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The sermon teaches that people may regularly attend worship, occupy religious office, or possess public honor while remaining spiritually wicked and unconverted. Death exposes the vanity of such outward religion and reveals whether a life has produced the fruit of holiness and service to God. Sin, pride, lust, and self-righteousness are presented as choices that lead toward damnation, while true hope is found in Jesus Christ. Hearers are therefore urged to repent before judgment and seek to be buried with the righteous.
Theological center: True salvation is not established by religious appearance but by genuine faith in Christ producing holiness and lasting spiritual fruit.
Applications: Examine your spiritual reality · Live to serve God faithfully · Turn from sin to Christ · Consider death and judgment
Primary texts: Ecclesiastes 8:10 · Acts 8:2
“And so I saw the wicked buried, who had come and gone from the place of the holy, and they were forgotten in the city where they had so done: this is also vanity.” Ecclesiastes 8:10 IT is quite certain that there are immense benefits attending our present mode of burial in extra mural cemeteries. It was high time that the dead should be removed from the midst of the living—that we should not worship in the midst of corpses and sit in the Lord’s house on the Sabbath, breathing the noxious effluvia of decaying bodies. But when we have said this, we must remember that there are some advantages which we have lost by the removal of the dead, and more especially by the wholesale mode of burial which now seems very likely to become general. We are not so often met by the array of dead. In the midst of our crowded cities, we sometimes see the sable hearse bearing the relics of men to their last homes, but the funeral ceremonies are now mostly confined to those sweet sleeping places beyond our walks, where rest the bodies of those who are very dear to us. Now I believe the sight of a funeral is a very healthful thing for the soul. Whatever harm may come to the body by walking through the vault and the catacomb, the soul can there find much food for contemplation and much excitement for thought. In the great villages where some of us were wont to dwell, we remember, how when the funeral came now and then, the tolling of the bell preached to all the villagers a better sermon than they had heard in the church for many a day. And we recollect how as children, we used to cluster around the grave and look at that which was not so frequent an occurrence in the midst of a rare and sparse population. And we remember the solemn thoughts which used to arise even in our young hearts when we heard the words uttered, “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” The solemn falling of the few grains of ashes upon the coffin lid was the sowing of good seed in our hearts. And afterwards, when we have in our childish play climbed over those nettle-bound graves and seated ourselves upon those moss-grown tombstones, we have had many a lesson preached to us by the dull, cold tongue of death—more eloquent than anything we have heard from the lip of living man and more likely to abide with us in after years. But now we see little of death. We have fulfilled Abraham’s wish beyond what he desired—we “bury the dead out of our sight.” It is rarely that we see them, and a stranger passing through our streets might say, “Do these live always? for I see no funerals amongst the millions of…