Henry Alford

“ It seems to me, my brethren, when we look at all these sources of blessed employment, though we are unable from our present weakness to follow them out into detail,—and when we think that perhaps after all in our earthly blindness we may be omitting some which shall there constitute the chief, it seems to me, I say, as if we should have to complain not of insufficient employ for the ages of eternity, but of an infinite and inexhaustible variety, for which even endless ages of limited being hardly seem to suffice. ”

“ Many a Christian’s spirit is set free from a body in perfect vigour and health. Let us take nothing but what is common to all who believe in and serve the Lord. Now what is our present state with reference to Him whom all Christians love? It is, absence. And it is absence aggravated in a way that earthly absence never is. For not only have we never seen Him, which is a case perfectly imaginable in earthly relations, but also, which hardly is, we have no absolute proof of His existence, nor of His mind towards us. Even as far as this, is matter of faith and not of appearance. ”

“ Though greater than our thoughts can now conceive, the bliss of which we are speaking to-day is incomplete. The spirit which has been set free from the body is alone, and without a body. This is not the complete state of man. ”

“ Let us conclude with a consideration, to a Christian the most glorious of all. The spirit that is with Christ in nearest presence and consciousness, knows Him as none know Him here. Here, we speak of His purity, His righteousness, His love, His triumph and glory, with miserably imperfect thoughts, and in words still more imperfect than our thoughts. We are obliged to employ earthly images to set forth heavenly things. The revelations of Scripture itself are made through a medium of man’s invention, and are bounded by our limited vocabulary. ”

“ How many energies, now tied and bound with the chain of sin, would spring upward into action! How many imprisoned yearnings would burst their bonds, and carry us onward to higher degrees of good! And all these energies, all these yearnings, can exist in the disembodied spirit. It is in a waiting, a hoping state: the greater the upward yearnings, the greater the accumulated energies for God and His work, the higher will be the measure of glory to be attained after the redemption of the body, and the completion of the entire man. ”

“ The resurrection is for him not a resurrection of judgment, not one in which the judgment is the leading feature and characteristic, but it is only and purely a resurrection of, and unto life: one in which life is the leading feature and idea.
Thus for the blessed dead, the judgment has no dark side: “there is no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.” But though it has no dark side, it has a bright one. Never for a moment do the Christian Scriptures lose sight of the Christian reward. Those who die in the Lord, like the rest of men, shall be laid open before the tribunal of Christ. ”

“ It is as if one bright light were lifted for us in the midst of a realm brooded over by impenetrable mist. For who knows whither the departed spirit has betaken itself when it has left us here? One of the most painful pangs in bereavement by death is the utter and absolute severance, without a spark of intelligence of the departed. One hour, life is blest by their presence ”

“ Now if what we have been saying be true,—and I have endeavoured not to go beyond the soberest inferences from the plain language of Scripture,—if so much be true, then the moment of departure from the body puts an end for ever to this imperfect, struggling, fitful state of faith and doubt. The spirit that is but a moment gone, that has left that well-known, familiar tabernacle of the body a sudden wreck of inanimate matter, that spirit is with the Lord. All doubt, all misgiving, is at an end. ”

“ So, then, these holy dead who have died in the Lord will in that judgment have each his reward allotted him according to his service and according to his measure. Then the good that has been done in secret will all come to light. All mere profession, all that has been artificial and put on, will drop off as though it had never been; and the real kernel of the character, the fair dealing and charity and love of the inner soul, will be made manifest before men and angels. ”

“ The bliss of the moment after death consisted in being with Christ: the bliss of unlimited ages can only be measured by the same. Nearness to Him that made us, union with Him who redeemed us, the everlasting and unvexed company of Him who sanctifieth us: what glory, what dignity, what happiness can be imagined for man greater than this? ”

“ And beyond all doubt such recognition and intercourse shall be, and shall constitute one of the most blessed accessories of the heavenly employment; but it can no more be that employment itself than similar intercourse on earth was the employment of life itself here. To read some descriptions of heaven, one would imagine that it were only an endless prolongation of some social meeting; walking and talking in some blessed country with those whom we love. It is clear that we have not thus provided the renewed energies and enlarged powers of perfected man with food for eternity. ”

“ If it be true that it is appointed unto all men once to die, but after that the judgment; if it be true that we all, including even the apostles themselves, shall be manifested, laid open, before the judgment-seat of Christ, how can it be also true that the believer in Christ has already passed from death into life, and therefore cometh not into judgment at all? How can it be true that while others shall rise to a resurrection of judgment, he shall rise to a resurrection of life? ”

“ What more may be reserved for us in the glorious perfect state which shall follow the resurrection, is another consideration altogether: but it clearly appears that the intermediate disembodied state is one of rest.
And let none cavil at the thought, that thus Adam may have rested his thousands of years, and the last taken of Adam’s children only a few moments. Time is only a relative term, even to us. A dream of years long may pass during the sound that awakens a man ”

“ I sometimes wonder whether ordinary Christian men and women ever figure to themselves what this means. I suppose we hardly do, because we fancy it is so far off from ourselves and our times, that we do not feel ourselves called upon to make it a subject of our practical thoughts. To this we might say, first, that we are by no means sure of this; and then, that even if it were true, the interest of that time of His coming for every one of us is hardly lessened by its not being near us, seeing that if we be His, it will be, whenever it comes, the day of our resurrection from the dead. ”

