appears but a second. What do we know of time, except as calculated by earthly objects? Day and night, the recurrence of meals,—these constitute time to us: shut up a man in darkness, and administer his food at irregular intervals, and he loses all count of time whatever. Surely, then, no cavil on this score can be admitted. In that presence where the departed spirits are, one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

Let us conclude with a consideration, to a Christian the most glorious of all. The spirit that is with Christ in nearest presence and consciousness, knows Him as none know Him here. Here, we speak of His purity, His righteousness, His love, His triumph and glory, with miserably imperfect thoughts, and in words still more imperfect than our thoughts. We are obliged to employ earthly images to set forth heavenly things. The revelations of Scripture itself are made through a medium of man’s invention, and are bounded by our limited vocabulary. But then it will be so no longer. The Apostle compares our seeing here to that of one who beholds the face of his friend in a mirror of metal, sure to be tarnished and distorting: and our vision there to beholding the same face to face,—the living features, the lips that move, the eyes that glisten. That spirit which has but now passed away, knows the love that passes our knowledge; contemplates things which God has prepared for them that love Him, such as eye has never seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive.

Therefore, beloved, let us be of good cheer concerning them that have fallen asleep through Jesus: and let us be of good cheer respecting ourselves. Good as it is to obey and serve God here, it has been far better for them to depart and to be with Christ; and it will be far better for us, if we hold fast our faith and our confidence in Him firm unto the end. If to us to live is Christ, then to us to die will be gain.

II.

We stand to-day at this point in our consideration of the state of the blessed dead. They depart, and are with Christ. “This day,” the day of the departure, they are consciously, blissfully, in His presence. Their faith is turned into sight: their misgivings are changed for certainty: their mourning for joy. Yet, we said, their state is necessarily imperfect. The complete condition of man is body, soul, and spirit. The former of these three, at all events, is wanting to the spirits and souls of the righteous. They are in a waiting, though in an inconceivably blissful state. Of the precise nature of that state,—of its employments, if employments it has, we know nothing. All would be speculation, if we were to speak of these matters.

Our concern to-day is with the termination of that their incomplete condition. When shall it come to an end? We have this very definitely answered for us by St. Paul, in a chapter of which we shall have much to say, and in a verse of that chapter which we will take for our text, 1 Cor. xv. 23. Notice, he is speaking of the resurrection of the dead: and he says, “But every one in his own order: Christ the first-fruits: afterward they that are Christ’s at His coming.”

Well then: from these words it is clear that the end of the expectant state of the blessed dead, and the reunion of their spirits with their risen bodies, will take place at the coming of Christ. Here at once we are met by a necessity to clear and explain that which these words import. In these days, it is by no means superfluous to say that we Christians do look forward to a real personal coming of our Lord Jesus Christ upon this our earth. I sometimes wonder whether ordinary Christian men and women ever figure to themselves what this means. I suppose we hardly do, because we fancy it is so far off from ourselves and our times, that we do not feel ourselves called upon to make it a subject of our practical thoughts. To this we might say, first, that we are by no means sure of this; and then, that even if it were true, the interest of that time of His coming for every one of us is hardly lessened by its not being near us, seeing that if we be His, it will be, whenever it comes, the day of our resurrection from the dead. It is evidently the duty of every Christian man to make it part of his ordinary thoughts and anticipations—that return of the Lord Jesus from heaven, even as He was seen to go up into heaven. Now, our object to-day is to ascertain how much we know from Scripture, without indulging in speculations of our own, about this coming, and this resurrection which shall accompany it. The latter of these two we made the subject of a sermon a very few Sundays ago; but it was not so much with our present view, as to lay down the hope of the resurrection as an element among the foundations of the Christian life.

Now one of the first and most important revelations respecting this matter is found in the fourth chapter of 1 Thess., ver. 13-18. These Thessalonians had been, as we learn from the two epistles to them, strangely excited about the coming of the Lord’s kingdom. Perhaps the Apostle’s preaching among them had taken especially this form; for he was accused before the magistrates of saying that there was besides or superior to Caesar another king, one Jesus. And in this excitement of the Thessalonians, fancying as they did that the Lord’s kingdom would come in their own time, they thought that their friends who through Jesus had died a happy death were losers by not having lived to witness the Lord’s coming. Indeed, they sorrowed for them as those that had no hope: by which expression it seems likely that they even supposed them to be altogether cut off from the benefits and blessedness of that coming by not having been able to see it in the flesh. Thereupon St. Paul puts them right by saying,—using the same argument as in that great resurrection chapter, 1 Cor. xv.,—that “if we believe that Jesus Himself died and rose again, even so also those who through Jesus have fallen asleep will God bring with Him,” that is, will God bring back to us when He brings back to us Jesus.

You may just observe, by the way, that the whole force of what the Apostle says is very commonly lost, by a wrong method of reading these words. We very commonly hear them read, “will God bring with him.” But thus we, as I said, lose the force of the argument, which is:—If Jesus, our first-fruits, our representative, died and rose again, so will all who die in union with Jesus rise again. And in order to that, the same power of God which brings Jesus back to us, will with Him, with Jesus, bring their spirits back, in order to that resurrection.

Well, what then? “This we say unto you by the word of the Lord”—thus the Apostle introduces, not an argument, not a command or saying of his own, but a special revelation—“that we, which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord” (for notice that at first, at the early time when these Thessalonian epistles were written, first of all St. Paul’s letters, the Apostle looked forward to that day of which neither man nor angel knoweth, as about to come on in his own time) shall have no advantage, no priority, over them which have fallen asleep. And why? For this reason—that “the Lord Himself shall come down from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first:” that is, shall rise before anything else happens—any changing, or summoning to the Lord, of us who are alive.

Now here let us pause in the sacred text, and consider what it is which we have before us. Mind, we are speaking to-day, as the Apostle is speaking in this passage, entirely of the blessed dead; of those of whom it may be said that through Jesus their death is but a holy sleep. We have