Selected From: George Philip, “Christ Destroys the Believer’s Fears” in The Free Church Pulpit; Consisting of Discourses by the Most Eminent Divines of the Free Church of Scotland, Vol. III, Sermon CXV (New York: Robert Carter, 1848), 239–246.
“And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not: I am the first and the last. 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 1:17–18
The subject of the text is a remedy prescribed by Christ for certain fears which had sprung up in the mind of his Apostle. The occasion of these fears was (as we find by the context) a sight of the glory of Christ in his state of exaltation.
This is a sight which all believers behold on earth. There are two ways in which it may be beheld. First, by the eye of the body. John was now beholding it with his eye, and this to him was but a following up of those sights which he had all along had of Christ in his state of humiliation. With the eye of the body, he had gazed upon the Man of Sorrows—with the same eye he was now gazing upon the Lord of Glory. But, secondly, this sight may be beheld by the eye of the regenerated soul. Believers look at it with this eye. They are the temple of the Spirit of God; and, speaking of that Spirit, Christ says, “He shall glorify me, for he shall receive of mine and shall shew it unto you.” But the Spirit glorifies and exhibits a full Christ—Christ risen, as well as Christ dead; Christ wearing his mediatorial crown, as well as Christ suspended on the cross.
This sight of Christ exalted, which believers now have, is as real and distinct as any of their other sights of Christ, and as in John’s case, is but a following up of these.
It is with the eye of the soul they behold him on the cross bearing their iniquities, and bringing in for them an everlasting righteousness; it is with the same eye they behold him as he sits with them at his table, and it is also with the same eye that they “see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God.”
Believers, you should practise your eye with this sight. Today it has been long and earnestly fixed on the Lamb of God slain from the foundation of the world—let it now gaze for a little on the glory of that Lamb in the kingdom of his Father. What though fears spring up at the sight! If you, like John, shall tremble, like John also, you may be encouraged and emboldened by the very voice of Him at whom you quail. It was not fitting that John should be always leaning on the bosom of the Man of Sorrows: he was now on the very threshold of a state where he would for ever be gazing on Jesus crowned with glory and honour; it was fitting therefore that his eye should be partially opened on earth to the overpowering splendour of the scene which was so soon to burst upon his view. And children of God, it is not fitting that you, who are already treading the very out-courts of the palace of the great king, should be always reclining beneath that banner of love which rests over the memorials of a crucified Jesus. The Lord is not here—he is risen, he is gone into heaven, and is at the right hand of God, and already the prayer which he has presented for you is hastening to be answered, “Father, I will that they also whom thou hast given me be with me where I am, that they may behold my glory which thou hast given me.”
What then are your feelings as you gaze on the glory of your exalted Lord? Like John, when you see him, do you fall at his feet as dead? And is the language of feelings which you have no power to express, such as fell from the mouth of Isaiah when he beheld the same glory, “Woe is me for I am undone, because I am a man of unclean lips, for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts?” Behold, Jesus is laying his right hand upon you, and hark what he is saying, “Fear not, I am the first and the last. 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.”
Now let us look at the comfort which these words are calculated to impart. And this we may do by considering:
(I) Who it is that prescribes the remedy for your fears. It is Jesus who lays his right hand upon you, saying unto you, “Fear not;” and by examining,
(II) The remedy in its several parts, “I am the first and the last. 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.”
I. Consider that it is Jesus himself who prescribes the remedy. He lays his right hand upon you. He says unto you, “Fear not.”
This might well be ranked among the parts of the remedy, for like many other remedies, the value of this one consists greatly in the hand that administers it. If I have offended a friend, his own simple assurance of forgiveness is worth a thousand arguments from others who would wish to convince me that he is no longer offended. Were a person of whom you stood greatly in dread to preserve the closest silence regarding you, although you should on all hands be pressed with reasons to show that your fears were groundless; reasons too, which he was willing should be employed; would you not feel as if there were something ominous in the mysterious silence which he himself preserved, and that ere the reasons could tell with all their effect upon your mind, that silence must be broken by an assurance of his love?
