Resurrection Is Unbelievable

It’s clear from Paul’s teaching in this letter that some people were teaching that resurrection is impossible. They said that there could be no such thing as resurrection – which is perfectly true from a human point of view! Even though medical science has made great advances (the average life expectancy in the UK is now 81, compared to 68 years in 1950), we still cannot raise anyone from the dead. But if we factor God into the equation, then nothing is impossible. God is able to do immeasurably more than all we imagine or think. (Eph 3:20) Nothing is too hard for Him. (Jer 32:17) God ‘gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not.’ (Rom 4:17) Easter demonstrates to us the reality that resurrection is definitely possible if God is in on the action!

Resurrection Is Necessary to Free Us From Sin

The Bible teaches us that death has come as the result of sin (Rom 5:12); ‘the wages of sin is death.’ (Rom 3:23) The Bible talks about two kinds of death, however: the physical death our bodies experience at the end of our lives and spiritual death which is essentially separation from God. It was to save us from spiritual death, from eternal separation from God, that Jesus died on the cross and was raised to life on the third day. This is why we need resurrection truths to be part of our everyday lives here on earth as well as something to look forward to in the future. Paul makes it clear in Romans 6:9-14 that sin no longer has mastery over us because Jesus defeated it on the cross – therefore we are free to live a new kind of life.

Resurrection Offers Us Hope

The interconnection between Christ’s resurrection and ours is something that’s stressed over and over again in this chapter. Paul says, ‘Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.’ (1 Cor 15:20) He is the guarantee that all those who belong to Him will be raised from the dead at His second coming. The worst thing anyone can do to us is to take away life, but we know that even if we lose our lives, there is still the hope of the resurrection! One day, we will leave this body, but then we get a perfect one! – we exchange the perishable for the imperishable, the mortal for immortality. (1 Cor 15:42, 53) Hope, therefore, is the fuel that enables us to get through life. Because Jesus experienced resurrection, we too can experience it.

Aaron Shust sings, in the song, ‘Resurrecting’:

‘By Your Spirit I will rise
From the ashes of defeat.
The resurrected king is resurrecting me.
In Your name I come alive
To declare Your victory.
The resurrected king is resurrecting me.’ (‘Resurrecting’, Aaron Shust)

Today is Easter Sunday, probably the most important day of the whole year, the day when we celebrate the victory that Jesus Christ won for us through His death and resurrection. All of God’s plan for the salvation of the world is bound up in this truth, for as Paul teaches us in 1 Corinthians 15: ‘if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.’ (1 Cor 15:14) The resurrection of Jesus means that we know His sacrificial death on the cross was acceptable to God. It was enough. The price for sin has been paid. We are now reconciled to God.

The resurrection of Jesus means we know that death doesn’t have the last word; towards the end of this chapter, Paul says, ‘“Death has been swallowed up in victory.” “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”’ (1 Cor 15:54-55) The resurrection of Jesus gives us hope, even in hopeless situations, because it demonstrates to us how totally and utterly our God has the power to transform situations. If God could turn the defeat and humiliation of crucifixion into something beautiful and victorious, then nothing we face in this life has the power to keep us down. Resurrection is at the heart of our Christian faith and needs to be at the heart of our daily lives too. In this chapter, Paul talks a lot about different aspects of resurrection, and we need to absorb these truths so that we can become a people living in the power of Christ’s resurrection every day of the year, not just on Easter Sunday.

We see in this chapter that resurreciton is impossible from a human perspective, but entirely possible when we take God’s power into account. We see also that it is necessary to break the hold sin has over us and to bring us back into a relationship with God. Finally, resurrection enables us to live with hope, not only for now, but also for eternity.

Easter Sunday is our day of victory because it was Jesus’s day of victory. It’s the day when we celebrate Jesus’s victory over sin, death and hell. It’s the day when we dance because our God does impossible things. It’s the day when we dance because we’re set free from the power and mastery of sin and are now free to live for God and serve Him with gladness and sincerity. It’s the day when we hold high our banner of hope and say that nothing can separate us from the love of God. This is our day of victory. Let’s believe that. Let’s proclaim that. Let’s live in victory.

Today is Easter Sunday. It’s a day of celebration and wonder, a day when we proclaim to all that He is not here in the tomb; He is risen! It’s a day of overflowing joy and boundless surprise as we declare that Jesus has defeated death and is alive forevermore – and because of this, everything has changed.

But it’s a story that starts with confusion and questions: the women setting off just after sunrise with spices to anoint Jesus’ body and wondering who will roll the stone away from the tomb. (Mk 16:1) It’s a day of meeting with angels and feeling bewilderment and confusion initially. The resurrection of Jesus took some getting used to. The honesty of the gospel accounts makes it plain that no one was really expecting this, and the responses range from thoughtful consideration to doubt, confusion and initial alarm. It took time for everyone to adjust to this tremendous news.

As we have lingered at Golgotha on Good Friday and sat in helpless silence on Saturday, we ought not to be surprised that resurrection takes more than a day to proclaim, understand and live in. The good news is this day is the beginning of the rest of our lives. We have an eternity to explore it. We don’t have to rush through this day. We can take our time discovering and growing into the truth that Jesus has been raised from the dead and therefore is with us forevermore.

Just as the sun rose on that first Easter Sunday bringing hope and life to all, so the hope of the resurrection brings light and life to all. Jesus is alive and so nothing is impossible any more. Anything can happen on our wondrous journey with Him.

