By Pastor Glenn Pease
CONTENTS
1. GOD'S DREAM FULFILLED Based
on Matt. 28:1‑10
2. THEN CAME THE MORNING Based
on Matt. 28:1‑10
3. A RISEN REDEEMER Based on
Mark 16:1‑14
4. THE REALITY OF THE RESURRECTION Based on Mark 16:1‑14
5. ROAD TO EMMAUS Based on Luke 24:13‑35
6. THE EASTER POTENTIAL Based on Luke 24:33‑53
7. BELIEVE IT OR NOT Based on Luke 24:36‑53
8. THE EASTER GARDEN Based on John 20:1‑18
9 THE REALITY OF THE RESURRECTION Based on John 20:1‑18
10. TEARS AT THE TOMB Based on
John 20:11‑18
11. THE RADICAL RESURRECTION Based on Rom. 6:1-10
12. THE LAST BREAKFAST Based on John 21:1‑14
13. THE POWER OF THE
RESURRECTION Based on Eph. 1:15‑23
14. THE POWER OF THE
RESURRECTION Based on Phil. 3:1‑16
1. GOD'S DREAM
FULFILLED Based on Matt. 28:1‑10
Few
people have ever been more lost than Dr. Robert Dykes and his wife
Margery. Both in their late 20's and
parents of two young children, they were presumed dead when their small plane
went down in the mountains of the Wyoming‑Utah boarder. Hundreds of planes searched in vain for
nearly a week, and there was no sign of them.
The temperature had been below zero every night, and they had no
supplies, and so it was presumed they would freeze and not be found until
spring.
But
young George Hunt who had just completed his first cross country flight as a
student pilot prayed for them as he went to sleep. He asked God to get them back to their family. When he went to sleep he dreamed. He saw a red plane on a snow swept ridge,
and two people waving for help. He woke
up and reasoned that he had that dream because he had been praying for the
couple. But when he went back to sleep
he dreamed it again. The third time he
could see clear details of an area he use to hunt in. It was Painter's Basin and Gilbert Peak.
The
next morning he went to the airport and took a plane he was not authorized to
take. He flew to the place he saw in
his dream. There he saw the red plane
and the Dykes waving at him just as in his dream. He waved back and headed to call the Civil Air Patrol. He got chewed out for taking the plane, but
when others flew over the area and confirmed his find he was forgiven. He joined the rescue party that spent the
next 24 hours getting to the plane.
There was much hugging and thanksgiving when they arrived.
The
Dykes had all but given up. They had
written notes as to who was to raise their children. All they had left was one candy bar. Mrs. Dykes said to young George, "When we saw your plane, it
was the most wonderful thing. Our
prayers were answered; a dream come true." They were brought back from certain death and given life with
their family by means of a dream.
This
salvation story is a mini example of what God did for all of us on Easter. We were all lost, and the whole human race
was facing certain death, and not just physical death, but spiritual as well,
which is separation from God. But God
gave His Son a dream, and in that dream a vision of how mankind could be
rescued and saved from that death which threatened to engulf them. The Bible tells us that Jesus was crucified
before the foundation of the world. The
plan of salvation was a dream of God even before He created man. He knew the consequences of making a free
will creature, and He knew sin and death was inevitable. But it was worth it, for He had a plan of
salvation that would be a dream come true.
In the
Incarnation Jesus took flight from eternity into time to seek and save the
lost. In the crucifixion he paid the
penalty for their sin and took their judgment on Himself. In the resurrection Jesus fulfilled God's
dream, for by this victory over man's last enemy, which is death, Jesus
guaranteed that God would have a redeemed family for all eternity. Easter is the celebration of God's dream
fulfilled.
When Jesus woke from the sleep of death,
And in His new body took His new breath,
The storm of darkness and doom He stilled;
With hope His disciple's hearts He filled,
And God's dream for man He fulfilled.
What
Jesus did for God and man on that first Easter dawn is so awesome and so
ultimate there is no way to adequately convey in words the wonder of it
all. That is why we have cantatas and a
world filled with beautiful Easter music.
The Easter message not only has to be believed, it has to be felt, for
the mind alone cannot grasp it all.
When the Queen of Sheba saw the wisdom and wealth of Solomon she
exclaimed, "Behold, the half was not told me." Jesus said of Himself, "A greater than
Solomon is here." If words could
not convey half the glory of Solomon, how much less can they convey the glory
of our risen Lord?
Trying
to illustrate the glory of the risen Christ by the use of words is like trying
to illustrate the glory of the sun by means of a candle. That is why we see God doing some
spectacular things that first Easter dawn, and adding special effects to the
event. The violent earthquake, the
angel rolling the stone back, and His appearance like lightning with clothes
white as snow. No wonder the guards
were so afraid that they shook and became like dead men. They were paralyzed with fear.
That
first Easter had a real impact on those guards, for it was not just a message
they were hearing. They were hearing
the Son of God breaking down the very gates of hell and releasing man from the
bondage to death. They were witnessing
a victory more amazing than any Rambo movie could ever portray. Nature and super nature combined to bear
witness to this cataclysmic event that shook up all of history. As the physical sun rose that dawn and lit
up the world, so the Son of God rose from the darkness of death's night and
filled the world with the light of hope.
Back in
February of 1993 the Flight Control Center near Moscow reported the successful
development of a space reflector. This
aluminum‑covered dish was used by Cosmonauts to reflect light from the
sun to the dark side of the earth. With
a 25 foot disc in space they were able to produce a 2 mile circle of light on
the earth. In other words, they were
able to turn 2 miles of night into 2 miles of day by reflecting the sun. The dream of man is to use this technology
to eliminate the might and be able to keep daytime all the time.
This is
one of God's dreams too, and He intends to dwell with the redeemed in the eternal
kingdom where Rev. 22:5 says there will be no more night. Rev. 21:23 says the New Jerusalem will not
ever need the sun or moon to shine, for the glory of God will be its light, and
the Lamb of God will be its lamp. Verse
25 says the gates never need to be shut for the night, for there will be no
night there. What we need to see is
that this dream of God had its fulfillment when Jesus came out of the darkness
of the tomb like the sun bursting from the womb of night. Paul in II Tim. 1:10 tells us that Jesus,
"...has destroyed death and brought life and immorality to light through
the Gospel."
The
simple message of the angel at the tomb was, "He is not here, He has
risen." You will never find Jesus
in the place of darkness, for He dwells in eternal light, and that is where all
will dwell who trust in Jesus as their Savior.
If you are looking for Jesus, you will not find Him in the
darkness. If you go to the tomb the
only message you will get is that He is not there. If you look for Jesus in the darkness of pessimism you will only
get the word that He is not there. If
you look for Jesus in the darkness of despair, you will only get the word that
He is not there. If you look for Jesus
in the darkness of your prejudice, again it will be that He is not there.
Where
will you find Jesus? You will find Him
in the light, and only in the light. He
is in the light of love, joy, peace, and all the fruits of the Spirit. In the light of the awareness of God's
presence in your everyday is where you will find Jesus. You will find Him in the light of prayer and
in the light of hope. Dr. Heyes tells
of living through the long night of a dark Artic winter. But the day finally came when he walked to
a high point to watch the sun rise for the first time in many months. When he saw it he was moved to shout,
"Heaven be praised! I have once
more seen the sun! He goes on to
describe the reaction of others:
"Off went our caps with simultaneous impulse, and we hailed this
long‑lost wanderer of the heavens with loud demonstrations of joy."
Most of
us have never been in darkness for so long that we cheered the rising of the
sun. But we can imagine how precious it
would be to see the light again after that long night. We can identify with the joy of those at the
tomb who had suffered through the darkest weekend of their lives, but who now
hear the good news that the Son of God has risen. Light has conquered darkness, and God's dream has been
fulfilled. Had the angels said, instead
of, "He is not here," but, "Welcome to the tomb of the world's
greatest teacher. Come in and observe
the body of this great prophet."
The women would have not been as shocked, but would have tearfully
viewed the body and carried the message of sorrow back to the despairing
disciples. The sun rising that morning
could have done nothing to dispel the darkness in their hearts that would never
go away.
There
would be no lights of Christmas, for there would no celebration of the birth of
one who died a loser. Good Friday would
be bad Friday, and Easter would not exist at all. If Christ had not risen, but stayed in death's prison, His
life's story would be a nightmare rather than a dream fulfilled. But we do put lights at Christmas, and we do
sing and rejoice in the beauty of the cross on Good Friday. We do celebrate Easter as well because Jesus
was not there in the darkness of the tomb.
He was alive and filling the world with the light of the Gospel of God's
dream fulfilled. Annie Johnson Flint
wrote,
How vain is our faith if the Christ be not risen;
How dark is the tomb if the Lord is still there!
How heavy our burden of grief and transgression.
How deep our despair!
Oh, justified faith is a finished salvation!
Oh, sure resurrection that comforts our woes!
Oh, glorious light in the valley of shadow,‑
Because Christ arose.
Number
one on the list of the seven wonders of the ancient world was the Great
Pyramid. It was the most stupendous
mass of masonry ever put together by man.
It was four hundred fifty feet high using blocks of stone weighing 2 and
a half tons a piece, and there were 2, 300,000 of them to pile on top of each
other. Cheops, the Pharaoh who had it
built, spent his life on this project using 100,000 men for 30 years to do the
job. He lived for a place to be when he
died.
Almost
3000 years later we see another tomb very famous, but very small by
comparison. The tomb of Jesus was a
mere hole in the hillside. It had one large stone rolled in from of the
entrance. Jesus did not spend a dime on
it, nor did He spend any labor on it.
It was a gift. If you are only
going to use something once, and for a very short time, it is wise to borrow or
rent. That is what Jesus did with His
tomb. It was no final resting place for
Him. It was just a weekend getaway, and
the result is that the stress of the New Testament is on the empty tomb and the
open tomb. It played but a trivial and
temporary role in the biography of our Lord.
He was not a king who lived for a place to die. He was a king who lived for a place beyond
the sky, and a place where He would take you and I, and all who love Him, to
dwell in light forever.
But the
fact remains that the Easter story begins at the tomb. It began in the silence and secrecy of the
pre‑dawn night. Jesus at an hour
unknown to anyone but God came back into His body and rose from the dead. There is no record of the actual
resurrection. This was a totally
private event within the darkness of the sealed tomb. Alice Meynell in her poem Easter Night describes it.
Public was death; but Power, but Might
But Life again, but Victory
Were hushed within the dead of night
The shattered dark, the secrecy.
And all alone, alone, alone,
He rose again behind the stone.
Jesus
was alive and long gone before the stone was rolled away. The stone was not removed to let Him out,
but to let men in to see that He was gone.
Because Jesus came out of the tomb there is no escape from the tomb
imagery in Easter. The Easter egg
became so popular a symbol of Easter because it is like a tomb sealed out of
which comes life. Easter eggs are still
a popular custom, but seldom do we tell our children that they are also because
they represent the tomb of Christ broken open for us to give new birth, life,
and hope beyond the tomb.
The
Easter rabbit falls into the same category.
The rabbit lives in a hole in the ground like the tomb of Jesus, and out
of it comes much life. A rabbit has 5
to 6 litters a year, and so if you have a few rabbits, you will soon have a lot
of them. They are symbolic of life
abundant out of a tomb like atmosphere.
I haven't watched Bugs Bunny for years, but I see that my grandchildren
do. Bugs is not consciously a symbol of
Christ, but the fact is that he can be made to be such. He is pursued by those who seek to destroy
him, but he always comes out on top with a victory over all the forces that
seek to do him in. This is what Easter
is all about. It is about victory over
all the forces of darkness that sought to rid the world of Jesus once and for
all. But instead, He came out on top
with the victory. Isaac Watts wrote,
Wrapt in the silence of the tomb
The Great Redeemer lay,
Till the revolving skies had brought
The third, the appointed day.
Hell and the grave combined their force
To hold our Lord, in vain.
Sudden thee Conqueror arose,
And burst their feeble chain.
The
point is, even the secular symbols of Easter, like the egg and the rabbit, are
valid symbols that can be given biblical color. But like most symbols they become detached from what they are to
symbolize, and they become objects of focus in themselves. As parents and grandparents we need to tie
in the secular symbols with Scripture, and use the power of secular customs to
support the Christian faith.
Most
every comedy or cartoon is about good and evil in conflict, and the evil forces
seem to be so powerful with their giant firecrackers, cannons and bombs. But the good guy, no matter how fiercely
attacked, is able to outwit the evil, and the clever schemes backfire so that
the evil ones suffer the very judgments they want to inflict on the good. This is all Easter theology, but we do not
see it, and so we fail to teach our children that the Easter Gospel can be seen
in cartoons, and in rabbits and eggs.
The first challenge of Easter is to see life as victorious over
death. We are to see it in nature, in
cartoons, in our culture, and in God's Word.
The more we see it everywhere, the more we will have an Easter spirit
all year round. And the more we will
praise our Lord daily for making it possible for God's dream to be
fulfilled. His dream for us will be
fulfilled as well if we confess that Jesus is Lord and believe in our hearts
that God raised Him from the dead.
Believe this and see God's dream come true for you.
2. THEN CAME THE MORNING Based on Matt. 28:1‑10
Louis
Evans told of the soldier who was wounded on the battlefield at night. He could not move or speak, but he could see
the lanterns of the medics as they made their way from body to body. Finally a lantern was shining down on him,
and after they examined his wounds one of them said, "I believe that if he
makes it to sunrise, he will live."
This gave the soldier a goal to reach, and a hope to cling to, so he lay
there looking up into the stars longing for the dawn. "If I make it to sunrise I will live," he kept saying
to himself, and so he filled his mind with thoughts of his wife and children,
and all the reasons he had to live.
Then came the morning and a feeling of victory, for he knew he would see
his family again.
Hope is
a powerful tool in helping people get through the night of their trials to the
dawn of a new day, and a new life. Most
of you have probably had some experience of waiting for the dawn. The one that stands out in my mind was in my
first year of college. I friend of mine
hit me in the front teeth on the basketball court. I developed an abscess that began to hurt terribly in the
night. I lived in the dorm, and I can
remember it being the longest night of my life. I roamed the hall and pleaded for the sun to rise. I was in such pain that I had no other goal
in life but to see the sunrise and be able to get some help. Nothing is so comforting as the coming of
the dawn when you are suffering in the night.
Thank God for the morning that enables you to endure the night.
Easter
is that morning of history than gives man the courage and the hope to endure
any night, even the night of death when the light of life is snuffed out and
darkness seems to have won the war. God
has always been a morning person, and it fits all we know of God that he would
raise his Son up from the grave on a Sunday Morning. It was the greatest single victorious event ever to happen on
this planet, and it happened in the morning.
You don't hear of Easter sunset services, but Easter sunrise services,
for it was in the early morning that the Son of God rose to never set again.
That
first Easter morning was the beginning of a day of Sonshine that would never
end in the darkness of night, for Jesus turned on a light that all the powers
of hell could never put out or even dim. Easter never ends, for on that morning
of all mornings Jesus conquered death and darkness and brought life and
immortality to light. There is just something about the morning that God loves.
He dwells in perpetual light and he is light, and in Him is no darkness at all,
yet He loves the dawning of the new day, and He made Easter morning the time of
his total victory over the kingdom of darkness. Easter was just the fulfillment of what we see all through the
Bible. God never slumbers or sleeps,
but is ever alert to give songs in the night to his needy children. But from the very start of creation God has
been most active in the morning. He
does his best work in the morning. That
is when he created the world.
I don't
know if you have ever noticed before, but God's workday in creation always
began in the morning. After each day he
said there was evening and morning. For
6 days God began each morning with a whole new project. We know it was morning because God told Job
it was. He asked Job in Job 38,
"Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?" And after a few more such questions he
added, "While the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted
for joy. God started all his
masterpieces in the morning. On the 7th
morning God rested and did no work, and the 7th day became the Sabbath day of
rest. It was still the sacred day of
worship and rest when Jesus lay in the tomb.
But Matthew now begins the last chapter of his Gospel with God going
back to work on Sunday morning. The
Sabbath was over and it was a dawning of a new week, and God decides it is time
for a new morning creation that will begin a whole new history on this planet.
God
could have raised his Son on the Sabbath, but he was starting fresh with a
whole new plan of salvation. He was not
going to dignify the Sabbath by the resurrection, and lock in the Sabbath
forever. He came to destroy the
legalism of the Sabbath and make a new day of worship. The Pharisees had no law against rising from
the dead on the Sabbath, but it did involve a lot of forbidden work. The stone being rolled away, and the Messiah
getting out of his grave clothes, and traveling more than a Sabbath's day
journey. The whole thing would have been
condemned had it been on the Sabbath.
So God chose to wait until Sunday morning to start his new
creation. It meant a mighty dull
weekend in the tomb, but what a way to start a new week. God skipped a chance to make the Sabbath the
most sacred day forever. Instead, he
exalted the lowly Sunday to that status.
Sunday
was just a commonplace secular day. It
was not sacred time, but secular time.
God took this day of common labor and made it the day that would be
exalted above all others, even the Sabbath.
Easter Sunday morning changed everything for God's people. It changed who they worshiped, and when they
worshiped, and how they worshiped.
Easter morning didn't just change our eternal destiny, it changed the
whole design of our earthly life in relation to God. The one thing it didn't
change, but only confirmed, is that God loves the morning. One of the reasons is, no doubt, because
every morning is symbolic of Easter morning.
Every night we sleep and are like the dead, but in the morning we rise
to walk in newness of life. It is a
fresh new day filled with the potential of tasting all the fruits of the Spirit‑love,
joy, peace, and all the rest. Jan
Struther wrote,
Lord of all hopefulness, Lord of all joy,
Whose trust, ever childlike, no cares could destroy,
Be
there at our waking, and give us, we pray,
Your bliss in our hearts, Lord, at the break of the day.
I could
spend an hour just quoting the Scripture on the importance of the morning and
beginning your day with God, and hours more quoting all the poetry men and women
have written on it. Let me share just a
few:
Ps. 5:3, "Morning by morning, O Lord you hear
my voice: Morning by morning I lay my
request before you and wait in expectation."
Ps. 30:5, "Weeping may remain for the night, but
rejoicing comes in the morning."
Easter
morning is the greatest example of this.
