“Then, when our dying bodies have been transformed into bodies that will never die, this Scripture will be fulfilled: “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” For sin is the sting that results in death… But thank God! He gives us victory over sin and death through our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 15:54-56, NLT).

We all live in and observe the same world. We all see and experience the same basic things. The world isn’t as it should be. It’s broken. In the words of Bob Dylan, “Everything’s Broken.” Bad things happen to good people. People who should love each other hurt each other. The spiritual, moral, emotional, physical, and environmental landscape of this world is horribly broken.

Though we all live in and observe the same world, we interpret the data differently. There are countless explanations and interpretations for what’s broken, why it’s broken, and how it can all ultimately be fixed. But even the brightest optimist, the person with the best life imaginable, has to come to grips with the one thing that inescapably says that something’s horribly wrong: death!

In this fallen world the majority of men and women think of death in a very small, personalized way. They think of it as an event.

Death is something that happens to someone who’s living. “They died.” They think of it as an inescapable outcome of existence. You have a birth certificate and a death certificate. The first records your entrance into the world, and the second records your exit. Everyone gets both of those certificates.

Everyone welcomes birth. When a baby is born, cigars and “congrats” are handed out. Colorful helium-filled balloons abound saying, “It’s a____!” We celebrate the date of our birth. Loved ones gather and celebrate the day their loved one was born. We have a name for it: “birth-day party.”

People don’t celebrate when a loved one dies. No cigars, no “congrats,” no balloons. There’s no such thing as a death-day party. People grieve and ache and have to find a way to deal with the gaping hole that someone’s death has left in their world.

Others view death as the termination of life. There was life, and then it was terminated. Death looms as the great terminator of everything they don’t want to end, the loss of everything they worked so hard to gain and don’t want to lose.

Death is surely not less than those things. But death is far greater than than all of that. Death is a “something” that came into a world that only knew life! The world didn’t always look like the News at 10 AM or on our web browser.

The Bible tells us that when God finished creating the world, preparing it for man, and then creating man, God said it was “very good!” Man lived in a perfect world. It was environmentally perfect. Everything was organic! Nothing needed to be labeled as “sustainably grown.” It was socially perfect.

No need for marital counseling. No need for police. It was biologically perfect. There was no need for health insurance because there was no such thing as sickness. There was no such thing as life insurance because there was no such thing as death.

So where did death come from? What is the ultimate “cause of death?” What happened to usher in this inexorable power which now holds sway over what was once a world of life? The Bible informs us that death entered into that perfect world by way of sin.

“For sin is the sting that results in death…” (1 Corinthians 15:56).

“When Adam sinned, sin entered the world. Adam’s sin brought death, so death spread to everyone” (Romans 5:12).

God had warned our first parents that sin would do that (Genesis 2:17). The New Testament tells us that sin has an outcome: “the wages of sin,” is “death” (Romans 6:23).

While fallen man processes the problem of death on one dimension, the Bible informs us that this thing we call “death” exerts its power on three levels. There’s spiritual death, there’s physical death, and there’s eternal death. To help us understand the nature and workings of death, and what it is we’re celebrating on Easter, let’s start with the one dimension of death that fallen man does understand: physical death.

Physical Death

First — The power of death does something to the body. A dead body can’t stick together. It’s falling apart. Death causes someone who was once beautiful to look ugly. When someone is dying of an aggressive form of cancer, you see death at work while they’re still alive. The complexities of anatomy lose all sense of integration. The body falls apart — and the person begin to waste away. When we bury someone, the corpse begins to dis-integrate. There’s no such thing as a beautiful corpse. Death makes once beautiful things ugly.

Second — A dead body can’t respond to stimuli. We have five senses. Those five senses make us fully aware of what’s going on outside of us. I’m aware of what’s outside of me through my eyes, nose, ears, mouth, and skin. I’m aware. I can see, smell, hear, taste, and touch. Death brings an end to the senses. It doesn’t respond to visual, olfactory, auditory, gustatory, or somatosensory stimulation. No more senses. No sensation. It doesn’t respond to stimuli.

Finally — A dead body can’t exert itself. It’s powerless — it can’t move.

A dead body doesn’t possess the desire to move, or the power to move.

Such is the power of death, the grip of death.

Man has no remedy for it.

He’s powerless to overcome physical death.

Spiritual Death

The Bible *informs us* that physical death was preceded by, and *followed from, *spiritual death. Before death impacts a person’s body, death impacts man in his relationship with God. God told Adam and Eve that if they disobeyed Him, they would die. They disobeyed, yet they didn’t immediately experience biological death. They did immediately experience spiritual death. Sin brought death into the realm of their relationship with God. Even though our first parents were physically alive, they were spiritually dead. They were the original “Walking Dead.”

First — The wages of sin makes us spiritually ugly because we’re no longer fully integrated. God, who is triune, said, “Let us make man in our image.” God made man body, soul, and spirit. Fully integrated. The body and intellect/emotions were designed to be subordinate to, and influenced by, man’s fellowship with God.

Death touched the part of us where we are able to know God — to derive life from God! The outcome was *dis-*integration. Separated from the life of God, fallen man is governed by his fallen emotions, fallen intellect, fallen passions.

“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world….among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind” (Ephesians 2:1-3).

Spiritual death makes us ugly. It makes us turn even good things into bad things by making them ultimate things! When good things become ultimate things, they become ugly: sex is perverted, wealth is perverted, and power is perverted. That truth changes the way we explain and interpret the world around us. That truth changes the diagnosis and the treatment of what’s broken!

Spiritual death (that makes us ugly on the vertical axis of our life, causing us to be dis-integrated in our relationship with God) makes us ugly on the horizontal axis of our lives, causing our human relationships to dis-integrate. We no longer image God well. Instead of bearing the image of the giving, servant heart of God, our first impulse is SELF: self-gain, self-serving, self-promotion, self-preservation. No sooner did sin destroy man’s relationship with God than we have the record of the first murder. It was premeditated murder driven by self-concern. Cain was envious and jealous of his brother, Abel.

Second — Spiritual death destroys the capacity to respond to stimuli. When you’re spiritually dead, it means you can’t see beyond the realm of the physical. Everything else is more interesting than God, His Word, and His Wisdom.

For example, how many people in your neighborhood, school, and workplace want to take a couple of hours on Sunday to gather with others to acknowledge God, worship God, and learn of God? For the *vast *majority of them, the newspaper is more interesting than the Bible; playing a round of golf is more desirable than praising God; being in the stands at a football game (or on the couch watching one with friends) is more interesting than being in a room full of people worshipping Jesus.

That’s because spiritual death makes us incapable of perceiving the reality of the love of God, the cross of Jesus, heaven and hell. You’re as aware of the reality of those things as a corpse is aware of the people at his funeral. Your saved spouse talks about the joy of the Lord, and you aren’t touched by it. Your Christian friend tells you how “blessed” they were reading the Bible, and you’re dead to that reality.

THIS IS HUGE — If you see the world wrong, you live wrong. If you see life as all about your story and your glory, you get wrong all of your responses to life.

Finally — Spiritual death has left us powerless — without the power to do anything about our condition. The following verses explain how spiritual death has left us powerless.

“For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly” (Romans 5:6).

“When we were utterly helpless” (Romans 5:6).

“For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Romans 8:7-8).

Spiritual death leaves us powerless, utterly helpless, in the realm of motive and in the realm of ability. In the physical realm, I have to want to pick up a Bible. That desire has to be connected by way of my nervous system to my muscles, so I can do what I want to do. Spiritual death leaves us without the power to want God and powerless to reach out and grab Him.

Many might say — and I surely used to say and think this — I might not love God as much as I should, I might not have faith in God like I should, but I’m not dead. I have some moral sensation, and I have some moral strength. I’m not dead. You and I might define that as life, but God doesn’t! That’s not life as God defines it. That’s not the life God intended for us to experience. (Think of the TV series “Walking Dead.” Think of how “alive” the “walkers” are compared to real humans). The Bible says that we’re not just sick because of our sins. The Bible says we’re *dead.*

The World’s Diagnosis & Remedy

The world at large has a different diagnosis: man’s not dead, just sick. The world at large has a different prognosis. Give man enough time and he’s going to get better. The world at large offers countless remedies that are the inventions of dead men. Those things are the basis of hope for broken men and women in this broken world. But here’s the problem:

Hope is only real hope if that hope can fix what’s broken.

Think about this: Mankind is obsessed with eliminating the causes of physical death. There are great campaigns against cancer, AIDS, and other diseases. Billions of dollars are spent on medical research and educational campaigns. There are great campaigns against poverty and starvation, substance abuse, drunk driving, and the latest, against guns. (By the way, while countless billions of dollars are funding these campaigns that war against various “causes of death,” a good chunk of a billion dollars is spent by our government every year to KILL nearly 4,000 babies per day. THAT is how ugly and blind sin has made us!)

Every one of those campaigns are against the “causes of death.” But have you noticed that no one has ever just come out and said, “Let’s have a global campaign against dying”? You see, all of those campaigns to cure the various causes of death only prolong the inevitable. One out of every one person born will die.

The Bible’s Diagnosis & Remedy

The Bible has a very different diagnosis: *Ephesians 2 *is the death certificate. Apart from Jesus, we’re all in the morgue. It’s only a matter of time — the body will eventually catch up with us. We NEED to be SAVED.

But the Bible offers real hope. The Bible tells us that God did something to fix the problem of death on every level! God launched a great campaign against death. His great campaign against death began with a campaign against *the *Cause of Death: SIN!

