The Meaning of the Resurrection.
By Editor
IT is a sad, sad thing that Christian journals, or professedly so, are coming more and more to deny the literal resurrection of the body. The Old Testament declarations to this effect are considered as mere myths or traditions, and the resurrection promised in the New Testament is made to refer wholly to the individual life. For instance, The Independent of April 16 quotes the saying of Jesus, “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” and remarks: “The saying is not, I will accomplish hereafter a resurrection. The true resurrection is in this present world. It is the SPIRITUAL ELEVATION which is manifested in the rise from low-thoughted earthiness to a life of moral endeavor and self-sacrificing love.” Now in a certain kind of a way that is true, and yet it forms a half-truth that is the very worst of errors. Jesus Christ died, Jesus Christ rose again from the dead. He who died was buried, and He who was buried rose again nevermore to die. That was the great evidence of His power over sin and death. That power is to come into the life of the believer, not in a mere “spiritual elevation which is manifested in the rise from low-thoughted earthiness to a life of moral endeavor and self-sacrificing love,”—a tremendously cheap way of putting it,—but in a regeneration and recreation of the soul of him who has given himself to Christ, and who rises from baptism to walk in a new life, because the resurrection power has come into his life. That resurrection power is not an earnest of something in the past, but an earnest of something in the future, by which the whole individual, physical as well as spiritual, shall rise to a new life. This resurrection the apostle Paul does not speak of as in the past, but one which will take place when Christ the Lord shall come; and he gives the lie to those who said that the resurrection was already past, and so overthrew the faith of some. 2 Tim. 2: 16-18. But as The Independent has set aside the second coming of Christ, naturally the resurrection goes with it. We do not know how its editor can more than half believe in anything whatsoever taught by the New Testament, for if the New Testament teaches any one thing, it teaches the literality of the physical resurrection—a demonstration of the power of God to save from sin.