The darkness night ever endured by God and man was on Good Friday. Jesus entered the darkness of hell, and the
world was plunged into darkness, and all of the disciples were in a state of
gloom as they wept over his fate and their own. Some of you may have heard Tony Compolo on TV. He was describing how a black preacher went
on for an hour and a half describing the darkness of Good Friday, but then he
would say, "But that was Friday‑Sunday morning is coming and with it
the rejoicing of the resurrection." It was after a dark and sorrowful
world that the light of Easter began to shine.
Easter morning guaranteed that all evil and sorrow is only temporary,
and that good and joy are eternal.
There is a great gettin‑up morning coming when the night of
darkness ends forever, and the only kind of songs we will ever sing again are
songs of victory.
Easter
morning is like that which the Psalmist waited for in Ps. 130:6. "My soul waits for the Lord more than
watchman wait for the morning, more than watchman wait for the
morning." He repeats that, for
that is the hope of the watchman‑the morning, and that is the hope of all
Christians. If we wake on earth we wake
everyday in a world where Lam. 3:23 says of God, "...His compassions never
fail. They are new every
morning." If we wake from the
sleep of death in heaven, we enter an eternal morning. We wake in the presence of him who is the
bright and morning star, and he promises he will give to over comers in Rev.
2:28, the morning star.
In
eternity it is always morning, for we will be fresh and energetic and full of
life with no weariness as time goes by.
It will be a fresh start that never ends. It will be Easter morning forever. When Donald Cargill died a martyr he stood on the scaffold in
Edinburgh, England and said to the crowd in a loud voice, "Now for the
morning and the King's face. No more
night and no more darkness."
Easter morning provides us with the hope we need to face death with
confidence, but it is not just pie in the sky on high by and by when we die
that we need. We need pie on the table
in the now, and Easter gives us this as well.
Jesus
came back from the dead not just to tell his disciples that they would go to
heaven when they die. He came back to
encourage them in living, and to meet basic needs, and so He fed them breakfast
on the beach. He gave them a purpose,
and it was to reach the whole world with the good news of Easter, and to teach
the world all he commanded. Easter is
not just about victory over death, it is about victory over life. It is about conquering all obstacles that
get in the way of achieving the purpose of Christ. The stone was rolled away, not for Jesus to come out of the tomb,
but for others to see its emptiness.
But there are no end to the stones that need to be rolled away to
fulfill God's purpose for our lives.
God's
mercies are new every morning because we can't live on yesterday's. We need new ones everyday to overcome the
obstacles in a fallen world. Tom
Dooley, the missionary doctor who died of an early case of cancer, told of lack
of money, supplies, and tedious labor.
He wrote, "Every time I get discouraged and down in the dumps
someone comes along and rings the rusty bells of hope, and I have encouragement
to get back at it." Easter is
about a hope that enables you to cope with the frustration of a fallen world
where nothing is just like it ought to be.
If Jesus rose and conquered death, then it is obvious his goal is to
conquer all the lesser consequences of sin as well. Death is the last enemy that will be destroyed. Meanwhile, there are many other enemies to
be destroyed now as we move toward that final victory. Easter is about victory over all the forces
of darkness. We need to grasp this lest
we think that the final victory is the only one that matters.
Leonard
Broughton was a pastor in Atlanta some years ago when the water in the poor
section of town became infected and 4 people died. A city council meeting was held to talk about the problem, but it
was tabled for further study. At that
same meeting they approved 15,000 dollars for road improvement in front of an
influential member's home. This so angered
pastor Broughton that he invited the council members to attend a special
service the next day. A few did, and he
preached for 50 minutes on the fact that Christ was not only interested in
saving souls, but also in good water.
He even promised a reward for a cup of cold water given in his
name. The council members there got the
message, and at ten o'clock the next day money was appropriated to clean up the
water. Broughton said later, "I
baptized 75 people in the next few months, and almost everyone said that what
got them interested in the church and in God was the fact that they were
concerned about giving them water that was good to drink."
When
Christians care, not just about what people are going to do after they die, but
about what they are doing now as they live, they will get people to consider
their readiness to die. If you don't
care that they live right, they don't care if they die right. Easter is about life, and all of life, not
just the after life. If it was just
about the after life, Jesus would not have needed to come back and spend 40
days teaching and training his disciples.
People don't just need hope for after death, they need hope for every
morning, and Easter hope is an every morning hope.
Jesus
is alive, and he is now as always a morning person. He always rose early in the morning to pray, and though he does
not need to do that now in heaven, he still needs to grant us new mercies every
morning. So every morning is special as
a fresh new opportunity to serve the living Christ and be a channel of his love
and light in a dark world. Easter
morning makes every morning special, for every morning is a new chance to know
and serve the Christ of Easter. Arthur
Tubbs wrote,
A moment in the morning ere cares of the day begin,
Ere the heart's wide door is open for the world to
enter in,
Ah, then, alone with Jesus, in the silence of the
morn,
In heavenly sweet communion, let your day be born.
In the quietude that blesses with a prelude of
repose,
Let your soul be smoothed and softened, as the dew
revives the
rose.
It is a
pretty poem, but the practice of it can make life beautiful. A young office worker wrote about her
experience in an article entitled, "The Day That Changed A
Life." Her attitude was so changed
it changed the atmosphere where she worked.
When her employer asked what made the difference she told him she was
not enjoying life as she knew God wanted her too. She was bored and just generally unhappy. She decided she would begin everyday with a
determination to sense the presence of Christ in her life. She would consciously seek to say what He
would want her to say, and do what He would want her to do. It became an exciting experiment that
changed her, and as a result changed all around her. It was making Easter morning a way of life in which she
encountered the living Lord, and not just a yearly few hours of celebration.
Easter
morning never ends, as I said, but that is not necessarily true in our personal
lives. For some it never begins, for
they are without God and without hope in the world. But for most of us it is intermittent. It is off and on and off again, because we do not work at being
conscious of the resurrected life.
After Easter is over we sink back into a spiritual coma, and don't come
out of our cocoon state again until the following Easter. I know that is a radical way of stating it,
and it is not accurate for many Christians, but none of us are as alive to the
Easter morning experience as we need to be.
We could all benefit by praying every morning something like the prayer
of Ella Scherick:
Lord, in the quiet of this morning hour,
I
come to Thee for peace, for wisdom, power
To
view the world today through love‑filled eyes;
Be
patient, understanding, gentle, wise.
To
see beyond what seems to be, and know
Thy
children as Thou knowest them; and so
Naught but the good in anyone behold.
Make deaf my ears to slander that is told;
Silence my tongue to ought that is unkind;
Let
only thoughts that bless dwell in my mind.
Let
me so kindly be, so full of cheer,
That all I meet will feel Thy presence near.
O
clothe me in Thy beauty, this I pray,
Let
me reveal Thee, Lord, through all the day.
The best
argument for the reality of the resurrection, and both temporal and eternal
hope, is not the empty tomb. A negative
fact, or an absence of something is not where the power is. It is in the presence of something positive,
like the power and love of Christ in life.
Charles Bradlaugh went about England debunking the Christian faith, and
one day he challenged Hugh Price Hughes, a pastor at one of the missions, to a debate
of the merits of the Christian faith.
Hughes agreed and said "I will bring to the meeting one hundred
people who will testify to the power of Christ in their lives. They will tell of sin forgiven and walking
in paths of victory where they once sat in chains." He said to Bradlaugh, "You bring those
who can testify to the new and better life they have because of their
unbelief." Needless to say, the
skeptic never showed up for the debate, for there is no argument that can match
the reality of changed lives, and that is your most powerful weapon. If you have no light to shine because Christ
has made a difference in your life, then you are not going to have much of a
witness to a doubting world. We need to
roll the stone away and let the Christ entombed in us rise and shine and bring
morning into the night around us.
You are
your own best argument, and that is why it is so vital that you begin your
morning with Christ, and learn to develop a Christlike attitude that takes you
through the day. I know that not
everyone is a morning person, and mornings are hard for some. In the new heaven and new earth all God's
people will be morning people, for it will be morning forever, and night will
never come. Meanwhile, we have to live
in this world where mornings are not always pleasant. The poet put it‑
The alarm is set,
But I fear the worst;
Come dawn, the baby
Will go off first.
The idea
of being an Easter morning person is in developing an Easter attitude of
optimism. Genesis begins with the earth
as a formless empty mass in darkness.
Then came the morning and God said, "Let there be light," and
thus began the beauty of creation.
Chaos first, and then came the morning, and cosmos was formed. This is God's pattern. On Good Friday the God‑man
relationship was thrown into chaos. Man
in hatred killed God on the cross. God
in judgment cast man into hell in the person of his Son. It was the most bitter battle the universe
had ever seen. God and man killed each
other in violent conflict, and the world was plunged into darkness. But then came the morning‑Easter
morning, and with it the dawn of a new day, a new life, a new age, a new people,
and a new kingdom. On Easter morning
all things were made new.
It was a
world of darkness, then came the morning and a light that could never be put
out. It was a world of death, then came
the morning and life conquered death.
It was a world of hate, then came the morning and love triumphed over
hate. It was a world of despair, then
came the morning and hope was born anew. Some poet put it‑
Behind him were the shouts of scorn.
No longer wore he the crown of thorn.
This was the day that hope was born,
On that first glorious Easter morn.
And now it is always morning somewhere, for the Son
of righteousness has risen with healing in his wings, and the sun never
sets. Everything connected with Easter
is a symbol of optimism, hope, and life.
Even the secular symbols of Easter can teach Biblical truth if we see
them for what they are.
Easter
eggs are symbols of the sealed tomb of Christ.
But then comes the morning, and we break them open, and out of them
comes life giving food. Little chicks,
or new life can be born from this mini‑tomb as well. The egg is a valid symbol of the Easter
message. So is the rabbit that is so
popular in the secular world. The
rabbit lives in a hole in the ground much like the tomb of Christ, and out of
that darkness comes a great deal of life.
If you have a few rabbits, you will soon have a lot of rabbits, for they
have 5 or 6 litters a year. They are
symbolic of abundant life out of a tomb‑like atmosphere. I haven't watched a Bugs Bunny cartoon for
years, but I know my grandchildren watch often. Nobody consciously made Bugs a symbol of the Easter message, but
the fact is, he can be made to be such a symbol. He is pursued by those who seek to destroy him and rid the world
of his presence. But no matter how
clever and deadly the schemes to do him in, he always comes out on top with a
victory.
No
matter how big the cannon, or powerful the bombs, Bugs finds a way to escape
and come out a winner. That is the
secular portrayal of the Easter message of optimism. All the powers of darkness and hell could not defeat our Lord. They did their best at the cross and it
looked devastating, but then came the morning, and Christ broke loose like
Samson from the feeble ropes that held him, and he rose victorious over all his
foes. We need to teach our children
that many of our secular and cultural heroes are symbols of Christ.
Characters like Superman, Batman, and Tarzan are often the target of
clever evil forces that almost do them in, but every time these forces for good
escape and come out victorious. The
difference with Jesus is that his victory was not just fiction but real, and he
can save us from all these evil forces that he conquered. He saves us, not just for heaven, but for
earth, in order to add life and light to this fallen world.
Charlie
Brown was telling Linus what an awful world it was. And Linus said, "I think the world is better today than it
was 6 years ago." Charley
protested, "Don't you read the paper or watch TV? How can you say the world is better today
than 6 years ago." Linus
responded, "I am in it now!"
That could be said in a spirit of pride, but it can also be said in a
spirit of Easter optimism. If the
living Christ has come into your life because you have asked him to be your
Savior, and have asked him to forgive you and make you a light in this dark
world, then the world should be a better place because you are in it. If you have never asked Jesus to be your
Savior, do so this morning and make this Easter morning the beginning of a day
that will never end. Be able to go out
into this dark world with the testimony, "I was lost and in the grave of
darkness. I could see no way of
escape. Then came the morning, and the
Christ of Easter became my Lord, and I now live in the light of his victory
over all the powers of evil." Ask
Jesus to be your Savior and enter the kingdom of optimism where the last word
is‑then came the morning.
3. A RISEN REDEEMER
Based on Mark 16:1‑14
Back in
1851 two missionaries, one English and the other American, were walking past
the temple of Siva in Tanjore, India.
They noticed the people carrying
out one of the brass idols. It
was a hot sunny day and the idol had become heated. One of the worshipers happened to touch it, and feeling that it
was very warm, concluded that it was sick with a fever. The Rajah, or king being present immediately
sent for a physician. He came and told
them not to be alarmed for the god was well.
The king called him a fool and sent him away. He ordered that another physician be called. When he arrived and examined the idol, he
told them the god was very ill with a high fever and would soon die if remedies
were not immediately applied. He
directed them to put the idol in a shady place, and wash him with cool
liquid. When it was cooled off the
physician pronounced him cured, and the Rajah gave him three thousands rupees
for saving the life of the god.
It is not everyday that a man can save a
god, and he was no doubt delighted with his accomplishment. We can laugh, of course, at the ignorance of
men who could seriously believe in a god capable of getting sick, dying, and
needing to be rescued by men from the jaws of death. Any god who can get sick
and die is no god at all. This ought to
be as obvious to us as any truth is.
Those who make statements that God has died only reveal that the God of
whom they speak is no more than a man made idol, and not the God of Biblical
revelation. It is true that God, out of
the great love with which He loved us, became incarnate in human flesh, and
submitted to the death of the cross. He
did literally go through the experience of dying, but the vital fact, the great
fact of Easter, is that He went through it.
He did not remain in death, but rose to live forever. Jesus said to John
in Rev. 1:18, "I am he that liveth, and was dead; and behold, I am alive
forevermore, Amen and have the keys of hell and death." Christ has the keys of hell and death
because He experienced both, and triumphed over both. A poet has written,
Yes, He is risen who is the
First and Last,
Who was and is, who liveth
and was dead.
Beyond the reach of death He
now has passed.
Of the glorious church the
glorious head.
This is
more than the message of Easter, for this is the foundation of the whole of
Christianity. Anyone is free to
disbelieve, and even deny it, but none are free to honestly bare the name of
Christian who do so. There is no
Christianity if the resurrection is not true.
If men have lost faith in the idols of their self‑made religion,
let them cry out that their god is dead, but let us not confuse their petty
idols with the Living God of Revelation.
Those who have a God who is dead need to be even more enlightened, and
recognized that their god was never alive.
We want
to consider the great story of the resurrection from the point of view of two
groups of people. Both groups are
believers, but Mark's account first deals with the experience of the women, and
then of the men. We want to consider
the male responses in another message.
For now we will consider the experience of the women on this day of
resurrection. The first thing we see is‑
I. DEVOTION
DISPLAYED. v. 1,2.
These
few loyal women have endured the agony of watching their Lord die a violent
death, and they watched Him being placed in a tomb hastily before the Sabbath
began. How much real resting they did
on that Sabbath we do not know, but our text shows that as soon as it was over
these devoted disciples made a purchase.
Late in the evening they bought spices for the purpose of going to the
tomb in the morning, and anointing the body of this one they so loved.
They harbor
no hope of the resurrection, for they would not spend money for spices to
anoint His body if they had any hope that it would be alive soon. They acted in the belief that this was the
end, and that His body would forever lay in the tomb, or at least until the
resurrection at the last day, which all faithful Jews looked for. They are so grateful, however, for all that
He was, and all that He did for them, that they must express their devotion,
and the only way they could do so was to honor the body that once housed His
much loved soul.
Call it
an extravagant waste if you will, but to discerning eyes it is an act of
devoted love that is taking place. It
is in sharp contrast to the despair that characterized the 11 disciples. All of the men were thrown into a state of
paralysis by their sorrow. They did not
make a move until they were compelled by the testimony of the women, and even
then it was with reluctance and skepticism.
But here we see action in the women, and a love that has not altered because
it alteration found. Jesus was no
longer alive and with them, yet they display what Macaulay refers to as
"The perfect disinterestedness and self‑devotion of which men are
incapable, but which is sometimes found in women."
They had
seen the worst and were convinced that Jesus was dead for good, yet they could
not wait to display their loyal devotion.
Verse 2 says it was very early in the morning they came to the
sepulcher. It was at the rising of the
sun. They were hardly able to wait for
dawn to carry out their act of love.
When we consider the devotion displayed by these faithful female
disciples, we can well understand why it was they were granted the honor of
being the first to receive the good news of the risen Redeemer. Women bore the shame of being the first to
bring the cause of death upon man, but now she bares the honor of being the
first to bring the good news of victory over death to man.
Not only
were they the first to hear the message, but Mark makes it clear in verse 9
that Mary Magdalene was the first to see the risen Christ. This is no accident, or incidental fact, but
appears to be an act by which the risen Redeemer recognizes and rewards her
devotion. Jesus could have appeared at
anytime to any person, but he chose to appear first to Mary. Jesus said, "To whom much is forgiven
the same loveth much," and this was certainly true for Mary whose devotion
did not depreciate even in the face of death.
Valzac spoke in truth when he said, "To feel, to love, to suffer,
to devote herself, will always be the text of the life of woman." It is also true that it will always be the
role of the risen Redeemer to richly reward those who are devoted to Him.
If these
women were so devoted to Christ when they thought He was dead, imagine the
beauty of their lives when the shock wore off, and they realized he was in
reality a risen and living Lord. Mary
Magdalene was the first to be able to affirm with assurance and confidence the
conviction of the poet Robert Heirich who wrote,
I do believe, that die I
must,
And be return'd from out my
dust;
I do believe, that when I
rise,
I shall see, with these same
eyes.
She was
the first to see Jesus risen and transformed; the first to know that the grave
has been conquered. If such was the
reward for her devotion, and such was the honor granted to the other women to
be the first to hear the good news, how great will be their reward in heaven after
a life of devotion to the risen Redeemer?
We cannot pretend to know, but we can learn a marvelous lesson from
their experience on that first Easter.
We can learn that Jesus prizes devotion, and that there is no greater
testimony to the reality of our love and devotion to Him, than to act in love
and honor Him, even when the circumstances are darkest, and hope seems to be
demolished. Their display of devotion
was not anything profound. It was very
simple and personal. There is no need
for elaborate display, for Jesus looks on the hearts, and we should care only
that He sees our hearts as He saw the hearts of those women in the morning
hours of that first Easter. May the
experience described by Thomas Moore be ours:
As down in the sunless
retreat of the ocean,
Sweet flowers are springing
no mortal can see,
So deep in my soul the still
prayer of devotion
Unheard by the world, rises
silent to Thee.
