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All the titles of our Lord are names of power. They express His nature, perfection, or prerogatives; what they declare He is. They are shadows of a Divine substance. He who is Very Life raised Himself from the dead: "I am the Resurrection." On the first day of the week His glorious soul returned to His pure flesh, and His manhood, whole and perfect, through the power of His Godhead, arose of His own will. He came back the very same, and yet the same no more. The dishonour of His holy passion had passed away, but its tokens still were there. And as in body, so in soul. Death had no more dominion over Him, yet He was full of sympathy, learned by dying. All the depths of His human experience were in Him still. "He learned obedience by the things which he suffered;" and the ineffable mystery of His three and thirty years of sorrow rose with Him from the grave. Wherefore this Divine name, as it reveals the power of His own resurrection, so it is the pledge of ours. It is a pledge to us of many joys; but chiefly of three Divine gifts.

1. The first is a perfect newness of body and soul. This very body shall be deathless and glorious as the body of His glory when He arose from the dead. And so, too, of the soul. It shall be still more glorious, even as the spirit is above the flesh. The more we know of ourselves, the more incredible, if I may so speak of a very blessedness, this promise seems. To be without sin, what else is heaven? And can it ever be that we who brought sin with our life blood into the world — who have fallen and soiled ourselves through and through with wilful evil — that we shall be one day clean as the light, and white as the driven snow? Yet this is His pledge to us.

2. Another gift pledged to us is the perfect restoration of all His brethren in His kingdom (John 17:24; John 14:2, 3). We shall be "with Him." We shall behold Him as He is; He will behold us as we are: He in the perfect sameness of His person; we in ours. What, then, means this unbelieving Christian world, when it asks, Shall we then recognize each other? Will not they all know Him as He them, and all know each other as He knows each? The law of perfect recognition is inseparable from the law of perfect identity. Our individual consciousness must be eternal. We should not be what we are to ourselves, if we were not so to others. The kingdom of God in glory is the perfection of His kingdom in grace, in which every several soul here tried, chastened, and purified, shall be there blessed, crowned and sainted — the same in person, changed only to perfection. And more than this. The perfect restitution which shall be in the kingdom of the resurrection will bring back, not only perfect mutual recognition, but the restoration of all pure and consecrated bonds.

3. This title pledges to us an immortal kingdom. The Resurrection has given back to us an inheritance in the paradise of God, where there shall be a new heaven and a new earth, of which the first creation, even in its perfection, was only an imperfect shadow. In that true paradise there shall be no seasons nor vicissitudes, no sweat of the face nor hard toil for bread. An everlasting noontide shall be there; an endless spring in the newness of unfading joy, a perpetual autumn in the ripeness of its gifts. There shall be "the tree of life bearing twelve manner of fruits"; all joy and all delight for every capacity of man; reward for every toil, and health for every wound, after the manifold trial of every soul, in the Israel of God.

(Archdeacon Manning.)

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KJV: Then when Jesus came, he found that he had lain in the grave four days already.

WEB: So when Jesus came, he found that he had been in the tomb four days already.