THE GOOD MAN’S LIFE AND DEATH – Charles Spurgeon
THE GOOD MAN’S LIFE AND DEATH
“For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” Philippians 1:21. How ominously these words follow each other in the text—“live,” “die.” There is but a comma between them, and surely as it is in the words, so is it in reality! How brief the distance between life and death! In fact, there is none. Life is but death’s vestibule and our pilgrimage on earth is but a journey to the grave. The pulse that preserves our being beats our death march, and the blood which circulates our life is floating it onward to the deeps of death. Today we see our friends in health—tomorrow we hear of their decease. We clasped the hand of the strong man but yesterday and today we close his eyes. We rode in the chariot of comfort but an hour ago, and in a few more hours, the last black chariot must convey us to the home of all living. Oh, how closely allied is death to life! The lamb that sports in the field must soon feel the knife. The ox that lows in the pasture is fattening for the slaughter. Trees do but grow that they may be felled. Yes, and greater things than these feel death! Empires rise and flourish—they flourish but to decay—they rise to fall. How often do we take up the volume of history and read of the rise and fall of empires. We hear of the coronation and the death of kings. Death is the black servant who rides behind the chariot of life. See life, and death is close behind it! Death reaches far throughout this world and has stamped all terrestrial things with the broad arrow of the grave. Stars may even die. It is said that conflagrations have been seen far off in the distant ether and astronomers have marked the funerals of worlds, the decay of those mighty orbs that we had imagined set forever in sockets of silver to glisten as the lamps of eternity! But blessed be God, there is one place where death is not life’s brother, where life reigns alone. “To live” is not the first syllable which is to be followed by the next, “to die.” There is a land where death knells are never tolled, where winding-sheets are never woven, where graves are never dug. Blessed land beyond the skies! To reach it we must die—but if after death we obtain a glorious immortality, our text is indeed true—“To die is gain.”
If you would get a fair estimate of the happiness of any man, you must judge him in these two closely connected things—his life and his death. The heathen Solon said, “Call no man happy until he is dead, for you know not what changes may pass upon him in life.” We add to that—Call no man happy until he is dead, because the life that is to come, if that is miserable, shall far outweigh the highest life of happiness that has been enjoyed on earth! To estimate a man’s condition, we must take it in all its length. We must not measure that one thread which reaches from the cradle to the coffin—we must go further! We must go from the coffin to the resurrection and from the resurrection on throughout eternity. To know whether acts are profitable, I must not estimate their effects on me for the hour in which I live, but for the eternity in which I am to exist! I must not weigh matters in the scales of time. I must not calculate by the hours, minutes, and seconds of the clock, but I must count and value things by the ages of eternity! Come, then, beloved. We have before us the picture of a man—the two sides of whose existence will, both of them, bear inspection! We have his life, we have his death—we have it said of his life, “to live is Christ.” Of his death, “to die is gain.” And if the same shall be said of any of you, oh, you may rejoice! You are among that thrice-happy number whom the Lord has loved and whom He delights to honor!
We shall now divide our text very simply into these two points, the good man’s life, and the good man’s death.
I. THE GOOD MAN’S LIFE
As to HIS LIFE, we have that briefly described thus—“For me to live is Christ.” The believer did not always live to Christ. When he was first born into this world, he was a slave of sin and an heir of wrath, even as others. Though he may have afterward become the greatest of saints, yet until divine grace has entered his heart, he is “in the gall of bitterness and in the bonds of iniquity.” He only begins to live to Christ when God the Holy Spirit convicts him of his sin and of his desperate evil nature—when by divine grace he is brought to see the dying Savior making a propitiation for his guilt. From that moment when, by faith, he sees the slaughtered victim of Calvary and casts his whole life on Him—to be saved, to be redeemed, to be preserved and to be blessed by the virtue of His atonement and the greatness of His grace—from that moment the man begins to live to Christ! And now shall we tell you as briefly as we can what living to Christ means. It means, first, that the life of a Christian derives its parentage from Christ. “For me to live is Christ.” The righteous man has two lives. He has one which he inherited from his parents. He looks back to an ancestral race of which he is the branch and he traces his life to the parent stock.
