John
Dear
Friends in Christ,
Go
back to your childhood, playground days.
A friend or classmate makes a claim about having something or being able
to do something that clearly seems improbable, if not impossible. Everyone listens with attention, but then you
or somebody else responds to such a highly unbelievable assertion with two compelling
little words. Prove it.
People
can make claims about anything they want.
Talk is cheap, we often say.
“Just trust me on this” only goes so far. The question we always want to know is
whether people can back up what they say with evidence. We like proof.
2000
years ago a man named Jesus Christ walked on this planet. He made some pretty big claims about
Himself. He talked about providing eternal life in
heaven to those who trust Him. He talked
about being with us always, even in our darkest moments. He talked about many things that literally
seem too good to be true.
How
do we know that they are? How do we know
that this wasn’t just so much self-aggrandizing talk? We know because we have evidence.
THE EMPTY TOMB
PROVIDES ALL THE PROOF WE NEED
1.
That Jesus is who He says He
is
2.
That our salvation is secure
3.
That we, too, will rise from
the dead
Jesus’ resurrection first of all proves He is who He said He is. And He claimed to be nothing less than the almighty, eternal Son of God. He made this claim many times.
To
a woman at a well in the country of
When
Jesus asked Peter as the spokesman for the disciples who they considered Him to
be, Peter said: “You are the Christ, the Son of
the Living God.” Jesus accepted
his statement. Later, when the disciples
asked Jesus to “show us the Father” (i.e., God), Jesus answered, “Anyone
who has seen me has seen the Father.”
And
when, in His trial before the religious leaders, the question was put to Him, “Are
you the Christ?”, His reply was “Yes, it is as you say.”
You get the picture. Jesus never hid the fact of who He was. But Jesus was more than just big talk. He authenticated this claim with His miracles. He did miracles of healing. He did miracles over nature. He did miracles of resurrection. In fact, the words of our text were spoken shortly before Jesus raised His friend Lazarus from the dead.
All these different miracles testified to His claims about #1) His person – that He is God the Son and #2) The truth of His message – that forgiveness of sins and eternal salvation was through Him alone.
But of all the things He ever said and all the things He
ever did, the biggest claim He ever made was that He would die, and then three
days later rise from the dead. “Destroy
this temple” said Jesus, “And I will raise it again in three days.”
To
make a long story short, on Good Friday He died, and today He arose. The ladies who went to His grave on that
first Easter morning with the expectation of performing last funeral rites were
not met by a corpse in the initials stages of decay, but by an empty tomb and
angels who said, “Why are you looking for the living among the dead? He is not here, He is risen, JUST AS HE
SAID.”
Do you see the significance of this? “Just as He said” He died. “Just as He said” He rose. Everything happened “Just as He said.” Jesus did something we cannot do; rising from the dead is something only God can do. And that’s who He claimed to be. Consequently the resurrection proves He is who He says He is: The Son of God, our Redeemer and Savior. Furthermore, it proves that He is reliable in every other promise and claim that He makes…
And
that brings us enormous comfort. Because
“just
as He said” He would rise, He also says many other wonderful and
marvelous things to us…
For
example, Jesus gives us the promise of His abiding presence in our lives when
He says, “Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you.” Jesus gives us the promise that we are
never alone when He says, “Surely I will be with you always, even to the
very end of the age.” Jesus
gives us the promise that He hears and answers our prayers.... Jesus gives us the promise that nothing shall
separate us from the love of Christ...
Jesus tells us that no matter how we may perceive things, He has a plan
for us and makes all things work for the good of those who love Him...
All
these promises Jesus makes to us in His Word.
Why can we believe Him? What
proof do we have that He can carry them out?
Go to the tomb. It’s empty – “just
as He said.” And just as He
proved Himself reliable in this greatest of claims and promises, so He is
reliable in every other promise He makes to us.
What
else does Jesus resurrection mean to us?
