61 - Revelation 1:18

’I am he that liveth, and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.’ -Revelation 1:18.

Half a century had gone by since the previous Amen; and that half century had been as a thousand years with respect to the vastness of the chapter which had been introduced into the moral history of the world. The Amens of the Son of God had vindicated their divine power by doing greater works than he himself had done in the time of his personal ministry; by casting down the strongholds of Phariseeism and Sadduceeism, and setting up the kingdom of God among those who had crucified the Lord of glory; had given a shock that was felt to be fatal to the great Gentile systems in Greece, Rome, Egypt, and elsewhere, and had gathered men of all creeds and philosophies and nations and grades into a thousand churches distributed over the face of the known world; and had visited the Jewish nation with that terrible chastisement, the predictions of which were inserted in the very constitution upon which the nation was built, and which had become sealed to them when they cried out, ’Upon us and upon our children be the blood of this Jesus.’

One of those Amens, spoken while Jesus was still nothing more than the despised and rejected man of Nazareth, and while the hearts of the disciples were of such poor stuff as they proved to be when their Lord was arrested, had undertaken that the Gospel should be preached in all the world. Well, it had been fulfilled; but how much, that nothing human could overcome, had to be overcome before this Amen could be fulfilled! No Macedonian phalanxes or Roman legions, no Alexander or Caesar, could have accomplished what these disciples of the Amen, the faithful and true Witness, had accomplished. But the Amen that had upheld and strengthened them, and given them these sublime victories, had, in the case of most of them, given way to the Amen that was commissioned to bring them to the presence of their King of glory, to the mansions which he had prepared for them. Peter and Paul, and James and other apostles, had gone to take their place among the multitude out of all nations standing before the throne. John was in the isle of Patmos, awaiting the time when he should glorify the Lord in his death.

"I am he that liveth." In him is life; life in the highest sense; the life of the life-giving God. The assaults made upon this life by the world which it came to bless, only showed the more signally its unconquerableness. The prince of this world hoped to extinguish it by the force of temptation. Men imagined that they had strangled it for ever upon the cross. The life that was in Christ could not die, as God could not die; when men imagined him dying he said to the believing thief, This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise. There was indeed a mortality in him, and without this his life would not have become life-giving to us: "This is my body, which is broken for you;" but there was infinitely more than the mortality, even the life of God; and unless there had been this to give dignity to the death, this last would not have been redemptorial. ’I am he before whose cross you stood, with certain women and other disciples, and upon whose sorrows and disgraces you gazed with agony, remembering all the days in which I had been your companion and your leader, and all the hopes with which my words and deeds had inspired you, and lost in wonder at this strange and cruel dissipation of them; and I am he who arose from the dead, and appeared unto you, and left you not until you had learned to know me as ever present with you. I have brought back from the realms of death the very keys of death and of Hades. It was a small thing to visit them and return unscathed; it behoved your Christ to go there as a conqueror, and not to return without the tokens of victory. The empire of the dead yielded up to me its keys. When I gave you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, I assured you that the gates of Hades should not prevail against it. I have the keys of those gates. The prince of this world has filled his servants with wrath against my servants, and commissioned them to put them to death, and Hades has opened wide her mouth to receive them; but while I have the keys of death and of Hades, Hades is only Hades, and death is not death; for when the Crucified One shall appear in glory to the world, and celebrate his triumph over the grave, then shall his faithful martyrs be seen with him in glory. ’0 death, where is thy sting? 0 grave (Hades), where is thy victory?’ The word Hades simply means ’the unseen world,’ and is used as comprehensively as our expression ’the other world,’ and does not necessarily refer to a place of torment. When a man dies, his body returns to the dust; his spirit goes into the invisible world, and is not, so far as this world is concerned; at the resurrection, the spirit and the changed body return, and the man is come again relatively to this world. The intermediate state is therefore expressed by these two words, Death and Hades; and when the time comes for the intermediate state to cease to be, the representation is (Revelation 20:14) that Death and Hades are cast into the lake of fire. To have the keys of death and hell is to have power over all that have passed away from the earth. "Thou hast given thy Son power over all flesh," says Christ in his address to the Father, John 17:1-26. His power is not merely over those now alive, but over the departed. They that are in their graves shall hear the voice of the Son of God, as Lazarus did, and shall come forth. We have therefore to do with One to whom all the past is present; on whose bidding wait all the generations of other days. The keys that hang at his girdle declare emphatically to us that our loved ones who are no longer with us are with him, and walk with him in white. As they slip from our loving grasp, the door of the unseen world is opened to them by him who has the keys thereof, and they find themselves in the ivory palaces, the mansions of delight prepared by Christ for all who love him.