"IN CHRIST"
“IN CHRIST”
1 Corinthians 15:1-6; 1 Corinthians 15:20-23; 1 Corinthians 15:42-49; 1 Corinthians 15:54-57
I feel assured that the truest comfort for our hearts at such a time as this is to speak of Christ. We must all have noticed in Scripture the frequent recurrence of the word “in Christ”. Some are referred to in this chapter as having “fallen asleep in Christ”, and we read that “as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive”. Nothing could be more blessed than to be “in Christ”. Those of whom these words are true have passed out of all that order of things which came in by “the first man Adam”, and they have come by divine grace into the good of what has been secured and established in Christ, God’s anointed Man, now glorified at His right hand. This wonderful transition has been brought about by God’s power in grace, and faith knows it to be a blessed reality.
Our beloved sister, whose memory we cherish, had learned that there was no moral value before God in what she was as having derived from Adam. But she had learned also that Christ was great enough to take up on her behalf, and for the glory of God, the sin and death which had come in by Adam. We had sinned, but He died for our sins. We had come under death by the righteous sentence of God, but Christ came into contact with death in such a way as to annul its power. We are all conscious that death is the greatest power here; the mightiest man goes down before it as well as the weakest; it is the judgment of God upon sin. But Christ has gone into death in the way of divine love in such a way as to break its power for ever.
The Red Sea and the Jordan are two of the most striking types of death that are found in the Old Testament. But God identified Himself in grace with His people when He intervened to bring them out of Egypt, and we read, “The sea saw it and fled, the Jordan turned back”. And the question is asked, “What ailed thee, thou sea, that thou fleddest? thou Jordan, that thou turnedst back?” (Psalm 114:3,5). All the power of death was there symbolically, but it was seen as fleeing before the victorious [p. 27] power of the Lord. The Lord Jesus became Man that He might take up all that rested upon man, that He might discharge every liability that rested on those on whose behalf He came. He met and annulled the power of death for those who feared death. In the poetic language of the psalm, death has fled before Him. We might say truly that the power of God in the Person of Christ has met death and death has fled before Him. The proof of it is that Christ is risen; we look at Him and see death annulled. It is not yet annulled publicly, but it is annulled in Christ risen for all that are His. So that now it is possible for us to be “in Christ” — in the One who is for ever beyond death in victorious power. Our dear sister knew something of what it means to be “in Christ”, and she is now amongst “the dead in Christ”. She is eternally linked up with Him and His victory over death; His resurrection is the sure pledge of hers, “In Christ shall all be made alive”. Every one who is in Christ will be made alive in His order of life in resurrection. All the blessed and holy dead will be made alive in Christ. Our dear sister was “in Christ” while she was with us here; she is now amongst “the dead in Christ”; and very soon she will be raised in incorruption, in glory, in power, and with a spiritual body. She, with all saints, will be wholly “in Christ” then, and will be amongst the heavenly ones who are as the heavenly One. Death will have disappeared, as the scripture so strikingly says, “Death is swallowed up in victory”.
It is to be noted that before Christ was preached as risen God secured that there should not only be divine testimony to Him as risen, but also an incontrovertible human testimony as risen. He was seen on many occasions, and seen of above five hundred brethren at once, of whom, Paul says, “the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep”. Some had fallen asleep who had actually seen Christ risen with their mortal eyes. I would have liked to have been at the bedside of one of those five hundred when he came to fall asleep! What a sense of holy triumph they must have had, for they had seen Him risen. But the triumph is not less for us who know the blessed reality of it by faith and by the Spirit.
The last time I saw our sister she said to me, ‘I love all the saints, and I find that they all love me’. It is the present triumph of divine love that we should he brought in our affections outside the realm of sin and death, able to love one another as “in Christ”.
[p. 28] It is the privilege of saints and faithful brethren in Christ to walk together in love as those who are risen with Christ. That is an anticipation of the resurrection world, and as we are maintained in the present life and power of it we can say, both as to those fallen asleep in Christ and for ourselves, “Thanks to God, who gives us the victory by our Lord Jesus Christ”.
A Word given at a Burial