LIVING ONE WHO BECAME DEAD - Alexander Maclaren

‘I am He that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death,’ — Revelation 1:13.

If we had been in ‘the isle which is called Patmos’ when John saw the glorified Lord, and heard these majestic words from His mouth, we should probably have seen nothing but the sunlight glinting on the water, and heard only the wave breaking on the shore. The Apostle tells us that he ‘was in the Spirit’; that is, in a state in which sense is lulled to sleep, and the inner man made aware of supersensual realities. The communication was none the less real because it was not perceived by the outward eye or ear. It was not born in, though it was perceived by, the Apostle’s spirit. We must hold fast by the objective reality of the communication, which is not in the slightest degree affected by the assumption that sense had no part in it.

Further what John once saw always is; the vision was a transient revelation of a permanent reality. The snowy summits are there, Behind the cloud- wrack that hides them, as truly as they were when the sunshine gleamed on their peaks. The veil has fallen again, But all behind it is as it was. So this revelation, Both in regard of the magnificent symbolic image imprinted on the Apostle’s consciousness, and in regard of the words which he reports to us as impressed upon him by Christ Himself, is meant for us just as it was for him, or for those to whom it was originally transmitted. ‘He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches.’ And as we meditate upon this proclamation by the kingly Christ Himself of His own style and titles, I we shall best gain its full sublimity and force if we simply take the words, clause by clause, as they stand in the text.

1 First, then, the royal Christ proclaims His absolute life.

Observe that, as the Revised Version will show those who use it, there is a much closer connection between the words of our text and those of the preceding verse than our Authorised Version gives. We must strike out that intrusive and wholly needless supplement,’ I am,’ and read the sentence unbrokenly: ‘I am the first, and the last and the living One.’

Now that close connection of clauses in itself suggests that this expression, ‘the Living One,’ means something more than the mere declaration that He was alive. That follows appropriately, as we shall see, in the last clause of the verse, which cannot be cleared from the charge of tautology, unless we attach a far deeper meaning than the mere declaration of life to this first solemn clause. What can stand worthily by the side of these majestic words, ‘I am the first and the last’? These claim a Divine attribute and are a direct quotation from ancient prophecy, where they are spoken as by the great Jehovah of the old covenant, and appear in a connection which makes any tampering with them the more impossible. For there follow upon them the great words, ‘and beside Me there is no God.’ But this royal Christ from the heavens puts out an unpresumptuous hand, and draws to Himself, as properly belonging to Him, the very style and signature of the Divine nature, ‘I am the first’ — before all creatural being, ‘and the last,’ as He to whom it all tends — its goal and aim. And therefore I say that this connection of clauses, apart altogether from other consideration, absolutely forbids our taking this great word, ‘the Living One,’ as meaning less than the similar lofty and profound signification. It means, as I believe, exactly what Jesus Christ meant when, in the hearing of this same Apostle, He said upon earth, ‘Am the Father hath life in Himself so hath He given’ — strange paradox — ‘so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself.’ A life which, considered in contrast with all the life of creatures, is underived, independent, self-feeding, and, considered in contrast with the life of the Father with whom that Son stands in ineffable and unbroken union, isbestowed. It is a paradox, I know, but until we assume that we have sounded all the depths and climbed all the height., and gone round the boundless boundaries of the circumference of that Divine nature, we have no business to say that it is impossible. And this, as I take it, is what the great words that echoed from Heaven in the Apostle’s hearing upon Patmos meant — the claim by the glorified Christ to possess absolute fontal life, and to be the Source of all creation, ‘in whom was life.’ He was not only ‘the Living One,’ but, as Himself has said, He was ‘the Life.’ And so He was the agent of all creation, as Scripture teaches us.

Now I am not going to dwell upon this great thought, but I.imply wish, in one sentence, to leave with you my own earnest conviction that it is the teaching of all Scripture, that it is distinctly the teaching of Christ Himself when on earth; that it is repeated in a real revelation from Himself to the recipient seer in this vision before us, that it is fundamental to all true understanding of Christ’s person and work, since none of His acts on earth shine in their full lustre of beauty unless the thought of His pre-incarnate and essential life is held fast to heighten all the marvels of His condescension, and to invest with power all the sweetness of His pity. ‘I am the first, and the last, and the Living One.’

2 Secondly, the royal Christ proclaims His submission to death.

The language of the original is, perhaps, scarcely capable of smooth transference into English, but it is to be held fast notwithstanding, for what is said is not ‘I wasdead,’ as describing a past condition, but ‘I became dead,’ as describing a past act. There is all the difference between these two, and avoidance of awkwardness is dearly purchased by obliteration of the solemn teaching of that profound word ‘became.’

I need not dwell upon this at any length, but I suggest to you one or two plain considerations. Such a statement implies our Lord’s assumption of flesh. The only possibility of death, for ‘the Living One,’ lies in His enwrapping Himself with that which can die. As you might put a piece of asbestos into a twist of cotton wool, over which the flame could have power, or as a sun might plunge into thick envelopes of darkness, so this eternal, absolute Life gathered to itself by voluntary accretion the surrounding which was capable of mortality. It is very significant that the same word which the seer in Patmos employs to describe the Lord’s submission to death is the word which, in his character of evangelist, he employs to describe the same Lord’s incarnation: ‘The Word became flesh,’ and so the Life ‘became dead.’ And this expression implies, too, another thing, on which I need not dwell, because I was touching on it in a previous sermon, and that is the entirely voluntary character of our Lord’s submission to the great law of mortality. He ‘became’ dead, and it was His act that He became so.