The same principle will hold in the case of Christ and his people. “I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine.” The very voice of Christ should operate as a charm on his people. There should be something heart-stirring in the words, “Fear not,” as uttered by him, altogether independent of reasons for the banishment of fears.
Fainthearted believers, be of good courage then. Not only are there reasons why your fears should be calmed—reasons too, which Christ is willing should be brought to bear upon you for this purpose, but he himself, so far from standing aloof in mysterious silence, is laying his right hand upon you, and with that voice which you have before obeyed, is saying unto you, “Fear not.”
It is not by arguments devised by men that you are called on to look up in hope and confidence. It is by an entreaty coming to yourself fresh from the mouth of Him before whom you tremble. And oh, when it is He himself that bids you not fear, does not the very glory with which he is encircled bring encouragement to your heart? Do you not feel that you may safely lay aside your fears, when all the terrors of His majesty are arrayed, not against you, but on your behalf? And if, in addition, you not only hear the sound of the voice of your exalted Lord, but that voice urging reasons why all your fears should be dispelled; and if, in the urging of these reasons, you can hear the silver tones of infinite and everlasting love, and behold the Lamb of God blended with the Lion of the tribe of Judah, do you not feel your soul reviving, yea, strengthened within you, at the very sight of the glory of Jesus at the right hand of God?
II. We come now, as proposed, secondly, to examine the remedy in its several parts. Christ not only bids his people fear not, but he urges reasons why they should not. These reasons are contained in the several parts of the remedy. Let us take up these, then, in their order.
And first, “I am the first and the last, I am he that liveth,” or, as it might be rendered, “I am the living one.”
Several ideas are comprehended under these expressions: Christ existing from everlasting to everlasting—Christ the author and end of all things—Christ their sum and substance. The epithets are, you perceive, expressive of his Godhead. The others which he assumes in the text have respect to his humanity. How beautifully they all unite to dispel the fears of his people! Some of these fears are to be chased away by his Godhead, some by his humanity; to chase away all, Christ speaks both as God and as man.
But let us now try the power of this first part of the remedy. What are your fears then, child of God, as you look upon the glory of Christ? Is this one of them, that it is impossible that he could be caring for and loving so insignificant and dead-hearted a creature as you? But whose voice is this? “Fear not, for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name, thou art mine.” Is this another of your fears, that you have such a heart that you will never be able to obtain fitness for beholding Christ’s glory in eternity? But who says this? “Hast thou not known, has thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? There is no searching of his understanding. He giveth power to the faint, and to them that have no might, he increaseth strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall, but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, and they shall walk and not faint.” Is this another, that your efforts to make known Christ’s glory to others will fail? Hark, who speaks! “My grace is sufficient for thee, for my strength is made perfect in weakness.”
Your fears, whatever they are, may be removed. The First, the Last, and the Living One must be able for the task, and He is willing. Did a past eternity require to be searched ere your peace could be fully established, Jesus would still say to you, “Fear not,” for he is from everlasting. Did a stream of spiritual life require to be struck out from some flinty heart, Jesus would still say, “Fear not,” for he himself is the Living One. And at the moment of your deepest despondings, and when the sighs of ten thousand fainting hearts like your own are ascending before him, conscious though he is that each one of his people must be presented faultless before the throne, he still whispers to you, “Fear not,” for “in Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.”
The second part of the remedy embraces the words, “I was dead.”
In how striking a contrast this part stands to the last! The glory of the Deity is now shaded by the darkness of a human grave. But what an amount of comfort this part is calculated to afford, for if Christ was dead, why should you fear to approach the throne of grace on which he now sits. He whose face you look upon when you bend the knee, once “made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men, and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” Christ cannot but rejoice in seeing angels approach him, but when he beholds you approaching him, his eye must single you out from the myriads of adoring hosts as one of the very same clime and family as himself, bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh.