But he has a second life, a spiritual life, a life which is as much above mere mental life as mental life is above the life of the animal or the plant! And for the source of this spiritual life, he looks not to father or mother, nor to priest nor man, nor to himself—he looks to Christ! He says, “O Lord Jesus, the everlasting Father, the Prince of peace, You are my spiritual parent. Unless Your Spirit had breathed into my nostrils the breath of a new, holy and spiritual life, I had been to this day ‘dead in trespasses and sins.’ I owe my third principle, my spirit, to the implantation of Your grace. I had a body and a soul by my parents. I have received the third principle, the spirit from You and in You I live and move and have my being. My new, my best, my highest, my most heavenly life is wholly derived from You. To You I ascribe it. My life is hid with Christ in God. It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.” And so the Christian says, “For me to live is Christ,” because for me to live is to live a life whose parentage is not of human origin, but of divine, even of Christ Himself! Again he intended to say that Christ was the sustenance of his life, the food his newborn spirit is fed upon. The believer has three parts to be sustained. The body, which must have its proper nutriment; the soul, which must have knowledge and thought to supply it, and the spirit which must feed on Christ. Without bread, I become weakened to a skeleton and at last I die. Without thought, my mind becomes dwarfed and dwindles itself until I become the idiot with a soul that has life but little more. And without Christ, my newborn spirit must become a vague shadowy emptiness. It cannot live unless it feeds on that heavenly manna which came down from heaven. Now the Christian can say, “The life that I live is Christ,” because Christ is the food on which he feeds and the sustenance of his newborn spirit!
The apostle also meant that the fashion of his life was Christ. I suppose that every man living has a model by which he endeavors to shape his life. When we start in life, we generally select some person, or persons, whose combined virtues shall be to us the mirror of perfection. “Now,” says Paul, “if you ask me after what fashion I mold my life and what is the model by which I would sculpture my being, I tell you it is Christ. I have no fashion, no form, no model by which to shape my being except the Lord Jesus Christ.” Now, the true Christian, if he is an upright man, can say the same. Understand, however, what I mean by the word, “upright.” An upright man means a straight-up man—a man that does not cringe and bow and fawn to other men’s feet. A man that does not lean for help on other men but just stands with his head heavenward, in all the dignity of his independence, leaning nowhere except on the arm of the omnipotent! Such a man will take Christ alone to be his model and pattern.
This is the very age of conventionalities. People dare not now do a thing unless everybody else does the same. You do not often say, “Is a thing right?” The most you say is, “Does So-and-So do it?” You have some great personage or other in your family connection who is looked upon as being the very standard of all propriety. And if he does it, then you think you may safely do it! And oh, what an outcry there is against a man who dares to be singular, who believes that some of your conventionalities are shackles and chains and kicks them all to pieces and says, “I am free!” The world is at him in a minute! All the bad dogs of malice and slander are at him because he says, “I will not follow your model! I will vindicate the honor of my Master and not take your great masters to be forever my pattern.” Oh, I would to God that every statesman, that every minister, that every Christian were free to hold that his only form and his only fashion for imitation must be the character of Christ!
II. THE GOOD MAN’S DEATH
Alas, alas, that the good should die! Alas, that the righteous should fall! Death, why do you not hew the deadly upas tree? Why do you not mow the hemlock? Why do you touch the tree beneath whose spreading branches weariness has rest? Why do you touch the flower whose perfume has made glad the earth? Death, why do you snatch away the excellent of the earth in whom is all our delight? If you have to use your axe, use it upon the cumber grounds, the trees that draw nourishment but afford no fruit! You might then be thanked—but why will you cut down the cedars, why will you fell the goodly trees of Lebanon? O Death, why do you not spare the church? Why must the pulpit be hung in black? Why must the missionary station be filled with weeping? Why must the pious family lose its priest and the house its head? O Death, what are you doing? Touch not earth’s holy things! Your hands are not fit to pollute the Israel of God! Why do you put your hand upon the hearts of the elect? Oh stop! Stop! Spare the righteous, Death, and take the evil! But no, it must not be. Death comes and smites the best of us all. The most generous, the most prayerful, the most holy, the most devoted must die! Weep, weep, weep, O church, for you have lost your martyrs! Weep, O church, for you have lost your confessors! Your holy men are fallen! Howl, fir tree, for the cedar has fallen! The godly fail and the righteous are cut off!
