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| What is the First Resurrection, and What the Second.
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Chapter 6.—What is the First
Resurrection, and What the Second.
After that He adds the words,
“Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is,
when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that
hear shall live. For as the Father hath life in Himself; so hath
He given to the Son to have life in Himself.”1334
As yet He does not speak of the
second resurrection, that is, the resurrection of the body, which
shall be in the end, but of the first, which now is. It is for
the sake of making this distinction that He says, “The hour is
coming, and now is.” Now this resurrection regards not the
body, but the soul. For souls, too, have a death of their own in
wickedness and sins, whereby they are the dead of whom the same
lips say, “Suffer the dead to bury their dead,”1335
—that is,
let those who are dead in soul bury them that are dead in body.
It is of these dead, then—the dead in ungodliness and
wickedness—that He says, “The hour is coming, and now is, when
the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that hear
shall live.” “They that hear,” that is, they who obey,
believe, and persevere to the end. Here no difference is made
between the good and the bad. For it is good for all men to hear
His voice and live, by passing to the life of godliness from the
death of ungodliness. Of this death the Apostle Paul says,
“Therefore all are dead, and He died for all, that they which
live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him which
died for them and rose again.”1336
Thus all, without one exception,
were dead in sins, whether original or voluntary sins, sins of
ignorance, or sins committed against knowledge; and for all the
dead there died the one only person who lived, that is, who had no
sin whatever, in order that they who live by the remission of their
sins should live, not to themselves, but to Him who died for all,
for our sins, and rose again for our justification, that we,
believing in Him who justifies the ungodly, and being justified
from ungodliness or quickened from death, may be able to attain to
the first resurrection which now is. For in this first
resurrection none have a part save those who shall be eternally
blessed; but in the second, of which He goes on to speak, all, as
we shall learn, have a part, both the blessed and the wretched.
The one is the resurrection of mercy, the other of judgment. And
therefore it is written in the psalm, “I will sing of mercy and
of judgment: unto Thee, O Lord, will I sing.”1337
And of this judgment He went on to
say, “And hath given Him authority to execute judgment also,
because He is the Son of man.” Here He shows that He will come
to judge in that flesh in which He had come to be judged. For it
is to show this He says, “because He is the Son of man.” And
then follow the words for our purpose: “Marvel not at this:
for the hour is coming, in the 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,
unto the resurrection of judgment.”1338
This judgment He uses here in
the same sense as a little before, when He says, “He that heareth
my word, and believeth on Him that sent me, hath everlasting life,
and shall not come into judgment, but is passed from death
to life;” i.e., by having a part in the first
resurrection, by which a transition from death to life is made in
this present time, he shall not come into damnation, which He
mentions by the name of judgment, as also in the place where He
says, “but they that have done evil unto the resurrection of
judgment,” i.e., of damnation. He, therefore, who would
not be damned in the second resurrection, let him rise in the
first. For “the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall
hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that hear shall live,”
i.e., shall not come into damnation, which is called the
second death; into which death, after the second or bodily
resurrection, they shall be
hurled who do not rise in the
first or spiritual resurrection. For “the hour is coming”
(but here He does not say, “and now is,” because it shall come
in the end of the world in the last and greatest judgment of God)
“when all that are in the graves shall hear His voice and shall
come forth.” He does not say, as in the first resurrection,
“And they that Hear shall live.” For all shall not live, at
least with such life as ought alone to be called life because it
alone is blessed. For some kind of life they must have in order
to hear, and come forth from the graves in their rising bodies.
And why all shall not live He teaches in the words that follow:
“They that have done good, to the resurrection of
life,”—these are they who shall live; “but they that have
done evil, to the resurrection of judgment,”—these are they who
shall not live, for they shall die in the second death. They have
done evil because their life has been evil; and their life has been
evil because it has not been renewed in the first or spiritual
resurrection which now is, or because they have not persevered to
the end in their renewed life. As, then, there are two
regenerations, of which I have already made mention,—the one
according to faith, and which takes place in the present life by
means of baptism; the other according to the flesh, and which shall
be accomplished in its incorruption and immortality by means of the
great and final judgment,—so are there also two
resurrections,—the one the first and spiritual resurrection,
which has place in this life, and preserves us from coming into the
second death; the other the second, which does not occur now, but
in the end of the world, and which is of the body, not of the soul,
and which by the last judgment shall dismiss some into the second
death, others into that life which has no death.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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