But again, if Christ was dead, why should you, who are one with him, fear the punishment of your sins? That punishment is all past already. The wages of sin is death. Yes, that is irreversible, and the gospel does not alter it. But it tells us of two ways in which the penalty of sins may be discharged. Your sins may lie either upon you or upon Christ. Lying upon you, they have their punishment exhausted only with the everlasting death of your soul; lying upon Christ, they have their punishment exhausted with the death of his body. But is not this your very claim as a believer, that Jehovah hath laid your sins upon Christ? Then their punishment must be all exhausted, if only that be a true sentence, “I was dead.” The groans of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane brought the punishment of your sins infinitely nearer a close than the wailings of the lost will bring the punishment of theirs, even after myriads of the ages of eternity shall have rolled; and the last breath of Christ terminated the punishment of your sins as really as the punishment of the lost would be terminated, could eternity come to an end.
And still farther, if Christ was dead, why should you fear to die? Perhaps you are among those who, through fear of death, are subject to bondage. Then Christ died to deliver you from this fear. Say, what would seem most likely to assuage it? Suppose you were required to undertake alone some difficult and dangerous navigation. What would then be best calculated to allay your fears? Would it not be some friend coming and offering to accompany you? And suppose it should turn out that he had made the passage before in tempestuous weather, and knew where the sunken rocks lay, and how to guide the quivering vessel through the raging flood; would you not feel as if new life had been communicated to you, and as if you might safely exchange your fears for confidence and joy? Then Jesus has promised to be waiting you on the eternal shore. Do you fear then, the last conflict with Satan—he has encountered it; the last agony—he has suffered it; the last breath—he has given it; the narrow house—he has been laid in it. Oh, when he who was dead says, “Fear not,” while you have the assurance from his own lips that after the hardest experience of death, after ransacking every corner of death’s domains, there is nothing for you to fear; strive to be able to say, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.”
But let us now proceed to notice the third part of the remedy, “Behold I am alive for evermore, Amen.”
This part is another strange contrast to the last, another brilliant evolution of the character of your exalted Lord. The darkness of a human grave is now dispelled by the light of immortality. This light should dissipate the gloom which overhangs the grave of the believer. The time of the greatest degradation of his body stands close on the time of its highest exaltation. The very degradation to which it is doomed makes its exaltation the greater astonishment. “I was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore.” This language will be yours on the morning of the resurrection, “for if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised. But now is Christ risen from the dead and become the first fruits of them that slept.”
Well, but mark the contrast between the body which believers now have and that which they shall receive at the resurrection. Of the one it will yet be possible to be said, “I was dead!” of the other, it will be true, “Behold I am alive for evermore.” The one may be spent, the other cannot be spent; it can only be employed in the service of Christ. “I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” This you can do only for a short time, and if the body which you now have must be wasted into the grave in some service or another, what though your arm shall never cease from its labours till it be stiffened by the grasp of death; what though your body shall find its first undisturbed repose in that place where “the weary are at rest”—you shall be clothed with an house which is from heaven, and the very wearing out of your earthly tabernacle in the service of Christ will enshrine you hereafter in a nobler immortality.
But the thought that Christ is alive for evermore should not only scatter the gloom which overhangs the grave of believers, but should also assure them of the perpetuity of that spiritual life with which Christ hath quickened them.
Let us take the case of a person embarking for a foreign land to whom you entrust all your property. How great would be your anxiety to know that he had arrived in safety and was well! But suppose that it were possible for you to entrust him with your very life, so that his death would be your death-knell, how intense must your anxiety become! What must be your anxiety then, believer, for you have done nothing less than give up your very life to Christ! Your “life is hid with Christ in God.” Your life then is far away, and if he with whom your life is hid shall cease to live, the knell of eternal death is rung for you. Was it not rash, then, to trust your life so far away from you? Hark! A voice from the land where it is, “Fear not, I am the Living One, and behold I am alive for evermore.” “I am the vine, ye are the branches.” All is still right with the vine. It is still shooting up an everlasting plant in the paradise of God. Its branches, therefore, whether reaching through heaven or downwards to earth, must still be flourishing. “Because I live ye shall live also.”
