Christianity

Christianity

Mark the change in that man!
The wife now watches at the door with a gladsome smile to greet his return. The children, who once in their rags trembled with fear, now clean and wholesomely clad, and gay with laughter, gather at his knee, the moment he enters his home. He is himself well dressed. He holds his head erect, his eyes, no longer bloodshot, meet your gaze with frank and open glance. His tones are soft and modulated, his speech gentle. The Bible, the one book he always hated, is his constant study. His mouth once filled with cursings that might well have chilled the blood to hear, now give utterance to the voice of prayer and earnest thanksgiving. The church he never entered and always avoided has become the centre around which the best activities of his life are continuously moving. He who was once shunned, despised and feared, is now honored and respected of all.
The man has been transformed.
Those who saw him in former days and see him now might in all reason ask, “Is this he, or some other man?”
It is both he and yet another man. The same person, but possessing another character.
What is the secret of it all?
Let the answer be graven on every heart. He has received a new life, a new, a pure, a holy and spiritual life. He has received that life from above, from the second Adam, the Lord in heaven. He is now a twice-begotten man.
And herein is the glorious, distinctive feature of Christianity in so far as it touches a human soul.
To that soul it brings the good news that a new generation is possible; the good news that any human being may start over. The good news that, no matter how much you may be handicapped by your original genesis; no matter what the terrific law of heredity may have transmitted to you, you may be generated again. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, you may have a genealogy that shall carry your name above the proudest of earth; a genealogy by the side of which the bluest blood of most ancient kings shall be as the palest and poorest of plebeian stuff. This Gospel of Christianity brings the good news that you may receive from the throne of God life from God, as directly as did Adam when God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul. In an instant you may be recreated morally and spiritually, and have in you all the assets which, when fully capitalized by the grace of God, shall insure your sonship with God here, making you master over every disturbing and disquieting passion, and guaranteeing to you an eternal entrance into the endless inheritance of God, wherein you shall be, indeed, the heir of God and joint heir with our Lord Jesus Christ. In short, you may have the bequeathed ability to glorify God and enjoy him forever.
This is the life which our Lord Jesus Christ has brought to light.
The Gospel is the good news of this life of which the life giver himself has said, “I came that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly.” That is to say: “I came that ye might have this spiritual life and have it without limit here.”
And this Gospel of the new life brought to light by and through the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ is one of the elemental facts and forces which definitely answers the question—“What is Christianity?”
But Christianity is something more than the abolition of death as a penalty and the bringing in of a new and spiritual life. Christianity is through its Gospel—the good news that—
Third—Immortality has been brought to light.
The word here translated “immortality” is “incorruption”; but it signifies in final terms the fact of immortality; for, as mortality is identified with corruption and is its consequent, so immortality, which is the opposite of mortality, is the consequence of incorruption and is inseparable from it.
This word “immortality” is greatly misunderstood, and almost always misapplied.
It is continually applied to the soul. It is a common thing to hear or read the expression, “immortal soul.”
The truth is, that phrase cannot be found in Holy Scripture. The terms are misleading—their conjunction is false. Applied to the soul, the word “immortal” is a misnomer. Throughout Scripture the original word and idea relate to the body—never otherwise. The word “mortal” is never used of the soul; you never read in Scripture the expression, “mortal soul.” You will find the words “mortal body.” A mortal body has for its opposite an “immortal body.” A mortal body is subject to corruption and death. An immortal body is incorruptible and not subject to death—an immortal body can never die.
The mortal body is the scandal of the race and the open label of sin. A mortal body puts us in the category of condemned criminals awaiting execution. The scandal is not only moral, but organic. To be filled with disease, with pestilence, with fever, and then die and the body turned back to its component parts—this is a scandal in construction; as much a scandal as when a house not properly built falls down; a dead body, whether of man or dog, is the most shameful blot on the face of the earth, and with the gaping mouth of the graveyard, justifies the estimate and the declaration of the living God, that death is an “enemy,” not a welcome thing like birth and life—but an enemy. Such a scandal is it, indeed, that when our Lord Jesus Christ came to the grave of Lazarus, he was himself moved with indignation; for the words, “groaning within himself,” miss the true force. The Greek verb used signifies that he was inwardly filled with indignation and a sense of outrage at the sight of the grave and the announcement that the body of Lazarus was already corrupt. Whatever groaning came from his lips and whatever tears fell from his eyes as he wept—these were his protests against death and the grave; for he recognized this dead body not only as due to the penalty of sin, but as the work of him “who had the power of death, that is, the devil.” (Hebrews 2:14.)
