Evolution and The Fall
By D. M. PANTON.
Two statements of the origin of life
(and especially human life) on earth, and two only, are before the world
to-day. The Scripture says:- “The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground,”
not out of previously existing forms of life; nor can the dust of the ground
mean animals, since all animals are named in the passage (verse 19) as themselves created, nearly
simultaneously, out of the ground – “and breathed into
his nostrils the breath of life, and man
became” - for the first time, as the still lifeless body was breathed
upon by God – “a living soul” (Gen. 2: 7).
“IN THF IMAGE OF GOD created He” - not
through the image of the beast evolved He – “them”
(Gen. 1: 27); “and out
of the ground the Lord God
formed every beast of the
field, and every fowl of the air” (Gen. 2:
19).
The alternative statement of the origin of life on the earth
is that of Evolution, a theory now almost universally held. It is conjectured that all life sprang, in
remote ages, out of dead matter, without the hand of a Creator; the lower forms
of life then gave birth, through countless ages, to the higher forms of life;
until, by its own inherent evolving power, nature reached its crowning
evolution, Man.*
[*Darwin himself says, concerning Evolution:- “Many of the views which have been advanced are highly
speculative, and some no doubt will prove erroneous.”]
Now we are met on the threshold by an arresting and
thought-provoking fact. Evolution itself
frankly confesses that it is false if the world is the age men have always
supposed it, and which has in its favour all actual historic data.
Now the traditional age of man on earth, together with the
fauna and flora that accompany man - as distinct from the untold ages before
the gigantic cataclysm that may be indicated by Gen.
1: 2 - is not discountenanced by science. For if the Glacial Epoch corresponds either
with the profound disorder into which the primaeval world had lapsed on the
threshold of the creation of man, or with the Flood, we are brought within
actual range of historic fact. In the
words of a professor of mathematics, Dr.
H. W. Morris:- “At the present time the earth is,
in winter, in that part of her orbit where she is nearest to the sun -
nearer by about three millions of miles than in summer; and this greater
proximity to the sun, in winter, renders this season now comparatively
mild. But it happens that in about every
10,000 years her winters, in the northern hemisphere, occur when she is in that
part of her orbit where she is at her greatest distance from the sun; then, those winters are
of extreme and arctic severity - in fact are prolonged one into the other, and
become continuous and form a Glacial Period.” That is, the Glacial Epoch occurred less than
ten thousand years ago. A French
authority, M. Edmond Perrier, says:
“It must be about ten thousand years since the
glaciers were enclosed within their present limits.” So also Geology reinforces Astronomy in
bringing the age of human life on earth within the traditional limits. Sir J.
W. Dawson says:- “The elaborate and careful
observations of Dr. Andrews on the raised beaches of Lake Michigan - observations
of a much more precise character than any which, in so far as I know, have been
made of such deposits in Europe - enable him to calculate the time which has
elapsed since North America rose out of the waters of the Glacial Period as
between 5,500 and 7,000 years.” “In the Post-Glacial Era,” Professor Dawson adds, “there was a
re-elevation of the continents, and a restoration of a milder temperature. No trace of human remains or implements
belonging to a period earlier than this has been detected.”
So Professor T. G. Bonney
summarises the most recent estimates on the appearance of man thus:‑ “On this point there is still room for controversy, but it
may suffice to say that, in Europe at any rate, it was probably some time -
probably rather late - in the Glacial Period.” So Cuvier
had said long ago – “If there be any circumstance
thoroughly established in Geology, it is that the crust of our earth has been
subject to a great and sudden revolution, the epoch of which cannot be dated
much further back than five or six thousand years ago.”