As we
move on to consider the second aspect of their experience that morning, we see
their devotion magnified even more. The
second point we want to consider is‑
II.
DIFFICULTY DISSOLVED. vv. 3 and
4.
There is
a saying that out of difficulty grows miracles. This is true, for if there is no difficulty, there is no need for
a miracle. All miracles are divine
solutions to human difficulties. A
miracle is only a miracle to man, and not to God, for He has no unsolvable
difficulties. These devoted women had a
dandy of a difficulty facing them, yet they moved forward. They watched the large stone rolled in front
of the tomb by strong men on Friday night, and now early Sunday morning, all
alone with no muscular men to help them, they made their way to the tomb. When we add the details of the other
Gospels, we see that the obstacles that they faced were even greater. Not only was the stone large, but it had
been sealed, and not only that, the Jewish leaders had seen to it that a guard
was standing watch lest there be any attempt to remove the body.
If ever
the weaker sex faced what appeared to be an insurmountable problem, it was here
as they walked along discussing how they will deal with the difficulty of the
stone. When you consider the
circumstances there is a natural tendency to question their good sense at this
point. Common sense would tell them
that they had to sit down and figure out a solution to this problem before they
went marching to the tomb. They knew
they could not do it, for they were wondering who could roll the stone away for
them. Their devotion refused to be
delayed until a solution was found, and so with the attitude in mind, we will
cross that bridge when we come to it, they headed for the tomb. Lesser love would have failed to make such a
plan in the first place, or would have forsaken the whole idea in the second place,
and would have retreated in the face of the difficulty.
These
women were like the English drummer boy who was captured and brought before
Napoleon. He was told to sound the
retreat and his prompt reply was, "I never learnt it!" Loyalty and love do not care to learn the
march of retreat, but like these devoted disciples it marches ever onward in
spite of difficulties. And again we see
that their determined devotion was richly rewarded. Like so many difficulties that are faced with no apparent
solution, when they are met head on they dissolve and disappear. So here we see that when they arrived at the
tomb their problem was gone. The
difficulty had been dissolved, for they looked up and the stone was already
rolled away.
We need
to learn another valuable lesson from their experience. We need to learn to be persistently positive
in the face of difficulty. We must be
always actively advancing in our cause of serving Christ. Difficulties are not imaginary. They are real, as real as the stone that
sealed the tomb, but the experience of these women reveals that for those who
walk forward in the face of obstacles to serve Christ, there will be a solution
available. The church has plenty of
obstacles to overcome, but until there are devoted disciples marching forward,
there will not be solutions to these difficulties.
In 1799
one of Napoleon's generals appeared before the town of Feldkirk in
Austria. It was Easter day and the
leaders of the town were at a loss as to what to do. The old dean of the church gave this advice, "This is Easter
day. We have been counting on our
strength and we know that always fails.
On the day of our Lord's resurrection let us ring the bells and have our
church service as usual and leave this thing in God's hands. He will show us the way out, and we can
certainly not find a way out without Him.
The
bells began to chime, and worshipers thronged the streets as they made their
way to the house of God. The French
general was frightened by the bell ringing, for he interpreted it to be a
rejoicing on the part of the city because an Austrian army had arrived in the
night to rescue them. He ordered his
men to quickly break camp, and they marched away leaving the city safe. God specializes in special delivery, and so
we need to learn to leave the impossible to Him, and move ahead in devoted
service regardless of obstacles.
If these
women could display such determined devotion with the conviction that Christ
was dead, how much greater ought our devotion to be who have 19 centuries of
evidence of the power of the risen Redeemer?
They marched forward to a sealed tomb, a dead Lord, and a hard
difficulty, on a dark morning. But we can shout with Fortunatus,
"Hail, Day of
days! In peals of praise
Throughout all ages owned,
When Christ, our God, hell's
empire trod,
And high o'er heaven was
throned."
We serve a living, royal, risen, reigning king. The Easter experience of these women
challenges us to consider the weakness of our devotion, and to commit ourselves
more completely to live for the honor and glory of our risen Redeemer.
4. THE REALITY OF THE RESURRECTION Based on Mark 16:1‑14
Ministers frequently call at a home when the man alone is there, and he
will respond in some such manner as this:
"I'm sorry my wife isn't home.
She takes care of the religious matters in our home." I have not just read about this, but have
experienced it, and have wondered how it is possible to be so misinformed about
the Christian life. Men in general seem
to think that spiritual matters are for women to handle. Men tend to be more skeptical, and women
tend to be more sensitive to spiritual things.
Eve may have gotten the problem of sin started, but men seem to have the
biggest part in hindering God's solution to the sin problem. For some reason men feel that faith is
feminine and not to be associated with the strong and self‑sufficient
image of the ideal man. Religion has
the reputation of being a crutch, and no man wants a crutch, for he wants to walk on his own.
This
attitude has had an effect on the lives of even those men already committed to
Christ, and has made them timid. The message
of Christ's manliness is missed, and even Christian males slip into the
background, and let the women do the work.
It is no joke, but actual fact, that many male responses to the call for
missionaries is, "Here am I Lord, send my sister." Statistics reveal this to be far from
fictitious. Dr. Barton was not just
trying to be funny when he wrote,
In the world's broad fields
of battle,
In the bivouac of life,
You will find the Christian
soldier
Represented by his wife.
He was serious, and was stating a well known
fact. However else men are superior to
women, they are statistically inferior in their commitment and devotion. Nothing could be more unprofitable,
however, then to rant and rave about
the problem. More profit, I am sure, can
be gained by recognizing that this has always been the case. It is not new, but has been a characteristic
of men from the start.
The very
group of men Jesus hand picked to be the foundation on which He would build His
church were of like nature. They were
the first body of skeptics in the Christian church. If they had not been convinced by the personal appearance of
Jesus in their presence, they would not have believed in the resurrection. If Jesus had not soundly rebuked them for
their skepticism, they would have been the greatest hindrance to the
advancement of the cause of Christ. The
fact that Jesus did go to this length to convince them shows that in spite of
the fact that men are more skeptical and harder to convince about spiritual
realities, yet, they are responsible for the leadership of the church. They were the foundation, and once convinced
they were dynamos of devotion. Men are
harder to win, but when they are won they are of greater power, and power is
what is needed to make Christianity appealing to other men. There must be a Christ‑centered
manliness for the church to appeal to the masculine mind. We want to consider how hard it was to even
bring the Apostles to a state of belief and commitment to the risen Redeemer. In contrast to the devotion of the women, we
see in the men, first of all‑
I. DESPAIR
DISPLAYED. v. 10
While
the women, who are supposedly more emotional, were up early and out actively
doing something practical in the face of the great tragedy that had struck
them, the men, most of whom had fled, and, as far as we know, did not even see
the crucifixion, as did the women, were setting idle mourning and weeping in
despair. They thought they were really
going to be something, and now the whole thing has proven to be a failure, and
they are left with no leader, humiliated and helpless, and with no further hope
of establishing a kingdom. They are sad
sheep without a shepherd. Despair had
immobilized them. They were in the
slough of despond. If the discovery of
the empty tomb had depended upon them, the world would have long remained in
darkness and ignorance.
Someone
has said, "Despair is the greatest of our errors." This was certainly true on this resurrection
day. All day long these men were in
sorrow when the greatest event in history had taken place. Christ was alive, and they were the key
servants of this living king of kings, and yet they lived in despair. These men give us a picture that is parallel
with what is true in millions of lives in every age. The good news is available, and eternal life in heaven, and
abundant life now is potentially theirs, yet while this good news is either
unknown or unbelieved, they gain no benefit, and so are without God and without
hope. The disciples had every reason to
be the most happy men in the world, but they sat weeping in despair because
they were ignorant. Even after they
were informed of the fact of the resurrection they gained none of its benefits
because they persisted in their unbelief.
Despair
is an evil, for it is being ungrateful for the fact that the path of hope is
still open. Despair refuses to move
against the obstacles because it has already decided that the battle is
lost. We saw that when the women
advanced to meet the difficulty it dissolved.
They cannot stand before determined devotion, but despair disables men
and defeats them before they even encounter the enemy. These despairing disciples speculate on the
problems from a distance, and their very attitude of despair distorts their
vision, and all they can see are insurmountable obstacles. Burke said, "A speculative despair is
unpardonable where it is our duty to act." If men would get out and put their faith to work, and test their
devotion, belief, and hope by action, they would see difficulty dissolved. But to set in despair produces a vicious
circle. Despair produces such a
hopeless attitude that it actually does become a hopeless situation. Howe wrote,
The wise and active conquer
difficulties
By daring to attempt them,
sloth and folly
Shimmer and shrink at the
sight of toil and hazard,
And make the impossibility
they fear.
Despair did this to the disciples. It hardened them so they would not even
respond to the evidence. This brings us
to the second point which is an attitude growing out of their despair.
II.
DISBELIEF DEMONSTRATED. v.11
You
would think that a company of men in such despair would have welcomed, as an
angel of light, anyone with a word of comfort and cheer. Anything that would ease the burden and lift
the weight of darkness that had settled over their souls, you would think would
be welcomed with joy. But instead we see
them unresponsive even to the glorious news that Jesus was not dead but alive,
and had actually been seen by Mary Magdalene.
Certainly the paralysis will wear off soon, and they will shout for joy
with Mary. But not so, we read on in
verses 12 and 13 and discover that they persisted in disbelief all day. In the evening when the two on the road to
Emmaus returned to tell them of their experience, they still stubbornly refused
to yield to the evidence and testimony of fellow believers.
Here is
a paradox. The men who would soon be
proclaiming the message of the crucified and living Christ, who would be
persistent in their emphasis on the resurrection as the foundation of belief,
are here examples of the most narrow minded unbelief. Mary and the other two disciples had seen Jesus and the empty
tomb with the stone rolled away. Peter
and John had seen the evidence as well, and yet the disciples are unconvinced
of the reality of the resurrection.
Remember
this when you are quick to condemn the unbeliever or the skeptic who refuses to
yield to your array of evidence for the resurrection. Why should we expect men today to be less skeptical than the
disciples who had eye witness testimonies from intimate friends, and still
demonstrated a disbelieving heart?
Unbelief, is the most natural response of men to the resurrection, and
we should expect it. If this experience
of the disciples teaches us anything, it should teach us that belief in the
reality of the resurrection is not a matter of evidence, but it is a matter of the will. All the evidence in the world may not convince
a man, but all that is needed sometimes is a testimony to the fact that Christ
is alive and has changed your life. If
a man will not be willing to believe, no amount of evidence will persuade him. One must want to experience the reality of
the resurrection. You cannot compel
them to believe by amassing evidence.
The evidence only becomes valuable when the will has chosen to believe.
A
paragraph from an editorial in Life Magazine way back in 1956 is worth
repeating:
"The resurrection cannot be tamed or tethered
by any
utilitarian test. It is a vast watershed in history
or it is
nothing. It cannot be tested for truth; it is the
test of
lesser truths. No light can be thrown on it; its own
light
blinds the investigator. It does not compel belief, it
resists it. But once accepted as fact it tells more
about the
universe, about history, and about man's state and
fate than
all the mountains of other facts in the human
accumulation."
This
being the case, we need to do less proving and more proclaiming of this truth.
We need more testimony to the reality of the resurrection in our own lives and
attitudes. Only as men actually encounter the living Christ in us will they
have a desire to will that he live in them. G. Campbell Morgan said, "The
resurrection is a fact that cannot be
proved except to the faith of the heart." The evidence must be approached
with faith, or it will not convince the skeptic.
The evidence
did not convince those who were already followers of Christ, and so we should
not expect it to convince those who are not his followers today. The only thing
that could bring them to belief out of their stubborn unbelief was a personal
encounter with Christ, and this is still true today for most. The disciples
spent the whole day of the first Easter being bombarded by the evidence of the
reality of the resurrection, and yet we see them in the evening still locked
behind closed doors in the darkness of despair. Mark tells us that Jesus had to
rebuke them for their unbelief. Imagine this, on the first Easter, the day of
the greatest victory in history, Jesus has to give a message of rebuke, not to
the world, but to his own church. Jesus had his problems with men that he never
had with women. He had to make his first message a negative one on this great
day of joy.
We call
Thomas the doubting Thomas, but remember he just happened to be absent from the
meeting. He was no more a doubter than the rest of them. They all needed the
same evidence that he demanded before they would believe. Let us then be aware
that it is hard to convince men of this truth. They will need more than
evidence and argument. They will need to see Christ in us before they will
believe in the reality of the resurrection.
5. ROAD TO EMMAUS Based on Luke 24:13‑35
During
the early part of the World War II, the crew of a vessel in the Caribbean Sea
had an experience that illustrates the theme we want to consider on this Easter
morning. As reported by Walter Maier,
this vessel was carrying a cargo of oil, and was suddenly attacked by an enemy
submarine. It raked the decks with
shell fire and shrapnel, and before the crew knew what was happening a torpedo
hit them. It destroyed the stirring
apparatus, and tore a gaping hole in the side.
The craft began to sink, and fire broke out. Soon the order came to abandon ship. Only one life boat and three rafts remained undamaged, and so the
crew had to squeeze into these, and roll for all they were worth to get out of
the danger zone.
The
captain and 8 men had been killed in the raid, but all the rest made it into
the rafts. There they were, huddled
together on a dark lonely sea waiting for the night to pass in great anxiety,
and wondering what the future might hold for them. You can imagine the thrill
that came to them as the sun came up and they discovered their ship had not
gone down. Life took on an altogether
different color. The blackness of
despair was now the brightness of delight.
Hopelessness vanished, and hopefulness filled their hearts. With all the vigor of men who had a good
nights rest, they rode back to their ship, and with some emergency adjustments
brought it into an American port several days later.
What an
illustration of the experience of the disciples. Everything was going so well, when all of the sudden, all the
forces of evil on earth and in hell broke loose upon Christ, and they abandoned
the ship. The cross was to them like a
torpedo that had ripped such a hole in their hopes that there was nothing to do
but forsake Jesus, and that they did in despair and utter hopelessness. We want to follow two of these discouraged
disciples and look at the three stages they passed though in coming to
experience the joy and victory of Easter.
The first stage is‑
I. HOPE
DEFEATED. vv. 13‑24.
We know
practically nothing about these two discouraged disciples. In fact, we do not even know the name of one
of them. Someone has said that Jesus
made His most remarkable revelations to the least remarkable people. Here we see Him walking 7 miles from
Jerusalem to Emmaus with two people who are never heard of before, and never
again after this. This shows there are
no such things as unimportant people in the eyes of Christ. Jesus is always busy with important people,
for all people are important to Him, even if the rest of the world only knows
them as Cleopas and whats his name.
As
these two walked along talking of what had happened, Jesus drew near,
unrecognized, and asked them why they were so sad. Jesus knew perfectly well what the problem was, but like any good
counselor He wanted to draw it out from them.
Just as He knows our problems, but wants us to come and share it with
Him in prayer. Modern psychology knows
that the best medicine is just to talk out your burdens to a sympathetic
person.
Cleopas
answered this sympathetic stranger, and the jest of his answer as to why they
were sad is in verse 21, "We had hoped." Note the past tense‑had hoped. We had high hopes that at last the Messiah had come, but the
nails they put through His hands punctured our hopes. It is no wonder they were discouraged, disappointed, downcast,
and depressed. No one can be happy when
their hope has been crushed. All of
life is a search to find hopes that cannot be dashed to pieces by
circumstances. They thought they had
found such hope in Jesus, but now it looked as if this too had been shattered
by the cross.
This search
for uncrushable hope is true for all of us, and we all go through the
experience of seeing that which we had hoped for be demolished by the
circumstances of life. These
experiences of defeated hopes begin even in childhood. The experience of pastor Donald Bastion is
typical of many. Though humorous to us,
it is painful to those who pass through it.
He tells of how he fell in love in the first grade. He had high hopes in spite of the fact that
Marjorie was in the third grade, and she was big for her age, and he was small
for his age.
His hope never wavered until one day he fell on some
cinders at school.
As
first grade boys will do, he began to cry, and walked around the corner of the
school building. Of all people, he ran
into Marjorie. When she put her arm
around him and tried to console him like a mother, it was too much for his male
ego, and right there his hope collapsed and was crushed beyond repair. How could a first grader love a girl who
treated him like a child? Being a
normal boy he recovered, and went on to become a happily married man, but when
hopes are crushed in the lives of adults, they often can not adjust as does a
youth, and so we have a world in which a suicide is committed every few
minutes.
People who commit suicide are not crazy, but on the
contrary, they are usually very serious thinkers. They have lost all hope, and have come to the conclusion that
life without hope is worse than death, and even hell itself could hardly be as
bad. Without hope life is perplexing,
puzzling, and even paralyzing. Without
hope a person is dead even while they live.
That is why the Bible considers those who do not know Jesus Christ as
being dead, and as not having real life.
They are without God and without hope in the world. The people who scoff at Christians, and call
them weak are usually those who do not have the courage to think seriously
about the ultimate goal and purpose of life, for they know it will only lead
them to the dead end of hopelessness.
Clarence Darrow, one of the most brilliant
and successful lawyers America has ever seen, was an unbeliever, and he made
the great mistake of doing some serious thinking about the meaning of life, and
he became a hopeless skeptic. He was
asked once if he had any advice for the youth of America. "Yes," he said, "My advice is
to go to the nearest building and jump out of a third story window." He said, "Like if an unpleasant
interruption of nothingness." He
had everything life could offer, but he had no hope. Hope is essential to meaningful life, and the only hope that
cannot be crushed is hope in Jesus Christ.
Getting
back to our friends on the road to Emmaus, we see that they did not realize
their hope was fulfilled. Jesus not
only redeemed Israel, but redeemed the whole world. But this is a truth which does no one any good until they know
it, and so we go on to the second stage of their experience.
II. HOPE
DEVELOPED. vv. 25‑29.
After
Jesus listened to their story, He rebuked them for their blindness. The Old Testament prophesied all that had
happened, and yet they could not see it.