As John Lennox explains, “sin entered the world to wreak endless havoc. So serious is that moral infection that the business of restoring men and women to fellowship with their Creator will involve something much bigger than creation itself: nothing less than the Creator becoming human, dying at the hands of his creatures and rising again in triumph over sin and death.”

Jesus Came to Destroy Sin & Death

The Bible tells us that something happened in history that we can’t ignore. Something happened that changes everything!

In The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis writes, “Once upon a time in our world, in a little stable, there was something that was bigger than the whole world.”

The Bible says that 2,000 years ago there was something inside a stable that was bigger than the world. 2,000 years ago, God came in human flesh. Jesus was born in a stable in Bethlehem. That’s what we celebrate on Christmas!

Death was not inescapable for Jesus. Jesus said, “No one takes my life — I lay it down…” Jesus said that He came to “give His life for a ransom.” Jesus is God come in human flesh for the sole purpose of destroying sin and death. On Good Friday, we gather to remember how Jesus was brutally beaten and then nailed to a Roman cross. 700 years before Jesus died on the cross, the prophet Isaiah told why all of that happened:

“Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:4-6).

Jesus Put Death to Death

Jesus would save us from our great enemies sin and death by His death on the cross in our place for our sin. There on the cross, when the Father laid the sins of the world on Jesus, Jesus experienced separation from God the Father. There on the cross, Jesus experienced biological death. Before He breathed His last, He shouted in victory, “It Is Finished!” Divine justice was satisfied. Our forgiveness was paid for in full. They took Jesus down from the cross and laid Him in a tomb.

Tim Chaddick puts it like this: “The empty cross is not good news without the empty tomb!”

Three days after Jesus died, He rose from the grave — PROVING that on the cross He had truly conquered our great enemies sin and death! The resurrection of Jesus Christ guarantees the final defeat of sin and death.

The Bible calls it a living hope (1 Peter 1:3). It’s a living hope because Jesus is alive! The Christian alone has real hope because their hope — JESUS — fixed what was broken! Jesus put death to death.

“Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades (Revelation 1:17-18).

We were hopelessly dead to God. We were powerless to overcome the power of that death. But when we were dead to God, God did what we couldn’t do.

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (Ephesians 2:4-5).

Spiritual death made us spiritually ugly. The glorious resurrection power of Jesus is at work to make something beautiful of my life. Day by day the resurrection power of Jesus takes what was made ugly because of sin and causes my mind, desires, and passions to integrate with the heart and wisdom of God. The things that I once made ultimate ends for my gratification or glory (time, talents, and treasures) I now, by the resurrection power of God, use for His pleasure and His glory. I now have the life and love of God working in me, causing me to look more like Jesus: loving others and serving others, for His glory and my joy!

Spiritual death made me incapable of seeing beyond the physical. But the resurrection power of God enables me to be stimulated by the things of the Spirit, and helps me hunger for the Word and desire to pray. Spiritual death left me powerless. But the same power that raised Jesus from the grave is now working in me to want and do that which pleases God.

“For it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13).

Eternal Death

The question remains — “If Jesus put death to death, why do I have to die physically?” Again, when we look at death’s entrance into the world in Genesis 3, we see that the power of death first touched man’s relationship with God. Physical death was secondary. The victory of Jesus over death begins where death began — by restoring our relationship with God, who is our life. The final stage of the destruction of death is over the grave.

This is huge. Physical death for the unbeliever is actually the last act in a progression toward eternal death — separation from God for eternity!

But because of the resurrection of Jesus, physical death for a Christian is the last and final act in a progression completely away from death.

I’ll tell a story that illustrates this: There was a Christian man who was dying of cancer. Whenever he was asked, “Do you believe God will heal you?” he said, “Oh, absolutely. I know God will heal me; I’m just not sure if He’s going to do it before I die or after.” In his case, it was after. But what he also used to say is, “If He heals me before, it’s just a temporary thing until He actually heals me after.”

Because Jesus conquered the grave, physical death is the door into a life forever in the presence of God. Death actually has no power over you. None at all. Physical death is actually going to be the last gasp of death in your life.

“Then, when our dying bodies have been transformed into bodies that will never die, this Scripture will be fulfilled: “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” For sin is the sting that results in death…But thank God! He gives us victory over sin and death through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:54-56).

I heard someone describe it like this: “Jesus conquered sin and death so you wouldn’t be defeated by them. Jesus walked out of His tomb so you could walk into life eternal. The resurrection of Jesus Christ means you’ll be invited to the one funeral you’ll want to attend: the funeral of death.”

Victory!

THAT’S why Jesus isn’t an option; Jesus isn’t a choice among many choices.

Religion can’t conquer death.

Moralism can’t conquer death.

ONLY JESUS CAN!

Conclusion

You can’t rejoice in the empty tomb if you haven’t been to the cross. Repent of — turn your back on — the lie of lies and trust in the cross and resurrection of Jesus to save you from your great enemies sin and death. Faith means that you’re so convinced that Jesus loved you and died for you that you’ll live for Him. You’ll trust, worship, serve, and obey Him.

If you’re alive — you get to be the agent of His life in a dead world! You get to communicate the life of Jesus by the way you live and by the words you say. You’re strategically placed in this world to use all that you are — all that you do — as ambassadors of the One who conquered death!

As we come to Good Friday, I thought it might be good to refresh our minds on what happened on the cross of Calvary 2,000 years ago. Although many died by crucifixion under Roman rule, there was one whose death was unique.

The death of Jesus of Nazareth was unlike any other death.

The Bible tells us that Jesus died in our place, not merely in a physical sense, but He died in our place in the greater spiritual sense. He died the death of a sinner under the wrath of God for the punishment of sin. The Scriptures teach that Christ died an atoning death, paying for the sin of the entire world. “The just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18). This is truly a wonderful message but strangely offensive to many.

I’ve heard people say that it would be immoral for an innocent person to be punished for someone else’s sins. They refuse to believe that Christ died for the sins of the world. Actually, there’s a whole school of thought that attributes this aspect of Christian teaching to Paul rather than to Jesus. They say Jesus never taught that He would die for the sins of the world; this idea was all part of the mythology that was concocted by His followers, Paul being the main culprit.

Some years ago, when I was living in London, I met an Englishman who had converted to Islam under the influence of his Middle Eastern wife. As I spoke to him about Christ, he told me that my version of Christianity was not anything that Jesus originally taught. He was extremely offended by the idea of the blood of Christ making atonement for sin. He said that Paul had invented the idea, and one only needed to be a good person to be accepted by God. So I asked him, “Do you really think Paul invented the Christian faith?” “Yes,” he answered, “Before Paul, no one believed that Jesus died for the sins of the world.” I replied, “Interesting, because Isaiah (written 700 years before Christ’s birth) says, ‘He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one, to his own way; and the LORD laid on Him the iniquity of us all.… For He was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgressions of My people He was stricken. And they made His grave with the wicked–but with the rich at His death …’ (Isaiah 53:5-9). That’s the Old Testament saying that the Messiah was going to give His life as a sacrifice for sin. Paul didn’t invent the idea of Christ making atonement for sin, God did!” The man stood speechless.

The promise from the very beginning (Genesis 3:15) was that God would send a redeemer who would crush the head of the serpent (Satan), and in the process, have His heel bruised (a reference to Christ’s death to save us from sin).

People often say in regard to the Old Testament sacrificial system, “Why were all those animals slain and sacrificed; it’s all so bloody and barbaric! What was God thinking?” God was seeking to communicate to us dull-minded, hard-hearted people that the price for sin was the shed blood of an innocent victim. It’s as though God was saying, “This is what it cost to restore your relationship with Me, and all of these sacrifices are just a picture that I’m painting for you of the one who will come and give Himself as the ultimate sacrifice–the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”

On the cross, Jesus died to pay the ransom for sinners.

For my sins and your sins, for the sins of everyone who has ever or will ever live. That is mind-boggling. As the psalmist said, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it” (Psalm 139:6). Although this is true and we can never fully comprehend what happened that day on Calvary, let’s take some time today to reflect and give thanks to the one who showed the greatest love of all as He by the grace of God tasted death for everyone.

_{Originally Published on April 14, 2017}

“Wasn’t Jesus just a failed apocalyptic preacher?”

I was speaking at an event on the University of South Carolina campus when a student read the question another student had submitted. While I imagine some might bristle at questions like that, it actually filled me with hope. A student from a generation rapidly finding the American Church devoid of anything worth sticking around for asked what essentially is the million-dollar question.

It was the question that prompted Paul to write many of his most powerful words. A question with an answer that has served as the fulcrum of much of humanity’s search for meaning for the last 2,000 years. Put simply, and perhaps less antagonistically than my Q&A attendees would, “What makes Jesus so special, and why should it matter to me?”

It should not be lost on us that each year our churches see attendance increase sharply on Easter. Pew Research reports that Google searches for “Church” spike nearly 25% during the week of Easter, only to usually be followed by returns to normal attendance just one week later. While this can largely be attributed to the rampant nominalism we see spreading through western Christianity, I think we as pastors need to own a share of this.

Those of us who stand on a stage or behind a pulpit have not forced the people listening to us on Resurrection Sunday to reckon with the reality of the resurrection, and what it means for them. We have instead settled for a quaint reminder that the story of humanity will one day have a nice ending, but ultimately, the Gospel might not have anything else for its hearers that day.

We then proceed to our egg hunts and family dinners, having not been made to look at the Gospel as it truly is: an earth-shattering story and moment in time we yearly pause to contemplate and celebrate. This moment 2,000 years ago, gives me the answer to the question that wonderful, questioning student asked.

The resurrection of Jesus causes it all to make sense and makes Jesus special and unique in our world of wanderers and wonderers.