Even though the Christian as to soul and spirit be delivered from death; even though he does not go down to Hades, but at death is safely housed and at home with God in heaven—yet the fact that this body, which was not only the dwelling place of his soul, but the temple and shrine of the Holy Spirit, should become a banquet for worms, a thing of repulsive decay, a residuum of forgotten dust, is a scandal, even to the Christian, and gives emphasis to the shame of death.
The Son of God came into the world to remove this scandal.
He died and rose again, not only that he might have power and authority to give a new and spiritual life to men, a character befitting them for the high things of God, he died and rose again that he might have power and authority to give an immortal body to all who would receive from him this new and spiritual life.
He brought this immortality to light when he rose from the dead.
He brought it to light by rising from the dead in the body in which he had died.
If our Lord Jesus Christ did not rise from the dead in the body in which he died, then immortality in the New Testament sense of the word has never been brought to light.
But he did so rise.
He made that clear on the first Sunday night after his resurrection.
The disciples were gathered together in the room.
The supper table was spread.
No one cared to eat.
The story had been going all day that Jesus had risen.
The women said so. They persisted that they had seen and talked with him.
Two men claimed, also, to have seen him, walked, talked and broken bread with him, that very afternoon.
The disciples did not believe it.
They were afraid to believe it lest it should prove to be untrue.
Then, suddenly, he stood in the midst.
They thought it was his ghost.
This was a proof to them that he had not risen; for a ghost is a disembodied thing.
He was a ghost—he was disembodied—therefore he had not risen.
So they felt—each one of them.
They did not say it—but they thought it.
He knew their thoughts.
He asks them why these thoughts arise in their hearts. He upbraids them for their unbelief.
He tells them plainly, a ghost does not have flesh and bones.
He says, “I have flesh and bones.”
They are still silent.
Then he stretches out his hands towards them. He shows them his feet.
There are great marks in them—there is around these marks as the stain of blood, or of wounds whence blood had flowed.
Still they do not speak. They are afraid to believe; it is too good to be true.
He says to them, “Handle me and see—take hold of my feet—feel me—examine me for yourselves.”
They are as immovable and speechless as men changed into stone.
He turns upon them quickly and says, “Have you anything to eat?”
They point to the untasted supper.
Then comes the climax.
He goes to the table.
He sits down.
He eats before them.
It is of record that he did eat broiled fish and an honeycomb.
Either this is the worst fable ever palmed off on the church of Christ—on the credulity of aching human hearts—or it is the truth of God.
Call it the truth of God—then the body in which our Lord Jesus Christ rose was the body in which he died.
That body, stamped and sealed with the stigmata of the cross, is the living, quivering definition, and indisputable demonstration of immortality. Immortality is the living again in a body which was dead and dieth no more; or, it is the change of the body in which we now live into an incorruptible, glorious body which shall never die.
In that body which he raised from the dead, and which never saw corruption, our Lord Jesus Christ now sitteth at the right hand of God.
He is there as the vision and standard of immortality.
He is there as the forerunner, the prototype, the sample and prophecy of immortality for the Christian.
Until the Christian is made immortal his redemption is not complete.
The Christian who dies is transported to heaven.
His estate there as compared to this is “far better.”
But “far better” is not the “best.” It is only a comparative.
The superlative requires that the Christian shall have a body. Without a body the Christian is neither a complete human being nor a perfect son of God.
The divine ordination is “spirit, soul, and body.”
Unless the Christian receives an immortal body the victory of our Lord Jesus Christ over death and over him who has the power of death (that is the Devil) is not complete.
Satan as the strong man armed holds the goods and keeps them secure within his house.
The instrument with which he is armed is the law. That law which requires that it shall be “appointed unto men once to die.” The goods are the bodies of the saints, and the house is the dark and dismal grave.
O the pitifulness of it! that our Lord Jesus Christ should possess the Christian as a ghost in heaven, and the Devil hold his blood-bought and spirit-sealed body in the grave.
A risen Christ in an immortal body, surrounded by disembodied Christian ghosts in heaven forever—that is a concept too hideously grotesque to consider.
An immortal Christ who redeemed his own body from the power of the grave, but is unable to deliver the bodies of those for whom he died—to think it is blasphemy! to believe it—impossible!
If the Devil be the strong man armed, the risen Lord is the one “stronger than he,” who has met and equalled all the demands of the law, and by his death nullified its ultimate power over the bodies of those for whom he died.
In the very nature of the case, then, full redemption requires that the body of every Christian shall be delivered from the grave, and that every Christian, whether living or dead, shall be clothed finally with an immortal body.
