"I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE"
“[p. 22] I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE”
It is on my heart that the Lord may engage our thoughts and affections with Himself The sisters at Bethany were mourning the loss of their brother, but when the Lord said to Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life”, it was as much as to say, I would have you think of Me.
How wonderful that God had brought into this world a Person who could say, “I am the resurrection and the life”! In that Person there was a power and a glory absolutely superior to the power of death; nothing brought out the glory of the Son of God as death did. If He came into contact with death — and, thank God, He did — it was only to make manifest His complete victory over death. The power of divine love and holiness in Him could but be victorious over death.
The Lord says, “he that believes on me, though he have died, shall live”. It is a great and blessed thing to believe on Him — the One in whom resurrection was inherent even as a Man in this world. In Him, the Son of God, was the power of resurrection, and those who believe on Him become participators in the power of resurrection that is in Him. They live in the life of the One in whom they believe.
It is but a brief moment until all who believe on the Son of God will be found in actuality in His life in resurrection, an order of life in which we are to live with Him eternally. God would have us, even now, to apprehend in His Son the order of that resurrection life.
Our beloved brother is to live eternally in that life. What a comforting thought to us in the breaking of the natural tie! There is no break in the spiritual ties. They remain as bound up with the Son of God. It is in Him that every blessing is. It is in Him that resurrection life is to be seen. How wonderful that we have such a Person in whom to believe!
Turning now to Mary, we see in her one who put her costly ointment upon Him. The Lord’s interpretation of her act was [p. 23] that it was for the day of His burial she had kept this. In the wisdom of divine love the Lord did not die until He had secured in the love of one heart such an appreciation of the power resident in His Person that she understood that if He went into death, He must be victorious over death. She came beforehand to anoint Him with that in view.
It is a law of spiritual life that love and appreciation of the Lord Jesus Christ must find expression. Where such exist there is an intense desire to give expression to what the heart cherishes. Nothing greater can be said of any person than that he or she appreciated Christ, and this we can truly say of our beloved brother. Most of us here have heard him ourselves giving expression to his appreciation of the Lord Jesus Christ. But he has also left his appreciation on record: in the hymns he has left behind him we have the fragrance of his inward appreciation of the Son of God.
How wonderful that there should be produced in human hearts, once so empty Godward, the holy fragrance of His blessed Son, formed and expressed in living affections. What a joy for the blessed God! It is this that is the substance and kernel of what engages us at this time. The best thing that can be said of anyone can be said of our beloved brother, and that is that he had a deep appreciation of the Lord Jesus Christ. Those of us who knew him best, know that there was in his heart an appreciation of the Son of God that will eternally enrich the heaven of God’s glory.
Ours is a deep and real sorrow — we miss from amongst us our beloved brother — but we can and do rejoice in what had been wrought in him and which will contribute to the joy of God’s eternity.
Let us glory increasingly in the faith of the Son of God.
A Word given at a Burial, Teignmouth 1938