Death Improved To Our Advantage. Part I

Adapted from a Sermon By

Isaac Watts

Whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours. 1 Cor 3:22

This morning we return to Isaac Watt’s exposition of 1 Corinthians 3:22 in which he brings out how even death is improved to the believers advantage.

Whether … life or death … all are yours.

The main thing which the apostle has in view in these verses, is to give us a picture of the glory and grandeur, the treasures and possessions that every believer is a partaker of, by virtue of his interest in Christ; and to show, that whatever persons or affairs a Christian has to do with in the natural, the civil, and the religious life, they will all turn to his benefit some way or other. All the circumstances that surround him while he continues here in this world, and even his departure out of it too, will work for his good.

And death is numbered among his possessions as well as life. Death may be terrible to flesh and blood, for it is a curse in its original nature and design, and sinners will find and feel the curse of it; but it is transformed into a blessing to the saints by the abounding grace of the gospel.

Now it is a Christian's own death that the inspired writer seems mainly and most particularly to address and intend in this verse. But since death in all its circumstances and connections, in all the extent of its dominion, and with all its power, is under the sovereign management of God our heavenly Father; it is forced to serve his kind and gracious purposes to his own people, in all its forms and appearances. And so, for this reason, it should not be inconsistent with the apostle's great and general design, if we take the dreadful name of death in its widest and most formidable extent of power, and with relation to all its victories; and show how, even in this largest sense, it is appointed to serve the glory of God, and the kingdom of Christ, and by the grace of the new covenant, it is made useful and beneficial to every true Christian; on this account, therefore, it may be numbered amongst his possessions. Death is yours.

With this view we will run through these following five general headings, and expand on each of them, in a few particulars, to the benefit of Christians, in line with the design of our text.—Death is made useful to a saint, when we consider it,

I. As reigning over all mankind in general.

II. As seizing on impenitent and unpardoned sinners.

III. As taking captive the bodies of the saints.

IV. As depriving us of our dear relations and kindred. And,

V. As bringing our own bodies down to the dust.

Now the death of Christ may well have been put at the head of this list, for his death is not only the most eminent blessing to every Christian, but it is also the price that purchased all other blessings, in time and in eternity. It is the death of Christ that may be called the Christian’s richest treasure, for it purchases for him all the treasures of grace and glory. It is the fruit of his death, that all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future. It is his death that gives truth and virtue to the words of our text, and to all the rich and spreading comments upon it, that faith can make here on earth, and that our souls will taste and enjoy in heaven.

Yet when we consider that the death of Christ is more directly expressed in many other Scriptures, and does not seem at all to have been the intent of the apostle Paul in this text; and given what a vast and abundant subject we would be entering into to recount the riches of blessing that are derived from this source, we will rather reserve that subject for another time.

We go on therefore according to the proposed order, to treat of the various advantages to be derived from this proposition, Death is yours.

I. First, The death of mankind in general will be made profitable to believers.

The death of all the sons and daughters of Adam, will promote the improvement of the children of God in knowledge, grace, and holiness; since it instructs them in three most useful lessons.

1. It gives them a most vivid and powerful lesson on the vanity of man. A burying-place filled with tombs is a vivid illustration of human frailty: It repeats the sad lesson on every page. Each little grave-stone becomes a preacher of vanity to the living, even in the profound silence of the dead. This is the doctrine of every rising burial mound, this is the universal theme: And every stately monument there, strikes the beholder with the same mortifying truth; though perhaps it swells with many lofty titles and images of honour. And this lesson of vanity stands written still there in clear and indelible characters, though the name of the dead, and all their praises, be quite worn out. Dust and ashes, even without an inscription, and without a monument, are silent but powerful teachers.

Sadly! what is man in his best condition! A poor and mortal dying creature! When we read the histories of past ages and foreign nations, and find that those whole nations and ages are all dead, and mingled with the dust, and even those who once made a great stir and impression in this world, are now but an empty name, we cry out, "What vain creatures we are!" When we behold our neighbours and our acquaintance on the right hand, and on the left, dropping away all round us; when we see one following another yearly down to the silent grave, it is a very natural and just reflection, "Alas, how frail is man!" When we behold the young, the healthy, the strong, the rich, and the powerful, together with the poor, the feeble, and the destitute, all yielding to the common law of death, and turning into earth and dust, we have good reason to cry out, "What a vain empty thing is human nature, even the best of it: A piece of pretty decaying clay: These bodies of ours are fine and curious engines, but they are made of dust, and to dust they return again."