This is the great objective of salvation—not just to save men from vice and immorality here; not just to fit them with an antidote against the poison of sin; or give them an impetus to holiness and truth for a few brief years in this mortal body, then let them die under various circumstances of suffering and pain and be carried away to heaven to live there as attenuated, invisible ghosts forever!
0 no! it is not that!
It is true men are to be saved here and now in such moral and spiritual fashion as that each saved person should make the world sweeter and better and nearer to God for living in it. All that is true, but it is only a part of the glorious truth. The supreme objective—the ultima thule of redemption—is—
Immortality—the Christian eternally and incorruptibly embodied.
And this immortality, this eternal embodiment, is to be accomplished for every Christian. The fact that death has been abolished officially as a penalty for the Christian is a demonstration that abolition of death means abolition for the whole Christian; as a whole or complete Christian must have a body, then the abolition of death for the Christian means abolition of death from the body. The abolition of death from the body is immortality; by virtue, then, of the abolition of death, immortality is assured to every Christian.
Not one will be forgotten even though centuries may have broken into dust above his grave.
This immortality will be brought to pass by him who is the Resurrection and the Life.
It will be brought to pass at the Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
He is coming to this world again. By every law of necessity he must come. He is coming to complete redemption, to bring on the capstone amid shoutings of “grace, grace unto it.”
He will raise the dead who have fallen asleep in his name. He will change the living ones who are his at his coming. He will make the body of each incorruptible, deathless, immortal, like unto his own glorious body, as it is written:
“We shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2.)
And again it is written:
“We are citizens of a country which is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change the body of our humiliation, that it may be fashioned like unto the body of his glory, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself.” (Philippians 3:20, 21.)
At the last he will regenerate the earth. He will make it over. He will make all things new. He will set this race of redeemed immortals within it. Perfectly recovered from the spoliation of sin and death, they shall inhabit it forever. God shall get his own world again.
Paradise lost shall become paradise regained, and God’s purpose to make man his constitutional, governmental, moral and spiritual image shall be fulfilled. Man shall be God incarnate, and incarnation shall be seen to be the beginning and the ending of the purpose of God.
This is the consummation to which Christianity leads us—a perfect race of immortal beings in a perfect world, a perfect world in which no man shall say, “I am sick”; where sin is unknown; where the funeral bell does not toll, and a grave is never dug. Where God is all in all.
This is the hope and the ultimate Christianity sets before us. Not once in all its record does it offer us heaven or bid us prepare for it as the ultimate, but always it exhorts us to look for and wait patiently for immortality and glory at the Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
This is the Christianity of the primitive centuries.
This is the Christianity of the New Testament.
It is the Christianity that fully met the needs of men.
It met the needs of men who gave themselves up to unrestrained passion, to the gluttony of every appetite; who lounged away their day in cool marble halls, or leaned half drunken from the cushioned seats of the amphitheatre, while the sands of the arena were reddened with human blood to give them a holiday. Look at them there. They passed their unsatisfying hours in idle jest, wreathed themselves with freshly plucked, but swiftly fading flowers, drowned their senses from moment to moment, still deeper in the spiced and maddening wines, gave unbridled freedom to their lust; and then, at close of day, in the splendor of the sinking sun, went forth to cool their fevered brows in the Campagna’s freshening but deadly air, and drove with furious pace and brutal laughter along the Appian way between rows of monumental tombs whose chiselled epitaphs told the hopeless end of human life; then back again they drove with still more reckless haste to spend the night in wild debauch and meet the gray dawning of another day with its mocking routine and disgust. Loathing their very joys, revolting at their own gratification, these men asked: “Is there nothing better than this, that we drain the cup of pleasure to the dregs, open our veins, watch the life blood ebb away, and laugh, and mingle our laughter with curses that so cheap and easy an ending should have cost so much to reach?”
O the woe, the horror, the emptiness, and the crying, agonizing need of lives like these.
And Christianity fully and richly met the need of lives like these.
It met the needs of men who in the midst of an environment of the flesh, with the wild beast of appetite struggling within, now and then had longings for a power that should enable them to put their feet upon the neck of passion.
It met the needs of men who, standing above their dead, asked again the old and oft-repeated question of Job, “If a man die, shall he live again?”
Christianity met all these needs.
Through crowded streets of populous towns and lonely lanes of silent villages, in lordly palace and before straw-thatched hovels, to listening throngs and wayside hearers, it rang forth its wondrous proclamation.
It told men that a man had been here who had proven himself stronger than death and mightier than the grave; a man who had burst the bars of death asunder, spurned the sepulchre wherein human hands had laid his body, had ascended up on high, and now, from heaven’s throne, had power to impart to men a life that hated sin, rejoiced in virtue, could make each moment of earth’s existence worth while, and carried within it the assurance and prophecy of eternal felicity.
