The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1906, Page 82

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82

The Lutheran Pioneer.

up.” “The great day of the Lord is at hand.” Are
you prepared for that day? “The Judge standeth
before the door.” Are you ready to meet Him?

By nature no man is prepared for the day of
judgment, no man is ready for the Lord’s coming;
for “all have sinned and come short of the glory
of God;” and as all have sinned, all are “children
of wrath.” Our sins provoke God’s wrath, and as
we are in ourselves we have nothing but condemna-
tion to expect when the Lord comes to judge the
world.

But an atonement for sin has been made by
God’s own Son, who “bore our sins in His own
body on the tree” and procured for all men for-
giveness of sin and life everlasting. This glorious
fact is made known and the forgiveness of sins is
offered to every sinner in the Gospel that it might
be taken by faith for salvation. “For God so loved
the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that
whosoever believeth in Him should not -perish, but
have everlasting life.” Those who believe in Him,
the Savior of sinners, have nothing to fear. By
faith they have redemption through His blood,
namely, the forgiveness of sins, and shall not come
into condemnation. “There is now no condemna-
tion to them which are in Christ Jesus,” says the
apostle. As there is nothing but condemnation to
the unbelievers, to them that are not in Christ
Jesus, so there is no condemnation to the believers,
who by faith are in Christ Jesus. They alone are
prepared for the last day, they alone are ready for
the Lord’s coming. Yea, they are longingly “look-
ing for that blessed hope, and the glorious appear-
ing of the great God, and our Savior Jesus Christ.”
They know that His coming will be the end of the
sins and sorrows and heartaches of this time and
the beginning of those everlasting joys and glories
which eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, and
which have not entered into the heart of man.

May we by faith in Jesus at every hour be ready
for His coming and be found among those blessed
servants who, watching and praying, cry out in
joyful welcome:

“We wait for Thee! With certain hope —
The time will soon be over;
With childlike longings we look up,
Thy glory to discover!
O bliss! ‘To share
Thy triumph there,
When home, wjth joy and singing,
The Lord His saints is bringing.”

_ “Ir matters not how they may look to us, all
the trials which God sends are blessings.”

“I Believe in the Resurrection of the Body.”

This is our firm belief, that our bodies, the
same bodies we had here, in all their parts, will
be raised on the last day. Still, it has been con-
sidered by many people at all times “a thing in-
credible that God should raise the dead,’ Acts
26, 8; and it is only in the Scriptures and in writ-
ings founded upon them that this doctrine is posi-
tively asserted. The Sadducees, for instance, “say
that there is no resurrection, neither angel, nor
spirit,” Matt. 22, 23; Acts 23,8. And even among
our Lord’s disciples there were some who, when
Jesus spoke of His rising from the dead, “wondered
what rising from the dead could mean.” When
Paul preached at Athens and declared to them the
resurrection of Jesus, this doctrine was so. new to
them that they said: “He seemeth to be a setter
forth of strange gods,” “because he preached to
them of Jesus and the Resurrection.” ‘These wise
men were so ignorant that they seem to have
thought, when the apostle used the words Jesus and
Resurrection, that He was trying to introduce a
new god and goddess among them. When, how-
ever, he urged the matter still further and explained
his meaning, “they mocked,” Acts 17, 18—32. On
another occasion, when preaching before Festus and
Agrippa, the former interrupted him as soon as he
referred to the resurrection of Jesus, saying, “Paul,
thou art beside thyself, much learning doth make
thee mad,” Acts 26, 24. A learned Roman of those
days classes the resurrection of the body among the
things God cannot do, and Celsus, a Roman philoso-
pher of the second century, who wrote a book against
Christianity, calls the Christian hope of the resur-
rection “the hope of worms, a very filthy and abom-
inable as well 4s impossible thing: it is that which
God neither can nor will do, being base and con-
trary to nature.”

This doctrine of the resurrection of the body is,
however, one of the great articles of the Christian
faith. We believe that “the hour is coming in
which all that are in the graves shall hear His
voice, and shall come forth: they that have done
good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that
have done evil, unto the resurrection of damna-
tion,” John 5, 28. 29. We are certain that “them
which sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him,”
1 Thess. 4, 14. 16; that Christ by His rising be-
came “the first-fruits of them that slept,” that “the
dead shall be raised incorruptible,” 1 Cor. 15, 20.
52; that the sea, and the grave shall give up their
dead, Rey. 20, 13; that in this resurrection Christ