See that you reverse not this. The root is in heaven, the branches are on earth. It is not when you have spiritual life, or because you have it, that Christ lives; you live because, and so long as he lives. And how long is that? Evermore. In old age, therefore, when others are fading, you shall be flourishing, and at the very time when death seems to hold you in secure possession, from your cold tomb shall the voice be heard, “When Christ who is our life shall appear, then shall we also appear with him in glory.” And oh! because Christ is thus alive for evermore, if you have followed one to the grave a single spark of whose life lies hid with Christ, then sorrow not as those who have no hope; that spark is indestructible as Christ. Where Christ is, there it must be; where Christ goes, there it must follow, first to the judgment seat, and then to the mansions of eternal day.
The fourth and last part of the remedy is contained in the words, “and have the keys of hell and of death.”
By the term, hell, we are here, as in several other places, to understand the state of souls between death and the resurrection. At death, there is a separation not only from friends and the world, but even from your very self. The body goes one way, the soul another; and yet their union is necessary for the complete existence and happiness of brethren of the man Christ Jesus. It is by the same door that they separate, but it is by different doors they return for their eternal union.
Christ has the keys of all these doors. He has the key of the door by which the body and soul of his people separate. You cannot die, therefore, till Christ, with his own hand, open the door, the last breath is the turning of the lock. What serenity this should shed around the deathbed of the believer, and how strong consolation it should impart to those who are left behind! Perhaps you have stood by the dying couch of one dear to you and dear to Jesus. Your heart was ready to sink within you as you gazed on the uplifted eye which told that the unequal strife would soon be over, and pressed the hand cold already with the dew from the valley of death. But even in that hour of agony, did not God become the strength of your heart when you thought that the hand of Jesus was there, and that when the closed door hid your friend from your view, it was Jesus who had shut him in?
But Christ has also the keys of the doors by which the souls and bodies of believers pass to each other for an eternal union. If saints on earth “groan within themselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of their body”—if their souls, even when inhabiting their earthly tabernacle, “do groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with their house which is from heaven”—what must be the longings of these souls as the winter of death advances to its close, and the time of the redemption of their bodies draws nigh! How impatient for the sound of the trump of God! That trump shall sound and wake the slumberer in the deepest grave. But who shall unlock the portals of the grave that the body may go forth? “I have the keys of hell and of death.” “I will ransom them from the power of the grave, I will redeem them from death. O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction.”
And now, children of God, you have been conducted by your Lord along the pathway you have to tread below, and led through the valley of death, the cavern of the grave and the land of spirits, to that full weight of glory which shall be yours at the resurrection. Every step you have taken has been gladdened by the voice of Christ. Where you have placed fears he has set promises, omnipotent for their remedy.
But though your soul has on trembling wing crossed the valley of death and seen terrors beyond, whatever fears you may have to encounter on earth, the last will vanish at the moment of your dissolution. Shall then that voice whose living power will, as you pass from earth, spread an eternal calm over your soul—shall that voice be unable to dissipate the fears by which you overshadow your brief pilgrimage below? Shall that voice, which, when sent through the unseen world, will cause your heart to vibrate with eternal joy, be unable, when sent downward to earth, to lift your soul up to rejoicing in hope of the glory of God?
But to conclude, Christ does not speak in the language of the text to those who will not come unto him. Impenitent sinners have everything to fear. The attributes of Christ conspire to crush them. “How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation?” He who is the First, the Last, and the Living One against us! Who can be for us? He who was dead, our enemy!—His shed blood trodden under foot will ever cry for vengeance. He who is alive for evermore our foe!—The worm of his anger will not die, the fire of his wrath cannot be quenched. He who hath the keys of hell and of death our Judge!—Deep and dark as the cavern may be, into which a soul without God, set free from its earthly tenement, shall be thrust; there will be a deeper and a darker cavern still in which it must eternally lie, when its partner, in unrepented sin, shall be brought up from the prison of death, that it may be its partner too in everlasting woe.