Far and wide, over land and sea, it rang the tidings that this perfect life might be had by king or cotter, by freeman or slave, without money and without price, for so simple a thing as genuine faith in, and open confession of, him who had died and risen again.
With rich, exultant note it announced that he who as very God had clothed himself with a new and distinct humanity, who had loved men unto death and died for them, had not forgotten the earth wherein he had suffered, his own grave from whence he had so triumphantly risen, nor yet the graves of those who had confessed his name; but, on the contrary, was coming back in personal glory and with limitless power to raise the dead, transfigure the living, make them immortal, and so change this earth that it should no longer be a swinging cemetery of the hopeless dead, but the abiding home of the eternally living sons of God.
Men held like Laocoon in the winding coils of sinuous and persistent sin, and who vainly sought to escape from its slowly crushing embrace, heard the good news and turned their faces towards the rising hope of present deliverance.
Men standing in the shadow of the tombs and waiting their turn smiled until their smiles turned into joyous laughter as they said: “If we die, we shall live again—the grave shall not always win its victory over us.”
Do you wonder the world stopped, listened, and that multitudes turned and followed after?
Do you wonder that this Christianity of the primitive centuries triumphed so phenomenally?
This is the Christianity we need to preach today.
It is full of a great body of doctrine.
It is full of the supernatural.
Miracle and miraculous are woven into its texture from beginning to end. You cannot touch it, or handle it, or look at it from any angle of vision that it does not suggest the miraculous. The moment the miracle is out of it it is no longer the Christianity of the first century, it is not the Christianity of the New Testament—the Christianity that has a miraculous Christ for its centre and the miracle of an infinite God for its environment.
A Christianity of doctrine!
A Christianity of miracle!
And why not?
It is as superior to the Christianity, so called, that sets aside miracle and doctrine, turns its back on the hereafter, makes its appeal in behalf of the present alone, and grounds its claim to authority, not on a “thus saith the Lord,” but on a “thus saith science and reason”; a Christianity that owns the law of evolution as its present force and defining motive; it is as superior to that sort of Christianity and as high above it as the heavens are above the earth.
One night this summer I stood upon a mountain ridge and watched the revelation of the starry sky. The great constellations, like silver squadrons, were sailing slowly and majestically to their appointed havens; from north to south and from south to north again, the Milky Way swept upward from its double horizon to the zenith like a highway paved and set with diamonds—a highway over which the wheels of the king’s chariot had sped, leaving behind that cloud of dust in which every gleaming particle was a burnished sun. I gazed spellbound until it was as the vision of an unfathomed sea, an ocean tide of light, where the shimmering foam was the rise and fall of single and multiple systems, the surf beat breaking on the shores of converging universes. I gazed on this wealth and congeries of far-flung worlds, in which some that appeared the most insignificant and twinkled and trembled as though each glimmer would be the last, were actually so great that beside them our own poor little world was but as a mole hill to earth’s Himalayas; as I gazed I thought of the distance from world to world—measured as light travels—till the count of years fell away, and there were no more numbers with which to count, and I knew that at the end of this calculation I had but entered the suburbs of that realm for which we have but one word, whose inadequacy we all confess—the Infinite. I listened, the silence seemed to utter forth majesty and might and honor and omnipotence, the air had in it the breath of sacred and adoring things, and unwittingly I cried out, alone in the night there, “The heavens, O God, declare thy glory and the firmament showeth thy handiwork.”
And when I look at this Christianity set forth in the New Testament, and anticipated in the Old, the constellations of doctrine, this Via Lactea of truth in which every statement is a sun of splendor; when I begin to get the sweep of the divine purpose coming up from the opening pages of Genesis and culminating in the book of the Revelation; when I see that Christianity is the presentation to us of the ways and means whereby the original thought of incarnation (and this was the very first thought stamped upon the first pages of the Genesis record of the creation of man; for incarnation is conceived in Eden before it is brought to the birth in Bethlehem)—when I see this original thought of incarnation, in spite of sin and failure, and the world’s captivity to the Devil and his angels; when I see this high purpose of God at last realized, and realized so completely that each redeemed soul is in final terms the glorious enthronement of God in humanity, and that God in Christ and in the Christian, gets his own world again, I cry out with full tribute of heart and intellect: “O Lord, this is the Christianity which thou hast wrought, thy name is written in every doctrine, every line justifies, as it proclaims thee, the infinite and gracious author.”
This is the Christianity to preach.
Let the preacher preach a Christianity of doctrine.
