapons. You may refuse to bow to them, but you cannot hurl them from their
pedestals. As little as the scientist can remove the disturbing forces in
the planetary system--as little can you negative and neutralize existing
moral perturbations. The voice of the siren call of sin may be, and
is, sternly resisted, but it remains unstifled. It was not to defiant
unbelievers, but to God's own children, the warning words were
addressed--"Why, let him who thinks he stands, take heed lest he fall" (1
Cor. 10;12).
The "groanings" of the Christian may, moreover, be
intensified by the very keenness of his spiritual sensibilities. While
he feels, on the one hand, that there is ever much remaining pollution in
his own heart to be expelled--while in himself he has cause perpetually to
mourn over the ungirded loins and the waning lamps, and the lack of vigilant
watchfulness, it is equally true that the instincts of his new-born nature
make him more alive to the turpitude of sin in general, and his own sins in
particular--leading him, in familiar words, to confess that "the remembrance
of them is grievous, the burden of them is intolerable." This spiritual
probing and analysis becomes more acute with the advance of years. The
figure, thank God, regarding the Christian, is generally as accurate as it
is beautiful, when the close of life is spoken of as a golden sunset--"The
path of the just is like the shining light which shines more and more unto
the perfect day." But it is equally true that the shadows deepen and
lengthen towards evening. Memory, dulled to other things, is quickened and
energized as the tent-pegs are beginning to loosen and "the clouds return
after the rain." In this and in many other ways, to dwell upon which would
only be to reiterate--"Even we ourselves groan within ourselves."
But why prolong the gloomy strain, when it is the
Apostle's present purpose to discard broken harp-strings and sing a true
"Excelsior;"--to lead from pang and groaning, death and dissolution, to a
perfection of bliss undreamt of, until HE came who revealed Himself as "the
Resurrection and the Life." We must pass at once to the antithetical clause
with which our verse closes--"Waiting for the adoption, to wit, the
redemption of our body."
WAITING. It is the watcher on tower or mountain waiting
in eager expectation of the morning dawn. It is the son, knowing that he is
a son--the child knowing of his adoption and its privileges, waiting for the
summons within the father's home, to be delivered all the blessings of the
purchased inheritance--"to be clothed upon with his house which is from
heaven."
It is at once apparent that "the redemption of the
body" is here represented as the consummation of the Christian's
adoption. It is not the mere revelation of heavenly happiness; it is not the
echo of the Apostle's assertion elsewhere--the most often quoted perhaps of
his epigrams--"to die is gain." That is indeed a glorious assurance. It is a
blessed hope, whether for ourselves or our departed, that when the spirit
takes its arrowy flight at the supreme hour of all, it is not to pass into
dreary solitude--dim shadowy regions of silence--but "to be with Christ
which is far better." Yes, and with more than mere surmise, we can think of
spirit re-linked with spirit--the loved and lost mutually rejoined and
restored; together embarked in that spirit-land on lofty ministrations--the
activities of the glorified.
This mere continuity of existence, however, in the state
beyond, is not the theme for contemplation now, and which absorbs our
thoughts in the present chapter. It is the truth certified at the sepulcher
of our risen Lord--the Resurrection, or "Redemption of the body;"
that the day is coming when "those who are in their graves shall hear His
voice and shall come forth;" when earth shall be resolved into the prophet's
wide valley of vision; when bone shall come to bone and sinew to sinew; when
the same divine Spirit here spoken of shall "breathe upon the slain that
they may live;" and when "they shall stand upon their feet an exceeding
great army" (Ezek. 37.). Let us lay the emphasis, where the Apostle intended
it, upon the BODY. Without this miracle of miracles--a glorified material
frame, there would not be a complete salvation. There would be elements of
bliss lacking, which go so far to brim even the cup of earthly happiness. If
no glorified body in heaven, how could I know or recognize, how could I hold
converse and fellowship with the company of redeemed? It is the visible
countenance, the tones of voice--the loving word or the loving deed, which
here below reveal the personality.