The Resurrection

Tim Keller has said, “If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said; if he didn’t rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead.” Keller’s assessment stands true, but it seems that somewhere along the way, pastors and communicators of the resurrection message have lost the ability to convey to their hearers the significance of this event, or perhaps we are just complicating it too much.

The Significance of the Resurrection

At the heart of any explanation of Jesus should be an explanation of the significance of the resurrection and why one absolutely must decide what they think of it. On the one hand, many Christians will likely jump out of their seat, agreeing to the significance of the resurrection, yet might not quite understand what it accomplished in the first place. On the other hand, the non-Christian might scoff at a quote like Keller’s, which might seem to them to reek with arrogance at the notion that it is in the death and ensuing events of one man that all our answers in life might be found.

It is to both of these crowds that the Gospel speaks, though, and there is no shortage of answers and encouragement to satisfy the most earnest believer wanting to understand the crux of their belief to the most antagonistic skeptic who simply cannot get away from the noise surrounding this resurrection of Jesus that seems to be talked about so much every spring.

The Historical Reliability of the Resurrection

First, we must attempt to tackle the historical reliability of the resurrection account. While the average churchgoer has little to no need of functional knowledge of manuscript analysis or Greek vocabulary, they might need to be able to answer the question of why we should even believe Christ was resurrected in the first place and why it deserves any more attention than the fairytales we read to our children at night. Even if the question only comes from their own minds late at night lying in bed, the question is sure to come up at some point.

To bring us back to that room in South Carolina, why should anyone believe that there is anything that sets Jesus apart from the hundreds of other apocalyptic messiahs who wandered through Israel trying to woo crowds? Was Jesus just more charismatic than them?

Navigating the Topic: the “Minimal Facts” Approach

One of the simplest approaches to navigate the topic of the historicity of the resurrection is what is often called the “Minimal Facts” argument that Dr. Gary Habermas has popularized. In its various forms, it proposes that from simple and mostly agreed upon facts from history, we can deduce that it is likely that Jesus rose from the dead, or at least that his resurrection is a fathomable conclusion to come to, given what we know. Some of these facts are:

• It is agreed upon that Jesus of Nazareth did, in fact, exist. While there is a school of thought that becomes popular with pop-skeptics from time to time (that Jesus did not actually exist), the most antagonistic of non-Christian scholars scoff at this notion themselves. We can be as sure as anything else we know from the annals of history that Jesus did, in fact, exist.

• John Dominic Crossan, a hugely influential non-Christian scholar, wrote in his book, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, “That he was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be.” Crossan suggests here that the crucifixion of Jesus is an inarguable fact of history. It is actually one of the most attested to events in ancient history, as many non-Christian sources in antiquity have addressed, as well as being included in all four Gospel accounts.

• Jesus’ empty tomb is a logical conclusion, given the surrounding events. It was Jewish custom to bury the dead within a specific timeframe, and the Gospels give a record of Joseph of Arimathea offering his family tomb to house the body of Jesus. It would have followed that in the event of claims of resurrection from Jesus’ followers, that his body would have been produced.

• Jesus was said to have appeared before hundreds of witnesses in his resurrected form. Perhaps most interestingly, his first appearance was to women in the garden, and he utilized their testimony to gather his remaining disciples. In 1st century Jewish culture, the testimony of women was of little use. If this story had been fabricated, this detail would not have been included as emphasizing the women’s experience in the garden was no way to convince a male-dominated world that the Gospel took place in. Along with these women, the other apostles testified to seeing Jesus: Luke records Paul’s conversion experience on the road to Damascus after seeing the resurrected Jesus. Paul later wrote in his letter to the Corinthians that around 500 people had seen Jesus in his resurrected form. After these, many people witnessed something reported by various sources to be a resurrected Jesus. Many of these people radically changed the direction of their lives to then go and be witnesses to this resurrected Jesus all over the known world. The legends abound of Thomas in India, Peter upside down on a cross in Rome, and John being thrown in a vat of boiling oil. The reliability of these stories varies, but the reason for their believability is centered on the notion that what they witnessed in the events of Easter shook the foundation of their lives and caused them to absolutely change the entire world.

These historical claims are not without objection, and some apologists and theologians have addressed them in greater depth elsewhere. The point though is that the resurrection and what is staked to it in Christian thought is not a fabled notion; it is something that can be believed in confidently without fear of being exposed as a wishful thinking fraud.

Keller’s suggestion then that all that really matters is the resurrection becomes more important to investigate for the nominal churchgoer who stumbles into a seat for their annual visit to church. Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 15 that without the resurrection we are essentially wasting our time as Christians becomes more provocative for the skeptic who might tune into a church Livestream out of boredom on Easter Sunday.

Why Does the Resurrection Matter?

The question of historicity having been addressed, the next out of these hearers mouth’s might be something along the lines of, “Why does it matter anyway?”

N.T. Wright, when addressing the necessity of a true understanding of the Gospel and therefore the resurrection with it, said, “We will never understand the gospel unless we see it as a great narrative, the narrative which finds its way through the dark night of the soul in the long years of Israel’s desolation and then bursts out with new life on Easter morning.”

This gospel that many of us will preach on Easter morning should lead its hearers to an understanding of the world around them that does not simply stop at the notion of going to heaven but instead draws them to a deeper understanding of God’s plan for them now, which is to bring about a new creation.

God’s desire in the Gospel narrative is to redeem the whole of us, not simply the spiritual parts of us, and this is reflective of what he will do at the end of days when he fashions a new heaven and new earth. It is in the resurrection of Jesus that we see this plan take shape, and it is this first resurrection that gives us the guarantee that what God has desired, he has also designed. It also validates in the person of Jesus the things he did during his ministry here and the things he said.

The man lowered through the roof by his friends (who was healed after receiving forgiveness of sins) can trust his sins truly are forgiven because of the resurrection. The hearers of Jesus’ momentous sermon on the mount can trust that Jesus’ radical teachings (that we should love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us) are worthy of following because he rose from the dead victoriously over our sin.

The Whole Purpose of Jesus Becoming Man

The validation of Jesus by God in the resurrection stands as both the period and exclamation point of history that we must build our city on a hill upon. C.S. Lewis remarked that the whole purpose of Jesus becoming man was, “To turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature.”

This new kind of human would not be possible by simply following the moral teachings of a rabbi on a hillside or receiving the forgiveness of sins from a faith healer in Galilee. Instead, it is accomplished by submitting to the lordship of the God of all gods who now walks in a new kind of victory over death that the world had never laid eyes on before.

No, Jesus was not simply a failed apocalyptic preacher. He was not simply a healer, or a teacher, or a prophet. He was God who took on flesh to dwell among us, who had that flesh ripped apart by the very sin and brokenness he came to redeem. Who was crushed and bruised by the world and humanity he created. And he rose from the dead. All this because while you and I cannot bear the burden of simply our own sin without being crushed under its weight, the sin of all humanity cannot keep the Son of God dead.

Now there is a redeemer, a savior, a Lord sitting at the right hand of God the father with flesh and bone like you and me, advocating on our behalf, and we can trust that advocacy is effective.

All because Jesus rose from the dead.

Well everyone, as you know the season of Easter is upon us!

My colleagues and I over at Calvary Global Network were, talking about ways we could serve the pastors in our network during this busy time, and we had a thought: there is so much pressure on preachers to come up with an Easter sermon every year that is both fresh and also impactful / evangelistic. Combine that with the busyness of Easter and it can create quite a challenging season for leaders.

With that in mind I sat down to have a conversation with Mike Neglia and Nick Cady, two pastors in our church family, and some of the leaders of The Expositors Collective, a fantastic ministry/movement all about helping preachers do their absolute best with their calling and craft.

We had a great discussion about Easter, and we’ve decided to release is as several small video clips for you to check out. We hope this helps you as you lean into the Easter season and seek after Jesus for what He has for your Church this year!

1.How do you approach your easter sermons?

2. How do you keep Easter fresh?

Mike and Nick also discuss their differences on the topic of lent in this one!

3. What are some unique ways to approach Good Friday?

4. What gets you excited about Easter?

5. What’s the worst Easter sermon you’ve ever preached?

Editor’s note: Nick Cady has a story in this one that simply can’t be missed… haha.

6. How do you help kids appreciate Easter?

Great question, especially for pastors with children.

7. How do you help your church staff enjoy easter when they are so busy planning it?

Today (this weekend), people worldwide are remembering and celebrating the greatest event in human history- the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead! All human discovery and achievement, all scientific breakthrough and advancement, pales in comparison to this most glorious event- which was essentially the abolition of death and meaninglessness and the ushering in of genuine hope for the world.

On Easter Sunday, I could tell you that:

Jesus didn’t swoon on the cross but genuinely, truly, died. And it was seen-to by professional executioners.

They buried him in a well-known location, and yet three days later, the tomb was empty.

Women were the first to see him risen from the dead (which brought no credit to the claim in those days because of women’s low role in society). Why mention the women at all? Because it’s actually how it went down.

Five hundred people saw the risen Jesus at one time.

Jesus ate, drank, talked & walked with his closest friends and followers for forty days after his resurrection. His appearance was not just a one-time hallucinated experience.

After witnessing his resurrection, Jesus’ own family members, who were skeptical of him, accepted him as Messiah and God.

Each of the Apostles (excluding John) died gruesome deaths for their claim that Jesus was Messiah and Lord.

I could tell you that people back then were not more gullible about these things than we are. No one in the 1st century (besides the Jews) believed in “resurrection,” or wanted it for that matter – The Greeks had a very low view of the body and afterlife.. and yet the claim that Jesus rose from the dead and was Lord over all changed the world.