It means my eternal salvation is complete and secure. Let us briefly return in time to Good Friday,
for Easter Sunday means nothing unless it is paired with Good Friday…
On
Good Friday we saw Jesus crucified. For
approximately six hours He endured one of the most painful deaths devised by
man. For three of those hours (when
darkness covered the earth), He suffered the very pangs of hell and experienced
something we never will – utter abandonment by God. Finally, after He voluntarily gave up His
life with the cry, “It is finished,” He was laid in the unused tomb of Joseph of
Arimathea.
This
is what happened. More importantly is why it happened. And why it happened to Christ is so that it wouldn’t happen to us…
You
see, God demands perfect obedience of His creatures. “The soul that sins is the
soul shall die… The wages of sin is death” says God in the Scriptures. We fall under that category. We are sinners deserving of eternal
death.
In
an age that worships at the twin altars of self-esteem and positive self-image,
an age that handles the concept of sin by redefining it until every
transgression can be clothed in the garb of respectability, this is not a
popular statement. Nonetheless, this is
the truth of God: We are sinners
deserving of eternal death.
But God is love. The same God who says the soul that sins will die also says that He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. So He came up with a plan to harmonize both His love for the sinner and His just hatred for sin. That plan was His Son.
Jesus,
the Son of God, became a man to do as man’s substitute that which we could not
do. He lived the perfect life in our
place. And then He suffered the
punishment for sin in our place. In His
life and in His death, He came to be our surrogate.
Every
year at this time we can count on news magazines to run some sort of cover
story about Jesus Christ. This year was
no different. They promise – but never
deliver – some new scholarly insight as to His life and work. Jesus is portrayed purely in political terms
as one who bucked the religious system to the point where he became so
bothersome that they eliminated him.
But
that’s not why Jesus was killed. And the
responsibility for putting him on the cross extends far beyond the betraying
Judas, or the intensely envious Jewish leaders, or the unprincipled Pontius
Pilate. We put him there. The Roman guard may have lifted the hammer to
pound the spikes through our Lord’s hands and feet, but it was the weight of our sins that brought the hammer down. The Apostle Paul summarizes it succinctly
when he says, “He was delivered over to death for our sins…”
But that was then.
Today is Easter. And the body
that suffered for our sins is no longer in the tomb. What does it mean? It means His mission of redemption was
satisfactorily accomplished. The empty
tomb is God’s stamp of approval on Christ’s redemptive work. It means the fulfillment of Jesus
statement, “I am the resurrection and
the life…” and it means the assurance that “Whoever believes in me will live, even though he dies, and whoever
lives and believes in Me will never die.”
In other words, the resurrection means the death of death. Which means that death – both our own and our loved ones – is a comma, not a period. It is not a door that shuts out earthly existence, but a gate that leads to eternal life for all who trust in Him as Savior.
Jesus resurrection has a third and final meaning for us, which we’ll touch upon just briefly. It means we, too, will rise from the dead.
In our creeds we confess that we believe in “the resurrection of the body.” How can we say that? What’s the basis? Once again, the answer is found in the empty tomb. The Apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15, “Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” Firstfruits is really an Old Testament agricultural term which referred to offering God the first portion of a harvest. It was also an indication that more was to follow…
The point: Christ was the first to rise; and we, too, will rise from the dead to live both body and soul in heaven… There to live in a glorified resurrection body free from any and all imperfections eternally in a joy and happiness and a Christ-centered fellowship which is beyond the very beginning of imagination.
Indeed, Jesus makes some big claims. Wonderful, marvelous, comforting claims about who He is, what He has done for us and where we will spend eternity. Claims that sound too good to be true.
But they are true. And He can prove it. Because THE TOMB IS EMPTY, AND THE EMPTY TOMB PROVIDES ALL THE PROOF WE NEED.
Christians, rejoice in this day and what it means. He is risen. He is risen indeed. Alleluia. Amen.