The Resurrection of the Just.
By Dean Alford
"I CANNOT consent to distort its words from their plain sense and chronological place in the prophecy on account of any consideration of difficulty, or any risk of abuses, which the doctrine of the millennium may bring with it. Those who lived next to the apostles, and the whole church for three hundred years, understood them in the plain literal sense; and it is a strange sight in these days to see expositors, who are among the first in reverence of antiquity, complacently casting aside the most cogent instance of unanimity which primitive antiquity presents. As regards the text itself, no legitimate treatment of it will extort what is known as the 'spiritual interpretation now in fashion.' If in a passage where two resurrections are mentioned, where certain souls lived at the first, and the rest of the dead lived only at the end of a specified period after that first, if in such a passage the first resurrection may be understood to mean spiritual rising with Christ, while the second means literal rising from the grave, then there is an end of all significance in language, and Scripture is wiped out as a definite testimony to anything. If the first resurrection is spiritual, then so is the second, which I suppose no one will be hardy enough to maintain; but if the second is literal, then so is the first, which, in common with the whole primitive church, and many of the best modern expositors, I do maintain and receive as an article of faith and hope."—Dean Alford, on Rev. 20.