Romans 6:5-7 For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection:… What is it to be dead? We all know what it is to turn away from the grave side, in which we have laid to its last rest the cold body of a friend. All is done and over now. Something has been in the world which will never be again. A story, a presence with its good and evil, with its joys and sorrows is wiped out. Everything is ended. The great silence closes over it, as the waters close over a sunken ship, and leaves no sign. It is all dead and over! We have said the last word; we have taken the last look. Now, let it go! Come away! Leave it to lie hidden! For you must go your way without it. That is death, and we are dead if we are in Christ. We have buried our old manhood. That old natural self of ours — the man in us that is born and lives its little day and dies — the self, as is by human laws, as a creature of this earth — that is with us no longer. It has had its day. It has done its business. We have wrapped it in its white shroud. We have carried it out to its burial; down in the dark grave we have laid it; it is buried, with Christ's burial. All that old past, so onerous, so tangled, so burdened, so sick — it is all gone and over, as completely as a life that is dead. Never, never can it be again, The blood of Christ's death lies between us and it; and it cannot touch us. Its sorrows, its sins, are remote and alien, as the voice of a torrent that we have crossed in the night, whose dull and smothered roar comes to our ears only in faint gusts of wind. The old is dead and buried. (H. S. Holland.) Parallel Verses KJV: For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection: |
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