Acts 2:22-36 You men of Israel, hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs… Dead, and yet not able to continue dead. A stone sepulchre, and yet not equal to the strain of the strange body that was entombed in it. "Not possible" that He should be holden of it. It is just that "not possible" that we are going to think about. The world has never made a great deal of the resurrection of Lazarus, or of the widow's son of Nain, or the ruler's daughter, or the Shunammite's son. There are two kinds of resurrection: there is a natural resurrection and there is an artificial resurrection. Something roused Lazarus. Elisha roused the Shunammite's son. Jesus has had His death-sleep out. Artifice versus: nature. It never could have been said of the ruler's daughter that God raised her up, loosing the pains of death because it was not possible that she should be holden of it. It was possible, most possible. In the rending of the Lord's sepulchre we are dealing with a distinct matter. It is an event on another plane. At any rate, people have never pinned their hope of immortality to Lazarus' resurrection, and they have to the Lord's. And something of the core of the case lies in this particular clause we are upon: "Because it was not possible that He should be holden of it." We gain from Christ's instance a sense Of resurrection power working from within outward; in other instances, the sense of resurrection power working from without inward. Here it is something indigenous. Here it is like the wheat-grain growing up out of the ground because there is intrinsic impulse making it grow up; resurrection inheres in its nature; it is not possible that it should be holden; rising is a part of its genius. The Lord's life was somehow in His own hands. His life was such a thing that limitations did not limit it; obstructions were no embarrassment to it; death was not fatal to it. Life under any circumstances, life of any kind is a wonderful thing, spiritual life, animal life, yea, even vegetable life. We cannot say much about it, only wonder at it. An acorn lying, for months, still, brown and insensible, with a slight change of environment, begins to become dimly conscious of itself; and waking up into a mighty tree that fills the air, greens and withers, and greens and withers while children grow old and generations pass away. It is a long way from the buried acorn cracking in the dark to the rending of the tomb of the Son of God in the morning twilight of the world's first Easter; and yet our thought to-day is upon the same feature in the two instances — the life element, vegetable in one, Divine in the other, but working out with an easy expanse, shattering confinement by the native tension of its own energy; with facile sufficiency disrupting its own confinement and crushing its own bonds. "It was not possible that He should be holden of it." It seems to me we can almost see the very steps of the transaction, Divine life in the grave unnerving the clasp of death and striving to fracture the meshes of fatality; and all of that, not by virtue of extrinsic reinforcement, but out of the abundance of its own easy sufficiency, the exuberance of its irresistible fulness of Divine life. Now all of that brings almost to our very senses the event of Divine resurrection which the great Church catholic on earth celebrates. But not only is there a great historic meaning in this resurrection emergence of Christ from the sepulchre, but it seems to me there is a picture in small of what Divine life on earth is everywhere and always doing. 1. That is the. grand meaning of history, slow resurrection of the Divine life float is buried in it, and that every day strains a little more the gritty sepulchre; not because you and I try to drive into the enshrouding rock the wedges of our holy endeavour, not because liberating power is borne in upon it from any outward source; but because of the strengthening tension and growing push of its own resistless life that is eternally destined to break loose from the confinement of death because it is not possible that it should be holden of it. All the sin that is in the world, and the apathy and the obstinacy, and the ignorance and the hopelessness, what is it but so much vast, cold granite tomb in which the immanent buried life of God is working itself forth day and night, century after century, as the dawn slowly reddens toward the perfect glory of the full day and the ushered kingdom for whose coming we reverently pray. Oh, in how many ways the Divine Spirit of all truth has been working through all the ages of the world and giving even pagan minds a presentiment and suspicion of the deep things of man and history of God! As geologists delight to lay bare the rocks and track the pathway upon them worn by the archaic forces of fire and flood, so it seems to me there is no grander effort of which human mind in the range of immaterial things is capable, than to trace the movements of human history, considering those movements always as being steadily marshalled by the generalship of God's ordering Spirit, and every advance toward freer living, truer thinking, sweeter acting, and holier worshipping as being one more blow with which the rising Lord of Life strikes the grim casing of His tomb, and shatters Himself a pathway out into the light and splendour of the world's final Easter. 