This is the common state, situation, and view of things in every age, and in every generation. But when we fix our thoughts on some special seasons or causes of mortality, when we think of a famine or calamity that have swept away thousands in a few days, that emptied whole streets in a night or two, and laid towns or cities desolate; when we read of wars and battles that have overspread the mountains with slaughter, and covered vast plains with human remains; when we hear of storms at sea that have drowned many hundreds at once, with perhaps some thousands sinking down to death, then we are more feelingly penetrated with a sense of our vanity; then we sigh and groan aloud, and break out into this mournful language, O Lord! For what vanity you have created all the children of man! Psalm 89, 47. How awful is your government! How terrible are your judgments, Almighty Sovereign of life and death! There are many writings of the saints of old in this vein: godly meditations drawing many serious and moving inferences from meditations on death such as,

(1.) "Will man compare himself with God? Mortal man dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, who are crushed like the moth! Can a man be pure before his Maker?” Job 4. 17-19. Again:

(2.) "What little reason have we to be proud and boastful! Poor dying creatures, who start up for a few hours, but can never be sure of tomorrow! Today we swell and look big among men, tomorrow we are reduced to food for worms. Our days are a few handbreadths, and our lifetime is as nothing before God;" Psalm 39. 5. Again:

(3.) "How vain and fruitless a thing is it to put our trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation! When his breath departs, he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish”; Psalm 146. 3, 4. Man is too weak a thing to encourage or support our confidence. And:

(4.) What a necessary duty is it then to fix our constant dependence upon God, even in all the common affairs of life! Let us not say therefore, that ”today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit—… you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that”; James 4. 13-15. And it is the same inference that holy David makes more than once when surveying the mortality of man, in the Psalms just before cited, Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in you. Psalm 39. 7. Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God, who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, who keeps faith forever; Psalm 46. 5, 6. The Lord is an everlasting friend, he lives when creatures die, and fulfils his word of truth, when the words of rulers perish with their breath.

2. The death of mankind in general shows us the dreadful evil and results of sin. It describes to us the awful holiness and terrible Majesty of God; and it teaches us what a sublime value he puts upon his own law, and how fearfully he avenges the breaking of it. We join these three things together, because they are so closely connected in the divine plans.

(1.) Firstly, the universal death of mankind shows us, what a dreadful and heinous evil there is in sin, and what wide destruction it has deserved. Sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned; Rom. 5. 12. For the wages of sin is death; Rom. 6. 23. Man was made innocent, and while he continued in obedience, he was immortal: Transgression and death came in together: A staggering pair! Two dreadful names, laden with trouble and ruin to human nature. When we see the dying agonies of poor mankind, our fellow-creatures, our brethren in flesh and blood, let us remember the sin of our common father, that first subjected him and all his posterity to death; and let us reflect upon the dreadful evil that is contained in the nature of every sin; for it deserves death at the hand of God, Sadly! how often has the best of us deserved to die, for our transgressions have been multiplied without number.

(2.) In the second place, the death of all mankind solemnly shows the terrible Majesty of God, and the justice that accompanies his government. He will not pass by the guilt of his rebellious creatures without a due resentment of their crimes. And even though he pardons the sins of his own people, so as to secure them from eternal vengeance, yet they must pass through death, that they may learn what an evil and bitter thing it is to have offended their Maker and their God.

When we see a cemetery filled with endless rows of tombstones, the ruins of a parish or a spacious town, and the dust of many generations, we naturally cry out, as in Deut. 29. 24. Why has the LORD done thus to this land? What caused the heat of this great anger? The next verse provides an answer; surely, every man may answer himself, It is because they abandoned the covenant of the LORD; they have forsaken his covenant of life, and sinned against him. Those dreadful words, In the day that you eat of it you shall surely die, (Gen 2. 17) have been being put into execution for over six thousand years, and in all this his anger has not turned away, and his hand is stretched out still; Isaiah 5. 25. the vengeance of the Lord is not yet fully executed according to the just merit of sin. Though saints are saved from the dismal consequences of death, yet God would not rescue them from dying, that they might always remember what sin deserved. And in this way the death of all mankind reveals to us the awful Majesty of God our Maker, who will not be affronted by his creatures, without terrible resentment; he is a holy and a jealous God.

