If we accept with all our hearts and minds Paul’s Gospel in its fundamental facts, we need not fear to die, because He has died, and by dying has been the death of death.  We need not doubt that we shall live again, because He was dead and is alive for ever more.  This Samson has carried away the gates on His strong shoulders, and death is no more a dungeon but a passage.  If we rest ourselves upon Him, then we can take up, for ourselves and for all that are dear to us and have gone before us, the triumphant song, ’O Death, where is thy sting?’ ’Thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.’

REMAINING AND FALLING ASLEEP

   ’After that He was seen of above five hundred brethren
   at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this
   present, but some are fallen asleep.’—­1 COR. xv. 6.

There were, then, some five-and-twenty years after the Resurrection, several hundred disciples who were known amongst the churches as having been eyewitnesses of the risen Saviour.  The greater part survived; some, evidently a very few, had died.  The proportion of the living to the dead, after five-and-twenty years, is generally the opposite.  The greater part have ‘fallen asleep’; some, a comparatively few, remain ‘unto this present.’  Possibly there was some divine intervention which supernaturally prolonged the lives of these witnesses, in order that their testimony might be the more lasting.  But, be that as it may, they evidently were men of mark, and some kind of honour and observance surrounded them, as was very natural, and as appears from the fact that Paul here knows so accurately (and can appeal to His fellow-Christians’ accurate knowledge) the proportion between the survivors and the departed.  We read of one of them in the Acts of the Apostles at a later date than this, one Mnason, an ‘original disciple.’

So we get a glimpse into the conditions of life in the early Church, interesting and of value in an evidential point of view.  But my purpose at present is to draw your attention to the remarkable language in which the Apostle here speaks of the living and the dead amongst these witnesses.  In neither case does he use the simple, common words ‘living’ or ‘dead’; but in the one clause he speaks of their ‘remaining,’ and in the other of their ‘falling asleep’; both phrases being significant, and, as I take it, both being traced up to the fact of their having seen the risen Lord as the cause why their life could be described as a ‘remaining,’ and their death as a ‘falling asleep.’  In other words, we have here brought before us, by these two striking expressions, the transforming effect upon life and upon death of the faith in a risen Lord, whether grounded on sight or not.  And it is simply to these two points that I desire to turn now.

I. First, then, we have to consider what life may become to those who see the risen Christ.