.
Those who saw Him risen join to declare: 'Now is Christ risen from
the dead,' but it is a higher Voice that goes on to say, 'and become
the first-fruits of them that slept.'

That one Man risen from the grave was like the solitary sheaf of
paschal first-fruits, prophesying of many more, a gathered harvest
that will fill the great Husbandman's barns. The Resurrection of
Jesus is not only a prophecy, showing, as it and it alone does, that
death is not the end of man, but that life persists through death and
emerges from it, like a buried river coming again flashing into the
light of day, but it is the source or cause of the Christian's
resurrection. The oneness of the race necessitated the diffusion
through all its members of sin and of its consequence--physical
death. If the fountain is poisoned, all the stream will be tainted.
If men are to be redeemed from the power of the grave, there must be
a new personal centre of life; and union with Him, which can only be
effected by faith, is the condition of receiving life from Him, which
gradually conquers the death of sin now, and will triumph over bodily
death in the final resurrection. It is the resurrection of Christians
that Paul is dealing with. Others are to be raised, but on a
different principle, and to sadly different issues. Since Christ's
Resurrection assures us of the future waking, it changes death into
'sleep,' and that sleep does not mean unconsciousness any more than
natural sleep does, but only rest from toil, and cessation of
intercourse with the external world.

In the part of the passage, verses 50 to 58, the Apostle becomes, not
the witness or the reasoner, as in the earlier parts of the chapter,
but the revealer of a 'mystery.' That word, so tragically
misunderstood, has here its uniform scriptural sense of truth,
otherwise unknown, made known by revelation. But before he unveils
the mystery, Paul states with the utmost force a difficulty which
might seem to crush all hope,--namely, that corporeity, as we know
it, is clearly incapable of living in such a world as that future one
must be. To use modern terms, organism and environment must be
adapted to each other. A fish must have the water, the creatures that
flourish at the poles would not survive at the equator. A man with
his gross earthly body, so thoroughly adapted to his earthly abode,
would be all out of harmony with his surroundings in that higher
world, and its rarified air would be too thi