But, for the enormous periods requisite for such enormous
changes as it postulates, Evolution has to face a new problem and one (for it)
of portentous gravity. For some
geologists, compelled by facts that have accumulated for nearly a century, are
now doubting whether fossil remains can be graded in a life-succession at all,
or were not once simultaneously alive. “In the present condition of our knowledge,” says Professor Huxley, “one verdict, ‘not proven and not provable’ - must be
recorded against all grand hypotheses of the palaeontologist respecting the
general succession of life on the globe.” For since (1) any kind of fossil may occur
next to the Archean or earth’s primitive bedrock; since (2) the geological
strata, super-imposed one on another, can occur in any order, with yet no trace
of cataclysm between the layers; and since (3) fossil man is found mixed in
with animal fossils of remote ages, and must so have been co-existent:- it
seems to follow that “the fossil world is a unit, and
simply represents the ruins of an older state of our present world; and
whatever geological changes they indicate, must have taken place since Man was
on the earth, for there is no possible line of scientific reasoning to convince
us that any single type of fossil is older than the human race.”* So Professor
Huxley says: “Even absolute identity of organic
contents is no proof of the synchrony of deposits, while absolute diversity is
no proof of difference of date. The
different parts of one and the same stratum, having a similar composition
throughout, containing the same organic remains, and having similar beds above
and below it, may yet differ to any conceivable extent in age.” That
is, Evolution’s main original foundation - a life-succession revealed by
fossils from the dawn of time - trembles in the balances, and with it Evolution
must collapse. “GEOLOGY,”
says
[* Prof. G. MeGready Price’s Fundamentals of Geology, p. 246, a startling work of great
value. See also, especially for Mendelism,
his Q.E.D. or New Light on the Doctrine
of Creation. I need not point out how, if established, the contemporaneousness of
all fossil life (which would make the preceding paragraph on the Glacial Epoch
altogether unnecessary) revolutionises the whole problem from top to bottom,
and would bring us back (by geology alone) face to face with the Adamic
creation and the Flood.]
But, apart from the antiquity of man, there are three facts,
facts which none will deny, that are fatal to Evolution; and the first is that transmutation
of species has never occurred in
the whole realm of nature; no example has ever been discovered of the change of
one species into another. In all the
fossil deposits of the rocks, where long epochs are recorded in stone, not a
single example of transmutation of species has ever been found, nor a single
fact leading to the conclusion that such an evolved species has ever
existed. The intermingling of species
invariably produces hybrids, which are as invariably sterile. Thousands of species have lived alongside man
for thousands - Evolutionists say for thousands of millions - of years; yet, in
untold millions of births, that which, if Evolution is true, must have occurred
at least many thousands of times, has never been known to occur once. Though
backed by all the powers and opportunities of deliberate selection, no florist
has ever modified a rose into anything but a rose, no dog-fancier has
produced from dogs a breed that was not a dog; much less has “natural selection,”
working without intelligence and at hazard, left the slightest trace of an
evolved species. God’s lovely plasticity in plant and animal, designed to adapt
them to, changing conditions and climes, has bounds as sharp and final as the
ocean itself. “THERE ARE TWO OR THREE MILLION SPECIES
ON EARTH,” says
The second fact fatal to Evolution is that transmutation
of species is impossible. So radically distinct are the groups of
the living, that transfusion of blood is fatal to life. Among all races of men, blood-transfusion is
practicable; but so varied are the size and shape of the blood corpuscles of different
species, and of the blood-vessels through which the corpuscles pass -
differences that are constant and permanent - that to transfuse the blood of an
animal into a man, or of a man into an animal, is followed by certain death. “THE GREAT BREAK,”
says Darwin, “IN THE ORGANIC CHAIN BETWEEN MAN AND HIS
NEAREST ALLIES CANNOT BE BRIDGED OVER BY ANY EXTINCI OR LIVING SPECIES.”
The third fact fatal to Evolution is that no approach to the human has ever
been discovered. As far back as extant species, living or
dead, carry us, man is as human, with a brain every whit as powerful, as he is to-day;* no remains
exist anywhere of transitional, semi-human apes. Geologists claim enormous ages, running back
into a hundred million years, for the human remains discovered; yet all
transition forms between the man and the ape are totally absent. Why?
