- Senior Pastor, Robert Dennison, preached this message on March 31, 2024.
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Audio Transcript
Just as he said. Matthew 28:1 10. After the Sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to view the tomb. There was a violent earthquake because an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and approached the tomb. He rolled back the stone and was sitting on it.
His appearance was like lightning and his clothing was as white as snow. The guards were so shaken by fear of him that they became like dead men. And the angel told the women, don’t be afraid, because I know you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen just as. As he said.
Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples he has risen from the dead. And indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee. You will see him there. Listen, I have told you so.
Departing quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, they ran to tell his disciples the news. Just then, Jesus met them and said greetings. They came up, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. Then Jesus told them, do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to leave for Galilee and they will see me there.
May we pray? Heavenly Father, as we look at your word today, we ask that you would give us a great understanding of the importance of. Of the resurrection and what it means to our life. And if there are any here, Father, that have not submitted to your call to salvation, of placing Jesus by faith as their Lord and Savior, that you would do that today, in his name we pray. Amen.
There’s an overall story in the Scripture that goes from beginning to end, starting in Genesis 1 and all the way up to the end of Revelation. And. And today we’re going to be talking about the importance of the resurrection, how that fits in with the whole story. But let’s go over the whole story first, and then we’ll zero in where the resurrection fits in. We know from Genesis chapter one that a good God made a good creation.
Everything in it was wonderful. And his desire was to have a personal relationship with all of mankind. He came and walked every day in the Garden of Eden, was with Adam and Eve, and he provided them with everything they needed to have a perfect and wonderful life. But Satan offered them a choice to either serve God or to serve him. He presented it as, don’t serve God, serve yourself.
But in so doing, they turned their attention to Satan instead of to God. And Adam and Eve made what we call a destructive choice, because everything that had been created good began to turn into chaos immediately. Adam and Eve were Arguing with one another, they were blaming one another, they were ashamed. They were hiding from the very God that had made them and they weren’t willing to walk with him in the garden. Their choice was destructive from the very beginning.
But their destructive choice left them and us with a condition that no longer was good. It was a deadly condition. And when we talk about being deadly, what we’re meaning is that they were now separated in their relationship from God. It was a spiritual death. And yes, eventually they would physically die.
But what was most important, it was a spiritual death that caused a great divide that God had not intended. We today still have this deadly condition in our life because we sin just like Adam and Eve sinned. We choose to go our own way and to do our own things instead of following God’s will and way for our life. And that creates in us this deadly condition that we’re separated from God not only in this life, but eternally. And we can’t do anything about it.
We can’t go to church enough to have a right relationship with the Lord. We can’t give enough money to have a right relationship with the Lord. We can’t say enough prayers to have a right relationship with the Lord. And even if we have godly grandparents and parents and great grandparents, it doesn’t pass down to us. We have a problem that we are dead.
But God stepped in with the cure that we all need. And that cure is gracious because it’s completely free for us. And this is where we get to the message today that the cure is that Jesus Christ came as God in the flesh and he lived a perfect life. He died a perfect death. He was buried and he rose from the dead so that we could be restored to a new creation, back to what God originally intended, that we can be friends with him, not only in this life, but for eternity.
It’s wonderful to know all this. People can intellectually know all these things in their mind and they still have not placed their faith in Christ because the verse says at the bottom, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord. In other words, you say he’s in control of my life. And you believe in your heart that he was raised from the dead. That’s when we come to this new life, that we’re returned to a new creation.
And eventually, not only are we recreated, but the whole world will come back to this good order that God originally intended. But we’re looking at the resurrection today and it fits here with this gracious cure. When we share the Gospel, we’re Going to look at four things, four reasons why the resurrection is necessary. It wasn’t just enough for Jesus to come and to live and to die on the cross. He had to be resurrected from the dead for several reasons.
We’re going to look at four of those today. The first one is that the resurrection is a validation of Jesus. The second thing is that it’s a validation of our faith, it’s a validation of our hope, and it’s preparation for eternity. So the resurrection is about Jesus, it’s about personally our faith, it’s about our hope, and it’s about our eternity. If you will turn in your Bibles to First Corinthians, chapter 15, we’d love to have you turn there if you can.
It will also be on the screen. But this is what Paul describes to us about the resurrection, why he tells us it’s so important and it’s so necessary that we get this, why we don’t leave Jesus in the tomb. He had to be raised from the dead. Let me read from verses 4 through 8. He, being Jesus, was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.