"The Communion of Saints" is one of the cherished
articles in the creed of the Church militant. Is it to be expunged the
moment we enter the Church triumphant? No, rather, we believe that with that
"redemption of the body" there will be the remolding, only in deathless
shape and beauty, of the cherished lineaments of earth--the resumption of
personal identity--the face of the resuscitated dead lighted by the familiar
terrestrial smiles; brother linked again with brother; husband with wife,
parent with child; friend with friend. And if the old skeptic question be
mooted--"How can these things be?" If science--and never more than in the
present day, affects to discard all as phantasy and legend palmed on human
credulity and ignorance--a figment incompatible with the elementary
principles of chemistry--at war with all needful conditions, whether of
absorption, or transformation, or assimilation, in the physical economy; it
is enough to reply, "With God all things are possible." This world of His,
guided and governed as unquestionably it is by a reign of law, is
nevertheless crossed and traversed with ten thousand mysteries which bring
what otherwise might well be called anomalies within that region of the
possible. With the subtle questions and sophistries of the schools, we have
no concern. We accept the explicit testimony of God's Holy Word. We leave
all difficulties, and perplexities, and conceded discrepancies with Him. And
when the doubter, with sinister look and accent, advances the defiant
query--"Son of man, can these bones live?"--Our safe answer--our only answer
is--"O Lord God, YOU know!"
But leaving the mere dogma--let us rather look at its
comfort and solace as an accepted truth of Revelation.
There is a twofold consolation which the Redemption of
the body imparts. First, regarding ourselves; and secondly, regarding our
beloved dead.
(1) Ourselves. Mortality is an dreadful fact--a
stern reality--which not one of us can lightly dismiss. There is the natural
fear of death which Christian valor at its best cannot altogether overcome.
No human philosophy can transform the last enemy into an angel of light. We
cannot gaze without awe on the inspired realistic picture--man going to his
long home, and the mourners going about the streets--the silver cord
loosed--the golden bowl broken, the dust returning to the earth as it was.
It is not on Roman or Athenian tombs alone, on which gloomy emblems may be
carved. The spirit is hushed into solemn silence as we tread even the
fairest of "God's acres" with their inscriptions of elevating hope and
promise. It is not the voice of poetry but of nature; it is not the voice of
fallen humanity alone but redeemed humanity also--which utters the words--
"It is a dread and dreadful thing to die!"
Then, turning from individual anticipations and musings;
who that has stood by the deathbed and grave of their loved ones; of those,
too, whose present bliss was felt to be most assured, but must have realized
the terribleness of disrupted ties--the hushed voice--the denied touch of
"the vanished hand," nothing left but the silent photograph, or the portrait
greeting with speechless inanimate smiles on the wall. Infinite gain to
them. Yes, but infinite loss to us!
Oh, is that grave to refuse ever to give back its sacred
treasure? It is not the soul of which we now speak. That is safe. We
confidently believe--the reverse is not questioned, that it has entered into
bliss--"crossed the bar" and reached the stormless haven. But what of the
earthly framework? When Paul, in his first letter to the Thessalonians,
wrote a special page of comfort to some family of mourners in their midst,
it was this he dwells on. He takes for granted the solace they have in the
old doctrine which even their Pagan systems taught them--of the immortality
of the soul. But he who analyzed human nature and human feelings so well,
knew that the problem of all problems--that which would most exercise their
bereaved and desolate spirits would be–"The Jewel itself is safe, but what
of the dear and precious casket which enclosed it? what of that body so
lately laid in the catacomb or rocky tomb; or whose dust is treasured in the
cinerary urn? Is it lost to sight forever? Can He who in Palestine
reanimated the dead; who restored the son to the widowed mother at Nain, and
the Bethany brother to his mourning sisters--can He not do for myriads what
He did for individuals? Himself the Lord and Giver of life, can He not"--may
we farther suppose that bereft Thessalonian to say–"draw near to me in this
script Grecian home of mine, and dry my tears with the brief message of the
old Hebrew prophet--Your dead shall live"?
