something more than ordinary grief
or sympathy was the fountain of these tears, the cause of the distress
which could vent itself only in audible groans. He was in sympathy with
the mourners and felt for them, but there was that in the whole scene
with which He had no sympathy; there was none of that feeling He
required His disciples to show at His own death, no rejoicing that one
more had gone to the Father. There was a forgetfulness of the most
essential facts of death, an unbelief which seemed entirely to separate
this crowd of wailing people from the light and life of God's presence.
"It was the darkness between God and His creatures that gave room for,
and was filled with, their weeping and wailing over their dead." It was
the deeper anguish into which mourners are plunged by looking upon death
as extinction, and by supposing that death separates from God and from
life, instead of giving closer access to God and more abundant life,--it
was this which caused Jesus to groan. He could not bear this evidence
that even the best of God's children do not believe in God as greater
than death, and in death as ruled by God.

This gives us the key to Christ's belief in immortality, and to all
sound belief in immortality. It was Christ's sense of God, His
uninterrupted consciousness of God, His distinct knowledge that God the
loving Father is _the_ existence in whom all live,--it was this which
made it impossible for Christ to think of death as extinction or
separation from God. For one who consciously lived in God to be
separated from God was impossible. For one who was bound to God by love,
to drop out of that love into nothingness or desolation was
inconceivable. His constant and absolute sense of God gave Him an
unquestioning sense of immortality. We cannot conceive of Christ having
any shadow of doubt of a life beyond death; and if we ask why it was so,
we further see it was because it was impossible for Him to doubt of the
existence of God--the ever-living, ever-loving God.

And this is the order or conviction in us all. It is vain to try and
build up a faith in immortality by natural arguments, or even by what
Scripture records. As Bushnell truly says: "The faith of immortality
depends on a sense of it begotten, not on an argument for it concluded."
And this sense of immortality is begotten when a man is truly born
again, and instinctively feels himself an heir of things beyond this
world into which his natural birth h