POWER TOWARDS US WHO BELIEVE
A.J.E.Welch
These verses are selected from a long and peculiarly rich section of the Scriptures which relates to what lies outside of death and sets out the portion that is in the heart of God for those who love Him. I was struck with the reality of the experience of being in the presence of death, as we are here. We are made to realise that, should the Lord Jesus not first come for us, the reality of it is ahead of us all, and death is the decisive termination of something. I do not say of everything. For our beloved one it is the termination of a path which latterly was one of increasing weakness and suffering, and that is done with, finished. What remains and will yet appear in its glory and distinctiveness is what God wrought in our beloved sister, even through and in the midst of the suffering. There is a sense in which God has used death to work out His own ends, because in the dying of Jesus and the cross of Jesus He has put away for ever an order of man that could never afford pleasure to Him; that is decisively, completely effected. And it is in going into death that our glorious Lover, Jesus, has effected it. It is to His glory that that is effected.
But what we have in this chapter is what is very strongly impressed upon me today, and that is the mighty power of resurrection. We shall all be raised; the dead in Christ shall rise first. That is why I commented that death is not the end of everything.
But these verses give us a present touch of divine power, to enter into our experience while we are still in the scene where death is, still in the scene where we have to face its reality. Because we read of "the working of the might of his strength, in which he" (that is God) "wrought in the Christ in raising him from among the dead, and he set him down at his right hand in the heavenlies". Notice the richness of language, the strength of language, that is used: "according to the working of the might of his strength". Think of the power which has already been referred to when He was raised "from among the dead by the glory of the Father", Rom 6: 4! Think of the power that wrought in raising Jesus! What a magnificent thing it is to think about! And what a comfort it is for our beloved, bereaved brother! Jesus is beyond death, beyond its power. As having submitted to the Lord - trusting in His precious, finished work, His shed blood, His bearing the judgment, His going into death, His coming forth from it and being exalted, and the Holy Spirit having come from Him - we may well ask ourselves whether we have some experience of what belongs beyond death. It is divine love that would give us that, and give it to us here in the presence of death and the realisation of its reality. God has opened up a heavenly order of things of which that glorious Man, as He is and where He is, is the centre, a new scene in which everything is for the pleasure of God and into which nothing that belongs to the scene of death goes through.
What I wanted specially to point out is that the power that raised up Jesus is power which is operative towards us at the present time. We know the working of it through the Spirit, but there is real, divine power operative at the present time to link us with that scene of glory and give us to live in the consciousness of it What a comfort! We are not limited by what is particularly before us today. We can look into heaven and see Jesus there, and realise that we belong there by virtue of redemption. We belong there for the delight of His heart and for the pleasure of God. There is comfort for our beloved brother with us in thinking of this, that real power is towards us now, "the surpassing greatness of his power towards us who believe". "The working of the might of his strength" is an expression which conveys far more than a kind of abstract acknowledgment of power. The thing is operative effectively, and we are to know it that way; we are brought into the experience and enjoyment of what is established in Christ up there, in the place of exaltation, the place of pre-eminence, into which He has gone.
LONDON
26 June 1980
At a burial