But stay awhile. I hear another voice. Say you unto the daughter of Judah, spare your weeping. Tell the Lord’s flock, cease, cease your sorrow. Your martyrs are dead but they are glorified! Your ministers are gone but they have ascended up to your Father and to their Father! Your brothers and sisters are buried in the grave, but the archangel’s trumpet shall awake them and their spirits are ever now with God. Hear the words of the text, by way of consolation, “To die is gain.”
Not such gain as you wish for, you son of the miser. Not such gain as you are hunting for, you man of covetousness and self-love. A higher and a better gain is that which death brings to a Christian! My dear friends, when I discoursed upon the former part of the verse, it was all plain. No proof was needed. You believed it, for you saw it clearly. “To live is Christ,” has no paradox in it. But, “To die is gain,” is one of the gospel riddles which only the Christian can truly understand. To die is not gain if I look upon the merely visible. To die is loss, it is not gain. Has not the dead man lost his wealth? Though he had piles of riches, can he take anything with him? Has it not been said, “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb and naked shall I return there”? “Dust you are and unto dust shall you return.” And which of all your goods can you take with you?
The man had a fair estate and a goodly mansion. He has lost that. He can no more tread those painted halls nor walk those lush green lawns. He had abundance of fame and honor. He has lost that, so far as his own sense of it is concerned, though still the harp string trembles at his name. He has lost his wealth and though he may be buried in a costly tomb, yet is he as poor as the beggar who looked upon him in the street in envy. That is not gain, it is loss! And he has lost his friends—he has left behind him a sorrowing wife and children, fatherless, without his guardian care. He has lost the friend of his bosom, the companion of his youth. Friends are there to weep over him, but they cannot cross the river with him. They drop a few tears into his tomb but with him they must not and cannot go.
And has he not lost all his learning, though he has toiled ever so much to fill his brain with knowledge? What is he now above the servile slave, though he has acquired all knowledge of earthly things? Is it not said—“Their memory and their love are lost Alike unknowing and unknown”? Surely death is loss. Has he not lost the songs of the sanctuary and the prayers of the righteous? Has he not lost the solemn assembly and the great gathering of the people? No more shall the promise enchant his ears; no more shall the glad tidings of the gospel wake his soul to melody. He sleeps in the dust, the Sabbath bell tolls not for him. The sacramental emblems are spread upon the table, but not for him. He has gone to his grave. He knows not that which shall be after him. There is neither work nor device in the grave to where we all are hastening. Surely death is loss.
When I look upon you, you clay-cold corpse and see you just preparing to be the palace of corruption and the carnival for worms, I cannot think that you have gained! When I see that your eyes have lost light and your lips have lost their speech and your ears have lost hearing and your feet have lost motion and your heart has lost its joy—when I see they who look out of the windows dressed in black and no sounds of the harp wake up your joys, O clay-cold corpse, then have you lost, lost immeasurably! And yet my text tells me it is not so—it says, “To die is gain.”
It looks as if it could not be thus and certainly it is not, so far as I can see. But put to your eye the telescope of faith—take that magic glass which pierces through the veil that parts us from the unseen. Anoint your eyes with eye salve and make them so bright that they can pierce the ether and see the unknown worlds! Come, bathe yourself in this sea of light and live in holy revelation and belief! Then look and oh, how changed the scene!
