Romans 7:4

Romans 7:4

I. "Ye are dead." This spiritual death must surely be in some profound sense so often and so earnestly is the phrase reiterated the mystical image of that death from which it derives its name. Whither does death conduct us? "Today shalt thou be with Me in paradise," said the Lord of Life to the dying penitent. He Himself "preached to spirits in confinement," preserved in the secret citadel of God; a world where, as He declared, all live unto Him, and whose happier region perhaps is typified by the bosom of Abraham, which the Jews employed to express it and which our Lord has consecrated by His adoption. The triumphant fulness of heavenly glory seems to demand the body no less than the spirit; and may we not fairly deem, with many of our safest and holiest divines, that there is beyond this scene, in some lone region of the illimitable universe, a home for the spirit, embodied, or clad it may be, with some fine and invisible materialism, where in the calm expectation of consummate bliss it learns the art of higher happiness, and trains its faculties for coming glory. And as in all our physical changes spiritual changes more essential seem pictured, I cannot but think that as our death represents the spiritual death that opens the Christian's course, so this intervening state of holy anticipation seems eminently to represent the peculiar blessedness that follows death to sin and to the law.

II. Departed saints are dead to the world, dead to its sins, dead to its avenging law. It cannot cast its shadow across the grave, and it cannot prolong one pang of bitterness, one touch of temptation. Its waves are broken beneath the walls of that sheltered paradise. These are the franchised of Christ and of death; dust has returned to dust that the spirit might return unto God; they have died into His eternal life. This is the story of the dying saint; such dying saints must you be even now, if you would live even now with Jesus.

W. Archer Butler, Sermons,2nd series, p. 116.

References: Romans 7:4. Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxv., p. 56. Romans 7:5. Homilist,new series, vol. i., p. 109. Romans 7:6. H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. iv., p. 11; Ibid., Sermons,10th series, p. 217. Romans 7:6; Romans 7:25. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. ix., p. 216.