rose
that we might live, and is glorified that we, too, may share His
glory? Is that your Gospel? But do not be content with an
intellectual grasp of the thing. 'So ye believed' means a great deal
more than 'I believe that Christ died for our sins.' It means 'I
believe in the Christ who did die for my sins.' You must cast
yourself as a sinful man on Him; and, so casting, you will find that
it is no vain story which is commended to us by all these august
voices from the past, but you will have in your own experience the
verification of the fact that He died for our sins, in your own
consciousness of sins forgiven, and new love bestowed; and so may
turn round to Paul, the leader of the chorus, and to all the
apostolic band, and say to them, 'Now I believe, not because of thy
saying, but because I have seen Him, and myself heard Him.'

THE CERTAINTY AND JOY OF THE RESURRECTION

'But now is Christ risen from the dead ... the first
fruits of them that slept.'--1 COR. xv. 20.

The Apostle has been contemplating the long train of dismal
consequences which he sees would arise if we only had a dead Christ.
He thinks that he, the Apostle, would have nothing to preach, and we,
nothing to believe. He thinks that all hope of deliverance from sin
would fade away. He thinks that the one fact which gives assurance of
immortality having vanished, the dead who had nurtured the assurance
have perished. And he thinks that if things were so, then Christian
men, who had believed a false gospel, and nourished an empty faith,
and died clinging to a baseless hope, were far more to be pitied than
men who had had less splendid dreams and less utter illusions.

Then, with a swift revulsion of feeling, he turns away from that
dreary picture, and with a change of key, which the dullest ear can
appreciate, from the wailing minors of the preceding verses, he
breaks into this burst of triumph. 'Now'--things being as they are,
for it is the logical 'now,' and not the temporal one--things being
as they are, 'Christ is risen from the dead, and that as the first
fruits of them that slept.'

Part of the ceremonial of the Passover was the presentation in the
Temple of a barley sheaf, the first of the harvest, waved before the
Lord in dedication to Him, and in sign of thankful confidence that
all the fields would be reaped and their blessing gathered.
There may be some allusion to that ceremony, which coincided in time
with the Resurrect