Online Resource Library
Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadJames Nisbet Commentary - 2 Timothy 1:10 - 1:10
(Show All Books | Show All Chapters)
This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
‘Our Saviour Jesus Christ, Who hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel.’
2Ti_1:10
Shall we try to gather from His teaching one or two thoughts about that present state of the departed, which may perhaps be of some help to us in our prayer?
I. Our Lord teaches most clearly the continuous nature of our life and our character.—Those in the unseen world are the same persons as those who lived on earth. Their life is the same, and their character is what it was made here.
II. And from that there comes to us the thought of how much there may be to be done in those who have passed from this world into the Veil. For there is the work of the development of life, the training of character, still to go on.
III. And the Lord teaches us, in His Incarnate life, of the justice of God.—That is involved in all the teaching as to the continuity of life and character, of which we have already thought.
IV. And, with God’s justice, the Lord reveals His goodness.—The goodness of God! It is the great thought running all through the Gospel history—the goodness of God in that He sent His Son to redeem the world, the goodness of God in that He is patient, in that He makes His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, giving them all possibilities and opportunities; the goodness of God, in that He cares, with a fulness of love, for the creatures whom He has made.
—
Rev. Darwell Stone.
Illustration‘We learn from the Old Testament that the thoughts of men about the future before Christ came were thoughts that were very dark and very confused. Here and there, one time and another, some chosen soul, pondering on man’s ways and on God’s works, led by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit of God, attained to some clear hope, to some strong conviction, about the future life. But for the most part it is not so. For the most part there are words of uncertainty, words of gloom, words which speak of a half-existent state among the dead, of the dead being in that state where there is no remembrance of God, of the dead going down into silence, and of not praising God, cut off from God’s hand, the slain that lie in the grave. When St. Paul speaks of our Lord bringing life and immortality to light, the contrast is very strong between that which our Lord did and what there had hitherto been.’
‘THE LAST ENEMY’
I. Why did not Christ demonstrate the power of His grace by making the good to pass into another life without first dying?
(a) This is from no want of power. The Word of Christ raised the dead, much more could it have kept men from the grave. They who are alive at the coming of the Lord will not die, but will simply be changed: this is not beyond His power. In the future the Divine Power will constitute the human body indestructible; surely the same energy could do so in the present if it were so disposed.
(b) This is from no want of merit in the work of human redemption. The sacrifice of Christ is of infinite merit, hence it cannot be through defect in it that believers are not freed from death. And if the death of Christ released from eternal death, it was of sufficient value to save from temporal. In Him we have not to view death so much as a penalty, but as the way to God. Why, then, is temporal death not abolished, seeing that Christ lacks neither power nor merit?
II. Take two reasons.
(a) In order that the truth of God might be vindicated. When man first sinned, God said, ‘Thou shalt surely die,’ and the sentence was, ‘Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.’ ‘By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men.’ This refers to temporal death. Though in Adam all die, yet in Christ all shall be made alive again. It is not abolished.
(b) In order that it may remain as an example of the evil of sin. We should thus learn not to awaken the indignation of the Holy God by transgressing His commands. Death makes men deeply sensible of the bitterness of sin. If they were to pass out of life without it and its pain, they would be more liable to spend their lives in folly and vanity.
A FESTIVAL OF JOY
I. It is the pledge of their own immortality and resurrection.—Our faith does not rest on arguments, but on a fact, on a certain, undeniable, glorious fact—the resurrection of Christ. Christ is risen; and because we are in Him, and He in us, we too shall rise again, for He is the firstfruits of them that slept.
II. It is the pledge of the remission of our sins.—The resurrection of Christ is the Divine seal set on the mission of the Son by the Father. All the Son has done and taught for the salvation of the Church is solemnly confirmed by this act of power that recalls Him to life.
III. It is the means by which the sinner passes from the death of sin to the life of righteousness.—Since he owes all to Jesus, he loves Him with an absolute, all-absorbing love. He loves all Jesus loves, and hates all He hates. He is united to Him by a real and close connection, in virtue of which he considers himself bound to realise in his spiritual life every one of the facts of the Saviour’s life and passion. Christ died—the Christian daily dies to selfishness, pride, etc. Christ is risen—the Christian day by day awakens to new life—to the life of Christ, which consists in humility, love, consecration to God.
Illustration
‘We may admit that in the two most ancient civilisations, the Egyptian and the Babylonian, we meet with conceptions of an after-existence in the realm of the dead, and in the dread land, as it is termed, of No-Return; but they are conceptions in which all true personality is lost. Shadowy souls people the silent regions of darkness, and even if, as in the Egyptian teaching, some beatified souls enter for a while into regions of bliss, it is only a preparation for the absorption in the God of the universe, from Whom they had originally emanated. The conception of an eternal life in heaven, with God, is rightly declared by a recent writer on this difficult subject to hold no place either in the Egyptian or the Babylonian creed. All conceptions, such as that involved in the text, namely, of life in any real sense of the word, will be sought for in vain in these ancient forms of religions. The utmost that can be said of them, even in their latest development, is that of a continued existence gladdened by some renewals of what most gladdened earthly life, but undeveloped, shadowy, and powerless.’
‘Life and Incorruption.’
2Ti_1:10 (R.V.)
I. And yet men often think and speak as if our hope of immortality and of a true life after death could be maintained independently of the historical fact that Christ rose again from the dead, and took again the body which had hung upon the cross. There are indeed, I fear, indications that this inability to recognise the certain and vital truth that not only our own future—the future of the individual—but the future of this world in which we dwell—yea, verily, and of the whole universe—are bound up with the fact of the Lord’s resurrection—there are indications, I say, that the ability to realise this is increasing rather than diminishing.
II. But it is on real union with Christ that the life and in-corruption which He brought to light alone can be vouchsafed to us. Our life is then bound up with His life. As His body was laid in the tomb, so will ours be laid in the chambers of the grave. As He, in soul and spirit, vouchsafed to enter the waiting world of the departed, so shall we enter that mystic realm. As He rose with His own veritable body, so shall we rise with our own bodies as those bodies shall have become inwardly fashioned during our earthly pilgrimage, by our deeds in the body, and by the tenor of our whole life and conversation.
—
Bishop Ellicott.