d also as a transference which in
form forcibly exhibits the weakness, the imperfection, the shame of our
present state. Thus death connects itself with sin, which our conscience
tells us is the great root of all our present misery. It is to us the
symptom of the punishment of sin, but the punishment itself is not the
death of the body but of the soul; the separation of the soul from all
good, from all hope,--in a word, from God. This is the real danger from
which Christ delivers us. If this be removed, it is immaterial whether
bodily death remain or not; or rather, bodily death is used to help out
our complete deliverance, as a symptom of the disease sometimes promotes
the cure. Christ has tasted death for every man, and out of each man's
cup has sucked the poison, so that now, as we in turn drink it, it is
but a sleeping draught. There was a chemistry in His love and perfect
obedience which drew the poison to His lips; and absorbing into His own
system all the virulence of it, by the immortal vigour of His own
constitution, He overcame its effects, and rose again triumphing over
its lethargic potency.

It was not mere bodily death, then, which our Lord endured. That was not
the wolf which the Good Shepherd saved us from. It was death with the
sting of sin in it. It is this fact which shows us, from one point of
view, the place of Christ's death in the work of atonement Death sets
the seal on a man's spiritual condition. It utters the final word: He
that is holy, let him be holy still; he that is filthy, let him be
filthy still. The biblical view of death is that it marks the transition
from a state of probation to a state of retribution. "It is appointed
unto men once to die, and after death the judgment." There is no coming
back again to make another preparation for judgment. We cannot have two
lives, one after the flesh, and another after the spirit, but one life,
one death, one judgment. Bodily death therefore thus becomes not only
the evidence of spiritual death, but its seal. But this, falling upon
Christ, fell harmless. Separation from God must be separation of the
will, separation accomplished by the soul's self. In Christ there was no
such separation. Sinners abide in death, because not only are they
judicially separated, but they are in will and disposition separate.
Plunge iron and wood into water: the one sinks, the other rises
immediately, cannot be kept under, has a native buoyancy of its own that
brings