They were blinded by tradition which said the Messiah was to come and
overthrow the powers of the world, and the Jews would reign. When Jesus did not do what they thought He
should, they lost hope. Jesus teaches a
strong lesson when He rebukes them, and goes back to the Scriptures to expound
them. The heart of the Protestant faith
is here, for Jesus teaches that the Bible is to be our soul authority. If you allow tradition to guide you, you can
wind up believing just the opposite of what God reveals.
The
quickest way to get out of the will of God is to let a professional do all your
thinking for you. That was the problem
with these two. They let the religious
leaders of the day guide their thinking, rather than the Word of God. There are
millions today doing the same thing.
They never bother to search the Scripture for themselves. They let professionals take care of that,
and rest their salvation on fallible men rather than the infallible Word of
God. Following ignorant traditions was
the curse of Israel, and it will be the curse of masses of modern people if
they do not get back to a biblical faith.
There is
a legend about a race of people who lived in an isolated valley surrounded by
high hills, and cut off from the outside world. It is called the legend of the valley of ignorance. The hills surrounding them were regarded as
sacred, and any attempt to scale them was forbidden by law. One day, however, a youth with a spirit of adventure felt a strong urge to climb to
the top and see what was beyond those hills.
He did it, and returned to his
village with his body weary, and cut from the rugged climb, but so filled with
excitement he hardly noticed his injuries.
He told others of the land he saw, of fertile pasture, running streams,
and of a mighty ocean that lay beyond.
The leaders of the valley of ignorance considered him to be a babbling
fanatic, and they had him stoned to death.
Many
years rolled by, and a famine came to the valley. The streams dried up, the pastures withered, and the cattle began
to die. Someone remembered the story of
the young man, and hope revived. In
desperation they forgot their traditional laws about climbing the hills. They sent a group of men to see what lay
beyond. They, of course, returned with
a message of hope and salvation. All of
the people gathered at the spot where they had stoned the youthful
adventurer. They erected a monument to
him as the savior of his people. It is
only a legend, but so true to life.
Tradition is almost always an enemy of truth. It killed the prophets; it killed the Son of God, and will go on
cursing all who cling to it rather than the Word of God. Tradition says there are several ways to be
saved, but Scripture says there is only one, and that is by faith in the Lord
Jesus Christ.
Tradition told these two disciples that Jesus could not have been the
Messiah, and so they lost hope. Jesus
comes to them with the Word of God, and He shows them that it was necessary
that the Christ was to suffer all that He did, and enter into His glory. As He took them through the Old Testament
showing them these things a new hope began to develop. Jesus did not reveal Himself to them at this
point, but use the Scriptures to develop their hope. He did this in order to teach that the Bible is sufficient to
give us the truth of God. They would
only see Jesus for a moment, but they would have the Scriptures to guide them
always.
In verse
32 they admit to each other that their hearts burned within them as He talked
with them, and open to them the Scriptures.
The evidence that new hope began to develop in their hearts is seen
already in verses 28‑29. When
they came to Emmaus Jesus made as if He would go on, but they constrain Him to
abide with them. They hungered to know
more of that which He spoke. This gives
us a real clue as to why Jesus revealed Himself to these two. They wanted to know. No one is ever hopeless who really wants to
know the truth. Those who hunger and
thirst after righteousness shall be filled.
Jesus had stimulated new hope in them, and they desired to develop it
further.
We
notice here the courtesy of Jesus. He
did not force Himself upon them. If
they had had no interest, He would have gone on. Jesus will knock at the door, but He will not break it down. Jesus would not approve of cramming the
Gospel down anyone throat. When He sent
the 70 out, He said, if they don't want your Gospel just shake off the dust of
your feet and move on. There is no
point in trying to force a decision, for only those who decide because they
desire to do so have a decision that counts.
These two desired Jesus to abide with them, and so He came, and that
brings us to the third stage of their experience.
III. HOPE
DISCOVERED. vv. 30‑35.
As Jesus
sat at the table with them, He took bread and blest it, and broke it as He had
done so often. And in so doing their
eyes were opened, and they saw it was Jesus.
Maybe it was the prayer, or the way He broke the bread, or the nail
prints in His hands, that made them see He was the risen Christ. Whatever, it was, as soon as they recognized
Him He vanished. Jesus had no intention
of staying with them. He was only
concerned to lead them to discover that their hope in Him was not in vain. It was perfectly fulfilled as Scripture
foretold.
At that
moment they experienced the meaning of Easter.
They discovered the reality of the resurrection, which meant that in
Christ we can have a hope that is eternal and uncrushable. Not all the darkness of hell and death could
quench His life and light. Never again
did they need to be without hope. There
cold hopeless hearts were kindled into flame, and as with those men on the sea
who saw their ship afloat, knew life pulsed through their veins. Hope in the soul gives strength to the body,
and so they rose up and returned in haste to Jerusalem. A new engine of purpose had been placed
under the hood of their life, and with high octane hope they ran back to
Jerusalem. I wouldn't be surprised if
eternity reveals that they were the first to break the four minute mile.
Crushed
hopes are like heavy chains around our ankles, but the hope that comes to those
who discover the living Christ is like helium from heaven that lifts and
lightens. Some people make a great deal
of the empty tomb, and that is essential, but it is the negative aspect of the
resurrection. The positive aspect is
the full heart. The heart filled and
flaming with hope because Christ is risen and is ever present is the necessary
positive side. They knew of the empty
tomb before, but that is not enough without the positive awareness of the
living Christ.
I can
imagine a beggar setting at the gate of Jerusalem seeing these two race past
him in excitement, and thinking to himself, "Isn't that those same two who
came dragging themselves along only a few hours ago with long sad faces? What a change has come over them." What a change comes to anyone who discovers
the living Christ. You cannot come to
know Christ and be the same. There is
new hope, and a new flame that is set to burning, and it consumes that which
does not belong.
When
Blaise Pascal, the famous French genius, and inventor, discovered Christ, he
wrote in his diary that Nov. 23, 1624 the word fire, and after that he
jotted "joy, joy, joy, tears of
joy‑Jesus Christ." Such was
the experience of John Wesley when he felt his heart strangely warmed as he
trusted in Jesus as his Savior. And
such has been the experience of millions who have discovered the living
Christ.
When
these two disciples walked out of Jerusalem that first Easter they were saying,
"This is the end, this is the end."
They were right, of course, but they did not realize which end it
was. But after their discovery they
realized it was the beginning end of a hope that would have no end. It was not the end; not even the beginning
of the end. It was just the end of the
beginning. The message of Easter is
eternal hope, a hope that cannot end.
Life with Christ is endless hope, but without Him it is a hopeless end.
Christ is risen, Christ is risen,
Sins long triumph now is o'er.
Christ is risen, death's dark prison
Now
can hold his saints no more.
6. THE EASTER POTENTIAL Based on Luke 24:33‑53
One of
the reasons that Ferdinand and Isabella supported Columbus in his scheme to find
a new world was their hope that he would also find the fountain of life. When Columbus landed he searched for it, and
he questioned the Indians about the legendary fountain that would make old men
young again. These Indian legends made
their way back to Spain, and they told of how old men could make love again to
a young wife and bear children, if they drank from this fountain. King Ferdinand, not long after Columbus
sailed, sent out Ponce de Leon to find
the island where this fountain was supposed to exist.
The
Spaniards did want gold for the present, but they wanted the fountain for the
future, for they wanted life that lasted forever. This was one of the powerful motivating factors in their drive to
explore the new world. Men have always longed
for life that was immortal. Animals do
not, but men do, because they are made in the image of the Immortal Creator,
and so they have an inherent desire for immortality.
Ponce
de Leon went from island to island drinking the water, but with no effect. On Easter Sunday he landed on what he
thought was an island, and he called it Florida. They drank water from many springs, but no miracles. Again, they asked the Indians questions
about the fountain of youth. He was
convinced that Florida was where it was at.
The Pope was informed that they were on the right trail, and he too was
excited about the search. It was a
Christian mission to find paradise, but instead, Ponce de Leon found death by
an Indian arrow, and the search ended.
This deep devotion to the notion that somewhere across the ocean there
is a potion that will give eternal life has always been a part of the human
drama.
Ancient
stories tell of how men have been able to drink the Elixer of the gods, and
thereby be restored to youth. The
Greeks tell of Tantalus who became immortal by drinking of the nectar and
ambrosia of the gods. The Koran tells
of a fountain of life where dying fish
are renewed by drinking of its water, and a dead fish dropped in it will swim
away as a young and active fish again.
Alexander the Great was told of a fountain in Arabia that would make a
man immortal if he could drink but one drop.
In the middle ages Christians thought India was the place where the
fountain could be found. Many went in
search, and Prester John developed a Christian kingdom in India, and he wrote
to the Pope that the fountain of youth was there.
The
legend has become a part of cultures all over the world, and texts on the
pyramids of Egypt talk of the everlasting beverage and the water of life. Whenever you have such a universal legend
you can assume there is some foundation for it in fact. Man wants to be able to drink some water
that will give him eternal life. Is
this sheer foolishness, or does the Bible encourage us to believe there is such
a fountain of life? David writes in Ps.
36:8‑9 about God's provision for those whom He loves, and He writes,
"You give them drink from your river of delights, for with you is the
fountain of life." So the idea is
not far fetched, but just the direction men go to seek it is foolish. It is not in Arabia, India, Florida, or on
any island. The fountain of life is
with God.
Man in
his rebellion against God seeks to find the fountain of life on his own, and become
independently immortal. Jer. 17:13
shows the prophet lamenting the folly of Israel in choosing death instead of
life. "For they have forsaken the
Lord, the fountain of living water."
Like Ponce de Leon, men want to find their own fountain and not be
dependent upon God. They always find
death, however, instead of life. This
is the folly of man all through history.
In Jer.
2:13 God describes this universal conflict:
"For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me, the
fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken
cisterns can hold no water." The
reason men are forever seeking for a fountain of life is because they refuse to
take the water of life as a gift. They
do not want it as a gift of grace. They
want is as a result of their own labor and discovery, so they can say they
found it, and they did it, and they achieved immorality by their own wits and
works. Meanwhile the Bible gives clear
directions to the treasure that men desperately seek. Prov. 14:27 says, "The fear of the Lord is a fountain of
life, turning a man from the snares of death."
In the
New Testament the entire plan of God for man is all wrapped up in Jesus Christ
leading the redeemed to the goal for which they long. It is the goal for which they are made, and it is that they live
forever in perpetual youth. Rev. 7:17
says, "For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd and
he will lead them to springs of living water." In Rev. 21:6 we read this climatic statement about the fountain
of life. "It is done! I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and
the end. To the thirsty I will give
water without price from the fountain of the water of life."
You
cannot find this water, or make it, or buy it, or in any way acquire it by
human effort. It is God's gift, and
Easter is the day God made it clear to man that faith in Jesus Christ is the
only way to find the fountain of life.
He, and He alone, has the power to make life immortal, and the right to
give everlasting youth. If you want to
quench the universal thirst for the water of life you need to simply ask Jesus
to forgive your sin, and come into your life as Lord. Easter is a day on which we celebrate His victory over death, but
it is also the day we celebrate our own victory, for by faith in Jesus we too
will live forever and drink of the fountain of life.
That
which men have sought for and been willing to pay anything for is available to
all who will take it freely as a gift. The only catch is that you must let Him be your Savior, and give
up the task, once and for all, of trying to save yourself. You must surrender to win this greatest of
all battles. Man loves life and
naturally so, for God made him that way.
The thirst for everlasting life is a God given thirst, but it is also a
thirst that only He can quench. Men are
constantly tinkering and tampering with life in the hopes of gaining some kind
of control over it. We are living in an
age of biological revolution as science learns how to manipulate life. This is the age of the surrogate mother, the
artificial body parts, the sperm bank, genetic engineering, and cloning. Most of what men can do is at the beginning
stages of life, but he is working on the other end also, and striving to
prolong life, but he has not come close to the fountain of youth yet.
Men can
do a lot with life, but they cannot make it start, or make it last. The origin and on going of life are in God's
hands. Man can prolong life for
sometime, but only God can make it permanent.
The potential for this permanent life, as well as abundant life, is what
Easter is all about. Jesus died young,
but on Easter He arose in that same
young body to live forever in the prime of life. Jesus found the fountain men have ever
searched for. Violet Storey put it in
poetry.
And He was only thirty‑three...
The year had come to spring‑
And He hung dead upon a
tree,
Robbed of its blossoming.
Sorrow of sorrows that Youth
should die
On a dead tree 'neath and April
sky.
And he was only thirty‑three...
Anthems of joy be sung‑
For, always, the Risen
Christ will be
A God divinely young.
Glory of glories, a Tree,
stripped bare,
Shed now Faith's blossoms
everywhere.
That
tree, the cross, is now no longer a symbol
of fear and shame, but a symbol of victory, for now it represents the fountain
of youth. The resurrection of Christ
changed everything; the past, the present, and the future. It transformed the cross, and has in it the
potential to change everything. We want
to focus on the Easter potential as we see it when the risen Christ appeared to
His disciples that first Easter evening.
We see
the risen Christ offering to His disciples the very two things that men have
sought for in the fountain of youth, and they are perpetual pleasure and
power. These are the keys to the joy of
life. Take away pleasure and power and
life is no longer a treasure. Life is
only truly life when there is some degree of pleasure and power.
Permanent and perpetual pleasure and power is what the Easter potential
is all about. Let's look at these two
ingredients of a happy now, and a happy forever.
I. THE EASTER POTENTIAL FOR PLEASURE.
The
disciples got no pleasure from their first encounter with the risen Christ, for
they feared He was a ghost, and seeing a ghost has never been man's idea of
fun. The first thing Jesus did was to
give them a lesson on ghosts by letting them touch Him, and feel that He had
flesh and bones. These, He points out,
are conspicuously absent in your typical ghost. Jesus is saying that ghosts do not have physical bodies, nor do
they enjoy physical pleasures. If you
discover your left over steak missing from the refrigerator, you can rule out
ghosts right away, for they do not have the privilege of indulging in the
physical pleasure of eating. Jesus,
however, asked for and ate fish in their presence, and by doing so demonstrated
that the resurrection body will go on enjoying the physical pleasures of
life. The Easter potential is
everlasting physical pleasure, which is the very thing that motivated men to
seek for the fountain of life.
This
will be ours in Jesus Christ, and we will enjoy the marriage supper of the Lamb
with our Lord, not merely symbolically, but literally, just as we enjoy a
festive banquet now. The resurrection
conquers all that death robs us of, and restores us to a state where we can
enjoy pleasures at His right hand forevermore. Death is man's greatest obstacle
to eternal pleasure, but Jesus reversed what is lost in death so that man can
have eternal health and pleasure. The
paradox of life is that many worldly people refuse to submit to the Lordship of
Christ, for they feel this would mean they have to give up some of the
pleasures they enjoy. What they are
really giving up is the eternal pleasures they might have. Jesus is the one who made us, and He knows
our love for and capacity for pleasure.
He is the one who made life as it is, and He desires that we have life
to its fullest. He came that we might
have life abundantly, and that means a pleasurable life.
All of
the commands of Christ to practice self‑control and self‑denial,
and to take up the cross and follow Him, are not pleasure eliminating commands,
but pleasure enhancing commands. They
lead to the disciplined life that develops a far greater capacity for
pleasure. The Prodigal had his fling,
but it was like the fire of the tumbleweed.
There was a burst of flame and then ashes, and they Prodigal's pleasure
trip ended in the muck of the pig pen.
Such is the end result of those who seek pleasure as an end in
itself. But the Prodigal went home and
entered into the enduring pleasure of a loving relationship with his
father. This is lasting and positive
pleasure, and the kind God expects all of His children to enjoy forever. This is part of the Easter potential‑pleasure
forevermore. Phillip Doddridge wrote,
Live while you live, the
epicure would say,
And seize the pleasures of
the present day.
Live while you live, the sacred
preacher cries,
And give to God the moment
as it flies.
Lord, in my view let both
united be;
I live in pleasure, when I
live to Thee.
Salvation and pleasure are linked all through the Bible. When God led the people in the Exodus out of
Egypt, it was to give them the joy and pleasure of freedom, and to lead them
into the land flowing with milk and honey.
God loves His people to enjoy the pleasures of life, and to escape the
pains of sin. The Passover Feast was to
be a perpetual reminder to Israel of the pleasure of salvation.
Come ye faithful, raise the
strain
Of triumphant gladness.
God has brought His Israel
Into joy from sadness.
In the
New Testament the cross is the Exodus‑the bringing us out of bondage to
the kingdom of darkness. The
resurrection is the entering into the promise land of joy and pleasure. The cross was painful, but Jesus endured it
with joy because of the end result which He saw, and that was the eternal
pleasure of the redeemed. This was the
promise of the Father, and David in Ps. 16 prophesied the reward of the cross
that kept Jesus looking beyond the cross to the resurrection. Both Paul and Peter quote this Old Testament
passage in reference to the resurrection of Christ. Ps. 16:9‑11 says, "Therefore my heart is glad and my
tongue rejoices; my body also will rest secure, because you will not abandon me
to the grave, nor will you let your holy one see decay. You have made known to me the path of life;
you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your
right hand."
This was
the destiny of Jesus, and the reward of His resurrection. Because of Easter and the reality of His
resurrection, this is now the potential destiny of all people. The fountain of life, and the well of
endless pleasure is at God's right hand.
Because of Easter that which is actual in the life of Jesus is possible
in the life of all who receive Him as Savior.
That is why Easter is the most special day of the Christian year. It is the day God revealed to man the way to
the fountain of youth.
Awareness of the beauty in nature all around us will
give us pleasure in nature.
Awareness of the pleasant odors of food cooking will
give us pleasure in anticipating in eating.
Awareness of beautiful music in the background can
give us the pleasure of peace of mind in our environment. Potential pleasure is everywhere waiting to
become actual by means of our awareness.
And so it is with the Easter potential, for pleasure is awaiting us as
we become more and more aware of the reality of the risen redeemer.
"God‑let me be
aware," pleads a poet.
Let me not stumble blindly
down the ways...
Stab my soul fiercely with
others' pain...
Let my hands, groping, find
other hands.
Give me the heart that divines,
understands...
God, let me be aware.
Angela Morgan writes as one who is aware in this
poem:
I am aware,
As I go commonly sweeping
the stair,
Doing my part of the
everyday care‑
Human and simple my lot and
my share‑
I am aware of a marvelous thing:
Voices that murmur and ethers that ring
In the far stellar spaces wherein cherubim sing.
