The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle to the Ephesians. Findlay George Gillanders

God raised the Christ from the dead.

      This assertion is the corner-stone of St Paul’s life and doctrine, and of the existence of Christendom. Did the event really take place? There were Christians at Corinth who affirmed, “There is no resurrection of the dead.” And there are followers of Jesus now who with deep sadness confess, like the author of Obermann once more:

      “Now He is dead! Far hence He lies

      In the lorn Syrian town;

      And on His grave, with shining eyes,

      The Syrian stars look down.”

      If we are driven to this surrender, compelled to think that it was an apparition, a creation of their own passionate longing and heated fancy that the disciples saw and conversed with during those forty days, an apparition sprung from his fevered remorse that arrested Saul on the Damascus road – if we no longer believe in Jesus and the resurrection, it is in vain that we still call ourselves Christians. The foundation of the Christian creed is struck away from under our feet. Its spell is broken; its energy is gone.

      Individual men may and do continue to believe in Christ, with no faith in the supernatural, men who are sceptics in regard to His resurrection and miracles. They believe in Himself, they say, not in His legendary wonders; in His character and teaching, in His beneficent influence – in the spiritual Christ, whom no physical marvel can exalt above His intrinsic greatness. And such trust in Him, where it is sincere, He accepts for all that it is worth, from the believer’s heart. But this is not the faith that saved Paul, and built the Church. It is not the faith which will save the world. It is the faith of compromise and transition, the faith of those whose conscience and heart cling to Christ while their reason gives its verdict against Him. Such belief may hold good for the individuals who profess it; but it must die with them. No skill of reasoning or grace of sentiment will for long conceal its inconsistency. The plain, blunt sense of mankind will decide again, as it has done already, that Jesus Christ was either a blasphemer, or He was the Son of the eternal God; either He rose from the dead in very truth, or His religion is a fable. Christianity is not bound up with the infallibility of the Church, whether in Pope or Councils, nor with the inerrancy of the letter of Scripture: it stands or falls with the reality of the facts of the gospel, with the risen life of Christ and His presence in the Spirit amongst men.

      The fact of Christ’s resurrection is one upon which modern science has nothing new to say. The law of death is not a recent discovery. Men were as well aware of its universality in the first century as they are in the nineteenth, and as little disposed as we are ourselves to believe in the return of the dead to bodily life. The stark reality of death makes us all sceptics. Nothing is clearer from the narratives than the utter surprise of the friends of Jesus at His reappearance, and their complete unpreparedness for the event. They were not eager, but “slow of heart to believe.” Their very love to the Master, as in the case of Thomas, made them fearful of self-deception. It is a shallow and an unjust criticism that dismisses the disciples as interested witnesses and predisposed to faith in the resurrection of their dead Master. Should we be thus credulous in the case of our best-beloved dead? The instinctive feeling that meets any thought of the kind, after the fact of death is once certain, is rather that of deprecation and aversion, such as Martha expressed when Jesus went to call her brother from his grave. In all the long record of human imposture and illusion, no resurrection story has ever found general credence outside of the Biblical revelation. No system of faith except our own has ever been built on the allegation that a dead man rose from the grave.

      Christ’s was not the only resurrection; but it is the only final resurrection. Lazarus of Bethany left his tomb at the word of Jesus, a living man; but he was still a mortal man, doomed to see corruption. He returned from the grave on this side, as he had entered it, “bound hand and foot with grave-clothes.” Not so with the Christ. He passed through the region of death and issued on the immortal side, escaped from the bondage of corruption. Therefore He is called the “firstfruits” and “the firstborn out of the dead.”69 Hence the alteration manifest in the risen form of Jesus. He was “changed,” as St Paul conceives those will be who await on earth their Lord’s return (1 Cor. xv. 51). The mortal in Him was swallowed up of life. The corpse that was laid in Joseph’s tomb was there no longer. From it another body has issued, recognized for the same person by look and voice and movement, but indescribably transfigured. Visible and tangible as the body of the Risen One was – “Handle me, and see,” He said – it was superior to material limitations; it belonged to a state whose laws transcend the range of our experience, in which the body is the pliant instrument of the animating spirit. From the Person of the risen Saviour the apostle formed his conception of the “spiritual body,” the “house from heaven” with which, as he teaches, each of the saints will be clothed – the wasted form that we lay down in the grave being transformed into the semblance of His “body of glory, according to the mighty working whereby He is able to subdue all things to Himself” (Phil. iii. 20, 21).

