John R. Macduff

“ Jesus shall come again!
When a beloved brother or friend whom we love is taken from us by death, how cheered we are by the thought of rejoining him in a brighter and better world. Even in earthly separations, how cheering the prospect of those severed by oceans and continents meeting once more in the flesh—the associations of youth renewed and perpetuated—and the long-severed links of friendship welded and cemented again! What must be, to the bereft and lonely Christian, the thought of being restored, and that for ever, to his long-absent Saviour? ”

“ The Gospel takes us to the tomb, and shews us Death vanquished, and the Grave spoiled. Death truly is in itself an unwelcome messenger at our door. It is the dark event in this our earth,—the deepest of the many deep shadows of an otherwise fair creation—a cold, cheerless avalanche lying at the heart of humanity, freezing up the gushing fountains of joyous life. But the Gospel shines, and the cold iceberg melts. The Sun of Righteousness effects what philosophy, with all its boasted power, never could. Jesus is the abolisher of Death. ”

“ It is the very end and design our gracious God has in all His dealings, to lead us, as he led Mary, to the feet of Jesus.
Yes! thou poor weeping, disconsolate one, “The Master calleth for thee.” Thee individually, as if thou stoodest the alone sufferer in a vast world. He wishes to pour His oil and wine into thy wounded heart—to give thee some overwhelming proof and pledge of the love he bears thee in this thy sore trial. He has come to pour drops of comfort in the bitter cup—to ease thee of thy heavy burden, and to point thee to hopes full of immortality. ”

“ Even in this world perplexing paths may be made plain, and slippery places smooth, and judgments “bright as the noonday;” but if not here, there is at least a glorious day of disclosures at hand, when the reign of unbelieving doubt shall terminate for ever, when the archives of a chequered past will be ransacked of their every mystery;—all events mirrored and made plain in the light of eternity; and this saying of the weeping Saviour of Bethany obtain its true and everlasting fulfilment, “Said I not unto thee, if thou wouldst believe, thou shouldst see the glory of God?” ”

“ Ask them why they believe? why their faith is so firm—their love so strong?
They will tell you that that Saviour, in all the glories of His person, in all the completeness of His work, in all the beauties of His character, is the very Saviour they need!—that His Gospel is the very errand of mercy suited to their souls’ necessities;—that His words of compassion, and tenderness, and hope, are in every way adapted to meet the yearnings of their longing spirits. They need to stand by the grave of no Lazarus to be certified as to His Messiahship. ”

“ Would it be to gaze like Lazarus on the face of our best friend—to see Jesus bending over us in looks of tenderness—to hear the living tones of that same voice, whose accents were last heard in the dark valley, whispering hopes full of immortality? True, we have not to wait for a Saviour’s love and presence till then. The hour of death is to the Christian the birthday of endless life. Guardian angels are hovering around his dying pillow ready to waft his spirit into Abraham’s bosom. “The souls of believers do immediately pass into glory.” ”

“ In the hour of death they are waiting to lend their wings to the Immortal tenant as it bursts its earthly coil. Oh, if the return of the Repentant Sinner be to them an hour of joyous jubilee;—if their songs of triumph greet the Believer justified;—what must it be to exult over the gladsome consummation—the Believer glorified; to be engaged on the Great Day as Reapers at the ingathering of the sheaves into the heavenly garner—throwing open, at the bidding of their Great Lord, the Golden Portals that the ransomed millions may enter in! ”

“ Anticipating His own glorious rising, He might well speak to Martha, standing before Him as the representative of weeping, sinful, woe-worn humanity, “He that liveth and believeth on Me shall never die.” “In Me, death is no longer death; it is only a parenthesis in life—a transition to a loftier stage of being. In Me, the grave is the vestibule of heaven, the robing-room of immortality!” ”

“ There were endless diversities and phases, doubtless, of human character and history there. The once proud formalist, the once greedy extortioner, the hated tax-gatherer, the rich nobleman, the child of penury, the Roman officer, the peasant or fisherman of Galilee, the humbled publican, the woman from the city, the reclaimed victim of misery and guilt! All were there as types and samples of that diversified multitude who, in every age, were to own Him as King, and receive His gracious benediction.
We have spoken of this incident as a glimpse of glory before His sufferings. ”