I am aware of a passion that
pours
Down channels of fire
through Infinity's doors;
Forces terrific, with melody shod,
Music that mates with the pulses of God.
I am aware of the glory that
runs
From the core of myself to
the core of the suns...
I am aware of the splendor
that ties
All things of the earth with
the things of the skies.
When we become aware of the presence of Christ in
our lives we will enjoy the pleasure of drinking from the fountain of
life.
II. THE EASTER POTENTIAL OF POWER.
Power
and pleasure go together, for power is pleasure, and one of life's greatest pleasures
is to have power to do the will of God, and be an effective servant. Jesus says to His disciples on that first
Easter that His resurrection has created all kinds of potential for new power
in their lives. He says in verse 45
that He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures. The power of illumination is theirs because
of the living Christ.
Not one
book of the New Testament would have been written had Jesus not risen. The disciples would have gone back to
fishing, and the movement would have been over, and been a mere footnote in
history. But in the risen Christ was
the potential for the New Testament; the new book of God to man; the new day of
worship, which is Sunday, and the new people of God‑the church. Easter had in it all of this potential power
to change the course of history for all mankind. It changed everything, and continues to do so, for the full
potential of Easter power can never be exhausted.
Jesus
goes on to tell His disciples that they will be clothed with power from on
high, and they will be witnesses to the message of the cross and Easter in all
the world. The whole history of
Christianity is the potential of Easter becoming actual. When a king stoops to pick something, it has
to be of great value. Jesus stooped to
pick up sinful mankind because He wants them to be saved as eternal
treasure. Jesus said that without Him
we can do nothing, but Paul knew that with Christ he could do all things, and
that is why he says in Phil. 3:10, "I want to know Christ and the power of
His resurrection." In the power of
the resurrection is the potential to do everything that God wants done in
history.
The
Greek word here for power is dunimis, which refers to latent power, that is the
power that resides in dynamite, or the electrical charge in a battery. It is potential power ready to be used for
purpose. In raising Jesus from the dead
God created a new power source in the universe, and it was the most powerful
ever created. "All power in heaven
and on earth is given unto me," said Jesus.
Easter means endless potential of power.
A tomb
is the last place from which you would expect good news, but from the empty
tomb of Jesus comes the powerful message of joy, because life is stronger than
death; love is stronger than hate, and light is stronger than darkness. Easter
is the good news that in the resurrection of Christ there is the
potential power for good to conquer all evil.
Jesus lives, He loves, and He leads, but best of all, He lasts. This means we do not have to despair when
evil is powerful, as it was when He hung on the cross. We do not have to throw in the towel and
become weary in well doing when the power of darkness seems to dominate the
scene. As powerful as evil is, it is
temporary. Only the power of the
resurrection is permanent.
In the
Easter message is the power to be a perpetual optimist. If we can be ever aware of the presence of
the living Christ, we can have this power.
Jonstone G. Patrick wrote, "The Gospel which the church proclaims
to the world ever Easter is not an embalmed memory of something that lit up the
screen of the past‑it is the offer of an up to the minute fellowship with
a living Person, risen and radiant, vital and victorious."
Potential power is not necessarily actualized, however. We see this on the first Easter. Jesus was alive, but the disciples were not
jumping for joy and dancing in the streets laughing at death. They were hiding fearfully behind closed
doors, and they had very mixed and confused emotions with doubt and belief,
fear and faith, all mixed together.
Easter was a reality, but the potential power of it was not yet made
actual in their lives. This is still
true today. The potential power of
Easter is not yet made actual in millions of lives, and even in the lives of us
who believe the potential power of the resurrection has not been fully
actualized.
Every
relationship in life if full of potential that is not made actual. Every marriage, every friendship, every
neighbor, and every relationship you can imagine has the potential of becoming
more. How much more so the relationship
of the risen Christ with His people? It
is a lifetime adventure to keep growing in our awareness of the presence of
Christ, and to tap that source of power for the abundant life. Science is forever striving to better
understand how to tap the mind‑boggling potential of the atom. The Christian is to strive to do the same
with Him who made the atom.
The more
we do tap this infinite potential of power, the more we taste of the things to
come, and drink now of the fountain of life.
We do not have to wait until eternity to drink. Jesus said to the woman at the well that if
she would drink of the water He would give it would become a spring of water
welling up to eternal life. Eternal
begins now, and not just after death.
The power to live forever begins in time in the power of the
resurrection. The potential of Easter
means there is never an end to progress.
There is always more life to be had, and more love, more joy, more
peace, and more of all the fruits of the spirit. Easter means we are to live in a perpetual state of
anticipation.
Because
Jesus is alive with all power in heaven and on earth, we can at any moment experience
new insight into the Word of God, or new power to do His will, and touch some
life for eternity. This kind of
potential is was enables the Christian to keep pressing on living for the
ideals of the kingdom of God. Phillips
Brooks wrote,
Be such a man, and live such
a life
That if every man were such
as you,
And every life a life like
yours,
This earth would be God's
paradise.
The fact
is, it will be paradise again one day because of the power of the resurrection,
and in that power God will restore this fallen world to its pre‑fall
state. Life as we live it now is our
expression of faith in that precious hope.
Spring is such an appropriate time for Easter for nature itself is a
witness to the message of potential power.
All winter the forces of life are real and potential, but not
actual. Then spring comes and we see
the actualizing of that potential.
Charles Kingsley wrote,
See the land, her Easter
keeping;
Rises as her Maker rose;
Seeds so long in darkness
sleeping
Burst at last from winter
snows.
When the
potential becomes actual there is life, joy, beauty, and all the positive
emotions of life. So it is in the
spiritual life of the Christian. There
is never more joy, love, and wonder than when we become channels of the power
of the resurrection. In the valley of
Chambra in India there is a spring which flows from the hillside, which makes
the area a place of beauty and fertility.
The legend is that the valley was once desolate, and both plants and
people were withering with thirst. A
princess who loved the people and felt their sorrows deeply went to an oracle
to find out what she could do to relieve the suffering of her people.
He told
her she had to sacrifice her life for them.
She chose to do this, and so her grave was dug, and she was buried
alive. Then out of her tomb on the
hillside a spring began to flow and run down into the valley, and this restored
life and beauty. Ever since this spring
of life has given pleasure and power to all who live in the valley. This legend illustrates what Jesus did. The world was perishing for want of the
water of life. Jesus died and was
buried, and from His cross and broken grave poured forth the river of the water
of life for the quenching of man's thirst.
No
longer does any person need to live in the desert and wilderness of life trying
to survive on the husks of the swine.
Now there is life abundant, and life with beauty, and life with pleasure
and power. That is the Easter potential. The challenge for us to know Christ is to
make more of that potential become actual by the perpetual growing of our
awareness as to His presence. The
challenge for those who have never received Christ as their Savior is to stop
trying to find a fountain of life on their own. They need to just surrender to Jesus, and take His free offer as
a gift. "To as many as receive Him
God gives the power to become children of God." He invites us to freely drink of the fountain of life right now
and begin to experience the abundant life, and the life that will be
forever. Receive Him now and enter into
the Easter Potential.
7. BELIEVE IT OR NOT Based
on Luke 24:36‑53
An
Irishman on holiday in New York went into a drug store and asked for a small
tube of toothpaste. When the clerk
handed him a tube he noticed it was marked large. "I'd rather have a small one," he said. "Listen bud," the clerk
replied. "In this country
toothpaste comes in three sizes: Large,
giant, and super. So if you want a
small tube ask for large‑see?"
The mystified traveler found himself caught up in the topsy turvy world
of believe it or not paradox where large can be the smallest thing
available. There may be limits to what
fiction can produce, but most anything can be true in reality.
The
proof that truth is often stranger than fiction is the fact that the first
Christians were also the first doubters, deniers, and disbelievers in the
resurrection of Christ. The paradox of
Christian disbelievers is a biblical fact, believe it or not. That first glorious Easter dawn is glorious
to us as we look back from our point of view, but for those actually
participating in that first Easter it was far from glorious. In fact, as strange as it may seem, the
first Easter was the day of the greatest unbelief in history.
We think
our day is one of unbelief and skepticism, but it cannot match the unbelief of
the first Easter. I doubt is there is any
period of history that can match it, for it is the only time in history where
all believers were unbelievers. Believe
it or not, there was not a single Christian who even showed a sign of belief in
the resurrection of Christ until they were compelled to believe by His very
appearance. Everyone of them, without
exception, was a confirmed skeptic and doubter.
We are
so use to making the quick transition from gloomy Good Friday to glorious
Easter morning, that we tend to ignore the fact that Jesus had to work all day
before He convinced His own disciples that He was really risen and alive. The
transition from gloom to glory was not as swift as we have come to make
it. It was a difficult process of
persuasion, and not an instantaneous transformation. As Christians, we often
act as if belief was an easy thing, and an effortless goal to attain, but this
is not being realistic about man's nature, and His natural skepticism. When it comes to the matter of death and
life beyond the grave, men have deep seeded doubts. All the evidence of our senses is against it, and man longs for
evidence of the senses to destroy his doubts.
We are so dependent upon physical facts for assurance. Tennyson wrote,
O
Christ, that it were possible
For one short hour to see
The
souls we loved, that they might tell us
What and where they be.
When
James Russell Lowell returned from the funeral of one he loved dearer than
life, he said to those who tried to comfort him with the hope of communion in
spirit,
Forgive me,
But
I who am earthly and weak,
Would give all my income from dreamland,
For
a touch of her hand on my cheek.
Were
these men deniers of the faith? Not at
all! They were simply expressing the
fact that belief and faith do not come easy.
The demand of the human mind for concrete evidence is so strong that the
leap of faith is hard to take. The
biblical record recognizes this, and so, believe it or not, the first believers
were not men and women of faith, but men and women of fact. They would not accept anything by
faith. They not only would not take a
leap of faith, they would not even take a step of faith. All the critics of the resurrection have
failed to recognize that all of their false theories to explain the
resurrection away were originated on the first Easter by the Christian
disciples themselves. We shall see this
as we go along.
A. B.
Bruce, the great Bible scholar, wrote, "The disciples were not clever,
quick‑witted, sentimental men such as Renan makes them. They were stupid, slow‑minded persons;
very honest, but very unapt to take in new ideas. They were like horses with blinders on, and could see only in one
direction,‑that, namely, of their prejudices. It required the surgery of events to insert a new truth into
their minds. Nothing would change the
current of their thoughts but a dam work of undeniable fact. They could be convinced that Christ must die
only by His dying, that He would rise only by His rising, that His kingdom was
not to be of this world, only by the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost and
the vocation of the Gentiles. Let us
the thankful for the honest stupidity of these men. It gives great value to their testimony. We know that nothing but facts could make
such men believe that which nowadays they get credit for inventing.
Therefore, believe it or not, the most solid historical foundation for
our belief is the determined unbelief of the Christians on that first
Easter. Our text reveals the climax of
the day when they finally came to a point of recognition and rejoicing. But let us look at the record of the rest of
the day where we see resignation and resistance.
Not a
single Christian greeted the first Easter dawn with a ray of hope. The women made their way to the tomb to
finish preparation of their Lord's body.
They were obviously convinced that He was dead, and
that He would remain dead. The men
remained behind weeping in hopeless sorrow.
Death was victor, and the forces of evil had conquered. The cross was the symbol of total disaster
to them. They held to their despair
tenaciously, and rejected any evidence of the resurrection as some kind of
hoax. When the women found the stone
rolled away, and the angel told them that Christ had risen, their reaction one
of fear and unbelief. Mark 16:8 says,
"And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment
had come upon them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
Some of
the women were brave, however, and they finally decided to tell the
disciples. Luke 24:11 says, "Their
words appeared in their sight as idle talk, and they disbelieved
them." Mary Magdalene was the
first to actually see the risen Christ, and she attempted to persuade the
disciples, but Mark 16:10‑11 says, "And she went and told them as
they mourned and wept. And they, when
they had heard that He was alive, and had been seen by her, believe
not." The very first preacher of
the good news of the resurrection could not even get a favorable response among
the disciples of Christ. The first
Easter message was a total flop, even though everyone present was a disciple of
Christ. Here were dogmatic and
determined disbelievers. No hysterical,
and emotionally controlled women were going to make fools out of these level
headed, common sense directed, realistic fact finding disciples.
It was
the disciples that originated the theory that the resurrection was the result
of emotionalism, delusion, or hallucination.
They were the first to charge the women with an overactive imagination
which invented the whole thing. They,
no doubt, looked upon these women as pathetic victims of their grief, while
they as men, though sorrowful, still retained their grasp of reality. Mary Magdalene was the originator of the
theory that the body was stolen. As she
wept outside the tomb she said, "They have taken away my Lord, and I know
not where they have laid Him." The
empty tomb proved nothing to her but that the body had been stolen. Had she not been approached by Christ in
person, she would have spent the first Easter searching for the body of Christ,
and seeking for clues as to the thieves.
Jesus
met two of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, and they were still sad and
unbelieving, and they said, "We hoped that it was He which should redeem
Israel." They had heard all of the
stories of the empty tomb, the angels message, and the testimony of Mary, but
they were not convinced by any of this.
They were willing to believe that some other theory could account for
all that had happened without it being a fact that Jesus was a live. They were only convinced by a special act of
revelation by which they recognized Christ.
When they ran to add their testimony to the increasing evidence we read
in Mark 16:13, "And they went away and told the rest; neither believed
they them." Their unbelief was not
based on their distrust of women preachers, for here were male evangelists that
also failed to penetrate their shield of disbelief.
So what
do we find at the end of the first glorious Easter? We find a group of fear filled disciples huddled in a room, and
afraid for their lives, with no confidence or assurance. They were confused, bewildered, and, no
doubt, wondered if they were going mad.
They would have been okay with the theory that they were the victims of
hallucination, or any other theory.
Then Jesus appeared in their midst, and they were terrified. They thought they were seeing a ghost. That first Easter was about as joyful as
spending a night in a literally haunted house.
They must have been emotionally exhausted from all the sorrow,
confusion, and fear.
How
realistic the biblical picture is. And
inventor would have had them singing the Hallelujah Chorus by the empty tomb,
but real life is not like that.
David Read writes, "Let me ask you this: If you lost a very dear friend in sudden
death, and then after two days you suddenly saw him materialize in front of
you, exactly as he was‑would you immediately and spontaneously be
overcome with joy and delight? Would
you really be glad? I believe that you
and I would be frankly terrified. We
should most likely ring for the nearest psychiatrist."
The
realism of the biblical record has convinced many a skeptic of its
authenticity. It is so true to life
that an inventor would have been unable to picture it apart from the actual
fact of its occurrence. All of this
determined disbelief was natural, but Jesus did not let it pass unrebuked, for
he had labored long to prepare them, and yet it was all in vain. He rebuked them for not being willing to
even accept the testimony of eyewitnesses among their own group. This was the basis upon which all other men
in history would have to believe, yet, they would not surrender their doubt on
that basis.
In Mark
16:14 we read, "Afterward He appeared to the 11 as they sat at meat, and
upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart. Because they believe not them which had seen
Him after He was risen. And verse 41 of
our text says that even when they were convinced, and heard, saw, and touched
Him, they still though joyful, disbelieved, and felt it was just too good to be
true.
If some theory could explain all this, they would
have been ready to accept it.
So,
believe it or not, the hardest men to ever be convinced of the reality of the
resurrection were the very disciples of Christ on that first Easter. No other men in history whoever became
believers needed as much evidence and persuasion as did these men. Even then, Thomas was gone and demanded all
the evidence the others had before he would believe. The first Easter ended with at least one Christian still in the
paradoxical position of being an unbeliever.
The Christians resisted belief until overwhelmed with the facts. There is not a hint that a single disciple
believed in the resurrection on the basis of the evidence we must believe on
today. They all had to see Him before
they would believe. That is why Jesus
said to Thomas, "You have believed because you have seen me. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet
believe." Our faith must be that
of the poet who wrote,
Jesus,
these eyes have never seen
That radiant form of Thine:
The
veil of sense hangs dark between
Thy blessed face and mine.
Yet, though I have not seen, and still
Must rest in faith alone,
I
love Thee, dearest Lord, and will,
Unseen, but not unknown.
We must
believe with a greater degree of faith than did the first believers, but we
also have a broader historical basis. We
have all they had plus the New Testament explanation of the Old Testament
prophecies. We have this realistic
record of their own journey from darkness to light, and we have the record of a
history transformed by the power of the living Christ, plus the personal
experience of His presence and power.
Nevertheless, let us not be deceived into an easy believism, and pretend
that only the willfully blind and hopelessly ignorant resist belief in the
resurrection. It is totally unrealistic
to expect the majority of people alive today to respond on a higher level of
faith then that possessed by the original disciples of Christ. People are basically materialistic, and they
demand visible proof of anything that calls for a sizable investment, or
serious commitment of their lives. If
they do not see the reality of the living Christ in us who profess to know Him;
if they cannot see a visible difference in our character and conduct that
suggests the presence of a power which is supernatural, then what evidence do
they have to persuade them to make the leap of faith?
The
Christian life which is not Christlike is the greatest hindrance to evangelism,
and to the growth of God's kingdom on earth.
Believers are the body of Christ, and are the only part of the risen
Christ men will ever see before the returning Christ appears in glory. Each of us on this Easter morning must ask
ourselves if we are convincing proof of the reality of the resurrection, for,
believe it or not, it is not the empty tomb, or the stone removed, or the angel
voices, or the history of the church, that is the vital evidence for our
day. It is, rather, the living evidence
of a Christ‑filled and Christ‑transformed life.
If your
picture was published with the caption over it‑believe it or not, and
underneath was the statement that here is a life which is positive proof of the
resurrected and living Christ, would those who know you be more likely to
laugh, or give serious consideration to the evidence? It is a frightening responsibility to claim that the living
Christ indwells you, but none claim the name of Christ can escape this
responsibility.
God
respects the craving of the human mind for evidence, and professing Christians
are the evidence He grants the world.
All other evidence will fall flat without that of Christlikeness in the
flesh. People today, like the first
disciples, want to hear, see, and handle before they will let down the guard of
unbelief, and let the light of truth transform them. Belief comes hard, and so the evidence must be strong. As goes the typical Christian life, so goes
the Gospel of the risen Christ. The
most effective evidence of Easter truth is you and I, believe it or not.
