hant passed the crystal ports of
light, and seized eternal youth!" Their view was not that Christ
effected all this by means of his own; but that the free grace of
God decreed it, and that Christ came to carry the plan into
execution. "God, for his great love to us, even when we were dead
in sins, has quickened us together with Christ." This was effected
as in dramatic show: Christ died, which was suffering the fate of
a sinner; he went in spirit to the subterranean abode of spirits,
which was bearing the penalty of sin; he rose again, which was
showing the penalty of sin removed by Divine forgiveness; he
ascended into heaven, which was revealing the way for our ascent
thrown open. Such is the general scope of thought in close and
vital connection with which the doctrine of the resurrection of
Christ stands. We shall spare enlarging on those parts of it which
have been sufficiently proved and illustrated in preceding
chapters, and confine our attention as much as may be to those
portions which have direct relations with the resurrection of
Christ. It is our object, then, to show what we think will plainly
appear in the light of the above general statement that, to the
New Testament writers, the resurrection, and not the death, of
Christ is the fact of central moment, is the assuring seal of our
forgiveness, reconciliation, and heavenly adoption.

6 Wood, The Last Things, pp. 31-44.

They saw two antithetical starting points in the history of
mankind: a career of ruin, beginning with condemned Adam in the
garden of Eden at the foot of the forbidden tree, dragging a
fleshly race down into Sheol; a career of remedy, beginning with
victorious Christ in the garden of Joseph at the mouth of the rent
sepulchre, guiding a spiritual race up into heaven.

The Savior himself is reported as saying, "I lay down my life that
I may take it again:" the dying was not for the sake of
substitutional suffering, but for the sake of a resurrection.
"Except a corn of wheat die, it abideth alone; but, if it die, it
bringeth forth much fruit." "A woman when she is in travail hath
sorrow; but as soon as she is delivered of the child she
remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into
the world." The context here shows the Savior's meaning to be that
the woe of his death would soon be lost in the weal of his
resurrection. The death was merely the necessary antecedent to the
significant resurrection. "Blessed be the God an