The language of the original is, perhaps, scarcely capable of smooth transference into English, but it is to be held fast notwithstanding, for what is said is not I was dead,' as describing a past condition, but I became dead,' as describing a past act. There is all the difference between these two, and avoidance of awkwardness is dearly purchased by obliteration of the solemn teaching of that profound word became.'
I need not dwell upon this at any length, but I suggest to you one or two plain considerations. Such a statement implies our Lord's assumption of flesh. The only possibility of death, for the Living One,' lies in His enwrapping Himself with that which can die. As you might put a piece of asbestos into a twist of cotton wool, over which the flame could have power, or as a sun might plunge into thick envelopes of darkness, so this eternal, absolute Life gathered to itself by voluntary accretion the surrounding which was capable of mortality. It is very significant that the same word which the seer in Patmos employs to describe the Lord's submission to death is the word which, in his character of evangelist, he employs to describe the same Lord's incarnation: The Word became flesh,' and so the Life became dead.' And this expression implies, too, another thing, on which I need not dwell, because I was touching on it in a previous sermon, and that is the entirely voluntary character of our Lord's submission to the great law of mortality. He became' dead, and it was His act that He became so.
Thus we are brought into the presence of the most stupendous fact in the world's history. Brethren, as I said that the firm grasp of the other truth of Christ's absolute life was fundamental to all understanding of His earthly career, so I say that this fundamental truth of His voluntarily becoming dead is fundamental to all understanding of His Cross. Without that thought His death becomes mere surplusage, in so far as His power over men is concerned. With it, what adoration can be too lowly, what gratitude can be disproportionate? He arrays Himself in that which can die, as if the sun plunged into the shadow of eclipse. Let us bow before that mystery of Divine love, the death of the Lord of Life. The motive which impelled Him, the consequences which followed, are not in view here. These are full of blessedness and of wonder, but we are now to concentrate our thoughts on the bare fact, and to find in it food for endless adoration and for perpetual praise.
But there is another consideration that I may suggest. The eternal Life became dead. Then the awful solitude--awful when we think of it for ourselves, awful when we stand by the bed, and feel so near, and yet so infinitely remote from the dear one that may be lying there--the awful solitude is solitary no longer. All alone, so Heaven has willed, we die'; but as travellers are cheered on a solitary road when they see the footprints that they know belonged to loved and trusted ones who have trodden it before, that desolate loneliness is less lonely when we think that He became dead. He will come to the shrinking, single soul as He joined Himself to the sad travellers on the road to Emmaus, and our hearts' may burn within us, even in that last hour of their beating, if we can remember who has become dead and trodden the road before us.
