AT TWO BURIALS - 1
i) SOWING
A.J.E.Welch
The last weeks of our brother's growing weakness have left a singular impression of how real death is. I am impressed that the Spirit would meet that, as we are here gathered, by a fresh sense of what the power of resurrection is. Resurrection actually and finally is very close. If we face the reality of death, the Spirit would meet it with some sense of glory in the power that is greater. He gives us to realise how soon the failing, weakening condition is to find an answer. That answer will be according to God's pleasure, and for His pleasure, in a condition of things actually in which there will be no weakening and no deficiency of any kind. In this passage, the Spirit uses the idea of the seed and the sowing, and even comments "thou sowest not the body that shall be, but a bare grain", as if to remind us that what follows the sowing is peculiarly rich, even in comparison with what has been sown. We think of our brother's long and faithful, steady pathway; no part of that path, as God has wrought through it, shall be lost. We have had the impression often that the exercises of our brother have been deep - often to a large degree hidden, but they have been there. God has wrought, and wrought constantly and continually, in such an one, and not a single element of what God has wrought out is to be lost. This thought of sowing, and this brief comment on the bare grain reminds us that what shall follow is exceeding glorious. A condition is in view now in which everything will be carried through for God according to His pleasure; that point is pressed upon us, "God gives to it a body as he has pleased, and to each of the seeds its own body". Something is to come forth that is a fitting answer according to God in every matter gone through here, glorious in the condition to which that will belong.
And, beloved brethren, we are to think of this as imminent. Our brother has referred in prayer to the way the power of resurrection affects us in the assembly now; how real that is! We are brought into acquaintance with Christ as the glorified Man. We cannot but remind ourselves of the way He has overcome death, and of the witness there has been (and is) to the glorious fact that He is risen and glorified. It is not imminent for Christ, it is actual; there were witnesses of His resurrection. They did not see what took place in the grave; what a matter that was as between the Father and the Son! But they saw Him risen, living, active, glorious, among them. The Spirit, in our time, gives us appreciation of what we are to know, and to experience and enjoy in the power of it in an occasion like this, in the knowledge of a living, glorified Christ. Soon we shall be with Him and like Him, in a condition of things to which no frailty attaches, and something is to be carried through and brought to light which is according to God's own pleasure, wholly so, with no element of any weakness or deficiency or decline. This, I believe, is the comfort the blessed Spirit would give us in an occasion like this, that something is being sown, but something is to come forth that is wholly for God and His pleasure.