      The resurrection of the Christ inaugurated a new order of things. It was like the appearance of the first living organism amidst dead matter, or of the first rational consciousness in the unconscious world. He “is,” says the apostle, the “beginning, first-begotten out of the dead” (Col. i. 18). With the harvest filling our granaries, we cease to wonder at the firstfruits; and in the new heavens and earth Christ’s resurrection will seem an entirely natural thing. Immortality will then be the normal condition of human existence.

      That resurrection, nevertheless, did homage to the fundamental law of science and of reason, that every occurrence, ordinary or extraordinary, shall have an adequate cause. The event was not more singular and unique than the nature of Him to whom it befell. Looking back over the Divine life and deeds of Jesus, St Peter said: “It was not possible that He should be holden of death.” How unfitting and repugnant to thought, that the common death of all men should come upon Jesus Christ! There was that in His Person, in its absolute purity and godlikeness, which repelled the touch of corruption. He was “marked out,” writes our apostle, “as Son of God, according to His spirit of holiness, by His resurrection from the dead” (Rom. i. 4). These two signs of Godhead agree in Jesus; and the second is no more superhuman than the first. For Him the supernatural was natural. There was a mighty working of the being of God latent in Him, which transcended and subdued to itself the laws of our physical frame, even more completely than they do the laws and conditions of the lower realms of nature.

      II. The power which raised Jesus our Lord from the dead could not leave Him in the world of sin and death. Lifting Him from hades to earth, by another step it exalted the risen Saviour above the clouds, and seated Him at God’s right hand in the heavens.

      The forty days were a halt by the way, a condescending pause in the operation of the almighty power that raised Him. “I ascend,” He said to the first that saw Him, – “I ascend to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” He must see His own in the world again; He must “show Himself alive after His passion by infallible proofs,” that their hearts may be comforted and knit together in the assurance of faith, that they may be prepared to receive His Spirit and to bear their witness to the world. Then He will ascend up where He was before, returning to the Father’s bosom. It was impossible that a spiritual body should tarry in a mortal dwelling; impossible that the familiar relations of discipleship should be resumed. No new follower can now ask of Him, “Rabbi, where dwellest Thou,” under what roof amid the homes of men? For He dwells with those that love Him always and everywhere, like the Father (John xiv. 23). From this time Christ will not be known after the flesh, but as the “Lord of the Spirit” (2 Cor. iii. 18).

      “In the heavenlies” now abides the Risen One. This expression, so frequent in the epistle as to be characteristic of it,70 denotes not locality so much as condition and sphere. It speaks of the bright and deathless world of God and the angels, of which the sky has always been to men the symbol. Thither Christ ascended in the eyes of His apostles on the fortieth day from His rising. Once before His death its brightness for a moment had irradiated His form upon the Mount of Transfiguration. Clad in the like celestial splendour He showed Himself to His future apostle Paul, as

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Πρωτότοκος ἐκ τῶν νεκρῶν, Col. i. 18: comp. Rom. vi. 13, x. 7, for the force of the preposition. Hence the peculiar ἐξανάστασιν τὴν ἐκ νεκρῶν of Phil. iii. 10, 11, – the out-and-out resurrection, which will utterly remove us from the sphere of death.

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Ver. 3, ch. ii. 6, iii. 10, vi. 12; nowhere else in the New Testament. Comp., however, 1 Cor. xv. 40, 48; Phil. ii. 10; Heb. viii. 5, ix. 23, xi. 16, xii. 22, where the adjective has the same kind of use.