Triumph over death.
There is a first reference here to the restoration of Judah from its death-state of captivity, and to the wiping away of the tears the captives shed when they hung their harps upon the willows. But we cannot forget that St. Paul and St. John have put the richest Christian meanings into these beautiful and pathetic words (1 Corinthians 4:1-21 :54; Revelation 7:17; Revelation 21:4). And life for a nation out of the death-state of captivity may well be taken as a type of the sublime resurrection of humanity from the grasp of physical death. Our triumph over death is assured; and foretaste of it is given in the conquest of the Lord Jesus over the grave. He is our Conqueror of death, and in him the prophecy of this text will have its large and blessed fulfillment. We read the prophecy in the light of Christ and of his work. And Scripture teaches us to regard the resurrection of Christ as a final conquest of death for us (Acts 2:24;1 Corinthians 4:21, 55, 56; Ephesians 4:8; 2 Timothy 1:10; Hebrews 2:14; Revelation 1:18).
I. CHRIST IS THE CONQUEROR OF DEATH ITSELF. It was not the design of Christ to destroy death altogether, and withdraw its commission to the human race. He left it still to bite, but plucked away its sting, the venom of its hopelessness, and the bitterness of its connection with human sin. We shall die, though Christ has conquered death; but death is now only the messenger that calls us home—he is no longer the jailer that drags us to our doom. Dissolution, or translation, such as we have hints of in the cases of Enoch and Elijah, may be the Divine idea for unfallen created beings; but certainly death, as we know it, with all its attendant circumstances of evil, is the immediate result of human sin. Change of state, and change of worlds, may be death in an abstract sense; but death in fear, and amid sufferings, and under disease, and involving agonizing separations, and terrible with the black shadows of an unknown future; this death—and this is the death with which we have to do—is the penalty of transgression. "The sting of death is sin." Lord Bacon, in his essay on death, almost makes too much of the material accompaniments of it, and under estimates the moral feeling in relation to it. He says, "Groans, and convulsions, and a discolored face, and friends weeping, and blacks, and obsequies, and the like, show death terrible There is no passion in the mind of man so weak, but it mates and masters the fear of death; and therefore death is no such terrible enemy when a man hath so many attendants about him that can win the combat for him. Revenge triumphs over death; love slights it; honor aspireth to it; grief fleeth to it; and lear preoccupieth it." But this is only true for certain individuals, and under various pressures of excitement. To most of us, and especially to those who are thoughtful, and oppressed with the burdens of humanity, death has aspects of great bitterness. Then in what sense can we think of Christ as the present Conqueror of death? The answer is this—He has conquered the death-dread in us, both concerning ourselves and concerning those who are dear to us. He has "delivered those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage." And he has conquered it by fixing its connections with the body alone, and severing it, once and forever, from all relation to the renewed and redeemed soul. "He that liveth and believeth on me shall never die." In Christ death is compelled to take rank with disease and pain, as the servants of God. Its masterfulness is destroyed; its dart lies broken on the ground.
II. THE CONQUEROR OF DEATH OUGHT TO RULE IN ITS STEAD. In Christ life rules, hope rules, goodness rules, eternity rules. Man may despairingly look upon his partially raised schemes, and say, "Alas! I shall die." But the Christian man builds on bravely and hopefully. He knows that beneath all the outward show he is raising a structure of character on which death has no power, and he says, "I shall never die." The difference that is made by our letting death rule our thoughts and hopes and endeavors, and letting Christ rule them, may be illustrated by the change wrought in the land of Persia, when Zoroaster proclaimed that Ormuzd, the Good, was the real ruler of humanity. When Zoroaster came, the religious instincts of the people were debased, the divinity worshipped was malevolent, the moral tone was low, the social habits were vicious, the land of Iran was overgrown with thorns and weeds; men were idle, negligent, like the surfeited inhabitants of Sodom, given up to sensuality; they thought of their divine ruler as evil, malicious, cruel; they had the crushing, despairing, disheartening sentiments which always follow the belief that death, the representative of evil, rules. Zoroaster brought back the old and lost truth that God rules—not evil, not death. Evil is subject to God. The good God is the God of life, and life is mightier than death; of light, and light triumphs over darkness. Ormuzd was the god of production, and if they would sow and plant and weed, they would be sure to win, under his benediction, a glorious triumph over waste and barrenness and death. We are not yet free as we should be from the notion that death still reigns. We have not yet opened our hearts fully to the glorious truth that Jesus, the conqueror of death, now reigns. Above everything else our age wants to yield its allegiance to Christ, ruling in morals, in education, in literature, in science, in politics, in commerce, and in society; triumphing now over all the forms of evil that death can symbolize.—R.T.