Some peoples gods are made up. Others, were real people who came up with a religion all their own.
I am here to tell you, I worship and serve the God.
The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He's the only God. Out of all the others, He is the only one to come through on His promises. He's the only one who has died, then been resurrected three days later. He's the only one to completely raise the dead and heal the sick. He's the only God who you don't have to jump through hoops for to follow. All He asks of you is to come to Him. He's the only GOD!
I think that around this time of year, we focus on the crucifixion and the death of Christ, and then we give a little play to the resurrection, then we move on. The greatest part of our relationship with Christ and our religion is that He was raised from the dead just like He said He would!
In Matthew 16, Jesus predicts all the happenings of what we have come to call Passion Week. The 21st verse in Matthew 16 talks about how Jesus told His disciples that He would go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the chief priests and elders and then that He would die and be raised on the third day.
In John, Jesus uses symbolism, but tell the Jews, "Destroy this temple, and I will raise it up in three days." They did not understand that He was talking about His own body. They would soon destroy Him and everything about Him, and then He would rise again.
Buddha and Mohammed cannot say that. Buddhists, Muslims, and any other religion you can think of can go to the tomb of their leader and he's still there! When you go to the tomb, where they laid Jesus of Nazareth, today, you will see an empty one! He's gone! He got up!
Sometimes I think, as Christians, we focus so much on the cross and the suffering of Jesus, that we forget to relish in the fact that He didn't stay dead! When they pierced His side and the blood and water flowed out, it showed that He was dead. He had taken on every sin that would ever be committed and was nailed to a cross and suffered between two criminals. Before that, He was beaten to a bloody pulp. The Romans were not the type to play when it came to disciplining who they thought to be criminals.
The cross wasn't what it is to us. We put it everywhere. Many of us wear it on our clothes, as a necklace, or put it on pictures or up in our house. We've, honestly, dulled the depth and the meaning of the cross. It was a gruesome death. Coupled with the way He was beaten and scourged, it was worse than we could ever imagine. But He did it for us. He did it for the worst we have within us. All our sins and everything we have ever done wrong in our lives, He did it for that.
So there I go, leaving the subject of the resurrection to emphasize the cross.
The resurrection is the cornerstone of the Christian faith. Without the resurrection, Jesus would have been just another guy who said some things about doing good and told good stories. He would have still had a following and I am sure still would have been the foundation of a religion of the world. The great thing is, there was a resurrection! We don't have to worry with the could have or would have, we got the is!
In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul explains what the resurrection means for our faith. Adam started off the entire cycle with sin in the Garden of Eden. The cycle rolled from Adam to Abraham to David and on down the line. Man had no way out of the cycle of sin but divine intervention. God sent Jesus to earth to take on the punishment for all that sin, then to defeat death. With His resurrection, Jesus defeated the death caused to us by our sin problem.
If we accept Christ, our death debt of sin is paid and we receive eternal life. If it wasn't for Him coming up out of the tomb, then that would all be nothing. With Jesus' resurrection, He set forth in motion the future resurrection of every Christian who dies. We will one day come up out of the grave just like Jesus did!
Paul says it like this, "For as in Adam, all men die, so in Christ all will be made alive." All we have to do is ask to be made alive by Christ.
Paul then goes into a symbol that is a great way to view the resurrection of believers.
When we die, we are put into the ground and we await the second coming of Christ. At that second coming, will we be raised in the body we were in? NO! That body will be all kinds of decomposed and rotten. Paul puts it in terms of seeds, "What you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, just a seed...The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown in a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body." (1 Corinthians 15:36, 42-44)
So there you have it. We look at that same example with the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.
Jesus was raised to fulfill a promise of salvation.
His resurrection is the crux of the salvation we receive!
So let me close with a little paraphrase of my own of Matthew 28:6.
"He ain't here! He did what He said He was gonna do!"
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