Here is the corpse but there the spirit. Here is the clay but there the soul; here is the carcass but there the seraph. He is supremely blessed—his death is gain! Come now, what did he lose? I will show that in everything he lost, he gained far more. He lost his friends, did he? His wife and his children, his brothers and sisters in church fellowship are all left to weep his loss. Yes, he lost them but, my brothers and sisters what did he gain? He gained more friends than he ever lost! He had lost many in his lifetime but he meets them all again. Parents, brothers and sisters who had died in youth or age and passed the stream before him—all salute him on the further brink! There the mother meets her infant. There the father meets his children. There the venerable patriarch greets his family to the third and fourth generation! There brother clasps brother to his arms and husband meets with wife, no more to be married or given in marriage, but to live together like the angels of God! Some of us have more friends in heaven than on earth. We have more dear relations in glory than we have here. It is not so with all of us, but with some it is so—more have crossed the stream than are left behind. But if it is not so, yet what friends we have to meet us there! Oh, I reckon on the day of death it were much gain if it were for the mere hope of seeing the bright spirits that are now before the throne; to clasp the hand of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob; to look into the face of Paul the apostle, and grasp the hand of Peter; to sit in flowery fields with Moses and David; to bask in the sunlight of bliss with John and Magdalene. Oh how blessed!
The company of poor imperfect saints on earth is good, but how much better the society of the redeemed! Death is no loss to us by way of friends. We leave a few, a little band below and say to them, “Fear not little flock,” and we ascend and meet the armies of the living God, the hosts of His redeemed! “To die is gain.”
Poor corpse! You have lost your friends on earth—but no, bright spirit—you have received a hundred-fold in heaven!
What else did we say he lost? We said he lost all his estate, all his substance and his wealth. Yes, but he has gained infinitely more. Though he were rich as Croesus, yet he might well give up his wealth for that which he has attained. Were his fingers bright with pearls and have they lost their brilliance? The pearly gates of heaven glisten brighter by far! Had he gold in his storehouse? Mark you, the streets of heaven are paved with gold and he is richer by far! The mansions of the redeemed are far brighter dwelling places than the mansions of the richest here below. But it is not so with many of you. You are not rich, you are poor. What can you lose by death? You are poor here, you shall be rich there! Here you suffer toil, there you shall rest forever! Here you earn your bread by the sweat of your brow but there, no toil! Here wearily you cast yourself upon your bed at the week’s end and sigh for the Sabbath—but there, there are no groans to mingle with the songs that warble from immortal tongues! Death will be gain to you in point of riches and substance. And as for the means of divine grace which we leave behind—what are they when compared with what we shall have hereafter?
Oh, might I die at this hour, I think I would say something like this, “Farewell Sabbaths—I am going to the eternal Sabbath of the redeemed! Farewell minister; I shall need no candle, neither light of the sun, when the Lord God shall give me light, and be my life forever and ever! Farewell you songs and sonnets of the blessed; farewell—I shall not need your melodious burst—I shall hear the eternal and unceasing hallelujahs of the beatified! Farewell prayers of God’s people; my spirit shall hear forever the intercessions of my Lord, and join with the noble army of martyrs in crying, ‘O Lord, how long?’ Farewell O Zion! Farewell house of my love, home of my life! Farewell temples where God’s people sing and pray! Farewell tents of Jacob where they daily burn their offering—I am going to a better Zion than you, to a brighter Jerusalem, to a temple that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God!”
O my dear friends, in the thought of these things, do we not, some of us, wish we could die!—“Even now by faith we join our hands With those that went before, And greet the blood-besprinkled bands Upon the eternal shore! One army of the living God, At His command we bow— Part of the host have crossed the flood, And part are crossing now.”
We have not come to the margin yet, but we shall be there soon—we soon expect to die. And again, one more thought. We said that when men died they lost their knowledge; we correct ourselves. Oh, no, when the righteous die, they know infinitely more than they could have known on earth—“There shall I see and hear and know All I desired or wished below! And every power find sweet employ In that eternal world of joy!”
“Here we see through a glass darkly but there face to face.” There what “eye has not seen nor ear heard” shall be fully manifest to us! There riddles shall be unraveled, mysteries made plain, dark texts enlightened, hard providences made to appear wise. The least soul in heaven knows more of God than the greatest saint on earth! The greatest saint on earth may have it said of him, “Nevertheless, he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” Not our mightiest divines understand so much of theology as the lambs of the flock of glory! Not the greatest masterminds of earth understand the millionth part of the mighty meanings which have been discovered by souls emancipated from clay. Yes, brothers and sisters, “To die is gain.”