These facts concerning Jesus’ resurrection are of enormous importance, but they aren’t delivered to us via scripture as cold facts from a textbook waiting to be dusted off once a year around this time. No, the Christian life is to be one continual celebration and observance of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead!

N.T. Wright, in his book Surprised By Hope, says, “The message of Easter is that God’s new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you’re now invited to belong to it.”

The Apostle Peter also develops this idea of living out or practicing resurrection in his 1st epistle. He speaks of God’s people as having a living hope, an inheritance, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Peter wants us to think about the real-life implications of the resurrection of Jesus and bring that to bear upon our everyday rhythms.

To Peter, the resurrection of Jesus is a life-altering, earth-shattering, historical event. So significant is the resurrection that it changed the course of history and the possibilities for every human that has ever lived. Peter says that Jesus’ resurrection means that we can now set our hope entirely on the coming Kingdom of God – with 100 % certainty. His call to all Christians is this: set your hope wholly on the grace brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. The phrase “the revelation of Jesus Christ” refers to the Day that God will seal up and finish everything that he did at the Resurrection of Jesus. The day that he will destroy death and bring new life to this world, the day when he will make all things new. This hope is everlasting, totally secure because Jesus alone has risen from the dead, never to die again. He has abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel, and He alone has the keys of hell and death. Now he sits at the right hand of God the Father with all authority and power guiding all things to this end; until the time when he will bring his kingdom to reign on earth, in righteousness and peace, world without end.

I love the way that Tim Keller uses this Tolkienism to refer to the new creation when he says, “The resurrection of Christ means everything sad is going to come untrue and it will somehow be greater for having once been broken and lost.” -Tim Keller, The Reason for God.

That is the Kingdom of God – Peace, Shalom – complete healing and wholeness to all relationships in all of creation. In the Kingdom of God, we will be fully reconciled to God, to nature, to one another, and to ourselves.

Since all of this is guaranteed to us through Jesus’ resurrection, I want to follow suit with the Apostle Peter and the famous American poet Wendall Berry and say to you, ‘Live out that Hope, Practice Resurrection!’

But what does it look like to practice resurrection?

To the extent that that future is real to you, it will change how you live in the present. We call this “Eschatological Ethics.” Living out the kingdom of God in the here and now.

This idea breaks down into two categories: the calculated and the care-free.

The Calculated

If Jesus Christ is risen from the dead – that means we should calculate all things in light of the final resurrection and the coming kingdom. It means that everything we do in this life has eternal weight and merit to it. Directly following Pauls’ teaching on the truth and effects of the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15, he concludes –

“Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15).

N.T. Wright says, “The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it…What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it). They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.” – N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope

Part of the church’s task consists of implementing that achievement of Jesus and anticipating the future kingdom by doing righteousness, justice and bringing peace to the places and people of our city where it is absent.

I see here a correlation to Jesus’ parables of the treasure in the field and the pearl of great price. The exhortation of these stories is to give everything you have for the working and building of the kingdom of God. To live our lives as though the kingdom were here now. To begin to practice now the language and characteristics of faith, hope, and love in our everyday lives. For this is the language they speak in the courts of the kingdom of heaven.

Again, N.T. Wright, “Every act of love, every deed done in Christ and by the Spirit, every work of true creativity – doing justice, making peace, healing families, resisting temptation, seeking and winning true freedom – is an earthly event in a long history of things that implement Jesus’ own Resurrection and anticipate the final new creation and act as signposts of hope, pointing back to the first and on to the second…” – N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope

The Care-free

Tim Keller, in his book, Jesus the King, asks a series of questions that help us to realize the everyday implication of the power and freedom that the resurrection of Jesus offers to our lives. He asks,

“Why is it so hard to face suffering? Why is it so hard to face disability and disease? Why is it so hard to do the right thing if you know it’s going to cost you money, reputation, maybe even your life? Why is it so hard to face your death of death of loved ones? It’s so hard because we think (and act) as though this broken world is the only world we’re ever going to have. It’s easy to feel as if this money is the only wealth we’ll ever have. If I only have one life to live, I better live it to the fullest by bringing ultimate satisfaction to myself. “But if the resurrection is true, then this is not my only life, nor is it my best life, but the best is yet to come.” – Tim Keller, Jesus the King.

Not only is the best to come, but it is “imperishable, undefiled, unfading and reserved in heaven for us, protected by God!

Because of this, we are free. Free to love all people liberally. Free to show kindness to all. Free to forgive. Free to think the best of people. Free to loosen our control and worry. Free to give more away. Free to take ourselves less seriously. We’re free to spend more time being with people, invest in their lives, and less time securing our own little kingdoms. We are free to bless the people who hate and curse us. Might I even suggest free to read another story to our kids or spend more time playing with them? We are free to throw a great party or plant a garden.

People who have no belief in God or the Resurrection – who have no hope in a restored heaven and earth, say stuff like this all the time. How much more can Christians live care-free? Indeed, if Jesus rose from the dead, your life should be care-free, but not because of flippancy. Your life should be care-free because of such great certainty and underlying hope about the future and the kingdom of God.

If you’re lonely in this life, in the resurrection, you will have perfect love. If you’re empty in this life, in the resurrection, you will be fully satisfied.

If you and I know that this is not the only world, the only body, the only life we are ever going to have – that we will one day have a perfect life, a definite, concrete life – then who ultimately cares what people do to you, and what happens in this life?

Because of the resurrection, we can be free from ultimate anxieties in this life; we can be brave and take risks. We can sacrifice greatly. We can face even the worst things with joy and with hope because it doesn’t end there. Death, chaos, and destruction do not have the final word over our lives – Jesus the resurrected Lord does.

It’s because of this hope we can freely give our bodies in obedience to God, to his use, and for his glory. We can have the mind of Christ, who did not hold onto his glory and comforts but laid them aside for others. We can be humble, like Jesus. We can make ourselves the servant of all, like Jesus. We can die to ourselves, our will, our self-preservation for the sake of others and receive a great reward in the Kingdom of God.” Only in the gospel of Jesus Christ can we find such enormous hope to live in. Only the resurrection promises us not just new minds and hearts but also new bodies. Only the resurrection promises that the best is yet to come!

Listen to the voices of the prophets, and just let this vision sink into your bones.

“On this mountain, the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. It will be said on that day, “Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation” (Isaiah 25:6-9)

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:1-5)

Last thing

“If you believe the resurrection is true. If you believe that Jesus has died to save you – to redirect your eternal trajectory irrevocably toward God. If you believe that God has accepted you, for Jesus’ sake, through an act of supreme grace. You are a part of the Kingdom of God which means – a guaranteed new heavens and new earth, a healed material creation, absolute wholeness and well being- physically, spiritually, socially, and economically.” – Tim Keller, Jesus the King.

If you believe this, then Practice Resurrection.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials” (1 Peter 1:3–6).

Hope is as essential to human life as food and water, without hope we lose the will to live. The best this world has to offer is hope in perishing things such as health, prosperity and happiness in this life, none of which last beyond the grave. Worldly hope is dying hope, and even this is in short demand nowadays. However, through the victorious resurrection of Christ we are given the promise of the imperishable inheritance that is eternal life. Christ conquered the grave and the promise of God is that we too will not be held down by death if we are found in him. Our hope in Christ is a living hope! Through this living hope alone can we have peace and even rejoice in these seasons of uncertainty and trials that we find ourselves in presently. May the peace, love, and hope of Christ be with you this week and forevermore.

“Today we call it the holy cross, for Christ has made it so glorious; but at that time it was nothing but the gallows on which the Jews hung and executed Him. This was the altar on which this High Priest performs His sacrifice.” – Martin Luther

Jesus our high priest chose as his altar the most gruesome and cruel place of torture for the dregs and criminals of society. Such was his identifying with the most heinous and shameful parts of our fallen, sinful, Adamic nature. He sanctified a symbol of gruesome Roman torture and criminal justice and transformed it into a symbol of grace, mercy, love and forgiveness. All this reminds me that in bearing my sin, He satisfies God’s justice for me and transforms my life through his sacrifice.

“Great God, in Christ You call our name and then receive us as Your own, not through some merit, right or claim, but by Your gracious love alone. We strain to glimpse Your mercy seat and find You kneeling at our feet. Then take the towel, and break the bread, and humble us, and call us friends. Suffer and serve till all are fed, and show how grandly love intends to work till all creation sings, to fill all worlds, to crown all things.” -Brian Wren

“Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him” (John 13:3-5).

The action of Jesus washing their feet is a demonstration of His love for sinners. And specifically His love for “his own.” This is an example of what Jesus’ love looks like. Humble, kneeling, washing. He cares about the dignity and value of each individual. He doesn’t stand far back with a hose and spray them all, but one by one, personally.

“Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day” (1 Corinthians 15:3-5).

Good Friday didn’t seem so good when it occurred. Jesus was beaten and bloodied. He had been falsely accused and unlawfully tried. He was sentenced to a criminal’s death without having committed any legal offense. He was condemned but at the same moment a sinister insurrectionist and murderer was released from captivity. Jesus, the friend of sinners, was ridiculed and then bludgeoned by the religious leaders, mocked and humiliated by Herod, interrogated by Pilate, rejected by the Jews, spit upon and tormented verbally by the crowds, and then scourged and crucified by the Romans. How can any of this be good?