The
resurrection of Christ is more than a fact of history. Facts of history can be ignored, deplored,
or adored, and have no significant effect on your life. If I do not believe Caesar was the emperor
of Rome, I may be wrong and ignorant, but I am not thereby any worse off. If I do not believe there are pyramids in
Egypt, I am misinformed, but I am none the poorer. But if I do not believe Jesus rose from the grave and conquered
death, I am lost, and I lose all the benefits that could be mine by faith in,
and commitment to Christ. This is a
fact that calls for faith, and it is so vital that one come to have faith in it
that every person owes it to himself to be a seeker until he finds whatever is
necessary to persuade him to put his trust in the living Christ.
Easter
means nothing can happen in life to a believer that can rob his biography of a
happy ending, for that ending is always eternal life. If you have never put your faith in Jesus Christ, do it
today. Ask Him to come into your life,
forgive your sin, and be your Savior.
He promises you eternal life, and a happy forever.
8. THE EASTER GARDEN Based on John 20:1‑18
A son
kept asking his father questions until he was bugged. He decided and try to quench the lad's curiosity with the old
cliche, "Remember, curiosity killed the cat." The son replied, "What was the cat
curious about dad?" The plan
backfired, for the boy was even curious about curiosity. The curious mind can be a nuisance, but its
constant probing can make valuable discoveries, even in the most unlikely
places. Sometimes the trivial
stimulates the mind to curiosity more than the tremendous. Tell people that there are 281,796,349,000
stars in the sky, and they will believe you without question, but put a wet
paint sign on a chair, and they will have to touch it and see for
themselves. There is an attraction to
the trivial.
This is
true for me when it comes to John's record of the events of the first
Easter. I am curious about a very minor
detail that seems almost incidental and inconsequential. I am curious about why Mary thought Jesus
was a gardener in verse 15. Why is such
a trivial thing as that recorded in the Word of God? The world cannot contain all the books that could be written
about Jesus is what John has said at the close of his Gospel. Why then would he use up even one precious
line of his Gospel to tell us that Mary Magdalene mistakenly thought Jesus was
a gardener. It was only a mistake that
momentarily flashed through her mind, and yet this error is recorded for all
time, and for all to see that she failed to identify her Lord at first sight on
that first Easter.
Some may
feel it is best to just leave such minor incidents in the limbo of neglect, but
curiosity demands an investigation. The
Holy Spirit had some reason for having it recorded, and a little searching
could open up some valuable insights into the mind and plan of God. If you feel it is a waste of time, you will
have to take up your quarrel with God, for He inspired this challenge to
curiosity, and I for one love to bite on the bait and get hooked on God's
Word,even if it comes by way of a weeping woman making a mistake.
The
first thing this mistake in identification tells us, by implication, is that
the garden in which Jesus was buried was a beautiful and large garden with many
flowers and shrubs. In other words, it
was a sizable garden and well kept. The
reference back in John 19:41 just says the place where He was crucified had a
garden, and there was a new tomb in it where no one had ever been laid. If it was not for Mary's mistake we could
never have guessed how nice a garden it was.
Her mistake, however, tells us that it was large enough so that it took
a hired man to maintain its order and beauty.
She never could have supposed Jesus was the gardener unless she was in a
garden that obviously needed the care of a gardener to maintain it.
The hymn
writer was not merely dreaming, but had a good basis when he wrote, "I
come to the garden alone while the dew is still on the roses..." In this early hour the dew would be on the
roses, and all of the flowers. It is
fitting that He who is called the Rose Of Sharon and The Lily Of The Valley
should come out of the tomb of the earth and first be seen in a garden. Like all flowers, He had to burst forth from
the blackness and darkness of the earth into the light of life. Everything about this Easter garden is
appropriate and fitting to the plan of God as it is revealed in Scripture. As we examine the Bible we discover that
gardens play a major role. Pascal said,
"Man was lost and saved in a garden." The Bible supports this.
God
started human history in a garden, and it was no accident, but a deliberate
plan. Gen. 2:8 says, "And the Lord
planted a garden Eastward in Eden, and there He put the man whom He had
formed." God was the first
gardener, and He made the first man a gardener. Adam's job was to keep the garden beautiful. It is no mistake that the second Adam
was mistaken for a gardener, for He
came to restore the paradise the first Adam failed to maintain because of his
sin. How beautiful that the resurrection should take place in a gorgeous
garden, for by His resurrection Jesus did in reality restore what Adam lost. If
man fell in a garden, it is fitting that he should rise again in a garden, and
that is just the way God planned it.
God loves order, beauty, and what is fitting, and that is why He saw to
it that His Son would be buried in the garden tomb of a rich man.
Kings
who were anything at all had their gardens of beauty, and some of them were
buried in their garden tombs. In II
Kings 21:26 we read of Amon the King of Judah.
"And he was buried in his tomb in the garden of Uzza." The King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, had the
most beautiful gardens in ancient history built for his wife. The hanging gardens of Babylon were one of
the 7 wonders of the ancient world.
The Scripture tells us, however, that even the king that Nebuchadnezzar
left in charge at Jerusalem had his garden, for when Zedekiah rebelled against
him, he came with his army to surround Jerusalem. We have the account recorded three times in the Old Testament
that Zedekiah and all his men escaped by way of the king's garden. (II Kings
25:4).
In Neh.
3:15 we read of the rebuilding of the king's garden. Solomon, of course, had his beautiful gardens with great orchards
of fruit trees. The point is, kings had
gardens, and it is appropriate that Jesus Christ, as the conquering King over
death, should have His garden as well.
If God started with a garden, and intends to end history with a restored
earth, and a beautiful garden in the Holy City, as the book of Revelation
reveals, then it is appropriate that Jesus should rise and be victorious over
the sin that lost the first garden, in a garden setting.
Jesus
made His first appearance after His resurrection in a garden, and to a
woman. Satan made his first appearance
in a garden and to a woman. It is no
mere coincidence, but a part of the total order of God's plan of
redemption. As a woman was the first to
be deceived by Satan, So she was the first to receive the revelation of the
risen Christ. A woman brought the first
word of temptation to man, and now it is she who brings the first word of
ultimate truth to man. The environment
was a garden because it adds to the beauty of the truth of the
resurrection. It symbolizes the truth
of paradise regained, and God and man reconciled. God loves a garden, and He loved to walk in the cool of the
evening with man in the garden of Eden.
Dorothy Frances Gurney wrote,
The Lord God planted a
garden
In the first white days of the world,
And He set there and angel
warden
In a garment of light unfurled.
So near to the peace of
Heaven,
That the lark might nest with the wren,
For there in the cool of the
even
God walked with the first of men.
The kiss of the sun for
pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth,
One is nearer God's heart in
a garden
Then anywhere else on earth.
Jesus
experienced this Himself, for His most intimate meditations and struggles in
relationship to the Father took place in the garden of Gethsemane.
This was a garden where Judas betrayed Him, and
where He was tempted to let paradise be lost forever, but where He gained the
victory, and choose to go the Father's way, even to the depths of hell, that
man might walk again with God in the garden.
Surrounded by beauty He sweat drops of blood, for He had to endure the
desert of damnation if men were ever to have the joy of perpetual garden
beauty.
We can
be sure of this: Mary's mistake in
supposing Jesus was a gardener was no mistake as far as God was concerned, for
no gardener ever created so much beauty as Jesus did. He could invite the thief on the cross into paradise, for He made
it possible for all men to have access again to the garden of God, and the tree
of life. Jesus is the only gardener
that raises people. He raises them to
life out of death. He beautifies them,
and prepares them to wear the garments of glory for all eternity. No gardener can match Jesus. When He reaps what He has sown, all of the
universe will be a glorious garden.
Let's look at some reasons why the garden is an important symbol of the
truth of the resurrection.
I. THE GARDEN IS A SOURCE OF LIFE.
The
garden and the abundant life go together.
The garden is a source of fruit, and when Adam and Eve were put out of
the garden it was the end of abundant and fruitful living for them. The loss of the garden meant hardship,
hunger, and a life of toil and sorrow.
The desert is the opposite of the garden. The desert is symbolic of death and barrenness. Sin brings a desert of life. It is the life without fruit. God does not like a desert. He started with a garden, and can never be
content until the garden is restored, and the desert blossoms as the rose. The prophet Isaiah tells us of God's love
and plan in Isa. 61:11. "For as
the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to
spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth
before all the nations."
When
the Rose of Sharon blossomed in the Easter garden, God had brought forth a
message of life that would cause righteousness and praise to spring forth
before all the nations. The Gospel of
the resurrection is the source of abundant life to be taken to all the
world. It is of interest that there
were four rivers flowing out of Eden.
It was really one river which divided in four ways, which produced a
symbol that has influenced all of history.
Many ancients had gardens with the four rivers, and Persian carpets
often have beautiful gardens on them with four rivers which cross and make the
symbol of the cross in the garden. That
is just what we see in the New Testament picture. We see a garden tomb with the cross nearby. The cross is symbolic of the four rivers
which flow out of the garden into all the world. Four is the number of the world.
You have the four directions, and the four winds. The four arms of the cross represent the
fact that the Gospel of the resurrection is to be taken to all men.
The
Easter message is in such harmony with the reality of Spring that it is no
wonder that the two are united in so much poetry. God's world and God's Word speak in unison of new life and
resurrection. Luther said, "The
Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every
leaf in springtime." The garden
and the Gospel go hand in hand. Jesus
is the world's best gardener because He is the only gardener that can bring
Spring and new life the year around.
Christina Rossetti wrote,
My life is like a faded
leaf,
My harvest dwindled to a husk;
Truly my life is void and
brief,
And tedious in the barren dusk;
My life is like a frozen
thing,
No bud nor greenness can I see;
Yet rise it shall‑the
sap of Spring
O Jesus, rise in me.
Jesus
came to turn our personal deserts into gardens, and to give us life
abundant. This is one reason why it is
fitting that the resurrection took place in a garden. The garden is a source of life, and so is the resurrection.
II. THE GARDEN IS A SOURCE OF JOY.
Men
plant gardens not just for food to sustain life, but just for the sheer pleasure
of seeing beautiful things grow.
Flowers and plants are the source of so much of the joy of life. Joy and a garden go together in God's mind
and plan. Isa. 51:3 says, "For
the Lord will comfort Zion; He will comfort all her waste places, and will make
her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and
gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song. When God really wants to bless His people,
He grants them the joy of a good garden.
A garden of beauty is a good environment for the production of the
fruits of the Spirit. The Word of God,
and all of history witnessed to the truth that a beautiful environment can
promote beautiful living in harmony with the author of all beauty. Mary Howitt wrote,
Yes, in the poor man's
garden grow
Far more than herbs and flowers‑
Kind thoughts, contentment,
peace of mind,
And joy for weary hours.
The
Christian poetry on the joy of the garden and flowers, and especially Easter
lilies and the rose is voluminous, and they all relate to Jesus who became the
greatest flower ever to bloom when He burst forth from the tomb. We would not sing of Him in joyful song as
the Lily of the Valley and the Rose of Sharon had He been planted but never
risen. But He did rise, and the garden
of His resurrection becomes the source of all our joy. Greater is the joy that Jesus was born from
the tomb than that He was born from the womb.
Christmas joy is completely dependent upon Easter joy. The birth of Jesus did nothing for our
salvation, but the birth from the tomb made our new birth possible, and that is
why the resurrection garden is the source of our joy.
The
garden tomb was a place of gloom till God made His greatest flower bloom. Now it is the source of joy.
Joy dawned again on Easter
day.
The sun shone out with fairer ray,
When, to their longing eyes
restored,
The Apostles saw their risen Lord.
III. THE GARDEN IS A SOURCE OF HOPE.
When
anyone plants a garden for the sake of food, or the beauty of flowers, they do
so with expectation and hope. When the
seed is planted you hope for what you cannot see. Jesus often spoke of the kingdom of God in terms of sowing and reaping, and He even spoke of His own
death and resurrection in these terms when He said in John 12:24, "Truly,
truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it
remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." Jesus looked at His own life like a seed,
and by planting it in death He knew it would come forth from the earth in
resurrection and bear much fruit.
Every
garden in the world the symbolic of the Christian hope of the
resurrection. The garden is such an
obvious picture of our hope that Paul uses this imagery often to describe our
resurrection hope. In Rom. 6:5 He
writes, for if we have been planted together in the likeness of His death we
shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection. In I Cor. 15, the great resurrection chapter of the Bible, Paul
again refers to the radical change that takes place when you plant a seed. It looks worthless and of no value whatever,
but in rising from the earth it changes to what is beautiful and fruitful. You can look at that bare seed you plant in
your garden with hope, for the resurrection will transform it, and so also you
can look at your body with all of its sin and weaknesses. When you get discouraged with your body,
look at your garden and remember the seed. Paul says in verses 42 and 43,
"So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in
glory. It is sown in weakness, it is
raised in power." Every child of
God will be a startling beauty in eternity.
No, it was
no mistake when Mary supposed Jesus to be a gardener, for He is not only the
King of Kings, He is the King of gardeners.
The Bible is full of garden terms to describe Him and His work. He is the alpha and omega of gardening. He is the Seed, the Branch, the Lily, the
Rose, the First Fruits, the Tree of Life, and the Vine. The prophets call Him both a tender plant
and a plant of renown. He is also the
Lord of the harvest, and when He comes again He will reap the harvest from the
seed He has planted in the world as the Sower.
Christ is risen, Christ the
first‑fruits
Of the holy harvest field,
Which will of its full
abundance
At His second coming yield.
Those
who are ready because they have received Him as Savior, and bowed to Him as Lord,
will enter the glorious garden of paradise to be with Him forever.
His reign shall know no end,
And round His pierced feet
Fair flowers of paradise
extend
Their fragrance ever sweet.
Thy gardens and thy goodly
walks
Continually are green,
Where grow such sweet and
pleasant flowers
As nowhere else is seen,
Right through the streets,
with silver sound,
The living waters flow,
And on the banks, on either
side,
The trees of life do grow.
Such is
the desirable destiny of all who become branches of the Living Vine.
If you have not attached yourself to Christ as the
source of your life, do so today. There
will no garden in hell, and no trees, shrubs, or flowers. Sin leads only to the desert of damnation,
but faith in Christ leads to abundant life in an eternal garden. What you do with Jesus determines your
eternal environment. It is either God
and the garden, or the devil and the desert.
Come to Christ, and you come to the garden where you enjoy beauty
forever.
9 THE REALITY OF THE
RESURRECTION Based on John 20:1‑18
When
Jesus Christ entered the stage of human history He entered it to stay, and even
when evil men and satanic forces nailed Him to a cross, and sealed Him in a tomb,
it was not the end; not even the beginning of the end, but only te end of the
beginning, for He made that cross a symbol of love and redemption, and that
tomb a symbol of life and resurrection. On that first Easter morning the
greatest act that ever took place on this earthly stage was performed. How
great was it, and how important was it? So important that the Bible says, if it
did not happen your faith is vain, and there is no hope, and you are yet in
your sins. It was so important that from the start the Apostles fearlessly
claimed it, and forcefully proclaimed it. Atheists and skeptics have done all
they could to try and disprove it, for if they could all of Christianity would
collapse, but so overwhelming is the reality of the resurrection that Christians
welcome investigation. Many who set out to disprove it have become committed
believers. There are just three things we want to consider in this message.
First we want to‑
I. EXAMINE THE RECORD OF THE RESURRECTION. vv. 5‑8
Why did
John believe? What evidence did he have here that told him of the reality of
the resurrection? We need to try and think like he must have thought. Could
robbers have stolen the body? This would be a logical question. But John would
conclude that no robber would neatly fold the grave clothes as they were. And
friend would not have stolen the body, for they would not have unwrapped the
body there. The evidence indicated that Jesus must have did this himself.
Who but
the Son of God would rise from the dead and then neatly fold up His grave
clothes? He did not just let them fall
in disorder, but He folded them neatly, and thus revealed that it was the Lord
of all order that was at work here. Nobody else would have bothered with such a
trivial matter, but nothing was too small for it to matter to Jesus, and John
knew that.
Mary is
seen weeping at the tomb because the body of Jesus was gone, but little did she
realize that she would really have something to weep about if the body had
still been there. She would then have a god like the gods of the world who
always end up in a tomb somewhere. She
was suffering the grief of Good Friday yet as she stood before the empty tomb
which represented the glory of Easter morning, and of the Risen Redeemer. She was bewailing her loss when she could be
beholding her Lord. She was like the masses who still live in the darkness of a
world with no hope when the light of eternal hope is right at their fingertips
in the Living Lord.
Mary,
however, did not stay in the dark, for Jesus revealed Himself. He spoke her
name and Mary entered the dawn of a new morning, and Easter glory was born in
her heart. Her Savior was alive, and had conquered death, just as he said. Anyone who will listen and turn to the
Living Christ today can still hear Him say "Come unto me and rest."
Anyone can enter into the Easter message and receive Jesus as Savior and have
the hope of eternal life with Him. Next we want to‑
II. EXPLAIN THE RESULTS OF THE RESURRECTION.
Mary
became the first witness of the resurrection, and she became the apostle to the
Apostles. But they were too sad to believe her good news. They were the saddest
group of men the world has ever seen. The walls of life had collapsed on them,
and lay in ruins at their feet. The one they put all their hope in was
crucified and buried. It was over and they were in despair.
That
evening Jesus himself came to them and this group of discouraged, disappointed,
and defeated disciples became dynamic and determined to devote their lives to
delivering this good news to the lost world. They turned the world upside down
and changed the course of history. Nothing but the reality of the resurrection
could explain this sudden change from fear to faith; from pain to praise; from
sorrow to service, and from self‑centered cowardice to Christ‑centered
courage. Men do not face torture, burning at the stake, being torn in two, fed
to lions, and all manner of persecution and suffering for the sake of a fairy
tale, or for anything they were not so sure of they would be willing to die for
its reality.