Somehow, the weekends seem harder in this lockdown. During the week, there are semblances of normality: work still to be done, learning still to be tackled, the usual chores to be completed. But the weekends were the times when we went out, visited friends and family, gathered together at church… The weekends were different. Now, our choices are limited and our sense of loss heightens. Weekends used to be the time for odd jobs, DIY, trips to the seaside and other places… now there is very little to distinguish them from other days for most people, and the ache seems to tighten around our chests just that little bit harder.

As we are contemplating this Easter weekend, I’m mindful of the silence of that first Easter Saturday. The adrenaline was gone; the awful reality of Jesus’ death was still there. Inactivity prevailed because of Sabbath restrictions, but how hard it must have been for the followers of Jesus, ‘coming to terms’ with their loss, trying to fathom what had happened and what would happen as a result. We get a glimpse of the unanswerable questions they were asking themselves when we see the women organising the purchase of spices to anoint Jesus’ body after the Sabbath and wondering who would roll the stone away from the tomb. (Mark 16:1-3) So many questions, and only silence as answers. And waiting.

Waiting, Michael Card says, ‘is the most bitter lesson a believing heart has to learn.’ (‘Maranatha’) The Psalms are full of our impatient questions: ‘How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?’ (Ps 13:1-2) In some ways, God gave us the Sabbath to teach us not only how to rest, but how to wait. Waiting, for most of us, is not what we want to do. We want to be active; we want to be doing. We’re not even sure it matters what we’re doing, as long as we’re doing something. Yet, as Eugene Peterson reminds us, “The precedent to quit doing and simply be is divine. Sabbath-keeping is commanded so that we internalise the being that matures out of doing.” (Eugene Peterson, ‘Working the Angles’) Waiting and not doing are as essential to our spiritual growth as doing.

So, on this silent Saturday as we wait for Sunday to come, as we have been forced to abandon our plans to gather with friends and family and to journey to much-loved places and are stuck with the potential boredom of home and the monotony of daily life, perhaps the best thing we can do is nothing. Simply wait before God, worship Him and allow Him into every corner of our hearts, every facet of our lives. Wait in stillness before the Lord.

Paul said to the Corinthians, ‘Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.’ (1 Cor 15:1-2) In our Bible studies on Acts, we have seen the stunning turnaround in Paul’s life when he met Jesus on the road to Damascus. (Acts 9) Paul was someone who, as he reminds the Corinthians, persecuted the church of God. (1 Cor 15:9) But on the road to Damascus, when he was on his way to arrest more Christians, Jesus met with him in a supernatural way that totally transformed his life. From this point onward, he received the good news. He understood the significance of Christ’s death and resurrection, that Jesus really was the promised Messiah, the Son of God.

One of the things we must remember is we can only pass on what we ourselves have received. At the moment, we are being urged to distance ourselves from others to stop us passing on the coronavirus, the difficulty being we often don’t know if we have the virus or not. If we are going to stand firm in life, we need to be sure of the gospel as the power of God for salvation. We can’t pass on the baton to the next generation or to anyone else unless we are sure we’ve got hold of this gospel for ourselves.

Once we have, however – once the truth of these fundamental gospel basics that Jesus died, was buried, rose again and is coming again soon grips our hearts – then we will long to pass it on to others. Like Paul, we’ve got good news and we want everyone to know it!

Today is Good Friday, the day when we remember the death of our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross. This Easter period is so important to our faith, for the death and resurrection of Jesus form the basis of the gospel message, a message which is good news to everyone, absolutely everyone, at every point in history. Paul wrote to the Corinthian church and said that he wanted to remind them of the gospel he had preached to them and they had received and on which they had taken their stand. (1 Cor 15:1) We need to hold firmly to the word of God at these times, because this word is eternal. (Ps 119:89)

The gospel basics which Paul expounds are ‘that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve.’ (1 Cor 15:3-5) 

1. Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures. We can see from the accounts in all four gospels (Matt 27:32-56; Mark 15:21-41; Luke 23:26-59; John 19:16-37) just how important this is and how this fulfilled Old Testament prophecies. We see not only facts but the reason for His death: God ‘reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them.’ (2 Cor 5:18-19) 

2. Christ was buried. He really did die. All 4 gospels again talk of His burial in a tomb purchased by Joseph of Arimathea. (John 19:38-42, Matt 27:57-61, Mark 15:42-47, Luke 23:50-56) This confirms the reality of His death. Many people in history have disputed this, but a burial is pretty incontrovertible.

3. that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures…Resurrection is a fundamental part of the gospel and without this, we have no hope. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, then we have nothing positive to look forward to whatsoever. If this life is all there is, we’re a people to be pitied. Paul is adamant that Jesus was raised on the third day, and again, we have this reminder that it was ‘according to the Scriptures.’ God was not taken by surprise by the death of Jesus: Rev 13:8 tells us the Lamb was ‘slain before the creation of the world.’ Isaiah prophesied, many years before Jesus was born, that the Lord would make His life an offering for sin and said, ‘He will see His offspring and prolong His days.’ (Is 53:10) The early apostles didn’t have the benefit of the New Testament Scriptures as we do, but they discovered that resurrection was there in the Old Testament too! – Peter, preaching on the Day of Pentecost, spoke from Psalm 16 and said, ‘Seeing what was to come, he [David] spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, that he was not abandoned to the realm of the dead, nor did his body see decay.’ (Acts 2:31)

4. … and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. Paul gives us facts and then evidence. Jesus really died. There was a real tomb. His body was placed there with a big stone in front of it as a seal and also with guards. He really did rise from the dead. Not only do we know that because the tomb was empty (which technically doesn’t prove He’s alive, just that He was no longer in the tomb), we know it because He appeared to people. They saw Him! They weren’t expecting to see Him and in many cases (like Thomas, for example), they took some persuading. Our faith rests on solid ground.