There is a final consideration connected with these words, which I must deal with very briefly--the importance of the fact which is thus borne witness to.
I have already pointed out that the Resurrection of Christ is viewed in Scripture in three aspects: in its bearing upon His nature and work, as a pattern for our future, and as a symbol of our present newness of life. The importance to which I refer now applies only to that first aspect.
With the Resurrection of Jesus Christ stands or falls the Divinity of Christ. As Paul said, in that letter to which I have referred, Declared to be the Son of God, with power by the resurrection from the dead.' As Peter said in the sermon that follows this one of our text, God hath made this same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ.' As Paul said, on Mars Hill, He will judge the world in righteousness by that Man whom He hath ordained, whereof He hath given assurance unto all men, in that He hath raised Him from the dead.'
The case is this. Jesus lived as we know, and in the course of that life claimed to be the Son of God. He made such broad and strange assertions as these--I and My Father are One.' I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life.' I am the Resurrection and the Life: He that believeth on Me shall never die.' The Son of Man must suffer many things, and the third day He shall rise again.' Thus speaking He dies, and rises again and passes into the heavens. That is the last mightiest utterance of the same testimony, which spake from heaven at His baptism,' This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased! If He be risen from the dead, then His loftiest claims are confirmed from the throne, and we can see in Him, the Son of God. But if death holds Him still, and the Syrian stars look down upon His grave,' as a modern poet tells us in his dainty English that they do, then what becomes of these words of His, and of our estimate of the character of Him, the speaker? Let us hear no more about the pure morality of Jesus Christ, and the beauty of His calm and lofty teaching, and the rest of it. Take away His resurrection from the dead, and we have left beautiful precepts, and fair wisdom, deformed with a monstrous self-assertion and the constant reiteration of claims which the event proves to have been baseless. Either He has risen from the dead or His words were blasphemy. Men nowadays talk very lightly of throwing aside the supernatural portions of the Gospel history, and retaining reverence for the great Teacher, the pure moralist of Nazareth. The Pharisees put the issue more coarsely and truly when they said, That deceiver said, while He was yet alive, after three days I will rise again.' Yes! one or the other. Declared to be the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead,' or--that which our lips refuse to say even as a hypothesis!
Still further, with the Resurrection stands or falls Christ's whole work for our redemption. If He died, like other men--if that awful bony hand has got its grip upon Him too, then we have no proof that the cross was anything but a martyr's cross. His Resurrection is the proof of His completed work of redemption. It is the proof--followed as it is by His Ascension--that His death was not the tribute which for Himself He had to pay, but the ransom for us. His Resurrection is the condition of His present activity. If He has not risen, He has not put away sin; and if He has notput it away by the sacrifice of Himself, none has, and it remains. We come back to the old dreary alternative: if Christ be not risen, your faith is vain, and our preaching is vain. Ye are yet in your sins, and they which have fallen asleep in Christ' with unfulfilled hopes fixed upon a baseless vision--they of whom we hoped, through our tears, that they live with Him--they are perished.' For, if He be not risen, there is no resurrection; and, if He be not risen, there is no forgiveness; and, if He be not risen, there is no Son of God; and the world is desolate, and the heaven is empty, and the grave is dark, and sin abides, and death is eternal. If Christ be dead, then that awful vision is true, As I looked up into the immeasurable heavens for the Divine Eye, it froze me with an empty, bottomless eye-socket.'
There is nothing between us and darkness, despair, death, but that ancient message, I declare unto you the Gospel which I preach, by which ye are saved if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was raised the third day according to the Scriptures.'
Well, then, may we take up the ancient glad salutation, The Lord is risen!' and, turning from these thoughts of the disaster and despair that that awful supposition drags after it, fall back upon sober certainty, and with the Apostle break forth in triumph, Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first-fruits of them that slept'!
