THE EMPTY GRAVE

By George W. McCree

            “Come, see the place where the Lord lay” (Matt. 28:6).

            The sublime tragedy of Calvary has been finished. Jesus has died on the cross for the sins of men.

            But we are not now in search of the Cross. Where He was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new sepulcher, wherein was never man yet laid. The first garden became the grave of man’s glory. There sin entered into the world and death by sin. The cedars and roses and lilies of Eden witnessed the moral entombment of the first Adam. But in this garden there may be found the new life through the second Adam, the Lord from Heaven.

            The grave is empty! The Lord said: “How that He must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders, and be raised again the third day.”

          But, if Jesus left His grave empty, He did not leave Himself without witness. “He showed Himself alive after His passion by many infallible proofs,” etc.

            He was with them “forty days.” What opportunities they had of knowing that it was “the same Jesus” who “died and rose again.”

            From this empty grave of Jesus there springs the Gospel of immortality. Coming to Jesus is coming to immortality. Eternal life is not in me; it is the gift of God through Jesus Christ. It is a pearl of great price, which we are to seek. It is a golden door at which we are to knock.

            As the flowers wait for the spring, and the yellow corn waits for he summer, and the stars wait for the morning, and as Lazarus waited in sweet silence for the voice of Jesus to awake him out of sleep, so do the blessed dead wait for the resurrection.

            Our friends, then, are not lost to us, although we buried them out of our sight; no, they are safe, restful, bright, immortal, in the Paradise of God.

            The fact that Jesus was laid in the midst of a garden, in the midst of tender grass, and flowers, and herbs, and trees, and birds, should teach us something as to the burial of the dead.

            Let this be to us a place of penitence, of faith in our risen Lord, of much praise and fervent prayer. “Come, see the place where the Lord lay,” and muse on the greatness of His love, the purity of His life, the atonement for sin made by His death, and the immorality secured by His resurrection.

            Are you serving and waiting for Jesus? Do you answer---no? Alas, my friend, alas, for thy soul---thy future lot. No cross---no crown; no Christ---no Heaven.

            Come to the Lord Jesus, and you shall go home saying: “The Lord hath risen indeed, and hath appeared unto me.” May that glorious vision be ours.

            (The Pulpit Treasury, Sept. 1886).