“ For let us think how much of employment for our present energies is occasioned by, and finds its very field of action in, the anxieties and vicissitudes of life. They are, so to speak, the winds which fill the sail and carry us onward. By their action, hope and enthusiasm are excited. But suppose a state where they are not, and life would become a dead calm ”

“ So that we may safely assume thus much, my brethren: that the moment a Christian’s spirit is released from the body, it does enter into the presence of our Blessed Lord and Saviour, in a way of which it knows nothing here: a way which, compared to all that its previous faith could know of Him, is like presence of friends compared to absence. ”

“ And when we remember that all blessings come by labour and the goodly heat of exercised energy, shall we deny to the highest of all states the choicest of all blessings? So that the attainment of, and advance in, the light and knowledge peculiar to that glorious land must be imagined as affording unending employment for the blessed hereafter. And this gives us another insight into the matter. As there is so great disparity among men here, so we may well believe will there be there. All Scripture goes to show that there will be no general equalizing, no flat level of mankind. ”

“ And in this excitement of the Thessalonians, fancying as they did that the Lord’s kingdom would come in their own time, they thought that their friends who through Jesus had died a happy death were losers by not having lived to witness the Lord’s coming. Indeed, they sorrowed for them as those that had no hope: by which expression it seems likely that they even supposed them to be altogether cut off from the benefits and blessedness of that coming by not having been able to see it in the flesh. ”

“ What do we know of this body? Very glorious thoughts rise up in our minds when we think of it: but in this course of sermons I am not speculating; I am inquiring soberly what is revealed to us about the blessed dead. Well then, again, what do we know of this body of the resurrection? In Phil. iii. 21, there is a revelation on this point. It is there said that “our home is in heaven, from whence also we expect the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: who shall change the body of our degradation that it may be fashioned like unto the body of His glory.” ”

“ And much and successfully as we may contend with these misgivings of unbelief, yet that frame of mind which is represented by them, that wavering, fitful, unsteady faith, ever accompanies us. The distress arising from it is known to every one who has the Christian life in him. Only those never doubt who have never believed: for doubt is of the very essence of belief. ”

“ With a body, then, of this kind will the blessed be clothed upon at the resurrection, and remain invested for ever in glory. Now let us see what further flows from this as an inference. We may further say, that we have implied in it a surrounding of external circumstances fitted to such a state of incorruptibility and glory. Man redeemed and glorified will not be a mere spirit in the vast realms of space, but a glorious body moving in a glorious world. Nor is this mere inference, however plain and legitimate. Holy Scripture is full of it. ”

“ It leads ever on to a greater blessing, the blessing of rest. Christ has entered into His rest; and the departed spirit shall be with Christ: faring as He fares, and a partaker of His condition. Any who have lived the ordinary term of human life in God’s service (for it is only of such that we are now speaking) can testify how sweet it is to anticipate a cessation of the toil and the harassing of life: to be looking on to keep the great Sabbath of the rest reserved for the people of God. ”

“ It is perfectly true, that the state of the departed is described to us as “sleeping in Jesus,” or rather, for the words are a misrendering, a having fallen asleep through, or by means of Jesus. But our texts are enough to show us, that we must not take such an expression for more than it really implies. Sleeping, or falling asleep, was a name current among Jews and Christians, and even among the best of the heathens, for death, implying its peace and rest, implying also that it should be followed by a waking: but apparently with no intent to convey any idea of unconsciousness. ”

“ It is evidently the duty of every Christian man to make it part of his ordinary thoughts and anticipations—that return of the Lord Jesus from heaven, even as He was seen to go up into heaven. Now, our object to-day is to ascertain how much we know from Scripture, without indulging in speculations of our own, about this coming, and this resurrection which shall accompany it. ”

“ Listen, again, to the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, that apostolic man, eloquent and mighty in the Scriptures, and hear him describing the very qualities and attributes of faith, that he who cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him, and saying of one of the first and brightest examples of faith, that he had respect unto the recompence of reward. ”

“ He was seen alive in His resurrection body; He was seen taking up that body from earth to heaven. And now we are waiting for the next great event, His coming. Wisely has the Church set apart a season in every year in which this subject may be uppermost in our thoughts. For there is nothing we are so apt—nothing, we may say, that our whole race is so determined to forget and put out of sight. It is alien from our common ideas, it ill suits our settled notions, that the personal appearing of Him in whom we believe should break in upon the natural sequence of things in which we are concerned. ”

“ Therefore, beloved, let us be of good cheer concerning them that have fallen asleep through Jesus: and let us be of good cheer respecting ourselves. Good as it is to obey and serve God here, it has been far better for them to depart and to be with Christ; and it will be far better for us, if we hold fast our faith and our confidence in Him firm unto the end. If to us to live is Christ, then to us to die will be gain. ”

“ When we are to leave this present state, is a matter hidden from our eyes, and not dependent on ourselves: but how we will leave it, whether as the Lord’s blessed ones, or with no part in Him, this is left for ourselves to determine. ”

“ How such an estimate of all holy men will be or can be made and published, utterly surpasses our present powers to imagine. We have no faculties now whereby to deal thus truly and fairly with all men: our organs of sense in this present state, and the minds themselves to which those organs convey impressions, are too feeble and limited for the effort required to apprehend all respecting all, as we shall then apprehend it. ”