We have certainties for life, in the matter of protection, guidance, supply of all necessity, and the like, treasured and garnered in Jesus Christ.  For He not only confirms, but fulfils, the promises which God has made.  If we have that dear Lord for our very own, and He belongs to us as He does belong to them who love Him and trust Him, then in Him we have in actual possession these promises, how many soever they be, which are given by God’s other words.

Christ is Protean, and becomes everything to each man that each man requires.  He is, as it were, ‘a box where sweets compacted lie.’  ’In Him are hid all the treasures,’ not only of wisdom and knowledge, but of divine gifts, and we have but to go to Him in order to have that which at each moment as it emerges, we most require.  As in some of those sunny islands of the Southern Pacific, one tree supplies the people with all that they need for their simple wants, fruit for their food, leaves for their houses, staves, thread, needles, clothing, drink, everything—­so Jesus Christ, this Tree of Life, is Himself the sum of all the promises, and, having Him, we have everything that we need.

And, lastly, in Christ we have the divine certainties as to the Future over which, apart from Him, lie cloud and darkness.  As I said about the revelation of the heart of God, so I say about the revelation of a future life—­a verbal revelation is not enough.  We have enough of arguments; what we want is facts.  We have enough of man’s peradventures about a future life, enough of evidence more or less valid to show that it is ‘probable,’ or ‘not inconceivable,’ or ‘more likely than not,’ and so on and so on.  What we want is that somebody shall cross the gulf and come back again, and so we get in the Resurrection of Christ the one fact on which men may safely rest their convictions of immortality, and I do not think that there is a second anywhere.  On it alone, as I believe, hinges the whole answer to the question—­’If a man die, shall he live again?’ This generation is brought, in my reading of it, right up to this alternative—­Christ’s Resurrection,—­or we die like the brutes that perish.  ‘All the promises of God in Him are yea.’

II.  And now a word as to the second portion of my text—­viz. man’s certitudes, which answer to God’s certainties.

The latter are in Christ, the former are through Christ.  Now it is clear that the only fitting attitude for professing Christians in reference to these certainties of God is the attitude of unhesitating affirmation and joyful assent.  Certitude is the fitting response to certainty.