“ Let us look to it with reference to the mightier moral miracle of the Resurrection of the soul “dead in trespasses and sins.” Jesus, and Jesus alone, can awake that soul from the deep slumber of its spiritual death, and invest it with the glories of a new resurrection-life. In vain can it awake of itself; no human skill can put animation into the moral skeleton. No power of human eloquence, no “excellency of man’s wisdom,” can open these rayless eyes, and pour life, and light, and hope into the dull caverns of the spiritual sepulchre. ”

“ His like the fixed stars, shining far above, clear and serene, from age to age, in their own changeless firmament.
Do we know anything of the words of this message? Could it be written on our hearts in life? Were we to die, could it be inscribed on our tombs, “This is one whom Jesus loved?”
Happy assurance! The pure spirits who bend before the throne know no happier. The archangels—the chieftains among principalities and powers, can claim no higher privilege, no loftier badge of glory!
Love is the atmosphere they breathe. It is the grand moral law of gravitation in the heavenly economy. ”

“ Let it be our privilege and delight to give Him our pound of spikenard, whatever that may be; and if we can give no other, let us offer the fragrant perfume of holy hearts and holy lives. That religion is always best which reveals itself by its effects—by kindness, gentleness, amiability, unselfishness, flowing from a principle of grateful love to Him who, though unseen, has been to us as to the family of Bethany—Friend, and Help, and Guide, and Portion. Mary’s honour was great to anoint her Lord, but the lowliest and humblest of His people may do the same. ”

“ Let not God’s restoring mercies be, as, alas! often they are to us, unsanctified;—receiving back our Lazarus from the brink of the tomb, but refusing, on the return of health and prosperity, to share in bearing our Lord’s cross—to “go forth with Him without the camp—bearing His reproach.” If He has delivered our souls from death, and our eyes from tears, be it ours to follow Him through good and through bad report. Not alone amid the hosannahs of His people, or amid the world’s bright sunshine, but, if need be, to confront suffering, and trial, and death for His sake. ”

“ True religion is quiet, unobtrusive, seeking the shade—its ever-befitting attitude at the feet of Jesus, looking to Him as all [Pg 171] in all. Yet, though retiring, it must and will manifest its living and influential power. The heart broken at the cross, like Mary’s broken box, begins from that hour to give forth the hallowed perfume of faith, and love, and obedience, and every kindred grace. Not a fitful and vacillating love and service, but ever emitting the fragrance of holiness, till the little world of home influence around us is filled with the odour of the ointment. ”

“ And you might as well try to convince the restored blind that the sunlight which has again burst on them is a wild dream of fancy, or the restored deaf that the world’s joyous melodies which have again awoke on them are the mockeries of their own brain, as convince the spiritually enlightened and awakened that He who has proved to them light and life, and joy and peace—their comfort in prosperity—their refuge in adversity—is other than the Son of God and Saviour of the world! ”

“ Is death to hold that prey? Is the grave to retain in gloomy custody that immaculate frame? Is the living temple to lie there an inglorious ruin, like other crumbling wrecks of mortality? The question of our eternal life or eternal death was suspended on the reply! If death succeeds in chaining down the illustrious Victim, our hopes of everlasting life are gone for ever. In vain can these dreary portals be ever again unbarred for the children of fallen humanity. He has gone there as their surety-Saviour. ”

“ He alone can bring back Lazarus from his death-sleep. Martha and Mary may weep an ocean of tears, but they cannot weep him back. They may linger for days and nights in that lonely graveyard, making it resound with their bitter dirges, but their impassioned entreaties will be mocked with impressive silence. Too well do they know that spirit is fled beyond their recall—the spark of life extinguished beyond any earthly rekindling! ”