On the cross, as He breathed His final breath, Jesus cried out one word and then died. This singular word meant a lot to artists and to those in the financial industry of Jesus’ day. In John 19:30, Jesus called out tetelestai!. The word means “IT IS FINISHED!” Artists who finished their works would often use this word just as their final stroke was completed. When a debt was finally paid off, the word tetelestai would be written on the invoice, much like the stamp many offices use that declares “PAID IN FULL”. Through the incarnation, His perfect life, and His suffering for us on the cross, Jesus became our perfect substitute. Christ is our atoning sacrifice, without blemish (Hebrews 9:11-10:18). He has saved us from the wrath of God (Romans 5:9), and has provided the only means of justification through His blood (Romans 3:24-25). Jesus died once – for all – and His death is sufficient to save. Nothing else must be done to add to the work that Christ accomplished.

Why is Good Friday good? Because this is the day that the power of sin was forever broken. This was the day that the wrath of God was appeased through the finished work of Christ at Calvary. The law was fully and finally fulfilled and upheld in perfection, even as our sin was imputed to the Son. In the midst of the evil, injustice, wrath, torment, suffering, pain and death, something intended for our greatest good was accomplished when Jesus cried out IT IS FINISHED. He didn’t say, “I AM FINISHED”. No, but the work He came to do was completed. Let’s praise God for the finished work of Christ on our behalf and follow Him with joy!

“When God becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth, he not only enters into the finitude of man, but in his death on the cross also enters into the situation of man’s god forsakenness. In Jesus he does not die the natural death of a finite being, but the violent death of the criminal on the cross, the death of complete abandonment by God. The suffering in the passion of Jesus is abandonment, rejection by God, his Father. God does not become a religion, so that man participates in him by corresponding religious thoughts and feelings. God does not become a law, so that man participates in him through obedience to a law. God does not become an ideal, so that man achieves community with him through constant striving. He humbles himself and takes upon himself the eternal death of the godless and the godforsaken, so that all the godless and the godforsaken can experience communion with him.” -Jürgen Moltmann

Every spring I find myself returning to this quote to help me plumb the depths of the significance of the Cross of Christ. That God would become man and willingly suffer and die is unique to the Christian witness and in itself powerful. But Moltmann here pushes us beyond the fact of the death of Christ to consider the reason for Christ’s death. Christ died for what? For who? Christ died for the ungodly…for the godforsaken. In the death of Christ God bridged the divide that he did not make, healed the wound he did not inflict, restored what he had not broken; and he did this on behalf of those who were responsible for those things. The death of Christ therefore is more than divine humility or even devine sympathy. It is divine love. Divine unfathomable love.

The good news of Good Friday is that “It is finished!” (John 19:30) As a result of what Jesus accomplished in his life, death, and resurrection, we can rest from our labors of trying to justify ourselves, and we can revel in hope, because not only were our sins imputed to Jesus, but his righteousness was imputed to us.

This is what it means when it says: “For our sake, He (God) made Him (Jesus), who knew no sin, to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

It’s the most astonishing exchange of all time: for those who receive Him (John 1:12), all of your sinfulness was placed on Him, and in return all of His righteousness was accounted to you.
Jürgen Moltmann puts it this way in his book, The Crucified God:

“When God becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth, he not only enters into the finitude of man, but in his death on the cross also enters into the situation of man’s godforsakenness. In Jesus he does not die the natural death of a finite being, but the violent death of the criminal on the cross, the death of complete abandonment by God. The suffering in the passion of Jesus is abandonment, rejection by God, his Father. God does not become a religion, so that man participates in him by corresponding religious thoughts and feelings. God does not become a law, so that man participates in him through obedience to a law. God does not become an ideal, so that man achieves community with him through constant striving. He humbles himself and takes upon himself the eternal death of the godless and the godforsaken, so that all the godless and the godforsaken can experience communion with him.”

Moltmann goes on to say: “God weeps with us so that we may one day laugh with him. May Holy Week be for you a time filled with reflection upon, appreciation for, and response to what Jesus did for you on Calvary; the ultimate expression of God’s love for you.”

_{This article originally appeared on calvarychapel.flywheelsites.com on April 20, 2019.}

“I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25)

Jesus’ claim to be the resurrection and the life is so radical that it does not allow the hearer to hold a neutral position concerning Him. As C.S. Lewis said, “There are only three possibilities with Jesus: He is a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord.” Any serious consideration of His words will almost certainly force one to admit, like it or not, that He is Lord.

Jesus made this statement in response to the death of His friend, Lazarus. Death is that dreaded reality that every human being hopes to avoid, but can never escape. Death is man’s perennial enemy and man’s greatest fear. In fact, the Bible says that men live all their lives in bondage to the fear of death (Hebrews 2:15).

Actually, death was never a part of God’s original plan for man.

It is something that came in because of sin. God had said to Adam, in the day that you eat of the fruit of the tree in the midst of the garden you shall surely die (Genesis 2:17). Our ongoing inability to accept death as just another part of the human experience is, to me, a strong indicator that the biblical explanation of it is the right one-death is abnormal.

Think about it: no matter how young or old the person, no matter how sick or disabled, no matter how far removed from a person we might have been, there is a pang in our hearts when we hear of their passing. Millions were stricken with grief over the untimely death of pop star and cultural icon, Michael Jackson. Yet how many actually knew him personally? Why do people react so passionately to death? Because death is not right. It never was right. It never will be right. Nevertheless, it is.

“The current death-rate is awesome. Three people die every second, 180 every minute, nearly 11,000 every hour, about 260,000 every day, 95,000,000 every year. Death comes to young and old, rich and poor, good and bad, educated and ignorant, king and commoner. … The dynamic young businessman, the glamorous actress, the great athlete, the brilliant scientist, the television personality, the powerful politician-none can resist the moment when death will lay its hand upon them and bring all their fame and achievements to nothing. … Death is no respecter of time or place; it has neither season nor parish. It can strike at any moment of the day or night, on land, on the sea or in the air. It comes to the hospital bed, the busy road, the comfortable armchair, the sports field and the office; there is not a single spot on the face of the planet where it is not able to strike.”

The philosopher Epicurus said, “It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls.”

Are there any solutions? Is man destined to go on endlessly being defeated by death? Jesus answered those questions when He stood face to face with death and said, “I am the resurrection and the life.”

Just a few days later, Jesus would meet death head-on Himself in fulfillment of the prophecy:

“I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death. O Death, I will be your plagues! O Grave, I will be your destruction!” (Hosea 13:14).

His destruction of death would come through His resurrection.

Paul the apostle would later write of Christ as the one who “abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10).

The word “abolish” means to put an end to. Some synonyms for “abolish” are: eradicate, rescind, repeal, obliterate, annihilate. Jesus Christ obliterated death! You might say, “Wait a minute, as you just stated, three people die every second. What do you mean Jesus Christ obliterated death?” There are two definitions of death: man’s and God’s. Man’s definition of death is essentially the separation of the soul and spirit from the body. God’s definition of death is the separation of the soul and spirit from God.

The Bible teaches that physical death is the result of spiritual death. Jesus obliterated spiritual death by bringing man’s soul and spirit back into conscious fellowship with God. But He also obliterated physical death by rising from the dead and becoming the first of a great multitude who will rise also. In the original order of things, spiritual death (which came through the sin of Adam) led ultimately to physical death. In the new order of things, spiritual life (which comes through faith in Jesus Christ) will lead ultimately to physical life without the possibility of death.

Again the apostle Paul put it this way in 1 Corinthians 15, that great chapter on the resurrection:

“Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruptible has put on incorruption, and this mortal has put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written:

‘Death is swallowed up in victory.’

“O Death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory?” (1 Corinthians 15:51-55).

_{This article originally appeared on calvarychapel.flywheelsites.com on April 17, 2019.}

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the Gardener. He cuts off every branch in Me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit He prunes so that it will be even more fruitful” (John 15:1-2).

“Come now; let us leave,” Jesus beckoned His disciples, leading them from the upper room where they shared their last supper together.

It was the day before the Cross.

He knew what was coming. He washed their feet, shared communion, taught them, reassured them, then stood up and led them down to the Garden of Gethsemane.

As they walked past acres of vineyards in the light of the Passover moon, I can see Jesus stopping to lift up a length of the vine as He began to reveal the mysteries of spiritual gardening.

“I am the vine,” He began.

It starts with Him. The Gardener is God the Father, and believers are the branches of the vine. There are only two kinds of branches: fruitless and fruitful. Which means there are two kinds of believers: fruitless and fruitful.

One of the great principles of gardening is pruning. Vine keepers cut off the sucker shoots, the cane like branches that produce beautiful leaves, but bear no fruit. If they remain, they will sap the life of the vine and reduce the amount of water and nutrients that reach the fruit. Everything suffers.

Pruning directs as much water and nutrients as possible to the branches bearing fruit, increasing the quantity and the quality of the harvest.

Jesus needed them to know that pruning is necessary.

Sometimes it is painful. Sometimes it is a relief! God will remove things from our lives that we simply don’t have the courage or strength to remove ourselves.

Even fruitless branches can bear deceptively beautiful foliage. Just because things look good and sound good, doesn’t mean they are part of the heavenly Gardener’s plan for your life.

God may be pruning something out of your life. Let it go. Trust Him. Don’t fight it. Welcome it, for His pruning will ultimately enrich your life.

Jesus said that He came that we may have life and have it “more abundantly.”

He came to give us rich, full, productive lives that are not distracted, weighed down, diluted or hindered by activities, relationships or unnecessary obligations. He waters, nourishes, weeds and carefully prunes our lives to allow our gifts and talents to flourish so that we can be a blessing to others and glorify God.

He was about to face Gethsemane but knew it was important to leave His beloved disciples with these life-giving lessons.