Some
skeptics know that they must have seen Jesus alive to have such a motivation,
but they come up with things like the swoon theory. It says that Jesus revived
in the coolness of the tomb, and so they did see him alive again. This is
foolishness, for he would be so weak that he would need long nursing back to
health, and likely never make it but die in the attempt. They would know how
unlike God he was then, and how he did not conquer death in any meaningful way
different than others who have survived. A man half dead, and staggering from a
tomb, and then needing a great deal of care would not inspire the conviction
that death had been conquered. This theory cannot explain the zeal of the
disciples to proclaim the reality of the resurrection. Jesus had to show He was
mighty in His victory over death to convince His disciples, and motivate them
to sacrifice their lives to share it with the world. Third we want to‑
III. EXPERIENCE THE REALITY OF THE
RESURRECTION.
There is
little profit if we examine the record and explain the results, but do not
experience the reality of the resurrection.
This is the heart of the Gospel, for we can know Jesus and the power of His
resurrection. Men can live without feet, fingers, and many other parts of the
body, but not without heart. You can know the facts of Easter, and not know the
faith of Easter, and this leaves you with a corpse religion, for the heart is
gone. If you meet your greatest foe,
which is death, and all you have is the facts of Easter, but not faith in the
Lord of Easter, you are fighting with an unloaded gun. You are on a bridge that
only goes part way across the river that separates time from eternity, and a
bridge that stops short of the other shore is not any better than no bridge at
all.
The
reality of the resurrection must be more than a fact you believe in. It must be
a force that motivates you like it did the disciples. It must be a reality that
determines your whole perspective on life, and your actions and goals. This can
only be by asking the Resurrected Savior to come into your life as Lord, and to
reign in you. Those who will receive Jesus as their Living Lord will experience
the reality of the resurrection, and enter into the joy of Easter, which means
we have eternal life in Him.
10. TEARS AT THE TOMB Based on John 20:11‑18
It I had a dollar for every
tear shed by men and women if the Bible, I would be a wealthy man, for the
Bible is a book soaked with the tears of the saints. The weeping of the wicked and the sobs of sinners added to the
tears of the saints makes a salty sea of liquid. Not only was Jesus a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,
but the Bible is a book of sorrows, and is acquainted with grief. The Bible deals with life as it really is,
and real life provides abundant opportunity for the exercise of the tear
ducts. Not all tears are bad.
Charles
Dickens said, "We need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are like
rain upon the blinding dust of earth."
Tears, like rain drops, have brought forth much fruitfulness. Tears can move the very heart of God. When Hezekiah was told he would die he wept
bitterly, and God sent Isaiah to say to him in II Kings 20:5, "Thus says
the Lord, the God of David your Father:
I've heard your prayers, I have seen your tears; behold, I will heal you."
Tears of
repentance have transformed dying weeds into living flowers of faith. Dante, in
his Divine Comedy, has a story of a demon and an angel debating over which
should have possession of the body of one who had died in battle. The angel clinched his argument for
possession by opening the eyes of the dead man. "See," said the bright angel, "The trace of a
recent tear." This can be overly
sentimental, and people can weep without repenting, but the fact is, tears of
true repentance do move the heart of God.
Few things are more tragic than eyes that have never shed tears over
sin.
O ye tears, O ye tears! I am thankful that ye run!
Thou ye trickle in the
darkness, ye shall glitter in the sun.
The rainbow cannot shine if
the rain refused to fall,
And the eyes that cannot
weep are the saddest eyes of all.
Tears of
repentance are worth their weight in gold.
Those who shed such tears will enter that land of bliss where God shall
wipe away all tears from their eyes.
But those who never shed them will never escape them, for their destiny
is outer darkness where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Blessed are those who mourn now for sin, for
they shall be comforted forever. Those
who will not weep in time, will weep in eternity. There is no escape from tears, but you have a choice as to when
you will shed them. Spurgeon said,
"The tears of penitents are precious, a cup of them were worth a king's
ransom. It is no sign of weakness when
a man weeps for sin."
Henry
Martyn is a legend among missionaries.
One of the greatest ever, but he may never have been heard of had it not
been for tears. As a student he got
into a quarrel with his father. In a
fit of passion he stormed out of the house, never to return. Before he could return and seek his father's
forgiveness, his father suddenly died.
His remorse was so pitiful, and his eyes so swollen with tears. F. W. Borham writes, "But that torrent
of tears so cleansed those eyes that he was able to see, as he had never seen
before, into the abysmal depths of his own heart." He saw himself as a sinner who desperately
needed a Savior. His father, by dying,
gained an answer to his prayers. The
poet describes how tears of repentance can be a dead man's blessing.
When I was laid in my
coffin,
Quite done with time and its
fears,
My son came and stood beside
me‑
He hadn't been home for
years;
And right on my face came
dripping
The scald of his salty
tears,
And I was glad to know his
breast
Had turned at last to the
old home nest,
That I said to myself in an
underbreath:
This is the recompense of
death.
There
are many kinds of tears. There are the
tears shed for the sins of others.
Compassion for others has made the strongest men weak. Jesus wept for others, and tears like these
have changed the course of history.
Shakespeare said, "Did he break into tears? There are no faces truer than those that are
so washed." Psa. 126:5‑6
says of this kind of weeping, "They that sow in tears shall reap in
joy. He that goeth forth and
weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall
doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him." Compassionate tears, like raindrops, have
brought forth much fruit.
When
Lincoln got the telegram that General Lee was about to surrender, he left
Washington to go to the front. He found
officials preparing for his entry into Richmond. Lincoln put his foot down and said, "There shall be no triumphal entry into Richmond. There shall be no demonstration just
now." He walked alone into the
city with his head bowed and his heart heavy with sorrow. He went to the Southern capital, and sat at
the desk of Jefferson Davis. He put his
head in his hands and wept. His
sympathetic heart bound the North and South together. Pride and a gloating smile of victory could have widened the
division, but a great man's humble tears cemented this split nation, and
brought it together.
Lincoln
was just one of the many great men who won great victories with the power of
tears. Someone once built a statue to
commemorate a victory, and when an observer said, "Why there is a tear in
the eye," the sculptor said, "I know, we won the war, but we did not
win the enemy." Lincoln's tears
did not win the war, but they won the enemy.
No radiant pearl, which
crested fortune wears,
No gem that twinkling hangs
from beauty's ears,
Not the bright stars which
night's blue arch adorn,
Nor rising suns that guild
the vernal morn,
Shines with such lustre as
the tear that flows
Down virtue's manly cheek
for other's woes.
C.
S. Lewis in, Letters To An American Lady wrote, "I am very sorry indeed to
hear that anxieties again assail you.
By the way, don't weep inwardly and get a sore throat. If you must weep, weep a good honest howl! I suspect we‑and especially, my sex‑don't
cry enough now‑a‑days.
Aeneas and Hector and Beowolf, Roland, and Lancelot blubbered like
school girls, so why shouldn't we?
A
concordance will reveal that almost every great man in Scripture wept. Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, David, Isaiah,
Jeremiah, the apostle Peter, the apostle Paul, and the greatest of all,
Jesus. Paul even counseled us to weep
with those who weep, as he did.
The fact is, there is more about the tears of men in
the Bible than about the tears of women.
Women are suppose to be the crying sex, but there are very few
descriptions of it in the Bible. One
of them we do have is of a wife's cleaver use of tears to get her own way. The woman in the Bible who cried the most
was the bride to be of Samson.
She wanted him to tell her the answer to his
riddle. He would not do it, so we read
in Judges 14:17, "She wept before him the seven days that their feast
lasted, and on the seventh day he told her...." Samson may have been the strongest man in history, but even he
could not take more than a week with a weeping woman. Women have used this fact effectively.
Ladies, to this advice give
heed:
In controlling men,
If at first you don't
succeed,
Cry, cry again.
Tears
can be a virtue, but these were tears that were a vice. Samson probably wept himself for ever
getting mixed up with this fake cry‑baby. She ruined his riddle bet for him, and he got angry, and the
whole wedding was off. Even these tears
had some value, for they led to Samson never having to live with this cry‑baby.
We could
go on studying the various kinds of tears of the Bible, but our text should be
our focus. Here are some of the most
unique tears of the Bible. Mary
Magdalene is the weepiest woman of the New Testament. She is the only person in history who had both angels and the son
of God ask her why she was weeping.
Tears at the tomb are not really much of a mystery. If weeping is not appropriate there, then it
is hard to conceive of where it is.
Tears in the tomb are a common place couple, as perfectly matched as
black and grief. If you see someone
crying at a grave site, you are not puzzled by this emotion. The real mystery is why the angels and the
Lord asked Mary why she was weeping.
Nobody ever asked the disciples why they were weeping. They were still shedding tears after the
Risen Son had dried hers, and made her smile in joy. In Mark 16:10 we read of
Mary after she met Christ, "She went and told those who have been with
him, as they mourned and wept..."
The
disciples tears are dismissed with a mere mention, but these tears at the tomb
are an issue. Mary's tears are pure
tears of loving grief. The disciples
have tears mixed with guilt. They failed
Jesus, they forsook Him, and their sorrow is contaminated with much
selfishness. Mary, however, never
forsook her Lord, and never denied Him, but openly followed Him to the
end. Her love did not depend upon His
popularity, or His acceptance among the leaders of Israel. It was not a superficial or surface love
with her. Someone wrote, "Don't be
veneer stuck on with glue, be solid mahogany all the way through." That was Mary Magdalene‑she was solid.
Her pure
tears, therefore, were the first to be dried by the risen Christ. Paul does not even mention her in his list
of those who saw Jesus risen. Some see
this as evidence of Paul's negative attitude toward women, but more than
likely, Paul did not even know about these things of which John writes. John did not write his Gospel until long
after Paul wrote his epistles. Whatever
the reason for Paul's neglect, John makes Mary the first to see the risen
Christ, and the first to have her tears of grief wiped away by the reality of
the resurrection. Her tears at the tomb
are symbolic of how deeply we can love Christ, and the drying of her tears are
symbolic of how deeply Christ loves us in conquering death. Only Christ could dry her tears.
Verse 12
says she saw two angels sitting where the body of Jesus had been. Jesus had hung on a cross between two
thieves, but His body in death lay between two angels. The angels were
literally bodyguards, for it the archangel Michael had to combat with the devil
in a dispute over the body of Moses, as we read in Jude 9, it would seem likely
that the body of Jesus would not be safe from demonic plots without angelic
protection. The angels were obviously
in the form of men, and Mary did not realize they were supernatural
beings. She could not calmly engage in
conversation with them had they been great winged creatures as the artists
portray them. She spoke with them as if
they were a couple of curious bystanders who stopped to see what was going on.
She was entertaining angels unaware.
In verse
13 they asked her why she is weeping.
For all we know angels never shed tears. They never lose loved ones to death, and they may not grasp the
meaning of tears of grief. They were
not asking for information, but were simply making her examine the basis for
her sorrow, for they knew she had none, but just didn't know it. Then Jesus appeared, but He was
unrecognized, and He asked her the same question,
"Why are you weeping?" She tells of her search for the body of her
Lord, and makes a commitment to carry it away if he would reveal where it is
hidden. When Jesus called her by name,
and she suddenly became aware that He was alive, she almost did carry Him away,
and Jesus had to caution her.
Mary's
tears were tears of ignorance. Three
times in verses 9, 13, and 14 there is reference to the cloud of ignorance that
was responsible for the rain of tears from her eyes. She did not know any of the positives, but saw only the
negatives. Ignorance is the cause of
many tears. Paul wrote to the
Thessalonians who were weeping for Christians who had died, and said, "I
would not have you to be ignorant brethren, concerning them which are fallen to
sleep, that you sorrow not, even as others who have no hope." Then he goes on to remind them of the
resurrection, rapture, and the precious hope of reunion. Those who live in ignorance of the good news
will weep the tears of ignorance, but those who know the living Christ, who
gained the victory over death, will only have tears of gratitude.
The word
that brought light was her own name.
When Jesus spoke her name the sun rose, the clouds dissolved, and the
tears at the tomb were ended. The ear
heard a sound which shut off the tears of the eyes. Words can be tear stoppers.
Many a tear has been dried by words of love and encouragement. Mary heard the voice that had cast out the
demons in her. She heard the voice that
had given forth life and health to the multitudes. She heard the voice of her Lord, and from that moment joy filled
her life, and tears were wiped away.
The resurrection of Christ is the foundation for the ultimate wiping
away of all tears, and an eternal life of rejoicing.
Who is this, a Man of
Sorrows,
Walking sadly life's hard
way,
Homeless, weary, sighing,
weeping
Over sin and Satan's sway?
'Tis our God, our glorious
Savior,
Who above the starry sky,
Now for us a place prepareth
Where no tear can dim the
eye.
Until
that day tears will continue to be a universal language. The simpleton can weep as well as the
sage. You may not understand Greek or
Spanish, but you can understand the tears of the Greeks and the Spaniards. Tears are neither foreign nor domestic, for
they are universal. But for the
believer tears are only temporary.
Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning, for when
Jesus arose, He gained victory over all our foes.
I invite
you to join me in the journey to that land of tearless joy by putting your
trust in the Lord Jesus as you Savior.
He wept so much on earth that we might weep no more in heaven. Whether you shed tears forever, or escape
them forever, all depends on what you do with Jesus. It is tears forever, or tears forever wiped away.
Tears forever washed away,
Or tears forever flowing.
It all depends upon the way
That you and I are going.
Jesus is the Way to tears forever wiped away.
11. THE RADICAL RESURRECTION
Based on Rom. 6:1‑10
What is
the most radical thing that could happen to you after you die? Death is not the last chapter in the
biography of anyone. Things have a way
of happening even after you are dead.
Pastor Leland Botjen of Spokane, Washington almost left the ministry
after his first funeral. The family of
the deceased was poor, and a pine box was all they could afford. As the pallbearers carried the coffin up the
stairs, the bottom fell out and the body rolled down the steps. The mourners were screaming, and the
undertaker fainted. He was frozen in a
state of shock.
That
was a radical after death experience, and history is full of them. Just because the body is dead it does not
mean that it cannot yet have a history.
Bodies have been stolen from their graves and sold. Bodies have been moved from one country to
another, or one cemetery to another.
Dead bodies are still things, and a lot of things can be done with
things like bodies.
My
Christian aunt donated her body to medical science, and so part of her are
still having a history. At her memorial
service I saw what I had never seen before.
There were balloon bearers rather than pallbearers. They hung in large bunches across the front
of the sanctuary, and after the service everyone gathered outside and they were
released to ascend into the sky and out of sight. In each balloon was a piece of paper with her favorite Scripture
which read, "Trust in the Lord with all thine heart and lean not unto
thine own understanding. In all thy
ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths." Prov. 3:5‑6.
She
wanted her memorial service to be a celebration, and to be a time when even the
last event of her life would be a service to the kingdom of God. Her body will go on serving, and the
balloons were an act of service to convey the Word of God to others. It was a beautiful experience, and a radical
new experience for me. But it does not
come close to being the most radical thing that can happen to someone after
death.
The
two thieves that died along side of Jesus were likely cast into the city dump
and burned to ashes. Cremation is
certainly a radical thing to happen to a body.
Others have been left to be eaten by birds and animals, and this is a
radical reality that has been the fate of many thousands. But none of these come close to being the
most radical after death experience.
That honor has to go to the experience of being resurrected. All of the after death experiences of people
who see lights, and who see loved ones are all kids stuff in comparison to the
experience of being resurrected. To be
truly dead and then to have your body refilled with life, and renewed by the
Spirit, and revived to consciousness to walk again in the land of the living‑that
is the ultimate in radical.
This
means that the resurrection of the body of Jesus is the most radical event in
history, for He was the first to be resurrected never to die again. All others who were raised from the dead had
to endure a rerun of dying all over again.
Their resurrection was only temporary, but the resurrection on that
first Easter was the beginning of the end for the reign of death, for the
resurrection of Jesus was a permanent victory over death. Paul says in Rom. 6:9, "For we know
that since Christ was raised from the dead, He cannot die again, death no
longer has mastery over him."
If
resurrection is the most radical thing that can happen to one after death, and
the resurrection of Jesus was the first permanent resurrection, then we can see
why Easter is the world‑wide focus that it is, for we are celebrating the
most radical event that can be conceived.
Before Easter there was a sort of dualism in the universe. Satan and his rebel forces had been cast out
of heaven, but they had considerable power on earth. Their control of the realm of the dead seemed to be secure. To rob the enemy of this stronghold someone
had to penetrate this fortress of death, and then escape to prove that life is
superior to death. Easter is the
celebration of the success of just such a radical military maneuver.
By
means of his radical resurrection Jesus defeated man's greatest enemy. Now a follower of Jesus does not need to
fear entering the realm of death, for it is no longer under the control of
Satan, but is under the Lordship of Christ.
Paul makes this clear in Rom. 14:8‑9. "So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. For this very reason, Christ died and
returned to life so that He might be Lord of both the dead and the
living."
There have been many decisive battles in history that have determined
the direction of history, but none so decisive as this one that determined the
destiny of all mankind. Because of His
victory over death there is now an up for every down, and the up has the final
word. Yes there is death, but life has
the last word. Yes there is ugliness,
but beauty has the last word. Yes there
is falsehood, but truth has the last word.
We could go on and on because the radical resurrection of Jesus has made
all negatives temporary and all positives permanent. That is why Paul was such an incurable optimist. That is why he could write in Phil. 4:8,
"Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure,
whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or
praiseworthy, think about such things."
Paul
knew that when a Christian becomes a pessimist it is because they have taken
their eyes off of the radical resurrection.
All the negative things of life are real, but they are not
permanent. They will be, not just out
of style, but totally obsolete in the kingdom of Christ. Therefore, the Christian has no business
making them the focus of life. It is
the permanent that is to be the focus, for in so doing we honor the victory
Jesus gained by His radical resurrection.
When we are pessimists we are being pre‑Easter in our
thinking. Pre‑Easter is death
oriented, but post‑Easter is life oriented. Keep this in mind every time you are thinking negative, for it
means you are taking your eyes off the radical resurrection. When this is your focus you will be able to
say with Camus, "In the midst of winter I suddenly found that there was in
me an invincible summer." Or sing
with Charles Wesley‑
Jesus, my All‑in‑All thou art:
My rest in toil, my ease in pain,
The healing of my broken heart,
In war my peace, in loss my gain,
My smile beneath the tyrant's frown:
In shame my glory and my crown.
In want my plentiful supply,
In weakness my almighty pow'r,
In bonds my perfect liberty,
My light in Satan's darkest hour,
In grief my joy unspeakable,
My life in death, my All‑in‑All.