There could have been no
such creature, else some bones of him must have been found. Haeckel says: “WE,
AS YET, KNOW OF NO FOSSIL REMAINS OF THE HYPOTHETICAL PRIMEVAL MAN.” If our ancestors were animal, and evolution
is a law of nature, among the many races of men, the four species of anthropoid
apes, and the innuinerable tribes of monkeys, all living together, there must
have been, and there must be half human,
half-animal races. Yet no such super-ape
exists anywhere on the globe, nor has left his trace in the depths of the
primaeval rocks. “There is not,” says Sir Alfred Russel Wallace, “as often
assumed, one ‘missing link’ to be discovered, but at least a score of such links, adequately to fill the gap between man and apes.” The fauna and flora in
[*On fossil remains and disinterred skulls it is well to
remember the warning of Huxley:‑ “The fossil remains of man hitherto discovered do not seem to
me to take us appreciably nearer to that lower pithecoid form, by the
modification of which he has probably become what he is.” Professor
Ray Lankester repeats the caution. “It must be carefully borne in mind that we have not at
present facts which justify more than preliminary guesses, as to the relation
in time of the Java skull, the Piltdown skull, the Broken Hill skull, and the
Heidelburg jaw to one another and to the little group of European skulls and
skeletons.”]
Moreover, (though this has not yet reached the general public)
a
law has been discovered in biology which disposes of the whole problem. Evolution
rests on the transmission of acquired characters, without which, says Haeckel, “it
would be better to accept a mysterious creation of all the species as described
in the Mosaic account.” Mendelism
(as it is called) has proved that no characters are acquired that are not
latent in the ancestry. In the words of Professor G. M. Price: “If we cross tall yellow peas with dwarf green peas, the
first hybrid generation will be all tall yellows, both tallness and yellowness
being dominant. But in the second hybrid
generation, out of every sixteen plants, we have nine tall yellows, one dwarf
green with three dwarf yellows, and three tall greens, the last two kinds being
wholly new forms. Although these new forms
will breed true indefinitely when kept in pure lines, yet they are nevertheless
cross-fertile
with the original forms, and thus the circle can be completed back
again at any time. Innumerable
repetitions of similar experiments have proved that these principles hold good
throughout the whole world of plants and animals; in other words, we see that the principles of
heredity, as now understood, have brought us back to that great truth that each
form of plant or animal was designed by the Creator to reproduce only ‘after its kind.’” Thus, while there is remarkable
elasticity, it is only elasticity, and the variation is within unalterable law
and inside unbridgeable gulfs: new species created by acquired characters, and
infertile with the old, are unknown and impossible. Negatively, Buxley had already made the admission. “There is nipositive
evidence at present,” he says, “that a group of
animals has, by variation and selective breeding, given rise to another group,
which was in the least degree infertile with the first.” Mendelism
has now revealed, by the invariable and mathematical rules of descent, that it
is impossible. But this is fatal to
Evolution. “EITHER,”
says Herbert Spencer, “THERE HAS BEEN INHERITANCE OF
ACQUIRED CHARACTERS, OR THERE HAS BEEN NO EVOLUTION.”
Nor is Evolution to-day, even among men of science, secure of
its once undisputed throne. Professor William Bateson, M.A., F.R.S., President of the British
Association in 1914, in his presidential address said: “We have come to the conviction that the principle of Natural Selection
cannot have been the chief factor in delimiting the species of animals and
plants. We are even more sceptical as to
the validity of that appeal to changes in the conditions of life as direct
causes of modification upon which latterly at all events
Historically, as Well as philosophically, is a purely pagan
conception; and its acceptance by the mass of Christian leaders is only one
more proof of the appalling bankruptcy of leadership in the modern Church. It was the Roman atheist philosopher and
poet, Lucretius, to whom primitive
atoms were the seeds of all things, who gave birth to Evolution; and it is
exceedingly remarkable that one of the earliest Spiritualists, Hudson Tuttle, almost at the same time
as Darwin, in his “Arcana of Nature” in 1859
stated Evolution as a revelation from the spirit world. Professor Huxley frankly
acknowledges the pagan parentage. “THE MODERN DOCTRINE
OF EVOLUTION,” he says, “IS BUT AN EXPRESSION
AND COMPLETION OF THOSE PHYSICAL THEORIES WHICH OPENED THE HISTORY OF
SPECULATION.” It has been
countered once for all by the Holy Ghost:
“The worlds have been framed by the word of God,
so that what is seen HATH NOT BEEN MADE out of things which do appear” (Heb. 11: 3).
