The subject of "life" is one which needs much care I in its consideration, and this on various accounts. No one can define life, even natural life. The acutest minds have either declared the impossibility of it, or done what they could to demonstrate this by their own failure. Its admitted different applications increase the difficulty. And when to this is added the use of terms hardly accurate, and at least not well understood by those who use them, it will be perceived that the need of care is abundantly evident.

I propose now only a very brief inquiry into the meaning of terms which are not, indeed, found in Scripture at all, but which are in frequent use among many students of Scripture, to express truth which I have no doubt it teaches, and truth which is important also, though it may be, and is, in fact, strange to many Christians. Naturally, our first endeavor will be to understand the statements of the Word itself, and then we shall have the truth which these terms are intended to express, and thus ability to see what, if they are rightly to be used, must be conveyed by them, and to guard against confusion and abuse.

The first scriptural statement is "that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son" (i Jno. 5:ii). It is the "divine nature" of the child of God, by virtue of which he is that:a real communication to the soul, "that which is born of the Spirit" being "spirit" (Jno. 3:6) as that which is born of the flesh is flesh.

But this new birth is also spoken of as quickening from the dead (Eph. 2:5), and a quickening together with Christ. Thus our life is connected, in its beginning, with Christ being quickened from the dead. Our quickening is identified with His, plainly because our life is in Him, and that He is the " last Adam "-head of the new race of men.

The Lord's words unite with this :" I am the resurrection and the life :he that believeth on Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live ; and he who liveth and believeth on Me shall never die" (Jno. 11:25, 26). It is plain that the Lord lays stress here not upon His being the life only, but the resurrection also, and that the resurrection is a present power for the life. So He says, not life and in due time resurrection, but resurrection and so life. And to this agrees the distinction made between the present and the past. He who had believed and died should live again; the power of death should yet be broken for him. In the present time, Christ having come as resurrection, there was no death for the believer on Him to meet:"he that liveth and believeth on Me shall never die." The life he gives is thus resurrection-life, the power of death left broken behind it.

Again, in the twelfth chapter He says, " Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." Here life for us springs out of the Lord's death :we are the fruit in resurrection, quickened with Him.

The scriptural basis of the term "resurrection-life" is evident, then.

But here is the difficulty. If the life we receive is divine life-life that was in Him before ever He came upon earth, or took up human life at all,-how could this divine life be resurrection-life as well ? It surely was not divine life that the Lord gave up on the cross, but His human life. It was this also He took up again in resurrection. Eternal life could know no interruption, nor the divine nature die. How, then, do we receive resurrection-life?

Confusion is in the minds of many upon this point; and it has led, I doubt not, to the mistake that some are making as to the Old-Testament saints not possessing eternal life. Does not eternal life begin for us with Christ's quickening from the dead ? Is it not resurrection-life ? How, then, could the Old-Testament saints possess it ? Then if it be resurrection-life, how can you distinguish it from the human life of " the Man Christ Jesus " ? And then, still more plainly, is not a communication of life to those living before impossible?

We have only to make some plain distinctions, and the confusion will begin to clear. In the first place, eternal life in its very nature admits of no cessation or interruption; neither death nor resurrection can be strictly predicated of it. Nay, the life strictly eternal-that is, divine life-knows no beginning any more than end. It begins for us, of course; we. are brought, one after another, into the participation of it. The life in itself never began, and that is the sense in which it is called "eternal life."

It was, of course, His human life that the Lord laid down, and which He took again in a new condition. In this He was alone; it is not this which He has communicated to us, although by and by we shall be in the image of the heavenly, our bodies change into the likeness of His glorious body (Phil. 3:21). " We shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is" (i Jno. 3:2). This involves no communication to us of His human life, or reception of His heavenly humanity,-a thing which ritualism dreams of being effected by sacraments, and to which some who are by no means ritualists seem to be getting back. His own resurrection-life we have not received.

The life communicated to us is eternal life, and this from the "last Adam" who "is a quickening spirit" (i Cor. 15:45). But by it we are children of God. It is never said "of Christ," but of the Father, and thus distinctly it is intimated what is the nature of the life received. "That which is born of the Spirit is spirit."

But how, then, is it resurrection-life ?

Only in this way, that, as communicated to us now by One who has been in death, and come up for us out of it, the virtue of this is connected with the reception of life. If He was "raised again for our justification" (Rom. 4:25), we, with the life received, have "justification of life" (chap. 5:18). We are not only children of God; we have an acknowledged right to the place of children. We have the "adoption," the sons' position, and so can have the "Spirit of adoption." These are the immense and special privileges of believers of the present day.

It is not that the life is higher or other than that which those born of God have possessed from the beginning. What can be higher than divine life ? " Except any one be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God;" and if born again, "that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." It must be either denied that Old-Testament saints were born again, or acknowledged that they had the divine " spirit "-nature, which is "eternal life."

It has been asked, " How, then, could the Lord say, 'Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone,' if in fact there were already multitudes of those who had received this life ?" To this it seems easy to answer that He could have said as well, " Except the Son of Man be lifted up, no man can be saved," while yet myriads had been saved before He said it. But only through His being lifted up, though it might be many generations before it. The stream of blessing flows backward as well as forward from the cross; and that is all such texts as this insist on.

And we are " quickened together with Christ," not because we are quickened with the life which He took back again from the dead, but because His death (which resurrection demonstrates as accepted for us) is that out of which alone comes to us this unspeakable blessing of a life by which we pass from under judgment into the place and relationship of children with the Father-sons of the living God.