And that he appeared to Cephas, that would be Peter, then to the 12. Then he appeared to over 500 brothers and sisters, sisters at one time. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. And last of all, as to one born at the wrong time, he also appeared to me. He appeared to Paul.
The fact that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead validates that he is who he said he is. He said, I am the Son of God, I am God in the flesh, and I have come to be your Savior and your Messiah. And the fact that he said he was going to be raised from the dead, this is the validation that everything else that he said was true. He is God in the flesh. He wasn’t raised by a team of health professionals like having a heart attack.
And they came in with the EMS and they shocked him back to life. He raised himself by the power of God. He wasn’t raised by some powerful religious person that came to the tomb and said, arise, as he had done with Lazarus. Or we see in the Old Testament with some of the prophets that raised individuals from the dead. He raised himself from the dead.
An utter impossibility. It would be like any one of us today having a heart attack. And then we grab the EMS machine out there and we put it on. It’s not ems, is it, aed? I’m getting my letters wrong.
And then to put it on yourself and then to bring yourself back to life. It was impossible, except for the fact that Jesus raised himself from the dead to validate that he is God in the flesh. Paul goes on to say in verse 12, now, if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say, well, there is no resurrection of the dead? Now, Paul was answering some teachings during that day that happened to be coming from the most highly esteemed religious leaders. The chief priests and his family were Sadducees.
And they taught there’s nothing after this life. Once you die, that’s it. There’s no resurrection, there is no eternity. And they were saying it was impossible for Jesus to be raised from the dead because there is no resurrection. But we’ve just read over 500 people saw him and witnessed to the fact that he had been raised from the dead.
It was a challenge to those religious leaders in their day that what they had been teaching was wrong. Therefore, some lies and false teachings developed. The first lie was that the disciples had stolen the body during the night. You have to realize how ridiculous that would have been. There was a group of soldiers there, and according to the language, there were probably 16 Roman soldiers that night that were guarding the tomb for the three days they were taking turns, four at a time, as one group would rest and the other would come, and then they would walk off and another would come in.
So imagine you’ve got 16 soldiers there at the tomb and. And you have these disciples that are so brave that when Jesus was taken away to the cross, none of them followed him except for one, and that one denied three times. And then even at the crucifixion, as far as we know, the only disciple was only one, and that was John that was there. It sounds like the rest of them ran off. They were in hiding.
They were probably just hoping, you know, hopefully nobody remembers that we were with him because we don’t want to end up with the same fate. These were not brave men at this time. It’s embarrassing to think, to even say that they went and they fought off those soldiers and stole the body of Christ. But if they had stolen the body of Christ, all the Sadducees and the Romans had to do is find that body to prove he. He wasn’t raised from the dead.
And you know, that they had people scouring everywhere. Where did they hide the body? If we could just find the body, we can prove that this man is not who he says that he was. And the last reason is that the likelihood that 11 men could keep this secret all of their life and never Say that they had stolen the body. It just doesn’t seem like that could have happened.
The disciples stole the body during the night. That was the first lie. Another lie was that, well, Jesus didn’t really die on the cross. He just fainted. And they wrapped him in all these linens and they put bombs and resins, pounds and pounds on it.
They laid him in the tomb, and he laid there without any food or water for three days. And then somehow he was able to hop, push over a large stone and rescue himself from 16 Roman soldiers. The likelihood that he had been asleep and woke up to do that is not possible. The last false teaching or lie was that Jesus was just a phantom. He wasn’t a real person.
Well, tell that to Mary, who had him in her womb for nine months. She knew that she was pregnant. She was embarrassed about it. She went to live with her aunt, who recognized that she was pregnant. She went through a real delivery.
Jesus grew as a young man. All of his neighbors said, well, this is Jesus, Joseph’s son. He wasn’t just a phantom. He was a real person. He came in the flesh.
He really died, and he really rose from the dead. Paul is telling us that the resurrection validates that Jesus is who he said that he is. But the second thing is that it is a validation of our faith. Let’s go on to read verses 13 and 14. And Paul is kind of presenting this negative argument so that you get the positive truth here.