Sir C. Lyell, himself the
teacher of
There remains a wonderful and decisive
fact. The Evolutionist has not a single example
of what he assumes the change of one species into another; on the contrary, we
have, in recorded history, the very thing Genesis asserts - specific
creation. “He
took the five loaves” - the vegetable creation – “and the two fishes” - the animal – “and looking up to heaven, he
blessed, and brake, and gave” (Matt. 14: 19);
five loaves and two fishes, multiplied by a direct act of creation, not by
a process
of evolution, into loaves and
fishes sufficient to feed five thousand; a specific creation, on the spot,
producing a perfected product, even to a loaf ready for human consumption. The Evolutionist is here impaled on a
hopeless dilemma. If he denies that the
incident ever occurred, he comes out boldly as an enemy of God and His Gospel;
if he acknowledges the truth of the Gospel narrative, then he admits that
specific creation has occurred within recorded history, and so acknowledges
that to take one of those fishes from the hand of Christ, and argue its descent
from countless earlier forms of life, would be absurd. The dilemma is decisive and inexorable. So “all things were made
by Him, and without Him was not anything made that hath been made”
(John 1: 3).
Alas, how many souls have been lost through building on an
empty conjecture! Mr. Andrew Carnegie says: “When I, along
with three or four of my boon companions, was in this stage of doubt about
theology, including the supernatural element, and indeed the whole scheme of
salvation through vicarious atonement and all the fabric built upon it, I came
fortunately upon Darwin’s and Spencer’s works, ‘The Data of Ethics,’ ‘First
Principles,’ ‘Social Statics,’ ‘The Descent of Man.’ Reaching the pages which explain how man has
absorbed such mental foods as were favourable to him, retaining what was salutary,
rejecting what was deleterious, I remember that light came as in a flood and
all was clear. Not only had I got rid of
theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth in evolution. ‘All is
well since all grows better’ became my motto, my true source of comfort. Man was not created with an instinct for his
own degradation, but from the lower he had risen to the higher forms. Nor is
there any conceivable end to his march to perfection. His face is turned to the light; he stands in
the sun and looks upward. Humanity is an organism, inherently rejecting all
that is deleterious, that is wrong, and absorbing after trial what is
beneficial, what is right.”
But the Great War burst upon Mr. Carnegie as the bankruptcy of
Evolution. The last broken passage in
his diary, following on a hopeful entry made in 1912, runs thus: “As I read this to-day (1914)
what a change! The world convulsed by
war as never before! Men slaying each
other like wild beasts!” In a
touching preface to his memoirs his wife says: “Until
then he had lived the life of a man in middle life - and a young one at that -
golfing, fishing, swimming each day, sometimes doing all three in one day. Optimist as he always was and tried to be,
even in the face of the failure of his hopes, the world disaster was too
much. His heart was broken.” It
is the tragedy of a disillusioned world. Out of sinful humanity nothing can
evolve but sinful humanity: only by faith in the Son of God can all souls, all
nations, all the world be made over again into the image of God.