Take away, take away that hearse! Remove that shroud! Come, put white plumes upon the horse’s heads, and let gilded trappings hang around them! There, take away that fife, that shrill sounding music of the death march. Lend me the trumpet and the drum. O hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah! Why weep we the saints to heaven? Why do we need to lament? They are not dead, they are gone ahead! Stop, stop that mourning, refrain your tears, clap your hands, clap your hands!—
“They are supremely blessed, Have done with care and sin and woe— And with their Savior rest.”
What? Weep? Weep for heads that are crowned with garlands of heaven? Weep? Weep for hands that grasp the harps of gold? What? Weep for eyes that see the Redeemer? What? Weep for hearts that are washed from sin and are throbbing with eternal bliss! What? Weep for men who are in the Savior’s bosom? No! Weep for yourselves, that you are here. Weep that the mandate has not come which bids you to die! Weep that you must tarry, but weep not for them!
I see them turning back on you with loving wonder, and they exclaim, “Why do you weep?” What? Weep for poverty that it is clothed in riches? Weep for sickness, that it has inherited eternal health? What? Weep for shame, that it is glorified? And weep for sinful mortality, that it has become immaculate? Oh, weep not, but rejoice! “If you knew what it was that I have said unto you and where I have gone, you would rejoice with a joy that no man should take from you.” “To die is gain.” Ah, this makes the Christian long to die! It makes him say—
“Oh, that the word were given! O Lord of Hosts, the wave divide, And land us all in heaven!”
And now, friends, does this belong to you all? Can you claim an interest in it? Are you living to Christ? Does Christ live in you? For if not, your death will not be gain. Are you a believer in the Savior? Has your heart been renewed and your conscience washed in the blood of Jesus? If not, my Hearer, I do truly weep for you. I will save my tears for lost friends. There, with this handkerchief I’d staunch my eyes forever for my beloved who shall die, if those tears could save you. O, when you die, what a day! If the world were hung in sackcloth, it could not express the grief that you would feel. You die. O death! O death! How hideous are you to men who are not in Christ! And yet, my hearer, you shall soon die. Save me your bed of shrieks, your look of gall, your words of bitterness! Oh that you could be saved from the dread hereafter! Oh, the wrath to come! The wrath to come! The wrath to come! Who is he that can preach of it? Horrors strike the guilty soul! It quivers upon the verge of death—no, on the verge of hell! It looks over, clutching hard to life and it hears there the sullen groans, the hollow moans and shrieks of tortured ghosts which come up from the pit of hell that is bottomless and it clutches firmly to life, clasps the physician and bids him hold on lest he should fall into the pit that burns! And the spirit looks down and sees all the fiends of everlasting punishments and back it recoils. But die it must. It would barter all it has to gain an hour. But no, the fiend has got its grip and down it must plunge! And who can tell the hideous shriek of a lost soul? It cannot reach heaven. But if it could, it might well be imagined that it would suspend the melodies of angels—it might make even God’s redeemed weep if they could hear the wailings of a damned soul! Ah, you men and women, you have wept. But if you die unregenerate, there will be no weeping like that—there will be no shrieks like that—no wails like that! May God spare us from ever hearing it or uttering it ourselves! Oh, how the grim caverns of hades startle, and how the darkness of night is frightful when the wail of a lost soul comes up from the ascending flames—while it is descending in the pit. “Turn you, turn you. Why will you die, O house of Israel?” Christ is preached to you. “This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” Believe on Him and live, you guilty, vile, perishing! Believe and live! But know this, that if you reject my message, and despise my Master—in that day when He shall judge the world in righteousness by that man, Jesus Christ, I must be a swift witness against you! I have told you—at your soul’s peril reject it! Receive my message and you are saved. Reject it—take the responsibility on your own head. Behold, my garments are clear of your blood; if you are damned, it is not for lack of warning. Oh God grant you may not perish!
Charles Spurgeon