Yes, in that pastoral message of comfort, our Apostle
does so bind up those brokenhearted ones. He speaks of "those who are
asleep" (laid asleep, as the word may mean) "by Jesus"--God "bringing them
with Him." "The dead in Christ," he continues, "shall rise first." Then,
"together with them." "Together." With this thought of eternal
reunion and fellowship and "ever with the Lord" he winds up in a
postscript--a postscript intended for all bleeding souls and vacant
homes--"Therefore comfort one another with these words."
In closing, I would recur for a moment to a special
clause in our present verse--that of "the first fruits." Some of the Jews in
Rome who read the Apostle's letter to the city of the Caesars, may, in the
significant type, have had the possibility, at all events, of the body's
redemption whispered to them. The analogy, we know, did not escape the mind
of the writer himself. Take the most familiar of these offerings--the first
sheaf of corn reaped in the fields near Jerusalem. What a silent preacher
and sermon in that early tribute borne to the Temple on Zion! Our blessed
Lord Himself selected it--consecrated it. "Except a grain of wheat fall into
the ground and dies, it abides alone; but if it dies, it brings forth much
fruit." We have here the most frequently repeated of all nature's parables,
the death of the grain-seed. That inert--if you will, that unsightly
particle, is deposited in the ground and if the eye could follow it to its
burial-place, it would see it becoming more repulsive in its first vital
struggles with the dark mold to which it was temporarily consigned. But the
insignificant, deteriorating seed watered by the early and latter rains, and
nurtured by the summer sun, bursts forth in due time in strange vitality,
"first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear."
Paul, as we well know, caught up and expanded his Lord's
parable in perhaps the best known chapter of all his writings--that
repertory of immeasurable comfort contained in the 15th of 1st Corinthians.
"But someone will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do
they come? You fool, that which you sow is not quickened, except it dies.
And that which you sow, you sow not that body that shall be, but bare grain,
it may be of wheat, or of some other grain; but God gives it a body as it
has pleased Him, and to every seed his own body…So also is the resurrection
of the dead. It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is
sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is
raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.
There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body…For this corruptible
must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality."
In all this our Apostle shows, how, by an eternal
sequence, life will spring, sooner or later, out of death. And if such be
the great law of the universe, will it be departed from--will it have its
only exception in the case of the fairest and noblest work of His hands?
Shall golden ears and sheaves be reaped from the most insignificant grains,
and shall the truest golden corn fail to fructify in heaven and fill
immortal garners? No! impossible. It is with the body's resurrection in his
thoughts that he closes with the challenge which is one day to wake the
echoes of the universe--Christianity's special "Song of Songs"--the theme
left unrevealed--the Song left unsung, until Christ Himself sounded the
glorious note--"O death, where is your sting? O grave, where is your
victory?" The cry of the Apostle and of the Church of the ransomed is not to
ascend unheeded and unresponded to--"Not that we would be unclothed, but
clothed, that mortality might be swallowed up of life. Now He who has
wrought us for this same thing is God" (2 Cor. 5;4, 5).
With these triumphant words in our ears, let us conclude
this meditation--seeking to look forward with joyful heart and hope to the
true "manifestation of the sons of God;" when He "shall change our vile
body, that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body." Thus shall I be
enabled not only to triumph personally over the fear of death but with
Paul's words in my ears, and feeling the elevating assurance that He who
redeemed the soul redeemed the body too--in calm serenity and confidence, I
can draw near to the couch around which the herald symptoms of dissolution
are gathering. I can follow the funeral crowd and stand by the grave, while
I take the Harp from the Willows and sing the Lord's Song--the Song which
the living Redeemer, the Conqueror of Hades, has warranted me to employ--"He
that goes forth and weeps bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again
with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him."
"Sleep," says Luther, "is nothing else than a death, and
death a sleep. For as through sleep all weariness and faintness pass away
and cease, and the powers of the spirit come back again, so that in the
morning we arise fresh and strong and joyous; so, at the Last Day, we shall
rise again as if we had only slept a night, and shall be fresh and strong…It
is best that the Potter should take the vessel, break it in pieces, make it
clay again, and then make it altogether new…All that we lost in Paradise, we
shall receive again far better and far more abundantly…There the saints
shall keep eternal holiday, ever joyful, secure, and free from all
suffering; ever satisfied in God."