Believer! art thou troubled and tempted? Do dark providences and severe afflictions seem to belie the truth and reality of this gracious assurance? Art thou ready, with Gideon, to say, "If the Lord be indeed with us, why has all this befallen us?" Be assured He has some faithful end in view. By the removal of prized and cherished earthly props and refuges, He would unfold more of his own tenderness. Amid the wreck and ruin of earthly joys, which, it may be, the grave has hidden from your sight, One nearer, dearer, tenderer still, would have you say of Himself, "_The Lord liveth_; and blessed be my Rock; and let the God of my salvation be exalted." "Thanks be to God, who _always_ maketh us to triumph in Christ." Yes! and never more so than when, stripped of all competing objects of creature affection, we are left, like the disciples on the mount, with "_Jesus only_!"
"THESE THINGS HAVE I SPOKEN UNTO YOU, THAT IN ME YE MIGHT HAVE PEACE."
"Remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how He said"--
"I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet he shall live."--John. xi. 25.
What a voice is this breaking over a world which for six thousand years has been a dormitory of sin and death! For four thousand of these years, heathendom could descry no light through the bars of the grave; her oracles were dumb on the great doctrine of a future state, and more especially regarding the body's resurrection. Even the Jewish Church, under the Old Testament dispensation, seemed to enjoy little more than fitful and uncertain glimmerings, like men groping in the dark. It required death's great Abolisher to show, to a benighted world, the luminous "path of life." With Him rested the "bringing in of a better hope"--the unfolding of "the mystery which had been hid from ages and generations." Marvellous disclosure! that this mortal frame, decomposed and resolved into its original dust, shall yet start from its ashes, remodelled and reconstructed--"a glorified body!" Not like "the earthly tabernacle" (a mere shifting and moveable _tent_, as the word denotes), but incorruptible--immortal! The beauteous transformation of the insect from its chrysalis state--the buried seed springing up from its tiny grave to the full-eared corn or gorgeous flower--these are nature's mute utterances as to the possibility of this great truth, which required the unfoldings of "a more sure word of prophecy." But the Gospel has fully revealed what Reason, in her loftiest imaginings, could not have dreamt of. Jesus "hath brought life and immortality to light." He, the Bright and Morning Star, hath "turned the shadow of death into the morning." He gives, in His own resurrection, the earnest of that of His people;--He is the first-fruits of the immortal harvest yet to be gathered into the garner of Heaven.