He said, if there is no resurrection of the dead, in other words, suppose it is true that there’s no resurrection of the dead. Well, there’s no resurrection of the dead, he says, then not even Christ could have been raised from the dead. But if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain, and so is your faith. What he’s saying is this whole story, this whole thing going through Scripture about how we come back to a right relationship with God Almighty. There’s nothing to it if we don’t have the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
If there is no resurrection, then Christ was not raised from the dead and our faith is vain and it’s invalid. But instead, the resurrection does just the opposite. It does validate our faith. It is a real faith in a real Jesus, who really lived a sinless life, who really died on the cross to take the punishment that was due to us upon himself, who proved his own claims by raising himself, and will come again someday for his children, just as he promised. Our faith is not in vain.
Our faith talks about the point in our life that we Give our life to the Lord and we accept the gift of salvation. But not only does the resurrection deal with that, but it looks to the future and we come to the next thing. It’s a validation of our hope. It’s not just the validation when we come to faith, but it’s the validation of everything that we have to look forward to someday in our eternal relationship with the Lord. Let’s go on to reading verses 17 through 19.
If Christ has not been raised, Paul says your faith is worthless. Again, he’s approaching this from a negative attitude and you are still in your sins. Meaning that if Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead, then his death did nothing to pay for the penalty of your sin. Because Scripture tells us that his blood became an atonement for us, that it covers us so that when God looks at us, he no longer sees our sin. He sees the blood of His Son that paid the price for those sins.
18 says those then who have fallen asleep in Christ have also perished. Meaning, okay, it’s worthless to us. It’s worthless to all those that have died. If we had put our hope in Christ for this life only, we should be pitied more than anyone. He’s saying that if Christ wasn’t resurrected from the dead, we have no hope.
Our life is worthless. We’re still in our sins and we should be pitied. That’s if the resurrection didn’t happen. But because the resurrection did happen, our faith is not worthless. Our sins have been forgiven, we are no longer guilty of them, and now we have hope.
This isn’t just wishful thinking, but the word here means it’s we know with certainty that there is life for us after death. Going on to read in verse 20. But as it is now, we get to him saying positively, Christ has been raised from the dead. He’s the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. Meaning his resurrection was to an eternal life that will never end.
Up to this point, there were people that had been raised from the dead, but they still died. Again, Jesus was unique and special in that he went on to to live in eternity in the same way that we do one day if we placed our faith in Him. For since death came through a man, we’re referring back here to the story that Adam made the destructive choice and through that one man, the deadly condition comes down to everyone that’s ever lived. His one decision has affected all of us negatively. But praise the Lord in the same way.
Jesus Christ, like Adam, made the decision one man, one God in the flesh to die on the cross so that now we can all have life and reverse what Satan caused. Verse 21 says, for since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead also comes through a man. That is Jesus Christ. For just as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive. It validates Jesus, it validates our faith, it validates our hope, but it also is preparation for eternity.
Let’s go on to read in verse 50, flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. He’s talking about our earthly body right here. He’s saying, the way our body is, we can’t go into eternity and live with God forever. I’m 62 years old. Every year I have more aches than pains.
Can any of y’ all you understand what I’m saying? Now if this body, the way it is, we’re going into eternity. And I know what happens to my body every year. Imagine eternity. What would my body be at?
A thousand years? 2000s? I mean, it would be miserable living. This body is not made to be eternal. It says, nor can corruption inherit incorruption.
We can’t be perfect in heaven unless we shed this body. That’s what happens in the resurrection. Jesus Christ left his body that was hungry at times he left his body that was hurt and in pain at times. He left his body that was tired at times. He left a body with all the emotions and things that we have.
But when he was resurrected from the dead, he took on this new body. It’s like right now, the Bible says we’re living in a tent. How many of you like to camp? How many of you like to camp in a tent? Oh, some of you do.
Okay. I mean, you’d much rather be in a nice mobile home, right? You know, or a Holiday Inn. That’s real camping. Tents aren’t made to last forever.
Brad tries to repair his tents. Okay? He spends hours doing that. He could have just bought a new one. I was helping him the other day and he was trying to repair relined the poles with this string that went through it to hold them together.
And I said, you need to tie two knots at the end. Brad didn’t listen to his pastor. He tied one knot and he let go. And you know what that string did? After he trimmed it and stretched it, it went back through all those poles.
Tents aren’t made to last. This body isn’t made to last. It’s going to get holes in it. That’s why the resurrection is so important in preparing us for eternity, because we’re not Going to live in this tent forever. We’re going to have a glorified body and we’re going to read about what that’s like.