Thus we are brought into the presence of the most stupendous fact in the world’s history. Brethren, as I said that the firm grasp of the other truth of Christ’s absolute life was fundamental to all understanding of His earthly career, so I say that this fundamental truth of His voluntarily becoming dead is fundamental to all understanding of His Cross. Without that thought His death becomes mere surplusage, in so far as His power over men is concerned. With it, what adoration can be too lowly, what gratitude can be disproportionate? He arrays Himself in that which can die, as if the sun plunged into the shadow of eclipse. Let us bow before that mystery of Divine love, the death of the Lord of Life. The motive which impelled Him, the consequences which followed, are not in view here. These are full of blessedness and of wonder, but we are now to concentrate our thoughts on the bare fact, and to find in it food for endless adoration and for perpetual praise.

But there is another consideration that I may suggest. The eternal Life became dead. Then the awful solitude — awful when we think of it for ourselves, awful when we stand by the bed, and feel so near, and yet so infinitely remote from the dear one that may be lying there — the awful solitude is solitary no longer. ‘All alone, so Heaven has willed, we die’; but as travellers are cheered on a solitary road when they see the footprints that they know belonged to loved and trusted ones who have trodden it before, that desolate loneliness is less lonely when we think that He became dead. He will come to the shrinking, single soul as He joined Himself to the sad travellers on the road to Emmaus, and ‘our hearts’ may burn within us, even in that last hour of their beating, if we can remember who has become dead and trodden the road before us.

3 The royal Christ proclaims His eternal life in glory. ‘Behold!’ — as if calling attention to a wonder — ‘I am alive for evermore.’ Again, I say, we have here a distinctly Divine prerogative claimed by the exalted Christ, as properly belonging to Himself. For that eternal life of which He speaks is by no means the communicated immortality which He imparts to them that in His love go down to death, but it is the inherent eternal life of the Divine nature.

But, mark, who is the ‘I’ that speaks? The seer has told us: ‘One like unto the Son of Man’ — which title, whether it repeats the name which our Lord habitually used, or whether, as some persons suppose, it should be read ‘a Son of Man,’ and merely declares that the vision of the glorified One was manlike, is equally relevant for my present purpose. For that is to ask you to mark that the ‘I’ of my text is the Divine-human Jesus. The manhood is so intertwined with the Deity that the absolute life of the latter has, as it were, flowed over and glorified the former; and it is a Man who lays His hand upon the Divine prerogative, and says, ‘I live for evermore.’

Now why do I dwell upon thoughts like this? Not for the purpose merely of putting accurately what I believe to be the truth, but for the sake of opening out to you and to myself the infinite treasures of consolation and strength which lie in that thought that He who ‘is alive for evermore’ is not merely Divine in HIS absolute life, but, as Son of Man, lives for ever. And so, ‘because I live, ye shall live also.’ We cannot die as long as Christ is alive. And if we knit our hearts to Him, the Divine glory which flows over His Manhood will trickle down to ours, and we, too, though by derivation, shall possess as immortal — and, in its measure, as glorious — a life as that of the Brother who reigns in Heaven, the Man Christ Jesus.

His resurrection is not only the demonstration of what manhood is capable of, and so, as I believe, the one irrefragable and all- satisfying proof of immortality, but it is also the actual source of that immortal life to all of us, if we will trust ourselves to Him For it is only because ‘He both died and rose and revived’ that He, in the truest and properest sense, becomes the gift of life to us men. The alabaster box was broken, and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment. Christ’s death is the world’s life.

Christ’s resurrection is the pledge and the source of eternal life for us.

4 And so, lastly, the royal Christ proclaims His authority over the dim regions of the dead.

Much to be regretted are two things in our Authorised Version’s rendering of the final words of our text. One is the order in which, following an inferior reading, it has placed the two things specified. And the other is that deplorable mistranslation, as it has come to be, of the word hades by the word ‘hell.’ The true original does not read ‘hell and death,’ but ‘death and hades,’ the dim unseen regions in which allthe dead, whatsoever their condition may be, are gathered. The hades of the New Testament includes the paradise into which the penitent thief was promised entrance, as well as the gehenna which threatened to open for the impenitent.

Here it is figured as being a great gloomy fortress, with barb and gates and locks, of which that ‘shadow feared of man’ is the warder, and keeps the portals. But he does not keep the keys. The kingly Christ has these in His own hand. So, brethren, He has authority to open and to shut; and death is not merely a terror nor is it altogether accounted for, when we say either that it is the fruit of sin, or that it is the result of physical laws. For behind the laws is the will — the will of the loving Christ. It is His hand that opens the dark door, and they who listen aright may hear Him say, when He does it, ‘Come! My people; enter thou into thy chamber until these calamities be overpast.’ ‘He openeth, and no man shutteth; He shutteth, and no man openeth.’ So is not the terror gone; and ‘the raven plumes of that darkness smoothed until it smiles’?

If we believe that He has the keys, how shall we dread when ourselves or our dear ones have to enter into the portal? There are two gates to the prison-house, and when the one that looks earthwards opens, the other, that gives on the heavens, opens too, and the prison becomes a thoroughfare, and the light shines through the short tunnel even to the hither side.

Because He has the keys, He will not leave His holy ones in the fetters. And for ourselves, and for our dearest, we have the right to think that the darkness is so short as to be but like an imperceptible wink of the eye; and ere we know that we have passed into it, we shall have passed out.

‘This is the gate of the Lord, into which the righteous shall enter.’ And it may be with us as it was with the Apostle who was awakened out of his sleep by the angel — only we shall be awakened out of ours by the angel’s Master — and who did not come to himself, and know that he had been delivered, until he had passed through the iron gate ‘that opened to him of its own accord’; and then, bewildered, he recovered himself when he found that, with the morning breaking over his head, he stood, delivered, in the city.