The Water of Life and Other Sermons | Page 9

that command literally, and see whether the promise is not
literally fulfilled to us in return.

SERMON III. THE VICTORY OF LIFE (Preached at the Chapel
Royal.)

ISAIAH xxxviii. 18, 19.
The grave cannot praise thee, death cannot celebrate thee: they that go
down into the pit cannot hope for thy truth. The living, the living, he
shall praise thee.
I may seem to have taken a strange text on which to speak,--a mournful,
a seemingly hopeless text. Why I have chosen it, I trust that you will
see presently; certainly not that I may make you hopeless about death.
Meanwhile, let us consider it; for it is in the Bible, and, like all words
in the Bible, was written for our instruction.
Now it is plain, I think, that the man who said these words--good king
Hezekiah--knew nothing of what we call heaven; of a blessed life with
God after death. He looks on death as his end. If he dies, he says, he
will not see the Lord in the land of the living, any more than he will see
man with the inhabitants of the world. God's mercies, he thinks, will
end with his death. God can only show His mercy and truth by saving
him from death. For the grave cannot praise God, death cannot
celebrate Him; those who go down into the pit cannot hope for His
truth. The living, the living, shall praise God; as Hezekiah praises Him
that day, because God has cured him of his sickness, and added fifteen
years to his life.
No language can be plainer than this. A man who had believed that he
would go to heaven when he died could not have used it.
In many of the Psalms, likewise, you will find words of exactly the
same kind, which show that the men who wrote them had no clear
conception, if any conception at all, of a life after death.
Solomon's words about death are utterly awful from their sadness. With
him, 'that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; as one dieth,
so dieth the other. Yea, they have all one breath, so that a man hath no
pre-eminence over a beast, and all is vanity. All go to one place, all are
of the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knoweth the spirit of man

that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to
the earth?'
He knows nothing about it. All he knows is, that the spirit shall return
to God who gave it,--and that a man will surely find, in this life, a
recompence for all his deeds, whether good or evil.
'Remember therefore thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the
evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I
have no pleasure in them. Fear God, and keep His commandments; for
this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into
judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be
evil.'
This is the doctrine of the Old Testament; that God judges and rewards
and punishes men in this life: but as for death, it is a great black cloud
into which all men must enter, and see and be seen no more. Only twice
or thrice, perhaps, a gleam of light from beyond breaks through the
dark. David, the noblest and wisest of all the Jews, can say once that
God will not leave his soul in hell, neither suffer His holy one to see
corruption; Job says that, though after his skin worms destroy his body,
yet in his flesh he shall see God; and Isaiah, again, when he sees his
countrymen slaughtered, and his nation all but destroyed, can say, 'Thy
dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise.
Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust: for thy dew is as the dew of the
morning, which brings the parched herbs to life and freshness
again.'--Great and glorious sayings, all of them: but we cannot tell how
far either David, or Job, or Isaiah, were thinking of a life after death.
We can think of a life after death when we use them; for we know how
they have been fulfilled in Jesus Christ our Lord; and we can see in
them more than the Jews of old could do; for, like all inspired words,
they mean more than the men who wrote them thought of; but we have
no right to impute our Christianity to them.
The only undoubted picture, perhaps, of the next life to be found in the
Old Testament, is that grand one in Isaiah xiv., where he paints to us
the tyrant king of Babylon going