SUNDAY READING.

Taranaki Daily News, 22 April 1922, Page 9

SUNDAY READING.

“THE THIRD DAY HE ROSE AGAIN.” “The power of His resurrection.” —Phil. 111.. 10. (By Rev. A. H. Collins, New Plymouth.) THE MEANING OF EASTER. One thought, and only one, fills our minds with light, and our hearts with hope to-day; it is the thought o" our Lord’s rising from the sealed and guarded -grave. Our understanding of all it means may be very imperfect, o-ir conception of it may be hazy, and our hold upon it weak, but We have a new sense of the largeness of life and the lovingness of God, as we hear again the Easter greeting: “He is risen." This in itself is most /significant, pointing as it does to the place this doctrine holds in the thought and life of the Church. On other subjects we may be “plunged in sunless gulfs of doubt,” where we “fads the spectres of the mind,” but in the presence of Christ’s empty sepulchre, it is easier to live and labor, easier to hope and pray. For that empty tomb declares that the one power thought to be invincible, the one law thought to be inexorable, the one fate thought to be inescapable, has been met and mastered, for Easter means that. Death has been outmatched, and Life crowned conqueror. “The third day He rose again from the dead.”

All this we gratefully confess. But it would argue strange and culpable ignorance did we fail to see that all this is being challenged, and in some cases scornfully denied, in the name of modern science, which says that the results of scientific investigation are fatal to the alleged facts of the gospels: and in the .presence of this materialistic temper, it may be useful to reconsider the ground of our confidence. In the New Testament the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is first stated as a fact, then de-' veloped into a doctrine, and finally usedas a symbol, and I propose to follow that order. THE FACT OF CHRIST’S DEATH. First as to the fact. We know bevond all reasonable challenge that Jesus Christ died, really died. The fact that the Romans were His executioners may be accepted as proof that our faith does not rest on a martyr’s fainting fit. Roman soldiers were not the men to leave their grim work unfinished. They had looked into the face of death too often to be mistaken. Had there been no other evidence the spear point knqw its way to His heart too well, and the Evangelist says: “They break not His legs because He was dead already.” The fact of Christ’s death Lies outside the realm of serious controversy, and as a matter of historic fact, Christ’s death has never been gravely questioned. That same day His body was taken down from the cross, and when kind hands had removed the dust and stains of crucifixion, the pale Conqueror, fair in death as in life, was wrapped in linen and buried in Joseph’s garden grave. In the judgment of the rulers “the game was up”! Jesus of Nazareth had staked all and lost all. His cqreer was ended. His pretensions were disposed of for ever! It was “finished,” as He said, though not in the sense He intended.

EVIDENCE OF RESURRECTION. x But we believe more than that. We' believe on evidence, abundant and circumstantial, that. Jesus not only “suffered under Pontius Pilate,” and was “crucified, dead and buried.” but that on “the third day He rose again from the dead.” We recall the events of that first Easter Day and the great forty days that followed; how the Angels rolled away the stone from the sepulchre, as a servant might open the gate for a king, how the iron-nerved Roman guard blanched white with terror, how the holy women visited His grave with spices, only to find the tomb empty and the grave clothes laid aside with every sign of leisureliness, how Jesus appeared to single individuals, to groups of disciples, and later to five hundred brethren at one time, and this not only in the dim light of the early morning, but throughout the great forty days between His Resurrection and Ascension; how. with every conceivable opportunity of test and investigation, He gave “infallible proofs” of Hi.s rising; how He breathed on them, ate with them, walked with them to Emmaus, and finally led them as far as Bethany, and “a cloud received Him out of t'heir sight.” • This is not all. The argument is not yet complete. We must remember that the disciples were at first reluctant to believe the evidence of their senses, and needed to be convinced of the fact, and when their reason had been conquered, they had to face fierce opposition, yet these eye-witnesses made the Resurrection of Christ the staple article of their ministry, and preached it to the very men who shared the guilt of the crucifixion, preached it in the city where the deed was done, preached it in the teeth of “clinched antagonisms.” Read the Book of the Acts and the Epistles, if you would see the commanding place the Resurrection of Christ held jn the life of the early Church. Remember the change from the Jewish Sabbath to the Christian Lord’s Day is witness to the significance of Christ’s rising, whilst the existence of the Christian Church, these two thousand years, is historic evidence to the same stupendous fact. Such, in rough, imperfect, outline, is the argument for the fact that “the third day He rose again from the dead.” and in the presence of these, sifted facts, say is Saint Paul too emphatic when he declares that “if Christ be not risen there is no resurrection,” and if Christ be not risen there is no Son of God, there is no forgiveness of sins, and the world is dark, and death is conqueror, and we might say with another: “As I looked up into the immeasurable heavens for the Divine Eye, it froze me with an empty socket.” Or, to put it another way, if the Resurrection of Christ be denied, then jt must be supposed that men who have been imposed upon, in the most odious and cruel manner, nevertheless hazarded their dearest hopes for the glory of an imposter; that ignorant and illiterate - men, who had neither reputation. nor fortune, nor eloquence, possessed the art of fascinating the eyes of the Church! It must be supposed .that five hundred persons were deprived of their senses at one time, or that they were all deceived in the plainest matter of fact, or that a crowd of witnesses had discovered the secret of never contradicting themselves or one another, and that the most expert judges could find no con. tradiction in a palpable imposture!