Now, Paul said, listen, I’m telling you a mystery. This is difficult to understand, but he says we will not all fall asleep, but we will all be changed. It should be over every nursery with babies. We will not all fall asleep, but we will all be changed. Okay?
That’s our promise. If you leave your kids downstairs, they will be changed, if it’s necessary, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last. We have to go through this process of our body being changed so we can be prepared for eternity. And Jesus Christ resurrection is the truth behind that. Our body’s not meant for eternity.
It cannot fully appreciate the pleasures of eternal life. I can’t go down a roller coaster anymore that turns upside down. My body doesn’t appreciate that. And there are going to be all these wonders in heaven, including God’s glory, that if we don’t have a body that’s in shape and perfect, we won’t be able to enjoy it. I doubt that we could even stand in the presence of God’s glory and these bodies without being destroyed, because God didn’t even let Moses see his glory.
But our eternal body, we will be able to stand in God’s presence and enjoy his glory and everything else he promises us. This body is a temporary dwelling and it’s going to wear out. But we go on to read. It says, but someday the trumpet will sound. And I don’t know about you, but if you’re asleep and somebody blows a trumpet, what does it do?
It’s. It wakes you up. And that’s what it’s going to be. Someday. The trumpet will sound.
The dead will be raised incorruptible. No problems with our bodies anymore. We’ll be all changed. For this corruptible body now must be clothed with incorruptibility. And this mortal body must be clothed with immortality.
Our new body will be like Jesus body was after the resurrection. Now he could do some special things. He could pass through walls, but he still ate fish. They recognized him. They could touch him.
But the best thing is that he was able with that new body, to pass on to heaven to be with the Father throughout eternity. We will need our new bodies after the resurrection in order to do that. Paul says in verse 35, but someone will ask, how are the dead raised? What kind of body will they have when they come? Everybody wants to know all these questions.
He says, you fool, don’t you understand? But he’s also saying you can’t understand. But he gives us this image of a seed being planted in the ground. He says, what you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow, you are not sowing the body that will be but only a seed, perhaps of wheat or another grain.
Now, if I went down to the Ace Hardware and I had bought all the packages of seeds and I cut them up and I mixed them all together and I gave all of y’ all like 12 seeds, how many of you think you’d be able to tell me what that seed’s going to look like when it grows up? Maybe a few of you could. But just think about a seed if you’ve never seen it before. They’re tiny, they’re ugly, They’re. They can be brown or they can be black or white, whatever color they are, but they don’t look like very much.
And you have to put them in the ground. It’s a picture of being buried, that when we put them in the ground, it’s like they die, but after that they’re resurrected. And those little ugly seeds that we don’t recognize, all of a sudden it becomes a huge stand of corn, or it becomes a beautiful vine with flowers on it, or there’s some type of fruit that comes from it. That is how different our present bodies will be now from what they will be like in eternity. We’re just a seed, but we’re going to be something wonderful.
Verse 42. So it is with the resurrection of the dead, sown in corruption, meaning these bodies deteriorate and fall away. But we’re going to be raised in incorruption. There’s going to be no aches and pains, no sickness, no disease in eternity, sown in dishonor, raised in glory. These bodies may not look that great, but in heaven our bodies are going to be glorious and beautiful.
I’d like to imagine I’m going to have hair again. Does anybody else want to have hair again? Or maybe we’ll all be like Dave and me, right in heaven, that we’re the ideal image here of glory. Dave’s bald like me, in case you don’t know. Dave.
Instead of being weak, we’re going to be powerful because we’re not going to have a natural body anymore. We’re going to have a spiritual body. So praise the Lord for the resurrection. We know that everything is going to be new and wonderful. You in our body so that we can experience this new creation and relationship with God that He’s always intended from eternity past, eternity present, and into eternity future.
It’s our prayer today that if anyone has not understood this story before and you’ve not come into the place, that you’ve accepted that Jesus died on the cross for your sins, that he was buried and rose from the dead, and that you would acknowledge that today verbally by talking to someone or even if you have more questions about it. Anyone going around with one of these name tags on, they either know everything or they know somebody that does. Okay, just look for one of them. We’d love to answer your questions and take time to sit and talk with you today. Would you bow with me in prayer?
Heavenly Father, we praise you and thank you for not only the death and the burial of your son, Jesus Christ, but of the resurrection. That we have faith, that we have hope, that we have an eternity, and we can know for certain that he is your son, God in the flesh. In his name we pray. Amen.