2. Think again of this same confined Spirit of God, as struggling in quiet resurrection against the barriers of sin, ignorance, and prejudice that hinder the evangelisation of the world. Remembering how the claims of the gospel cut directly athwart the stalwart passions of every human heart, I cannot understand how any man, with a mind that is appreciative, and that has a grasp upon the history of the victories achieved by the Cross, can escape the conclusion of a God-Spirit striving in the midst of it all, and rending its way out like an entombed Jesus breaking forth into the light and liberty of full resurrection. There is no argument for the Divineness of Christianity like the steady, irresistible, onward march of Christianity. It is the same thing over again, a sepulchre entombing a waking Divine Lord, and it was not possible that He should be holden of it; antagonism compacted to granitic hardness; sin rolled as a stone against the door of the sepulchre and sealed with malignity and cruelty: cunning posted as a watch upon it. But the night is going by, it is a Divine presence that is straining at the grave clothes and struggling out from entombment, and every new tribe that has the gospel brought to it, every new island out in mid-ocean that is vocal to-day with Easter praises, every new dialect that this April spells out "resurrection" to the wondering eye of the untaught pagan, is one more blow with which the rising Lord of Life strikes the grim casing of His tomb and shatters Himself a pathway out into the light and splendour of the great world's Easter. 3. And then, again, an imprisoned Divine Lord is struggling to full resurrection within the entombing religion of the world. One of the unappreciated marvels of our very Bible is the way in which, from the beginning of it to the end, it marks the steady rise of that current of Divine truth which it channels. There is not a greater mistake made, nor a sadder one, than the habit of treating the Bible as a dead level of Divine revelation. Its first lessons are but the seed-corn out of which, through the successive seasons of four thousand years, the primary germ has been unfolding into to-day's blossomed and fruited Tree of Life. It was a Divine thing then; Divine in its inception as it is in its finish; just as the confined germ is as live a thing as the great air-filling elm after a growth of two hundred years. But away back there it was a Divine thing perpetually striving and struggling forth into unsepulchred life against the constraints and confinements that human small-mindedness and false-heartedness put upon it. Divine, but Divineness bandaged! Eternal Spirit, but Eternal Spirit in a vault. Four thousand years of resurrection in the domain of truth! The Word which in the beginning was with God and was God, breaking off year by year and century by century the coarse integuments of human stupidity and carnality with which, forsooth, even Divineness requires to come into the world encased. 4. The Lord, too, is sepulchred, and has always been most gloomily sepulchred, in the theology of His Church. To disparage theology is to forget the Divine Spirit of truth which the pettiness and faultiness of human conception encases; and to ignore or lightly to pass over the history of theologic thought for the past forty centuries is to be oblivious of the slow, steady process of resurrection through which the confined Spirit of God is straining and crushing, age by age, the tough integument by which He is so jealously guarded, the tomb of petrified opinion around which His lovers keep tearful vigil, and to which in the grey light of the early morning they gather with linen bandages and spices "as the manner of the Jews is to bury." Theological controversy thus, so far as it is the cracking away of archaeological deposit and dogmatic stratification is but the emergence of the God-Spirit into freer air and wider liberty, and therefore can no more be stamped out or whistled down by a dogmatic constabulary than you could stop the growth of a California pine by girdling its trunk with cotton yarn, or than the resurrection of the Son of God at Jerusalem could have been delayed by piling more granite upon the roof of the sepulchre or posting more Roman police at its door. 5. And then, just in a word, the irrepressible Lord of Life is immured and struggling inside the ethics of the world. There is nothing in the history of the human race more calculated to amaze us than its improvement in morals; especially when you remember that every step of such improvement is taken in the teeth of every man's native tendency and original passion. No man ever becomes better except as he has Divine power given him to trample on himself. And to deny that there has been moral improvement is to be ignorant of history or to give the lie to history. As I say, it is all of it a growth; and the hindered, entombed, struggling life of the Lord is the Divine sap that permeates that growth. History, from the beginning of it to the end of it, is all resurrection; the straining, tenser and tenser straining, of the immured life of God in the world. Here is our hope. We praise God for the irrepressible and irresistible life that is in His Son Jesus Christ. We celebrate the empty grave with songs of loud acclaim. But while in this we are memorially celebrating the past, we would also, O God, by the same act anticipate and celebrate that greater coming Eastertide, when every bandage that human pettiness and ignorance wind about our risen Lord shall be sundered, when the whole sepulchre of world-sin in which He is yet entombed shall be rent, and the Lord of Life move forth a free Lord over a free earth — a glorified Lord in the midst of a redeemed world. (C. H. Parkhurst, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Ye men of Israel, hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know: |
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