“ We have the tender tones of a Man blended with the ineffable majesty of God. Hopes “full of immortality” [Pg 3] shine with their celestial rainbow-hues amid a shower of holy tears. The cancelling from our Bibles of the 11th chapter of St John would be like the blotting out of the brightest planet from the spiritual firmament. Each of its magnificent utterances has proved like a ministering-angel—a seraph-messenger bearing its live-coal of comfort to the broken, bleeding heart from the holiest altar which Sympathy (divine and human) ever upreared in a trial-world! ”

“ But He would not suffer you to linger in this state of worthless barrenness. Oh! better far, surely, these severest cuttings and incisions of the pruning knife, than to listen to the stern words—“Ephraim is joined to his idols, let him alone!” It is the most terrible of all judgments when God leaves a sinner undisturbed in his sinfulness—abandons him to “the fruit of his own ways, and to be filled with his own devices;” until, like a tree impervious to moistening dews and fructifying heat, he dwarfs and dwindles into the last hopeless stage of spiritual decay and death! ”

“ Life is too short—their Apostolic work too solemn and momentous, to suffer them to consume their hours in unavailing sorrow. We may imagine them taking their last look upwards to heaven, and then bending a tearful eye down upon Bethany—its hallowed remembrances all the more hallowed, that the vision is now about to pass away for ever! The Angels, too, have sped away, and the eleven pilgrims begin their solitary return back to the city and temple from which the true Glory had indeed departed! ”

“ Wondrous close to a wondrous life! We have traversed in thought many other memorials of Bethany. We have stood by the gate where Martha met her Lord—the silent sepulchre which listened to the voice of Omnipotence—the holy home where friendship was realised such as earth never before or since beheld. But surely not less sacred or hallowed than any of these is the scene presented on the green ridge rising to the west of the village, overlooking its groves of palm. ”

“ He pleads for His elect in every phase of their spiritual history—He pleads for their inbringing into His fold—He pleads for their perseverance in grace—He pleads for their deliverance at once from the accusations and the power of Satan—He pleads for their growing sanctification;—and when the battle of life is over, He uplifts His last pleading voice for their complete glorification. The intercession of Jesus is the golden key which unlocks the gates of Paradise to the departing soul. At a saint’s dying moments we are too often occupied with the lower earthly scene to think of the heavenly. ”

“ The visits of Jesus to Bethany were soon to be over;—so also with us. He will not always linger on our thresholds, if our souls refuse to receive Him, or yield Him nothing but coldness and ingratitude in return for His love. “Me ye have not always.” Soon may sickness incapacitate for active service! Soon may opportunities for doing good be gone, and gone for ever! Soon may death overtake us, and the alabaster box be left behind, unused and unemployed; the dying regret on our lips—“Oh that I had done more while I lived for this most precious Saviour! ”

“ Ah! to be without that love, is to be a little [Pg 49] world ungladdened by its central sun, wandering on in its devious pathway of darkness and gloom. Earthly things may do well enough when the world is all bright and shining—when prosperity sheds its bewitching gleam around you, and no symptoms of the cloudy and dark day are at hand; but the hour is coming (it may come soon, it must come at some time) when your Bethany-home will be clouded with deepening death-shadows—when, like Lazarus, you will be laid on a dying couch, and what will avail you then? ”

“ He, the Great Sun of the World—the Sun of Righteousness, was to set in a few brief days behind the walls of ungrateful Jerusalem in darkness and blood—His last rays seem now lingering over the crest of Olivet—His tears seem to tell that He has clung till He can cling no more to the fond hope that an impenitent nation and guilty city will yet turn at His reproof, believe and live. ”

“ And what was experienced in that lowly Bethany home, may be experienced by us.
That love in its wondrous manifestation is confined to no limits, no age, no peculiar circumstances. Many a Lazarus, pining in want, who can claim no heritage but poverty, no home but cottage walls, or who, stretched on a bed of protracted sickness, is heard saying in the morning, “Would God it were evening! and in the evening, Would God it were morning!” if he have that love reigning in his heart, he has a possession outweighing the wealth of worlds! ”