Now we turn from the physical creation to the spiritual
significance of the Fal1. Profoundly
connected are Evolution and the dynamic overthrow of all revelation. For two books of the Bible, and perhaps two
supremely, have been the objects of Satan’s bitterest attacks - Genesis and
Revelation; the book that betrays his origin, and the book that discloses his
destiny. But there must be a profounder
reason for the assault than mere pride or pique. The germ of all things is in Genesis, and the
clue to all mysteries is in Revelation; therefore to destroy these two books,
revelation’s source and goal, is the destruction of the Book. “In the beginning God” - are the splendid portals
through which we pass from eternity into time; “Even so
come, Lord Jesus” - are the massive gateways by which we pass back from
time into eternity: beyond these Pillars of Hercules, backward, the human mind
cannot travel; and through the Gates of Pearl, forward, we catch only broken
gleams of the immeasurable glory. To
overthrow Genesis and Revelation is to destroy - at least as far as revelation
is concerned - the origin and ultimate of all things.
Now the moral centre of Genesis is the Fall; and apparently it
is the extraordinary simplicity of the drama, though concealing as it does a
fathomless profundity, which stumbles modern thought. “There was no garden
in
[* The Fall of Man,
p. 7.]
Upon this organic fall of all in the one God builds the whole structure
of redemption; for He takes this very principle of solidarity, which was our
ruin, and makes that solidarity the organ of the world’s salvation. “For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners” - sinners by a
representative act, sinners by a fouled nature inherited, sinners ourselves by
active choice‑ - “EVEN so” - God taking the
solidarity which ruined as the solidarity which shall redeem – “through the obedience of the One shall the many be made righteous.” The helpless fall of the race into death
through the act of a lonely man is countered by a helpless salvation for the
entire race wrought by a Man as lonely and unique. That is, God incarnate in human flesh, the
Second Man, is so organically one with the race as a race - so the Son of man, not a son of man - that His
righteousness is (potentially) imputed to all as actually and as really as is
Adam’s sin.* The first Adam was the
federal head of the race; the last Adam. is equally the federal head of the
race: the first Adam, the law-breaker, is replaced by the last Adam, the law‑fulfiller:
the first man acted for all mankind, and plunged the world into ruin; the
Second Man acted for all mankind, and lifted the world into (potential)
salvation: Adam was the author of death to all; Christ is the author of life
for all. Thus the doctrine of the Fall lies at the root of all redemption. “Death,” says
Canon Barnes, “did not come into the world through
human sin: there was no first man made in the image of God”** It is manifest that if there be no first
Adam, there could be no last. But the Holy Ghost says:- “So then as through one trespass” - for however often Adam sinned afterwards, we fell only by the one act that
introduced sin itself – “the judgment came unto all men to condemnation; EVEN SO” - God turning solidarity, the
organ of condemnation, into solidarity, the organ of grace – “through one righteousness the free gift came unto all men to justification of life.”
If the first limb of the parallel is a myth, disaster and ruin overwhelm
the second limb: on the other hand, if the Second Head of the race really died
for all, it could only be because in the First Head all had died. As Adam ruined us through sin foreign to us,
without our fault; so Christ has saved us with a righteousness foreign to us,
without our merit: and the Holy Spirit thus rests our entire redemption on the
historical, actual, personal fall of the first man countered by the historical,
actual, personal death and resurrection of the Second.
[*But potentially only: for, unlike infants and all born
imbecile, we have also sinned of our own free choice; and a choice of sin can
only be countered by a choice of salvation.
He who has willed to sin must
will to be saved.
**
Inconceivably solemn and weighted with latter-day doom is the
main consequence of a denial of the Fall, which one approaches with a
shudder. “Though
we abandon belief,” says Canon
Barnes, “that the Fall was an historical event, the
fact of sin remains.”* Now
if sin is a fact, and a fact not chargeable to man, it must be chargeable to
God: whether through creation or evolution is immaterial - if man did not fall, the sin that is in him must have been
in him in his origin, at his creation - that is, God must have created him sinful: if sin is not man’s choice,
it is God’s responsibility. The dilemma
is inexorable. This is precisely the goal at which the Spirit saith expressly (1 Tim. 4:
1-3) we shall arrive in the last days.
