If there were no death, there would be no pain, no sickness, no dying. Every ache
and pain which we experience is so much of death working in us – Dying, thou
shalt die”; “and so death passed upon all men.” Billions of people have lived a
few years; and these few, as Job says, were “full of trouble.” Man that is born
of a woman is of few days and “full of trouble.” And then they die. Nine hun-
dred and ninety-nine out of every thousand is not too great an estimate of the
number who never even heard of Christ. And now the question is, How is the
blessing to come to them? It is to come by the resurrection. When Paul spoke
to the Athenians about resurrection, Inany of them mocked and said, “We will
hear you again on this matter.” The idea of a resurrection seems absurd to
many; and it is absurd, positively ridiculous, as viewed by some. But neverthe-
less there shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and unjust. “The
hour is coming when all that are in the graves shall hear the voice of the Son of
God and come fonh.”
An illustration of this fact was given in the case of Lazarus, excepting that
because the due time had not yet come he could not be raised up fully, to per-
fection. We will not now take time to go into the subject, but will merely say
that when rightly understood, as the Scriptures present it, the doctrine of resur-
rection is reasonable and worthy of all acceptation. But some may doubtingly
say, It cannot be that God has such a good Plan as that! It has seemed as
though we, His children, were putting forth more effort than He on behalf of
tho world; and now you tell us that He has all the while been working out such
a glorious Plan, and on behalf of the dead as well as the living! I f this be true.
we can see why God has been permitting things to run on with such apparenl
indifference. You say that all the dead are to come forth; is there any Scripture
which so declares?
Yes, there are Scriptures on the subject. Our Lord said-“All that ore in the
graves shall hear the voice of the Son of God and come forth;” and on one
occasion, when He went into the synagogue, and a copy of the book of Isaiah
was handed to Hiin upon which to comment, He turned to chapter 61 and read,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He hath anointed Me to preach the
good tidings unto the meek; He hath sent Me to hind up the broken-hearted, to
proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are
bound.” (Luke 4:18; Isa. 61:1) You will notice that He does not say that He is
going to bind up all hearts, but only the “broken” hearts. There is no balm except for the hearts that are “broken.”
And what is meant by the “prison doors’;? Did He mean the doors of the jails
of Palestine? Did He mean that He would come and set all the convicts rree?
Be certainly could not have meant that. He could not have referred to anything
else than the great prison house of death, and the “prisoners of hope” which
the great enemy Satan has bound therein. They are “prisoners of hope ” because Christ has died for them. Under Satan the world has been going down
into death; but Christ was manifested in order that He might destroy death and