(3.) It teaches us the high value that God has for his own law, that he will rather crush a whole creation to pieces, than allow his holy law to be insulted and broken, without some vindication of its honour. The race of Adam is doomed to death, for the sake of sin against this law, and mortality and a curse are spread over this lower world. Let us accustom our thoughts to such reflections as these, that we may ever keep our souls in awe of the Majesty of God, and dread the thoughts of breaking his law, which he values above a whole world of men. And may sin become the most hateful object in our eyes; it is this that has laid cities desolate, and fills the graves; it is this that has corrupted and destroyed our natures; it has turned millions of strong and well-formed bodies into dust: It has ruined the most beautiful part of God's lower creation, and is sending thousands every day to an endless hell. It is sin that has filled our nature with diseases, and sown the poisonous seeds of mortality and death, in every son and daughter of Adam; a malignant and fatal poison, that has destroyed all the nations on earth, and buried them underground, heaps upon heaps, one after the other!

But we now go on to another distinct lesson, that the death of all mankind teaches us.

3. It informs us, in a very sensible and moving way, that we ourselves must soon die, and awakens the soul to actual preparation for its departure. Heb. 9. 27. It is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment; Joshua and David, saints and kings, tell us, they go the way of all the earth: The grave is the house appointed for all the living; Job 30. 23. When we behold one after another, made of the same flesh and blood as we are, going down to the dust in a long continual succession, we have a solemn warning, that we must soon follow: There is no ransom in this case, no hope of safety, no door of escape, and, as Solomon expresses it, there is no discharge in this war; Eccl. 8. 8

A true Christian takes notice of this with a spirit of pious awe; and when he is ready to grow drowsy and secure, the sight of a funeral, or a grave, will rouse him out of his sleepy state, and awaken religion into life again: When he hears of a neighbour's death, he asks his own soul, "Are you ready? For the next summons may come to call you away into the world of spirits, to stand before God the Judge of all."

And so a child of God reaps some advantage by the spreading empire of death over all mankind; he makes a sacred improvement of the terrible waste that the king of terrors has made over all the earth: He learns the vanity and emptiness of man in his best condition: He grows humble and dependant on the eternal God: He reads the dreadful evil of sin on every tombstone: The death of every man calls him aloud to prepare for his own, and to be in actual readiness for his entrance into the invisible world. Happy souls, who pay attention to this warning, and stand ever prepared!

But we now go on to the next general theme which was proposed:

II. Secondly, As the death of mankind in general, gives these divine lessons to a saint, so the death of impenitent sinners, which has something very terrible in it, may be turned to the advantage and profit of believers, in these four ways:

1. If we are true Christians, and persecuted and injured here on earth, then the death of the wicked delivers us from our enemies, and releases us from the wrath of our oppressors. In the grave the wicked cease from troubling, as well as the weary are at rest; Job 3. 17.

Look back around three thousand years, and see the children of Israel on the banks of the Red-sea, rejoicing in the Lord their deliverer, when an army of Egyptian bodies floated on the waters, or were cast up in heaps on the shore: These were the cruel oppressors of the people of God: They were drowned in the evening, and the morning light revealed the devastation that death had made, and the salvation it brought about for Israel, in the 14th and 15th chapters of Exodus.

See the whole city of Jerusalem, and Hezekiah at the head of them, triumphing in the Lord, when he sent the angel of death, and destroyed the besiegers: A hundred and eighty-five thousand Assyrians lay dead on the border of the city; Isaiah 37. 36. By awesome deeds … with righteousness God answered the prayer of his saints; Psalm 65. 5.

And at the death of Herod, the father and mother of our blessed Lord were glad, for they returned from their exile; they came from the land of Egypt, and dwelt in their own land again; and the child Jesus was saved from the murderous plans of that cruel man; Matt. 2. 19.

Such examples of advantage which the saints receive from the death of men of violence, their impious and bloody enemies, are frequent in sacred history: Throughout history monarchs of the earth have been turned down to their graves, one year after another, and the churches of God, in many nations, have found rest and deliverance.

