18 Sermon Illustrations on Resurrection Hope

As a cripple would rejoice to hear that his limbs should be restored perfect, or the beggar that he should be clad in silk and gold; so much more ought Christians to rejoice to hear of the restoration of the integrity and innocency of the body in the resurrection. Cawdray.

As, when different seeds are cast into the ground together, each produces its proper herb; so the bodies of men, though mingled in the dust, shall each receive its own flesh in the resurrection.

— Cawdray

Both philosophers and divines have written of the phenix, that first she is consumed to ashes by the heat of the sun, and that afterwards of her ashes arises a young one; and in this manner is her kind preserved. Again: swallows, worms, and flies, which have lain dead in the winter season, in the spring, by the virtue of the sun's heat, revive again; so, likewise, men fall in swoons and trances, being for a time without breath or show of life, and yet afterwards come again. And so (to use Paul's example), before the corn can grow, and bear fruit, it must first be cast into the ground, and there rot. And, if this were not seen by experience, men would not believe it. Again: every present day is as it were dead and buried in the night following; and afterwards it returns again the next morning. Perkins.

Madame de Gasparin visited a great vault at Palermo, where thousands of skeletons, in every variety of position, were seen. There were the mingled bones and the nameless dust, an indistinguishable mass! She took a handful of the dust, gazed upon it, and was filled with doubt of the possibility of the resurrection of the dead. She hastened back into the daylight, when she suddenly saw the symbol I.N.R.I.; and a voice echoed in her heart, “Believest thou that I am able to do this?” She responded. “Yea, verily, Thou wilt do it;” and from that day forth never doubted the doctrine of the resurrection.

God has filled all Nature with continual emblems of this doctrine. What is night but the death of day? What is morning but its resurrection from the shades of darkness? We see the insect-tribe give their evidence—sometimes crawling, as a worm, then lying in apparent torpor; then bursting the shell, and, with wings of beauty and activity, skimming the atmosphere.

When friends of Monica, mother of Augustine, expressed their wonder that she did not fear to leave her body so far from her country, she said: “Nothing is far from God, and I do not fear that He will not know where to find me at the resurrection.”

When a man is about to rebuild an old and tottering house, he first sends out its occupants, then tears it down and rebuilds anew, a more splendid one. This occasions no grief to the occupants, but rather joy, for they do not care for the destruction of the old house, but look forward with anticipation to the new house which is to come, though not yet seen. When God is about to do a similar work, He destroys our body, and removes the soul which was dwelling in it, as from some house that He may build it anew and more splendidly, and bring the soul into greater joy.

Again and again this old poetic fancy of the earth as one great cemetery buried several times deep with dead men, women and children, has been refuted by figures. But great is the error and will prevail, unless the truth be well and steadily upheld. The population of the earth is now about 1,500,000,000. Suppose the human race to have existed for 6,000 years and you have sixty centuries. In each century you may count three generations of mankind, or one hundred and eighty generations in all, each being a generation of 1,500,000,000. Now, lay out a cemetery for one generation. It will be a huge estimate to give to every man, woman, and child a grave five feet by two, or ten square. You want for your graveyard, then, 15,000,000,000 square feet of ground. A square mile contains something less than 28,000,000 square feet. You want, then, a graveyard fifty-five miles long by ten wide for your whole generation. Now multiply this by one hundred and eighty and you have your burial-ground for 6,000 years of mankind. That is, a strip of land, 1,800 miles long by 55 miles wide will be ample. In other words, a cemetery containing 100,000 square miles would be sufficient for the entire human race to lie side by side. The estimate which I have given you of continuous population is obviously enormously large. The estimate of the size of each grave is very large. A strictly correct estimate would reduce the size of the required cemetery more than one-half. But enormous as it is, you could lay out your burial-ground for all men who have lived on earth, so that they could lie side by side in Arizona or in California, or you could lay it out in Texas large enough to accommodate the race of 6,000 years past, and also the race for 6,000 years yet to come, all sleeping in the soil of that one State of this Union. But some one says the race of man has been on the earth 100,000 years. That is a pure imagination and there is not, so far as I know, a fact on which to rest it. But suppose it is true, and suppose the population always what it is now, you have provided for 6,000 years of it. You want nearly seventeen times as large a cemetery for the generations of a thousand centuries. That is, you want 1,700,000 square miles in it. Lay it out whenever you please, 1,700 miles long by 1,000 miles wide. It is but part of the United States. And so enormously large have been the rough estimates thus far used, it is safe to say that if the human race has been in existence 100,000 years, a separate grave could be provided for every individual of the race within a part of the United States east of the Mississippi River.--W. C. PRIME, New York _Journal of Commerce_.

See RESUSCITATION.

PRESERVATION, A PROCESS OF

It is not hard to believe that the passage through death will be the occasion for a new blossoming of the flowers of character, after the analogy of the frozen flowers about which this account from _Harper’s Weekly_ is given:

The latest and most approved method of preserving flowers during transportation is that of freezing them. When this process is employed the flowers are picked while in the bud and will keep perfectly for several weeks in refrigerator boxes. No deterioration in their beauty results from this treatment, and after they have been unpacked and placed in water they slowly revive and the blossoms develop fully. During the period of refrigeration all growth is suspended, and so slowly do the flowers return to their natural state that such blossoms will last much longer in a room than would be the case had they been brought directly from the greenhouse or the garden.

The facility with which horticultural specimens have been transported by this new method has led to experiments in South Africa, with a view to determining whether many of their wonderful flowers may not be safely exported in bulk to supply the trade in Europe and America.