_{This article originally appeared on calvarychapel.flywheelsites.com on April 14, 2017.}

“He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

As we approach Easter Sunday and celebrate the death of death in the life of the Resurrection of Jesus, we come to this great day through the path of Good Friday. On Easter we celebrate the resurrection; on Friday we contemplate the meaning and implications of His death. It is good for us to slow down and journey with Jesus, as it were, in His work on our behalf so as to absorb the story and the verity therein as it pertains to His mission of rescuing us from our sin and reconciling us to God.

As we take time to reflect on Good Friday, we consider the cross, where the love of God towards sinners was expressed in the wrath bearing obedience of His Son. There are numerous ways we can go with such a massive topic. For instance, the cosmic plan of redemption, and how God brought it all to pass just as He intended (Acts 2:22-24; 4:27-8), the spectacle and injustice of how His trial was handled, and on and on and on.

In this post, I want to address the nakedness of Jesus and what can be theologically deduced from it.

Jesus was crucified naked

It seems most renderings of Jesus on the cross have His loins covered, but it seems that in all actuality He would have been naked on the cross. It has been pointed out that for Jewish sensitivities a cloth may be provided so as to reduce the sense of shame that was certainly intended in the act of crucifixion. Yet it hardly seems from the Gospels that this would have been a concern of the Jews who could have influenced such a thing, but rather that they did not want His Jewishness to be an issue (John 19:21). I am of the opinion that Jesus was absolutely naked as He hung on the cross as was the Roman custom.

All of the Gospels speak of Him being stripped and beaten (Matthew 27:28, 35; Mark 15:24; Luke 23:34; John 19:23). I admit there is no scholarly consensus as to whether Jesus retained an article of clothing or not. Yet upon reading John 19:23-4, the evidence seems to point to the absolute nakedness of Jesus.

“When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his garments and divided them into four parts, one part for each soldier; also his tunic. But the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from top to bottom, so they said to one another, ‘Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it to see whose it shall be.’” This was to fulfill the Scripture which says, “They divided my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.”

Several important things here are to be noted. First of all His garments were divided and His tunic was attained by the casting of lots. Secondly, this was done in fulfillment of Scripture. The Scripture that is being fulfilled is Psalm 22:18. For a more detailed treatment of the grammar and literary issues involved in interpreting this fulfillment formula, I would point you to the work of Carson.¹

Nakedness in the Bible

The Roman reason that Jesus was crucified naked was to utterly humiliate Him, cause Him to feel shame and abandonment and warn the onlookers of the cost of crime and rebellion in Rome. That is the historic reason. Yet, I would also suggest that we can deduce a theological point from understanding how nakedness is treated in the Bible.

A Sign of innocence

In Genesis when God made the world, He made man and gave Him dominion over the world and commanded him to inhabit and fill it. There is an interesting phrase about Adam and Eve that is a shadow of the darkness to come after the fall. Before they fell into sin, it says of them in 2:25, “And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.”

The implication is that in the original innocent state of mankind, nakedness was normal and was a sign of innocence. There was no need to hide or avoid physical vulnerability because there was no sin in the world and thus no guilt and no sense of separation. To be naked and not ashamed was to be in a state of innocence. While it is not the nakedness that is the main issue, but the heart’s relation to God, it is clear that nakedness is equated with the original state of man, as was innocence and the two are used in harmony to describe man before sin came into the world.

A Sign of guilt and shame

The sign of purity very quickly becomes a sign of sin due to the fact that man becomes a sinner by virtue of disobeying the command of God. Now the natural constitution of man is no longer purity, but defilement, corruption and separation. Now man who once operated in his natural state with no sense of shame has a deep sense of shame in his natural state because his natural state is now sin. His nature has changed dramatically. Nakedness is what man is. It was innocence, but now it is guilt. Thus when we see man fall into sin, nakedness is now embarrassing, awkward, and a sense of separation and avoidance have replaced the purity of freedom and unhindered fellowship.

“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ And he said, ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself'” (Genesis 3:7-10).

Their sense of separation was immediate, and they sought to remedy the problem with urgency. Their connection to God has been broken, and now they fear Him and hide from Him. Their nakedness now represents their sinful state and separation from God. Nakedness is associated with guilt, which comes from sin. As Matthews points out how nakedness operated with a negative connotation in the Pentateuch and that the Hebrews associated it with guilt.²

There are also a few New Testament passages that may add to this theme as well (2 Corinthians 5:3; Revelation 3:17), although they are less obviously implicit than the ones noted above.

The Nakedness of Jesus

In view of what has been seen about nakedness, several valuable observations can be seen about the nakedness of Jesus:

His Humanity and Humiliation

When we picture Jesus hanging naked on the cross, there we seen Him in His true and raw humanity. As one of us, He died for us. There He experienced our shame and beyond that the agony of bearing our sin for us. He was gathering up our humanity in Himself and presenting it to God. His pain was real. His blood was real. His wounds were real. His thirst was real. There was nothing easy about what He endured. And as Paul said, it was His humility (Philippians 2:8) that caused Him to endure the cross. Rome wanted to humiliate Him in His nakedness, but it was His own humility there to be seen in the most raw and vulnerable conditions humans know… nakedness.

His Innocence and Identification

In seeing how nakedness both conveys innocence and sin, we can look at our naked Savior on the cross and see how He was both. His nakedness spoke of His innocence as the last Adam and simultaneously of the sin that was placed on Him from the people of the first Adam. Adam experienced shame in the garden and exchanged an innocent nakedness for a guilty nakedness. Jesus, the last Adam, despised the shame as He in our likeness suffered for our shame and nakedness. He was simultaneously innocent and bearing our sin. He, though innocent, identified with our fallen humanity and redeemed us.

Hanging naked in His innocence, He was clothed with our sin, that we in our guilty nakedness may be clothed with His righteousness.

Paul has this exchange in mind in several passages:

“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’” (Galatians 3:13).

It was in being our substitute that He reconciled us back to God as a people constituted in Him as our federal head. This Good Friday, Behold your King there in your stead. Behold Him, our last Adam in all His innocence bearing our guilt and shame and giving us His life.

And the reason you came
Was to endure the pain

On the tree
On the tree

Bore my sin and my shame

Erased my guilt and my blame

Now I’m free
Now I’m free

Perfect liberty

Perfect freedom

For all those found in Christ

Perfect grace

Perfect love

God’s perfect sacrifice

– anonymous

Notes:

¹ D. A. Carson, The Gospel according to John, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Leicester, England; Grand Rapids, MI: Inter-Varsity Press; W.B. Eerdmans, 1991), 612.

² K. A. Mathews, Genesis 1-11:26, vol. 1A, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1996), 225.

_{This article originally appeared on calvarychapel.flywheelsites.com on April 13, 2014.}

When Jesus came into Jerusalem on what we call Palm Sunday, you could say that it was a patriotic parade. This is how it is described in John 12:12-13:

“The next day a great multitude that had come to the feast, when they heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, took branches of palm trees and went out to meet Him, and cried out: ‘Hosanna! “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the LORD!” The King of Israel!’”

In that day and for those people, it looked like a Fourth of July parade in modern America. The crowd shouted that Jesus was “the King of Israel.” They waved branches “of palm trees,” which were a patriotic symbol for an independent Israel going back to their last independent state under the Maccabees. This was an exciting, happy time of welcoming the man whom many thought could be the King of Israel, who had finally come to overthrow the hated Romans.

Since it was near the Passover, there were a lot of Roman soldiers in Jerusalem. It isn’t hard to imagine that several of them saw the parade and felt it was important to tell their commander, Pontus Pilate, that the Jews just welcomed a king into the city to replace the present rulers.

If Pilate received the news, how do you think he responded? Think of the questions he might have asked of the soldiers who brought the report. What kind of army did this “King of the Jews” have? There were no soldiers, only children who laughed and danced with the parade. What kind of patriotic war songs did they sing? There were only songs of praise to the God of Israel.

What kind of weapons did they have? They didn’t have swords or spears, only palm branches. What about the king? What kind of horse did he ride? He didn’t ride a warhorse. He didn’t ride a horse at all. It was a donkey and a colt at that.

If Pontius Pilate thought about the parade that brought Jesus of Nazareth into Jerusalem, he probably laughed.

The Romans knew how to put on a proper military parade, and this wasn’t it. It was like the difference between a great military parade with soldiers and tanks and missiles, contrasted with a children’s Fourth of July parade completed with toddlers, tricycles and flags.

Jesus said something dramatic with this entry to Jerusalem: “Yes, I am a King of love and power as I showed with raising Lazarus from the dead. But I’m not like the kings of this world; I am a humble King, come to serve and to die for My people.”

The most wonderful thing about this is that the humble King won. He defeated the Roman Empire and every other empire. His kingdom continues to grow and remains today.

Jesus said He would be crucified.

“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14-15).

Psalm 22 predicted Jesus would be crucified. Isaiah 53 predicted that Jesus would be crucified. Zechariah 12:10 predicted that Jesus would be crucified. God was sovereign over the worst in humanity.

This whole scene is filled with voices and choices: Pontius Pilate and Barabbas the robber.

The voices and choices in this trial unveil how broken humanity is and how humble and majestic Jesus is.

“Jesus stands before Pilate” (Luke 23:1–25).

“Then the whole company of them arose and brought him before Pilate” (Luke 23:1).

The only reason the average person knows anything about Pontius Pilate is because of his relationship with Jesus Christ. If Pilate had not been the governor of Judea at the time of Jesus, he would have lived and died in obscurity. There were thousands of Roman officials commissioned throughout the Roman Empire, but I doubt that any of us know even one of them by name. But Pilate is known throughout history because of these moments he spent with Jesus.