views; that thousands suffered imprisonment and death to spread a delusion; that 10,000 miracles have 'been wrought in favor of a lie; that the Apostles were ’ idiots, the foes of Christianity were idiots, and all the primitive Christians were idiots! To ask us to believe all this at the bidding of men wlho, whilst they profess beliefs in God, deny the super-normal, is to ask us to dismiss cool sense and walk in a vain show. Instead of doing this I range myself with Ewald when he says that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the best attested fact in history. Here are his words: “No fact in history is more certain than that . Jesus Christ rose and appeared, to His disciples, and that His appearance was the beginning of their work in the world.” On this solid masonry of fact the New Testament writers built the doctrine, of the Resurrectiop. They say that Christ was proven tp-<be the Son of God by the power—oL"the Resurrection. They say that this stupendous event marks His death off from every other, and that thereby “He hath opened the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.” They say that Christ is risen, and so has demonstrated the Divinity of His person, the sufficiency of His Atonement, the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy, and New Testament hopes, and laid, deep and sure, the foundation of our hope in the Life Everlasting. They say—“Up and away! Thy Saviour’s gone before, Why dost thou stay, dull soul 1 Behold the door Is open, and His* precepts bid thee rise Whose power hath vanquished all thine enemies.” THE POWER OF THE RESURRECTION. But “the power of His Resurrection” is not only something different from the fact and the doctrine; it is something more. The proof of Christ’s rising lies in the regenerated lives of men and women. To believe in the fact of the resurrection js as though a man should be assured that there are gold and treasure in the Bank of New Zealand, but to experience “the power of the resurrection” is as though a man should possess the gold and treasure. A man may admit the fact that Christ died and rose again; he may consent to the doctrines that spring out of the fact as flowers from a seed, and still remains, as thousands do, practically unaffected, but to know “the power of the resurrection” means that life is penetrated by Christ’s spirit and ruled by Christ’s law. What we call “conversion” is really a resurrection. “You hath He quickened who were dead in trespasses and sins.” Spiritual death means insensibility to the best and the highest. A man may have splendid physique, great mental ‘gifts, and be alive in every nerve and fibre, and all the while insensible to spiritual things. The practical lesson of Easter is a movement of the soul Godward, the removal of some stone from life’s sepulchre, t'he bursting of. some fetter, and the stepping out with .larger, fuller life, power and freedom. When Jesus rose from the dead, Ho entered on a new and heavenly life with renewed and enlarged powers to bless and save the world. Finally “t'be power of His Resurrection means a. wealth of consolatioi" poured into sorrowful hearts. The heathen mourned without hope; a shattered pillar, a ship gone., to pieces, a race lost, a harp lying on the ground with snapped strings and all its music gone, a flower crushed and all its fragrance spill, ed, these were thp emblems of their hope, less grief. But “He is risen”!

Death 'hath not slain them, they are free, not slain; It is the gate of life, and not of death, which they have entered, And in vain the grave has tried to stifle t'heir immortal breath.” DEATH IS DEAD. Death is dead. Say it again and again. Death is dead. Death is dead. Maeterlinck. in his dainty play, “The Blue Bird,” makes the little boy’s voice thrill through the theatre: “There are no dead.” Let that voice thrill through all your sorrow and your fears, through all your disappointment and your loss. “There ar e ,no dead.” “There are no dead.” They are alive. So is He. “There is no death, the dust we tread. Shall change beneath the summer showers, To golden grain or mellow fruit, Or rainbow-tinted flowers. “And ever near us, though unseen, The dear immortal spirits tread, For all thp boundless universe Is life. There are no dead.” So the one word with which we greet each other to-day is this: “He is risen”! It is Easter the world over. The Resurrection. and the hope which springs from it. belts the dark earth with a zone of light. It is enough to say Christ is risen. Tn the presence of that fact it is easier to hope and wait. For it makes all the difference whether the sky above is an infinite and immeasurable height, or the place where Christ has gone.” “The day He rose again.”