Raised to Newness of Life
Courtesy of the National Message

The absolute mastership of death is a fact with which the human race is compelled to reckon. It cannot be disputed, neither may it be avoided. Yet death is not annihilation; there is a mysterious something that goes on, something that refuses to submit to its dictatorship but retains the possibility of an ultimate survival that will reverse the death sentence and again produce life. It is life rather than death that baffles the scientific quest as regards origins. Nature speaks to us of the triumph of life over death and of the refusal to accept extinction as the final verdict. How true it is that where death reigns, life throws off its usurpation and manifests itself in a thousand glorious forms every year as seasons change and bring with them the evidence that there is a resurrection.

As these lines are perused the world around us is coming to life after its winter sleep and affording the great parable of new life in other spheres. Yes, nature lives again; also men and women live again, and nations likewise where correspondence to environment is adjusted and maintained. Henry Drummond defined life as correspondence with environment, and death as the impairing of this correspondence. Paul tells us that those who attain to the world (age) to come are Children of the Resurrection. To be in correspondence with that age to come assures life from the dead whether it be the individual or the nation.

One may travel through the lovely peach orchards of a Southern State of America in the month of February, the time of the blossoming pageant of a hundred thousand peach trees robed in the glory and splendour of their pink and white bloom, the air laden with their rich perfume. But had one stood at the same spot in the dead of winter, two months earlier, how different it would have looked! The trees all in the same place, but no sign of life, neither bloom nor beauty. Dead, bare, leafless branches stretching up toward the dull winter sky. Could one bend over them and whisper to them, "Peach trees, as you stand there so dead and so dry and bloomless, what is your hope that you will some bright day be clad with splendour and glory of spring blossom time? "If those trees could but answer they would whisper back as with one voice, "The peach-life in us is our hope of glory!" Yes, a great mystery indeed, but "Christ in you the hope of glory " is its equivalent in the realm of human life. And so, with one nation in particular, a nation chosen for world service and destined to become the nucleus of a Kingdom set up by the God of Heaven, to remain when all the kingdoms of this world have had their day and passed from the pages of world history, there is the promise of resurrection and restoration.

“If a man die, shall he live again?" asked Job of old. “If a nation die, shall it live again?” asks the passing centuries. The answer is clear and sure when it is written, " Thus saith the Lord God ; Behold, O My people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel. And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves, O My people, and brought you up out of your graves, and shall put My spirit in you, and ye shall live."

Today, as we watch nature springing into life after its sleep of death, shall we remember that other victory taking shape in our very midst; renascent Israel breaking out into new life that she may pioneer the nations of the world into the coming Kingdom of God on earth, and pray that the glory of God may be seen upon her in increasing measure? "If the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?