Genesis Vol 3.pdf - College Press

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--even as it is u
im~ortality rests.”
ultimate fact is not
Resurrection and the Crown. It is
it is persuaded that the sting of
and the grave robbed of its victory; so,%that. death has no
more dominion over us. It is franM%rreCoggize,d that in
its own self-enclosed and untransfigurecj .naturej as .it must
present itself to those who do not sbaie, any such persuasion,
death must be a ghastly and terxible, thing; and indeed
it is thus that death always has presFqted :itself to sincere
and profound unbelief. To see one’s: beloved stamped into
the sod for his body to rot and the ms ,toteat him . . .
and then be of good cheer! No, there can be no good
cheer unless it be true that that to ,which this-dreadful
thing has happened is not really one’s beloved himself but
only his earthly tabernacle; unless it be true that ‘the world
passeth away, and the lust thereof; but he that doeth the
will of God abideth forever’ (1 John 2:17). Whereas,
therefore, it would be nothing but shallowness of spirit for
one who had no hope beyond the grave to cease to be
obsessed by the fact of death (whether by facing it cheerfully
or by refusing to make it the object of his too
constant thought), such a result in the soul of a Christian
must be the mark of a great depth and maturity. . , . I
have quoted Spinoza’s saying, spoken in defiance of Plato,
that ‘the free man thinks of nothing less than of death;
his wisdom is a meditation not upon death but upon life.’
Let me now say that of the man who stands fast in the
liberty wherewith Christ hath made him free this may well
be true-truer than Plato’s ‘studying nothing but dying
and being dead’; since he can now cry with St. Paul, ‘For
the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me
free- from the law of sin and death.’” (Rom. 8:2). (See
Baillie, .OB cit., 341-342). (2) Lange (CDHCG, 441):
“In regard to the thought of Abraham’s intercession, we
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