A
Christ‑centered mind is radically optimist and life‑centered. There is no record of anyone being able to
stay dead in the presence of Christ.
Every time Jesus confronted a corpse He brought it to life. No one ever died in His presence, or stayed
dead after He arrived. Even the thief
who died next to Him was promised to be alive with Him that very day. No doubt, the reason Jesus did not come to
the home of Lazarus when He was dying was because if He did Lazarus never would
have died. Jesus had to stay away to
give death a chance to do its worst.
Then He came and raised him from the dead to demonstrate that even after
death has done its worst life is still superior. Jesus said on that occasion in John 11:25‑26, "I am
the resurrection and the life. He who
believes in me will live, even though He dies, and whoever lives and believes
in me will never die."
This
is radical teaching. Nobody in history
except Jesus made such radical claims.
If you don't think Jesus was a radical, you are just not listening. The people who did listen said, "No man
ever spoke as this man." In John
14:19 Jesus said, "He who has seen me has seen the Father." Try and top that! When a man says you are looking at God when you are looking at
me, you have reached the top rung on the ladder of the radical. You can't get beyond the extreme of saying,
as Jesus did, "All power in heaven and on earth is given unto
me." Let's face it, Jesus was the
most radical personality whoever walked this planet, and He made the most
radical claims, and did the most radical things, and at the center of it all is
the radical resurrection. Jesus said in
John 6:40, "For my Father's will is that everyone who looks to the Son and
believes in Him shall have eternal life, and I will raise Him up at the last day."
The
resurrection is so radical because it becomes the foundation for the ultimate
plan of God to have an eternal family in heaven raised up from the realm of
death to dwell with Him forever. There
is nothing moderate about the resurrection.
It is the supreme truth of Christianity.
It is the Mt. Rushmore of Christian memorials.
It is the Mt. Everest of Christian peaks.
It is the Crown Jewels of Christian values.
It is the Niagara Falls of Christian resources.
It is the Great Pyramid of Christian permanence.
It is the Grand Canyon of Christian awesomeness.
It is the Rock of Gibraltar of Christian stability.
It is the Sun of the Christian solar system.
The resurrection
is the most radical event in history because it made the most radical changes
in history. You cannot exaggerate its
importance. You cannot excessively
exalt it, or find terms that are too superlative to describe it. Paul made this clear in I Cor. 15:14 where
he wrote, "..if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and
so is your faith." The proverb
says, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket." God, however, does not always do the
conventional thing. He did put all His
eggs in one basket, and it was the Easter basket that He chose. The entire plan of God hinges on the reality
of the radical resurrection. If this is
not real, the entire plan of God is a house of cards ready to collapse into a
meaningless heap. If Easter is not
true, then Christianity is as worthless as a rotten egg. But if it is true, then all the forces of
hell cannot withstand its radical power to change everything that sin has
corrupted and made rotten. It reverses
the ultimate wrong of death, and gives to us the ultimate right, which is
life.
Two
centuries ago a Russian General named Rimniksky Suvarov faced an enemy that
greatly outnumbered him. But he
motivated his army to advance, and they won an important victory. He ordered all the captured enemy ammunition
melted down and he made medals out of it for his soldiers. The very lead that was intended to pierce
their hearts and take their lives was worn over their hearts in pride, for they
had turned defeat into victory. What a
radical change from bullets of death to medals of life. That is what Jesus did by His radical
resurrection to the cross. He made this
object of horror and death a symbol of beauty and life. By His resurrection He changed
everything.
The
epitaph of Jesus is the most radical in all of history. All over the world the words on tombs and
graves are, "Here lies _______" the name is given, but on the tomb of
Jesus are the words of the angel, "He is not here." That is radical. People go to famous tombs because the bodies of well‑known
people are there. But people go to the
tomb of Jesus because His body is not there.
If His body was there, there would be no reason to go, for it would mean
that all He said was worthless, and that all He did was futile. But people go because the empty tomb is the
radical symbol of His radical resurrection.
That is what makes all that He said and did the most radical truth and
action in the history of the world.
In the
19th century it was a custom to bury valuable things with loved ones in order
to show your grief. Dante Gabriel
Rossetti showed the extent of his grief by putting into coffin of his wife the
manuscript of his poetry. These famous
poems laid in her arms for years. Then
he began to doubt if this was the best place for his creativity to lie. He risked imprisonment and fines by digging
up her grave and retrieving his poetry.
It was wet and had to be dried leaf by leaf, but this poetry rescued
from the grave is now in anthologies of poetry all over the world. But as radical as this was it cannot begin
to match the radical resurrection of Jesus by which He inspired poems by the
millions.
Before
Easter death was a dead end street, but by his radical resurrection Jesus
changed it from a terminal to a freeway to the eternal city, and ever since,
the joy of the Easter message has brought forth poetry and songs of praise and
thanksgiving. There has never been a
more radical gift ever given than the one made possible by the radical
resurrection. An unknown poet wrote,
Thanks to Thee, O Christ victorious!
Thanks to Thee, O Lord of Life!
Death hath now no power o'er us,
Thou hast conquered in the strife.
Thanks because Thou didst arise
And hast opened Paradise!
None can fully sing the glory
Of the resurrection story.
Easter
is so radical because it is the basis for all the other Christian holidays and
celebrations. There would be no
Christmas, lent, or Good Friday, or a Christian year at all if there had been
no Easter. Jesus could walk on water,
feed the famished, heal the heart broken, cure the contagious, hush the
hurricane, lift the lowly, and teach the truth, but all of this would be in
vain if His body did in the tomb remain.
If the tomb of Jesus was not empty, then all of the rest of His life
would be, for all the hopes of man for a radical victory over death would be
buried there with Him. But Jesus lives,
and His radical resurrection began to change the world right away.
A Roman
magistrate said to the Christian prisoner before him, "I sentence you to
death as a follower of the Nazarene."
The prisoner replied, "Death sir is dead. It no longer has power to make me afraid. Our Master has conquered death and the grave
and He told us, 'Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have
no more that they can do.'" Rome
had no weapon by which to counteract this radical strategy of Christ. The threat of death was the most powerful
weapon in the world to coerce and manipulate people. Jesus took that away on Easter, and so it is no wonder that the
cross of the despised Galilean became the dominate symbol, and the Roman eagle
began to fade.
The
resurrection of Jesus is the most radical fact of history, and it is also the
most radical force in history, for it changed the value placed upon every human
being. Life was cheap all through pre‑Easter
history, but if Jesus died for all, and rose at all might have eternal life,
this changed the value of every person.
They now have infinite worth.
This was so radical a change that Celsus, the bitter critic of early
Christianity, said that other teachers invited the clean and the worthy to
follow them, but Jesus called the rag, tag and bobtail of humanity. Origin, the church father, answered the
critic by writing, "Yes, but he does not leave them the rag, tag and
bobtail of humanity, but out of the material you would have thrown away as
useless, he fashions men, giving them back their self‑respect, enabling
them to stand on their feet and look God in th eye. They were cowed, cringing, broken things, but the Son has made
them free."
The
radical resurrection reversed so many of the values of the world and enabled
ordinary men to live extraordinary lives.
That is the whole point of this passage in Rom. 6. If we identify with the cross and
resurrection of Christ, we can die to sin and live to God. The resurrection made it possible for any of
us to live the life that is pleasing to God and victorious over the forces of
evil. The resurrection life does not
start after we die. It starts now in
this life, and it is a radical change from the life of the flesh. The flesh life enjoys the physical, and by
itself this leads to all sorts of sin.
The resurrection life enjoys higher values of the spirit, and this keeps
the enjoyment of the flesh consistent with those higher values. It enables a person to fulfill the chief end
of man, which is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
The one
problem involved in the resurrection life is that you have to die first to
experience it. Jesus could not be
raised until He died, nor can we. We
will not all die physically, for when Christ comes again those who are living
will not die but be changed and receive new bodies like those who are raised
from the dead. But all Christians need
to die spiritually and be raised spiritually.
We need to die to sin and to live to righteousness. We need to die to pride and to live to
humble service. We need to die to greed
and to live to generosity. Death and
resurrection are a part of the whole process of becoming sanctified and mature
in Christ. The less we die the less we
can rise. The more we die the more we
can rise. Resurrection is always after
death, and so if people do not die there can be little in the way of rising.
It is
one of the marvels of history that one poor man in England could care for the
needs of ten thousand orphans. George
Muller not only build 5 spacious building to house orphans, but he established
day schools and Sunday schools all over the world. They touched up to 150 thousand children. It is estimated that he raised 7 and a half
million dollars back in the 1800's. How
could a man be so fruitful? When George
was asked this he replied, "There was a day when I died, utterly died,
died to George Muller, his opinions, preferences, tastes and will‑died to
the world, its approval or censure; died to the approval or blame even of my
brethren and friends‑and since then I have studied only to show myself
approved to God."
The
point is God could use all of us to care for thousands of orphans, but that the
more radical the death the more radical the resurrection. If we are never crucified with Christ, we
will never be raised with Christ to live the resurrection life of victory. What that victory means to you and I will be
radically different for each of us.
None of the Apostles did what Muller did, nor have any of the great
Christians of our century. Each of us
has a different role in God's plan, but that role is more likely to be
fulfilled if we die daily and like the Sun rise anew each day to walk in
newness of life. D. L. Moody said,
"Everyday I have a little new birth." Sarah Woolsey wrote‑
Everyday is a fresh beginning,
Every morn is the world made new,
You who are weary of sorrow and sinning,
Here is a beautiful hope for you,‑
A hope for me and a hope for you.
Everyday is a fresh beginning;
Listen, my soul, to the glad refrain,
And, spite of old sorrow and older sinning,
And puzzles forecasted and possible pain,
Take heart with the day, and begin again.
This
is radical teaching, but the fact is, the Scriptures support the idea that
everyday is resurrection day. Easter
comes but once a year, but everyday is resurrection day. Paul did not say that he dies once a
year. He said that he dies daily. Nature is too slow a model for us to follow. Jesus said in Luke 9:23, "If any man
would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and
follow me." Note the word
daily. What you did yesterday was
yesterday's life. Today is a new day
and tomorrow will be another new day, and every day of your life is a new
beginning. You have to start all over
on every one of them, and die to self, and live to God.
Salvation is a one for all experience.
It is an act of faith by which we trust in Jesus as Savior, and we are
born again into the family of God. It
can happen by the simple prayer, "Lord Jesus forgive me and come into my
life." But the resurrection life
is not an event. It is a process that
never ends. It is daily and
perpetual. Nothing we do no Easter will
be of any major consequence if we do not continue to do it the day after, and
everyday after, for where there is no death there can be no resurrection. It depends upon daily dying. Grasping this, and then doing it, can make
everyday an Easter, and everyday a day in which we experience more of the power
of the radical resurrection.
12. THE LAST BREAKFAST Based on John 21:1‑14
The Bible
says God's mercies are new every morning, and the result is that many of His
blessings have come to His people at breakfast. Hudson Taylor, the founder of the China Inland Mission, tells of this event in his life as he prepared to
go to China. When he got to China he
knew he would have to depend upon God alone, and so he began to practice while
yet in England. He decided that he
would move man through God by prayer alone.
He worked for a man who needed to be reminded every time his salary was
due. Taylor was determined to trust God
to move him and not do so directly. He
began to pray for God to bring this need to his employer's mind. The time came for his quarterly salary, but
Dr. Harley made no mention of the
matter. As the day passed, Taylor
prayed without ceasing until finally he was down to one coin that was worth
about one dollar.
On
Sunday he had a full day of Christian service, and after the last service at
about 10 at night a poor man asked him to come and pray for his wife who was
dying. The man was a Catholic and so he
asked him why he did not send for a priest.
The man explained that he had, but the priest would not come without a
payment of 18 pence which the man did not possess. That reminded Taylor of just how poor he was also at that
point. His last coin was in his pocket
and all he had at home was some water‑gruel for breakfast. He had nothing for dinner the next day. He thought how gladly would I give something
to these poor people if I only had more, but to part with his last coin was not
even thinkable. When he got to the home
he saw a miserable and wretched sight with five children with sunken
cheeks. They were slowly starving, and
there was the poor exhausted mother lying on a pallet.
He began
to struggle with himself. He tried to
offer words of comfort, but inside he was calling himself a hypocrite, for he
was telling them to trust God, but he would not trust God alone. He was clinging to that last coin as if that
was his only hope. He prayed and rose
to leave. The father said, "You
see the terrible state we are in. If
you can help us, for God's sake do!"
At that moment the word flashed into his mind, "Give to him that
asketh of thee." He reached into
his pocket and pulled out his last coin and gave it to the man. Joy flooded his heart, and he was again on
track of trusting God alone and not God plus a coin. He walked home rejoicing,
and that night he reminded the Lord of His Word which said, "He that
giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord."
He asked God to not let his loan be a long one for he had no dinner for
the next day.
The next
morning he rose and sat down to eat his last plate of porridge. While he was consuming this final bit of
food, there was a knock at the door. It
was the postman with a very unusual Monday morning delivery. When he opened the letter he found a blank
piece of paper out of which fell half a sovereign. He writes, "Praise the Lord," I exclaimed, "Four hundred per cent for a 12 hour
investment." This was not the end
of the story for he did get his salary also in answer to prayer, but this
blessing at breakfast so convinced Taylor that he could trust God alone to meet
his every need that he went on to start the greatest missionary movement in the
history of China. That breakfast was
the beginning of a great movement in fulfilling the Great Commission.
Jesus
loves to do some great things at breakfast.
As we focus our attention on the beautiful breakfast on the beach in John's
Gospel, let us keep in mind that it was indeed
the last breakfast.
We hear much of the last supper, but here was the last breakfast that
Jesus had with His disciples, as far as the record of the Bible reveals. It was also a breakfast of beginnings, for
Jesus here taught the disciples the same lesson Hudson Taylor needed to
learn. He taught them that He can
supply their every need, so they are to follow Him and fish for men, and trust
in Him alone. This breakfast was also
the beginning of a great missionary movement.
The movement that began the history of fulfilling the Great
Commission.
Many
great movements begin with decisions made around a meal. Here is one of the greatest ever to begin at
a breakfast. Breakfast is the most
unsociable of all meals. How often do
you have people over for breakfast? It
is the least elaborate and most monotonous of meals, and yet many experts say
it is the key meal of the day. There
are even poets who will rank it the number one meal for pure pleasure.
Dinner may be pleasant,
So my social tea;
But yet methinks that
breakfast
Is best of all the three.
Irvin S. Cobb said, "Next to the Magna Carta,
and Englishman's breakfast is his most sacred right."
Since the
Jews generally ate only two meals a day it is likely they felt quite strong
about their breakfast also, and especially after working all night, as did the
disciples in this context. This last
breakfast was nothing elaborate, but it is the most mouth watering meal
described in the life of Christ and His disciples. It is of interest to note how often food is involved in the
resurrection appearances of Jesus. In
Luke 24:30 we read of how He took bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to
the two companions He had met on the road to Emmaus. They recognized Him in the breaking of the bread.
Later
that night Jesus appeared to the disciples and in Luke 24:41‑43 we read,
"He said to them, have you anything here to eat? They gave Him a piece of broiled fish, and He took it and ate
before them." In both of these
references we see Jesus at an evening meal, and this last one was more like a
midnight snack of left over fish. But
when we come to this last breakfast we get details like no where else in the
Gospels. Verse 9 shows us a charcoal
fire on the beach with fish frying on it and bread being toasted. If you have ever been camping you know the
appetite that the open air develops.
You can just imagine what a sight and smell that was to those hungry
fishermen.
Jesus
knew they would be hungry, and so He prepared this delicious fish
breakfast. Fish for breakfast is not
very common for most of us, but a study of history, and books on nutrition,
reveal that Jesus was a very wise cook.
He may have done this often for His disciples in that He was a early
riser. We only have this one record,
however, and we see Jesus making fish for breakfast. Helen Brown, a breakfast expert, says that for a good protein
diet the American people should have fish for breakfast. The early Americans did. The early
presidents had cod fish cakes for breakfast.
In 1888 a nutrition expert, Thomas Murrey, wrote, "Would it not be
beneficial were the average American to substitute fish for the everlasting
steak and chops of a breakfast table."
Jesus, of course, did not have
the choices of cereal or eggs and bacon.
He used what was common every day food of that day.
The
point that most expositors focus on here is the identification of the risen Christ
with our humanity. We do not see Jesus
anywhere in His earthly ministry more involved in the common place realties of
everyday life than we see Him here as He cooks breakfast. He has just demonstrated that it is He and
not the mythological god Neptune who controls the sea. He is the one who got them a great catch of
fish, and yet in spite of being the Lord of all nature He stoops to serve human
nature by cooking breakfast for His disciples.
The Lord's supper was prepared by others, but the Lord's breakfast is
really just that, it is the Lord's breakfast that He prepared Himself. This is the only men's breakfast we read
about in the Bible, and the Lord of the universe is both the host and the cook.
The
incongruity of what was happening was hard for the disciples to adjust to. The paradox of the King of Kings frying fish
for these grimy fishermen was more than they could cope with. Verse 12
reveals the confusion of their
minds. None dare ask Him who are
you? They knew it was the Lord, they
knew, yet it didn't seem possible, and so they questioned the reality of what
they were experiencing. For Jesus to
appear in the upper room and show His nail‑pierced hands made sense. That was a place of sacred memory for them
all. To appear in the garden to Mary
was a beautiful and logical appearance.
Had Jesus come in the clouds they would have shouted for joy. But now they come ashore and discover the
Lord busy around a camp fire cooking them breakfast, and they were puzzled.
There
was no parable coming from His mouth.
No profound theological dissertation was on His lips. His only words were, "Come and get
it." It was also commonplace they
just could not recognize how their risen Lord fit into this role He was
playing. What did Jesus do after He
conquered man's greatest enemy? What
did He do after He rose victorious as Lord of all time and eternity? He fixed breakfast for His disciples. Jesus was going from the marvelous to the
mini; from the tremendous to the trivial; from the magnificent to the
mediocre. John ends His Gospel by
telling us that Jesus did so many other things that the world could not hold
all the books if they were all written down.
Yet, with all that material to select from, he chose to end his Gospel
with the risen Lord making breakfast on the beach. There has got to be profound implications in this breakfast.