There are three important things every preacher should preach. The first thing is doctrine. The second thing is doctrine. The third and pre-eminent thing is doctrine. The church is starving to death for the want of it, the preachers are becoming emasculated apologists for lack of it, and the world, looking on, is laughing at a limp, genuflecting thing calling itself modern Christianity and for want of vertebrate strength, unable to stand alone.
It was doctrine believed in and preached which sustained the martyrs and gave courage to missionaries. He who believed in the sovereignty of a redeeming God, the certainty that God would get his elect, the Coming of Christ, the millennial triumph, and a rebel world surrendered at the feet of God, could endure the agony of the stake, the privation of the wilderness, and all the discomforts and all the discouragements of fields of endeavor well sowed but scantily reaped.
Let the preacher preach the supernatural—the things that are miraculous, and be unafraid.
He need not be afraid. The world wants that sort of preaching. It is growing tired at heart of mere machinery and this eternally running up against a formula of the laboratory or a mathematical calculation and analyzed force, as explanatory of everything in heaven and in earth. It would like, if it were possible, to believe in something a little beyond the length of its eyelashes and the touch of its finger tips; something that cannot be summed up always in avoirdupois; something, indeed, beyond the ability of man.
Let the church get back to the old-fashioned doctrinal, supernatural, miraculous Christianity that underwrites itself with the name of God. Let it be boldly proclaimed that Christianity is miraculous, because it is, first and last, the Christianity of that God who is himself—the eternal miracle.
The very salvation of the church as a church depends upon this retrograde.
If the church hesitates, compromises, seeks to accommodate its formulas to modern nomenclature. If it is willing to carry its baggage at half weight; if it is willing to make its proclamation a continual denial of all that it has heretofore professed as fundamental; if it believes the twentieth century has the call on the first, and that modernism outranks primitivism; if, in short, it looks upon primitive and apostolic Christianity as the feeble hint which the modern thinker has known how to modify and improve, then, as already suggested, the days of its spiritual and moral bankruptcy are in sight, and the sooner good business arrangements are made to hire out its meeting houses for ethical and social culture the better.
Let the church persevere in turning its back upon the hereafter; let it continue the folly of ignoring the eschatological emphasis of Christianity; let it keep on giving to men the anodynes of mere moral maxims; let it direct all its energies to improving and perfecting a society which God has already judged and condemned at its best, and presently these drugged and befooled people will awake, the drugs will no longer be effective, and they will turn in indignation upon a Christianity which began by professing to be a revelation from God and ends by confessing to be nothing more than an evolution from man.
It is time for preachers to arouse if they would have the hearing, and not the indifferent ears.
Let them refuse to apologize or defend.
Let them have the courage of divine conviction.
Let them refuse to admit into their fellowship men who are willing that a bar-sinister shall be stained across the birth hour of the Christ; who are ready to smile away such a title as “the Blessed Virgin”; who can read no deeper meaning in the cross than a brutal murder, and who do not yet know that in the garden of Arimathea there is still an empty tomb. Let them refuse ministerial ordination and partnership with men who, bearing the university brand, claim the authority of a self-elected scholarship to make the Word of God secondary to the word of man. Let them go forth and proclaim to the world with the voice of assurance which permits of no debate and will accept no recall, the Christianity that is summed up, is perfectly defined and holds inclusively all its splendor of doctrine in the three immense facts which its Gospel proclaims:
The abolition of death, the gift of a new and spiritual life, and the guaranty to every believer of a resplendent immortality like unto his who sits on yonder throne—both eternal God and immortal man—Coming Bridegroom and Triumphant King.
Let them preach this. Let them tell the guilty sinner that the blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ meets his case and can make the foulest clean; let them tell the slave-bound sinner that in a moment, in the flash of an eye glance, a risen Saviour can deliver him and set him free; let them tell the dying that death has lost its sting, and at death a convoy of heaven’s host shall bear him away from his home in this mortal body to be at home in heaven with his ascended Lord; let them cry above every Christian grave, louder than the sound of any falling tear: “Jesus is coming to raise your dead and change the living and clothe each saint with immortal beauty”; let them look abroad upon a world full of the storm of sin, the tumult of high passion and long rebellion against our God, and shout aloud that victory cometh in the end; that Christ is God as well as man; that the days of his glory are at hand, when the “God of the whole earth” shall he be called; and when all beneath a perfect heaven in a perfect world shall know him as Lord and God from the least to the greatest. Let them preach this, and with unbroken confidence repeat the exultant words of Holy Writ, the words which shall warrant all their speech, that “our Saviour Jesus Christ hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel”; and it will be this Gospel echoing forth with all the music of its joyful tidings that shall answer infallibly and beyond all dispute the question of the hour—“What is Christianity?”