Once again looms on the horizon a blundering or else a malignant
Demiurge, who, handling forces he could not control, bungled against his will
into a sinful creation; or else, himself an evil being, made matter itself
evil; a creator or evolver who either could not or would not control that which
he had himself created or evolved.
Gnosticism was born in an attempt to solve the problem of evil, and
exactly at that spot it will be born afresh.**
It is inexpressibly startling to hear this sentence from the chief
living protagonist of a denial of the Fall:‑“Those of
us who hold that He [Christ] was God Incarnate
before His Death, and God Discarnate afterwards.”*** Whether it be Docetic Gnosticism, which
regarded the Lord’s humanity as phantasmal, or Ebionite Gnosticism, which
asserted that the Divine Being finally abandoned Jesus upon the cross all
Gnosticism insisted, and will insist again, that the Son of God is now
discarnate ****: hence the terrible words of the great anti-Gnostic Apostle,- “they that confess not that Jesus Christ cometh [R.V.] IN THE
FLESH; this is the deceiver and the antichrist” (2 John 7). The giant
theosophies of the East are once again laying their octopus arms about the
[*Record, Sept. 16,
1920. ** The Evolutionist Le Conte says :‑ “If Evolution be true, and especially if man be indeed a
product of Evolution, then what we call evil is not a unique phenomenon
confined to man, and the result of an accident [the Fall], but must be a great fact pervading all
nature, and part of its very constitution.” Exactly so the Gnostic Celsus, the first man to compose a
written attack on the Christian Faith, says:- “In this
world evil is a necessary thing. It has no origin and will have no end. Matter is the source from which what we call
evil is ever springing up afresh.”
*** Canon Barnes’ Spiritualism and
the Christian Faith, P. 27. **** See
Dean Mansel’s Gnostic Heresies, p.
111..***** British Congregationalist, Jan.
24, 1907.]
So all the glory gathers at last about one lonely Brow. “The first man Adam became” - after the corpse was moulded, and
when his nostrils were inbreathed of God – “a
living soul” ‑ neither
mortal nor immortal, but simply alive, and alive at the will of God; “the last Adam became” – when the inherent Divine power to give life had been liberated
by a work finished through an atoning cross and an empty tomb – “A LIFE GIVING SPIRIT” (1
Cor. 15: 45), a regenerator, the Lord and Giver of life. Christ is the Last Adam, for there are only two Heads of the race, and to all
eternity there will be no fresh Adam, and therefore no fresh fall; but He is
the Second Man, for though millions
intervened between Adam and Himself, He was a man of a new kind, the introducer of a fresh family, the creator of a new type of humanity. Both Heads of the race have a vast following;
for to Adam belonged the power of generation, and to Christ belongs the power
of regeneration; and made one as we are with the First Man by ordinary birth,
so we are made one with the Second Man by the second birth. “As is the earthy,
such are they also that are earthy” – Adam’s countless unregenerate breed; “and
as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly” - all in whom, after a divine birth,
the image of Adam is fading and melting into the image of Christ.
And for both types of men the Incarnation has emptied every
tomb. “For since by man came death” - since:
because of the right balance of things; since death was a human product -“ by MAN came also the
resurrection of the dead” or more exactly, the resurrection of dead men
(Ellicott): not by a man, in each case,
though that is true - but – “by man”: death and resurrection are both human
products. Taken as a race, and not as
individuals, death passed on all men for the act of Adam: so also, taken as a
race, and not as individuals, resurrection passes upon all men for the act of
Christ. When God breathed into man’s
nostrils the breath of life, man became a
living soul - that is, simply alive; but when He brought up Christ from the
grave, the act made all men ultimately imperishable. This puts enormous dignity upon
humanity. Conceivably, God by some kind
of external machinery could have saved men, while so humanity was left degraded
and despicable: far more wonderful truth, He has, so to speak, saved humanity from
within - it is not a salvation for man merely, but it is a salvation by man; so lifting
manhood on to the very Throne of Heaven.