Pilate possessed great power and position in the Empire. But he hated Judea — he hated the Jews — he had zero concern for them or for their religion — all of which led to decisions that resulted in horrific political setbacks with the Jews that put his entire career in jeopardy.

Pilate’s life was defined by his decisions concerning Jesus — and most importantly the consequences of his indecision concerning Jesus. Life is filled with decisions.

There are political decisions. As the voting results from presidential elections are reported, there are graphic banners running across screens that say “Decision 20_ _.” There are educational decisions. Purchase decisions (Buying a car, buying a house, school district, square footage, neighborhood). Relationship decisions — Is this the one? Each of those decisions has consequences — some small, some life-changing.

But there is one decision that has eternal consequence.

That is the decision that we make concerning Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit inspired the authors of all four accounts of the life and mission of Jesus (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) to hold this man, Pontius Pilate, before us because his decision was made through the filters of a value system that could never supply the deepest need of his heart — a value system that has without exception failed everyone. He came down on the wrong side of the decision concerning Jesus — when all the while he tried everything in his power to make no decision.

In verse three, we find Pilate face to face with Jesus for the first time.

“And Pilate asked him, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?'” (Luke 23:3).

No doubt Pilate had heard much about Him. He wouldn’t have failed to miss the way Jesus entered into Jerusalem on the first day of that week with the crowd shouting, “Hosanna, Hosanna! Blessed is the King who comes.” Then there was a Cohort (600 Roman soldiers) involved in the arrest of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. The ranking officer would have had daily communications with Pilate. He had spies all through Judea and Galilee. In fact, Matthew and Mark tell us that Pilate knew exactly why the religious rulers had brought Jesus to him.

“For he knew that it was out of envy that they had delivered Him up” (Matthew 27:18; Mark 16:10).

Pilate didn’t ask, “Are you the Messiah? Are you bringing salvation? Are you from heaven?” Pilate had ZERO interest in such things. Pilate’s question had everything to do with the brief biographical sketch of this man. “Are you the King of the Jews?” “Do you have a political agenda?” “Are you out to oppose Caesar and me?”

All four Gospel accounts give us the answer of Jesus to this first question: “And He answered him, ‘You have said so.’”

In John 18:34 we read, “Jesus answered, ‘Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about Me?'”

This is radical! Suddenly, Pilate’s on trial! The beaten, disfigured and defenseless Jesus was holding court on Pilate; and by proxy, you and me.

So many people think that Jesus is on trial when someone shares the Gospel with them! REALITY — Jesus is judging them! THEY are the ones on trial!

We need to bear this in mind — Jesus loved Pilate. Jesus was after Pilate’s heart. Jesus was appealing to him — “As you stand here and look at Me, are you asking if I’m a king because you need to know for yourself? Do you have a conviction in your heart about Me? Or are you just saying this because it’s popular opinion, and other people told it to you?” Jesus wasn’t asking to obtain information. He was asking so Pilate could discover the truth about himself.

“Pilate answered, ‘Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered you over to me. What have you done?’” (John 18:35).

Without a doubt, Pilate did not expect the answer that he was about to hear from this bloodied, disfigured man standing before him.

“Jesus answered, ‘My kingdom is not of this world'” (John 18:36).

At this moment, Jesus shows us how to deal with our post-everything world. Jesus loved this man. Jesus was probing Pilate and provoking Pilate to consider Him. Pilate could only come up with, “What IS truth?” That is the battle cry of our post-modern, post-Christian, post-Truth world!

We shouldn’t be shocked by post-modern man’s take on truth. We should be shocked at how Jesus — even after He had been brutally beaten and disfigured — loved this man and tried to draw him to the truth.

DON’T MISS THIS — Pilate was CONVINCED that Jesus was innocent. But he could see how volatile this situation was. Pilate had to make a decision between his CONSCIENCE — what he knew to be right about Jesus — and CONVENIENCE — a course of action that would bring him the least amount of grief.

We are always faced with the choice between conscience and convenience.

“You always said people don’t do what they believe in, they just do what’s most convenient, then they repent”– Bob Dylan

If Pilate had an ounce of integrity, it would have been, “I find no fault in this man” — PERIOD! But there was that ring he wore — that ring said that he was the “Friend of Caesar.” That relationship, and the prestige, the position and power it brought to him, was his idol. It was the very thing that defined him; the thing that he lived for. Pilate could not put a period at the end of his judgment because he knew that his decision was not the decision that was going to satisfy the Jews — and as a result, it was a threat to his idol — a threat to his status as governor and “Friend of Caesar.” So, Pilate immediately jumped on a potential escape route. By the way — in any and all wrong decisions concerning Jesus, the first course of action is to identify the idol.

That was Pilate’s official judgment — he made it on behalf of the Senate and the people of Rome. So, Pilate tried another potential escape route.

The Roman system of justice was unyielding. If you pronounced a man innocent, the authorities had no right to punish him after that. You were to let him go.

“But they all cried out together, ‘Away with this man, and release to us Barabbas’” (Luke 23:18).

Barabbas is mentioned in all four gospels — I believe — for very definite reasons. We don’t know a whole lot about him. “Bar-Abba” means “Son of the Father.” There are those who say that his name was actually Jesus Bar-abbas.

“In the hands of some first-century authors, however, the word depicts not simply a thief, but a terrorist”– D.A. Carson

Matthew tells us he was “a notorious prisoner” (Matthew 27:16). Luke and Mark tell us he was an insurrectionist and a murderer. He was scheduled to be crucified. In light of what transpired here, we can see that it was originally Barabbas who was going to be crucified on Golgotha between two other thieves.

Jesus died on the very cross Barabbas was going to die on.

If anyone could say, “Jesus died for me,” it was Barabbas. He knew that he was guilty. He knew that he was facing the death penalty. He knew that there was a piece of wood with his name on it waiting for him to carry outside of the city where they would nail him to it. He knew that he was released and that Jesus died in his place — the innocent for the guilty.

As brutal a man as he was, the shouts that he heard must have made him buckle. Then he heard the sound of the key unlocking his cell. He discovered that Jesus Christ was dying in his place. On a human level, try to imagine what that moment was like as he realized that the piece of wood that he was going to carry to his own death, was now going to be placed upon a substitute.

But we see it from an even more radical vantage point. Here is the best in the universe, God incarnate, and the worst in humanity, and whom do men choose? God incarnate dies in the place of the brutal Barabbas.

“For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21, KJV).

“He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed” (1 Peter 2:24).

Remember — The Gospel is not religious advice.

The Gospel is the startling proclamation of what God did for us!

The Gospel is the startling proclamation that because of what God did for us, anyone can be right with God. The Gospel proclaims that God offers to open the prison cell, release us from the bondage of sin, and have Jesus die in our place.

“Then Pilate took Jesus and flogged him” (John 19:1).

We don’t want to miss how brutal Pilate was willing to be to maintain the privileged status of wearing that ring that said, “Friend of Caesar.” He essentially said — “I’m not going to kill Him all the way — I’ll half-kill Him. When this mob sees Jesus torn to shreds, they will leave me alone, and I can be rid of Jesus.”

The first blows caused bleeding from the capillaries and veins. But as the blows continued in frequency and intensity, the back was torn to shreds, and there would be arterial bleeding. Once the hooks were sunk deeply into the tenderized flesh, the executioner would rip the skin, muscle, tendons and even bones off the victim. Victims would shake violently and bleed profusely.

History records that upon occasion, the hooks would go so deep that a rib would literally come flying off the body of a living man. Eyewitness accounts tell us that by the end of the Roman scourging, the victim’s back was a mass of hanging, unidentifiable flesh — and you could actually see internal organs! The victim would go into shock. His body was covered in blood. The Lictor would then untie the hands of the victim, and he would collapse in a pool of his own blood and flesh.

Seven hundred years before the scourging of Jesus, the prophet Isaiah predicted the results of Jesus’ scourging:

“Many were astonished at you—his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of mankind” (Isaiah 52:14).

In the most personal way — Barabbas, the guilty man was released — the innocent Son of God was crucified in his place. THAT is the Gospel.

Does it blow your mind how gracious God was to Pilate? Jesus spoke to Pilate in His first civil trial before Pilate. Jesus continued to speak to Pilate the second time He stood before him.

DON’T MISS THIS — Pilate teaches us that whatever it is you hope to gain by compromising concerning Jesus — you can NEVER keep it! Within 10 years, Pilate would lose his position as Prefect and Governor of Judea and be sent back to Rome. By the time he was sent back to Rome, Tiberius had died. Caligula was Caesar. Caligula banished Pilate to the region known as Gaul where he ended up committing suicide. Here he had compromised everything in regard to Jesus in order to secure his identity as the “Friend of Caesar” — and his place in the Roman Empire. He chose friend of Caesar over friend of Jesus — the King of kings and Lord of lords.

You’ll have to kill Jesus or crown Jesus.

Voices and Choices: Kill Jesus or Crown Jesus. That is the decision that everyone must make. This is the decision that determines forever for you. This isn’t like the choice someone makes to flee approaching peril.

This is a decision to flee from eternal loss, eternal darkness — to the light of Jesus Christ. This is the decision to choose life over death.

As Easter approaches, it makes me consider the way people think about Jesus in the world I live in. I live in Cork, Ireland. Ireland is a modern western society, embracing all things liberal and running full tilt away from its religious heritage. In Ireland these days, it seems you can be anything you want, but if you decide to follow Jesus with your life and put your trust in Him, there is an air of mocking and eye-rolling that is inevitably encountered. Jesus is the butt of many jokes. He is a meme, a parody, powerless and, if at all possible, He is completely avoided.

