Dear Friends,
When you read the subject line of today’s attached devotional, you might
have winced! Death is the last enemy. How can we look to it for
blessing? Read and rejoice!

Because of Calvary,
John Janney

• Revelation 5:9 (ESV)

  9 And they sang a new song, saying,

  “Worthy are you to take the scroll
  and to open its seals,
  for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God
  from every tribe and language and people and nation,

“When Jesus died at Calvary, the headquarters of death became the nursery of life. The place of a skull, like the prophet’s valley of dry bones, gave birth to an exceeding great army of living men…. And even when the end comes, and death is swallowed up of victory, and death and hell are cast into the lake of fire, there will abide with the glorified a lively sense of the infinite blessing that came to them from God through the repulsive channel of death, finding its highest expression in that anthem of the redeemed — ‘THOU WAST SLAIN, AND HAST REDEEMED US TO GOD BY THY BLOOD.’” [William Garden Blaikie, “The Book of Joshua,” The Expositor’s Bible I, (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1903), p. 644]