Humanity is the common platform on which the first Adam and the Last
stand together; the one dissolving
humanity into dust and death; the other re-knitting humanity into spirit, soul,
and body restored for ever. There
is not a grave which is not a human product; and there will never be an emptied
grave which is not equally a human product: a Man has glorified God as no other
being in the universe has; a man filled all graves, and another Man, by the
same solidarity with the race, destroys all graves for ever.
The Apostle now re-states the amazing truth so that it may not
be missed. “For
as in Adam all die” - the
total race condemned to death in the fountain of their blood – “SO ALSO” - with an identical universality – “shall all be made alive” - in an exact antithesis to the death;
that is, restored in physical resurrection. The truth here skirts dangerous
precipices; but it is all the more precious and vital for that - a lamp shining
in a dark place. The ‘resurrection’ here is not spiritual resurrection, for
our Lord never rose out of spiritual death: He rose out of the grave, and it is
out of the grave that He lifts the whole of humanity. Adam dug a grave for every one of us: for
every one of us Christ will burst that grave.* And this is because He has
become so organically one with the race, so really human, that He has become
identified with our common fate. As
little as the sun could move from its place without disintegrating, or
reintegrating, the whole solar system; so little could the Eternal Christ
descend from heaven to become man without affecting as profoundly our entire
humanity: so organically is He one with the human, so fathomless a fact is the
Incarnation, so effectual is it in counterworking the entrance of death, that
all humanity sprang like one man from the grave - however the fact may be
delayed - when the Syrian stone was rolled away. The Power that revives all, stood
self-revived: being a self-resurrection, it stands alone as a monument of the
inherent power of life: in words as astounding as ever fell even from the lips
of the Son of God – “I AM RESURRECTION, and life” (John 11:
25); a Resurrection which, entering humanity, bursts every grave. For “by man came the
resurrection of the dead”: it is not by the regenerating Deity, but by
the resurrecting Humanity, that all mankind, by physical revitalising, is made
immortal: eternal Heaven and eternal Hell lie beyond each emptied grave, but
every grave will be emptied. “O DEATH, I WILL BE THY PLAGUES; O GRAVE, I WILL BE THY
DESTRUCTION” (Hosea 13: 14).
[* So far from general resurrection proving Universalism, it
is one of the most appalling disproofs to be found in the whole range of
revelation; for it is the resurrection of the body, made inevitable by the Incarnation, which renders the human
personality immortal in Gehenna. Death
itself is to be destroyed for the whole race, and with it all possibility of
cessation of existence.]
So the Apostle now summarises all resurrections that will ever
be: “the whole resurrection of the human race is
represented as one prolonged fact, of which the resurrection of Christ is the
first beginning” (Dean Stanley).
“But” - lest any should think that resurrection
is simultaneous – “each” - of all the vast
hordes of mankind – “in his own order” - in his own band or class (Ellicott):
“Christ the, firstfruits” - Christ is, to
all humanity, what the first ripe ear, gathered by the hand, is to the whole
harvest; and the sun which ripened the first lonely ear has warmth and life to
quicken the vastest wheatfield; “then they that are
Christ’s at His coming” - in His Parousia; a Parousia which lasts at
least three and a half years, and during which different batches of saints are
reaped; for some escape the Tribulation by rapture (Revelation
7: 9), while, years after, martyrs under Antichrist are seen standing on
the Crystal Sea (Revelation 15: 2): “then cometh the end” - of resurrection, when the Millennial Kingdom over, all the
graves of the wicked are destroyed before the Great White Throne. “The last enemy that shall be, destroyed”
- for all mankind – “is DEATH.” “Marvel not at this:
for the hour cometh, in which all that are in the graves shall hear His voice,
and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life;
and they that have done evil” - for our Lord’s Voice ultimately empties
all graves - “unto the resurrection of judgment”
(John 5: 28). So we stand at last upon the
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