The modern western societies that many of us live in often tell us that it is ridiculous to believe in God, to put our trust in Him is a mere delusion.

These voices are loud, seemingly infallibly rational, and there have been times when they have shaken my faith. However, as time goes by and I look at the world around me, I become more convinced daily that, in fact, it is a place that needs Jesus more than ever, no matter how loudly it shouts to the contrary.

In Isaiah 41, the chapter opens with God calling the nations to come before Him in a sort of courtroom setting, to make their arguments as to why they serve other “gods” than Him. He says:

“Let the nations come forward and speak; let us meet together at the place of Judgement… The metalworker encourages the goldsmith, and the one who smooths with the hammer encourages the one who strikes with the anvil. One says of the welding, ‘it is good’ and the other nails down the idol so it will not topple.”

The nations come before God and encourage each other about the idols they are building with their own hands.

In our world, these idols are everywhere, depending on our bent, we pick our idol: “self,” power, recognition, fame, money, reputation, beauty… you name it. But these idols cannot stand in front of the one true God, as it says in verse seven, they “nail down the idol so it will not topple.” The voices of the world must be fortified with elaborate justifications so that they do not topple, but ultimately, they are powerless to save. The world we live in is a broken place; it is time we recognized that and stopped being so intimidated by it.

In verses 2-3 of Isaiah 41, we remain in the courtroom as God takes His turn to speak. He speaks of the coming deliverance of Israel out of their Babylonian captivity in 150 years, through a Medo-Persian emperor named Cyrus. This is a beautiful moment of Bible prophecy, declaring events that would not happen for more than a century. God goes on to declare in verse four:

“Who has done this and carried it through, calling forth the generations from the beginning? I, the Lord with the first of them and with the last, I am He.”

Here, God is declaring how great He is, how He has no beginning and no end; He created time, the universe, all of history is in His hand and only in Him is truth and wisdom found. For the short time we have here on this earth, it is wise to submit our lives to the God who knows all of eternity in its infinity; it is the only option that makes sense.

Proverb 9:10 tells us, “The knowledge of God is the beginning of wisdom.” The world shouts the opposite of this at us very loudly, but only God is all-knowing, eternal, omniscient, only in putting our trust in Him can we know the truth. The Oxford English dictionary’s word of the year for 2016 was “post-truth.”

Apparently, we now live in a post-truth world.

There is no truth anymore; there is only your truth and my truth, but there is no absolute truth anymore. However, without truth, how do you know where to place your foot, where to take your next step? Without absolute truth, we are walking perpetually on shifting sands. I think we can agree with Isaiah when in said in Isaiah 59:14, “truth has fallen in the public square.” In a world like this, it is such a privilege to know “The Truth,” Jesus Christ, “The way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). When we build our lives on this truth, we have the word and the spirit to guide us; we are never alone. What a great honor and joy it is to know the truth, to know Jesus.

We have seen how, in Isaiah 41, God calls the nations to present their case to Him. The question is: Is the world in a good position to make their argument against God?

Has the world got it all figured out on its own? Let’s have a look at what some prominent social commentators have to say about the world we live in to see if it is ready to stand up against God. Henry Allen, a famous journalist for the Wall Street Journal recently wrote:

“For the first time in my 72 years, I have no idea what is going on. The most important thing in our culture is not change but the fact that reality itself is dwindling, fading like sun-struck wallpaper. Facebook enshrines banality, we have individualism but no privacy, we are all outsiders with no inside to be outside of. There is no arc, no through line, no destiny. As the British Tommies sang in WWI, ‘We are here because we’re here, because we’re here.’ Like many people, I used to think the world would go on as it would go on – with the arrival of better medicines, an Ipad and the occasional earthquake, but that was when I thought I knew what was going on. Now I fear reality is fading like the Cheshire Cat, leaving behind only a smile that grows ever more alarming.”

This is an insightful observation of the world we live in. I could analyze it all day, but the prominent point I think in this quote is that the world is lost. Allen says, “There is no arc, no through line, no destiny.” When we remove God from the picture, we lose our purpose. The enlightenment promised so much, but the world we live in is still dark and needs the light of Christ to shine for people to see their lives as God does, filled with purpose and intention.

The sociologist George Weigel says:

“We live in a world that has lost its story…a world in which the progress promised by the humanities of the past three centuries is now gravely threatened by understandings of the human person that reduce our humanity to a congeries of cosmic chemical accidents. We are a humanity with no intentional origin, no noble destiny, and thus no path to take through history.”

Without God, it is impossible to know our purpose.

We are lost. Remember, the world is loud, but it is in great need. It needs to turn from idols and know its creator, the God who made it, the God who loves it.

This year has been declared the year of the self. “Self-help” is more popular than ever. We are to look to ourselves for everything we need. If we are mindful and self-aware and in-tune, all will be well. But all will not be well, while these things are profitable to some degree, they cannot save your eternal soul. When we look only to ourselves for help, we are totally limited, but if we “lift our eyes up to the mountains, where does my help come from, my help comes from the maker of heaven and earth” (Psalm 121:1-2 ). We have access to the God of the universe through Jesus Christ. We have limitless help, and God is desiring to give it to us.

In Isaiah 41 God promises us, that if we put our trust in Him, He will “take you by the right hand and say to you, do not fear I will help you. Do not be afraid you worm Jacob, little Israel, do not fear, for I myself will help you” (Isaiah 41:13-14). Without God, we are like a little worm, trying to figure out the world, but it is impossible without Him. That is why the world is so lost; its perspective is simply too small. But with God, we can understand our purpose and why we are on this earth. We can let Him take us by the hand and lead us through our lives. He knows the way. He wants to lead us, and He loves us. He will lead us with love.

The current views of the world we live in are becoming more and more confusing to me. There seems to be absurdity at every turn. The notions that are being put forward to help us are simply “wind and confusion” as it says in Isaiah 41:29. When we think about the power that is available to us when we put our trust in God, all other options pale in comparison. Their absurdity becomes clear. A Welsh comedian named David Walliams expresses absurdity beautifully in the following quote:

“A cup of tea is the answer to every problem. Fallen off your bicycle? Nice cup of tea. Your house has been destroyed by a meteorite? Nice cup of tea and a biscuit. Your entire family has been eaten by a Tyrannosaurus Rex that has travelled through a space/time portal? Nice cup of tea and a piece of cake. Possibly a savoury option would be welcome here too, for example a Scotch egg or a sausage roll.”

I love this quote, obviously it’s funny, obviously it’s absurd, but honestly, anything other than putting our trust in the God of the universe to guide us through our life is the equivalent to looking for salvation in a cup of tea.

There is a God. His name is Jesus.

He created this universe. He knew you before you were born. He has a purpose for you. You did not slip through His net. He knows you. He loves you. He wants to take your hand and lead you through your life.

This Easter, for those of us who are believers, let us not be quieted by the noise and nonsense of the world we live.

Let us remember the world is lost. We must love it. We must love the lost. We must tell them about Jesus. If it were not for Jesus, we too would be hopelessly lost. Jesus is the only answer; this has always been the case, and this will never change. I am so grateful to know Him. I am so grateful to know the truth. Lord, help us to spread the good news of Jesus Christ to this world.

Many times during the years of His earthly ministry, Jesus promised that He would rise from the dead (John 2:18-22; Matthew 12:39-40; 16:21). His enemies remembered those predictions (Matthew 27:62-64) and were worried that what Jesus said might actually happen.

So, those enemies came to Pilate, asking for a guard to be set at the tomb (Matthew 27:65-66). The Roman ruler granted their request, saying, “You have a guard,” giving them Roman soldiers to watch the tomb. Before the enemies of Jesus left, Pilate added one more thought, telling them, “Make it as secure as you know how” (Matthew 27:65).

Pilate probably wondered why these religious leaders were afraid of a dead man. He didn’t think of setting a guard himself because he didn’t care. Why would anyone care about the tomb of a convicted criminal? But the religious leaders were more interested in making the tomb secure than the Romans were. They took Pilate’s permission and made the tomb as secure as they could, because it was in their interest to do so.

We know how the story ended. They did their best to make the tomb secure, but it didn’t stop the resurrected Jesus.

They tried to make the tomb secure with a stone, which is a material obstacle. These stones were big and set in a slanted channel. It could not be rolled away from the inside. If enough of the disciples had the courage to come to the guarded tomb, maybe they could roll away the stone. But to do that, they would have to work together, and that didn’t seem likely knowing their history of bickering and competition.

The tomb was also secured by a seal, which was an obstacle of human authority. According to custom, the seal was a rope, overlapping the width of the stone covering the entrance to the tomb. On either side of the doorway, there was a glob of wax securing the rope over the stone. You could not move the rock without breaking the seal. The Roman seal carried legal authority. It was more than yellow tape barricading a crime scene; to break a Roman seal was to defy Roman authority. That stone was secured by the authority of the Roman Empire.

Finally, the tomb was secured by a guard, which was an obstacle of human strength. A typical Roman guard had four soldiers. Two watched while the others rested. The soldiers would be equipped with sword, shield, spear, dagger and full armor. Remember that these were Roman soldiers. They didn’t care about Jesus or Jewish laws or rituals. They were called to secure the tomb of a criminal. To them, the only sacred thing at this tomb was the Roman seal, because if that were broken, their careers were ruined; and they might be executed themselves.

None of these obstacles mattered. They made the tomb “as secure as they knew how,” but it wasn’t secure enough to stand against the glory of the resurrected Jesus:

. Material obstacles can’t stand against the resurrected Jesus.
. Human authority can’t stand against the resurrected Jesus.
. Human strength can’t stand against the resurrected Jesus.

All opposition falls away before our resurrected Lord.