2. The death of impenitent sinners has often been the happy occasion of the conversion of a saint. There is many a holy soul, now in heaven, that was first awakened to escape from the wrath to come, by the death of some of his wicked companions in his younger years. When a snare falls suddenly, and seizes a little bird or two of the flock, the rest take wing toward heaven, and fly for safety. And happy are those souls who take the terrible warning, who fly to the sacred refuge, and lay hold on offered grace.

When a vile wretch is seized in the midst of his companions and his sins, and sent down to hell and destruction in a moment, the very gates of hell seem to open before our faces, to receive the rebels; such a spectacle fills the hearts of those that are near him with amazement and terror, and has often been the first means of sending them to the throne of grace, and, by degrees, to the throne of heaven.

The story of Peter Valdo is a notable example of this. He was a rich merchant, of Lyons in France, but had no sense of inward religion or true piety. When in the midst of feasting and merrymaking, he saw one of his companions struck with sudden death, he was awakened to serious thoughts of eternity: And so he applied himself to study the Scriptures, and discover the errors of the Catholic church; he acquainted his friends with them, and instructed the poor, who were continual recipients of his generosity and help. And in this way the Waldensian movement began whose devotees, though severely persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church, sought to follow Christ in poverty and simplicity accepting the Bible as the sole authority of all doctrine.

3. The death of the wicked gives the children of God glorious matter for praise to his distinguishing grace. When they see or hear of a hardened and impenitent sinner, cut off in his guilt and obstinacy, and in the pursuit of his lusts, the holy soul cries out with thankfulness and zeal, "Glory be to that grace which has made the difference between him and me!"

And this is still more remarkable, when a sinner dies with all the terrors of God upon him, when the sting of death enters into his heart, and sharpens all his last agonies, when conscience is awakened with all its horrors, and the soul is plunging with its eyes open into a gulf of everlasting misery. How deeply does this affect the heart of a true Christian! He stands and wonders, and adores that rich mercy that has snatched him as a brand out of the fire. "What am I," he says, " by nature more than another, that God should have called me by his grace, and given me repentance to life, while this poor wretch continued obstinate and impenitent?

We were both sons of Adam the sinner, alienated from the life of God, and enemies to all that is holy: We were both favoured with the means of grace, and sat under the ministry of the same gospel. Who, or what am I better than my neighbour, that God should powerfully incline my heart to accept the offered salvation! That he should have prepared me as a vessel of mercy, to be filled with glory, while my old companion has now made himself a complete vessel of wrath, and fitted himself for swift destruction; Romans 9. 22, 23.

By nature I was a child of wrath, no less than he was, a rebel, and a vile transgressor, without God, without Christ, and without hope: And why was I not seized by divine justice, in those days of my rebellion, and made a sacrifice to the indignation of God? What merit was there in me, that I should be spared, while my companion suffered under swift vengeance? Let the freedom and riches of grace be adored forever: It was rich and sovereign grace that spared me: And now, through the abounding mercy of God, I hope I have fled to lay hold on the refuge set before me: my heart is, in some measure, sanctified; my nature renewed, and my sins pardoned. Blessed be the Lord who has given me refuge in his death, while the wicked are overthrown through their wickedness, driven far away from hope and heaven;" Prov. 14. 32.

4. The death of impenitent sinners does another service also for the saints, in that it effectively excites their pity and their prayers for the living.

It awakens the exercise of pious charity for the souls of their friends, that are yet in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity. Acts 8. 23. A true Christian, that has tasted of the grace of God, can hardly be supposed to see his impenitent neighbour seized with sudden death, and sent away to darkness, without it deeply affecting him, and constrains him to speak a word to others in the same danger, and to lift up a cry to God upon their account for grace and salvation.

Surely that Christian is not in a right state of mind, who can see or hear of impenitent and guilty souls seized away from his neighbourhood or his acquaintance, and plunging into eternity with horror and despair, and yet have no compassion awakened in him, no impulse of pity for those of his acquaintance that are involved in the same iniquities, and are yet in the land of the living, and on this side hell. Such an awful providence is like a warning-word which heaven puts into our mouths, that we may echo it with solemn horror round the neighbourhood, and try to rouse senseless sinners from their dangerous and fatal lethargy.

And so we see how even death works to the advantage of the children of God.

Whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours.