n His life the all-sufficing
pattern of duty. We have in His companionship the all-strengthening
consolation. Let us leave the direction of our road in His hands, who
never says 'Go!' but always 'Come!' This General marches in the midst of
His battalions and sets His soldiers on no enterprises or forlorn hopes
which He has not Himself dared and overcome.

So Christ goes as our Companion before us, the true pillar of fire and
cloud in which the present Deity abode, and He is with us in real
companionship. Our joyful march through the wilderness is directed,
patterned, protected, companioned by Him, and when He 'putteth forth His
own sheep,' blessed be His name, 'He goeth before them.'

IV. And now, lastly, there is a final application of this figure which
sets forth our Lord as the Breaker for us of the bands of death, and the
Forerunner 'entered for us into the heavens.'

Christ's resurrection is the only solid proof of a future life. Christ's
present resurrection life is the power by partaking in which, 'though we
were dead, yet shall we live.'

He has trodden that path, too, before us. He has entered into the great
prison-house into which the generations of men have been hounded and
hurried; and where they lie in their graves, as in their narrow cells.
He has entered there; with one blow He has struck the gates from their
hinges, and has passed out, and no soul can any longer be shut in as for
ever into that ruined and opened prison. Like Samson, He has taken the
gates which from of old barred its entrance, and borne them on His
strong shoulders to the city on the hill, and now Death's darts are
blunted, his fetters are broken, and his gaol has its doors wide open,
and there is nothing for him to do now but to fall upon his sword and to
kill himself, for his prisoners are free. 'Oh, death! I will be thy
plague; oh, grave! I will be thy destruction.' 'The Breaker has gone
up before us'; therefore it is not possible that we should be holden of
the impotent chains that He has broken.

The Forerunner is for us entered and passed through the heavens, and
entered into the holiest of all. We are too closely knit to Him, if we
love Him and trust Him, to make it possible that we shall be where He is
not, or that He shall be where we are not. Where He has gone we shall
go. In heaven, blessed be His name! He will still be the leader of our
progress and the captain at the head of our march. For He crowns all His
other work b