The Meaning of the Easter Resurrection

Happy Resurrection Day! Today is the day we celebrate Jesus’ bodily resurrection – his return from the grave. But not just back from the dead. After all that had happened before. We saw both Elijah and Elisha raise the dead in the OT. We even see an instance where a dead man is thrown into the grave of Elisha and when the corpse touched the bones, he was raised back to life (2 Kings 13:21). Jesus himself brought several people back to life – the young girl, the widow’s son and of course, Lazarus. But Jesus’ resurrection was different. This was not just a return from the dead. Each of these other people who were brought back to life, all died again. They were all brought back to the same life they were living before they died. They were all brought back in the same bodies that they had before they died. Jesus’ resurrection was something completely different, completely new.

Let’s first look at the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Peter’s sermon – Acts 2:22-35

We read in this account that Jesus was accredited by God through the miracles he performed. Accredited means to be qualified or endorsed. God endorsed Jesus, he qualified him by giving him the power to perform miracles. The feeding of the 5000 men, the healing of the lame, blind and sick, the walking on water and as mentioned already, the bringing back to life of the dead. These are evidence that Jesus was not just talking the talk but had come from God, as he said.

However, the people, and specifically, the leaders, of Israel were not happy to have their Messiah as God desired. They chose their own desires over God’s; their own wills over God’s. And so, by God’s own hand, Jesus was handed over to these selfish and ambitious men to be crucified. But this was not the end of the story. If it were, Peter would still be in hiding from those same leaders who had crucified Jesus and were now looking for ways to destroy his disciples. Peter had hid from these men at first, before he realized what God’s plan was.

However, after Jesus was wrongfully crucified, he was raised from the dead. Peter explains that it was impossible for Jesus to stay dead anyway. He gives the proof from the Psalms of David, where David says that God would not let His Holy One see decay. He reminds everyone that even the great King David was still buried in the ground. But not Jesus. He tells us that Jesus is exalted at the right hand of God.

And Peter reminds us that God has made Jesus, Lord and Christ, which means Anointed One or Messiah. Peter explains that it was God’s plan from the beginning to have Jesus sacrificed for the forgiveness of our sins and to bring him back to life through the Resurrection. What an amazing thought! That God would allow His own son to be brutally sacrificed so that we could come into the presence of God – doing so knowing that though for a period of time, the brutality would be overwhelming, that 3 days later, he would be back in his body.

So Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 15:55 Death where is your victory? Death where is your sting? If Jesus has overcome death, then death no longer has a hold on us. Every person ever born can now know that they do not have to deal with eternal death but instead, through Jesus, can have eternal life! Before Jesus, death was the end. When you died, there was no future, no hope. But after Jesus’ resurrection, there is hope. We know where we will be after our time on this present Earth is complete. We know that we will have eternal life, that we will be present with the Lord, our God. There is no longer a sting to death but, the opposite. Paul tells us that he would rather be with the Lord in heaven than stay alive on this Earth. Once you receive Jesus as your Lord and Savior, you also will long to be with the One who loves you and has saved you, the one who has given you eternal life. And so, when we pass from this life, there is no need for remorse or sorrow, but instead there is rejoicing. Death has not won, it has no victory over us, there is no pain or sting in dying anymore. Jesus has overcome death with his resurrection.

But what is this resurrection that we are talking about? Paul describes it in 1 Corinthians 15:52-53. At some point, the end will come. This time of the Church on the Earth will cease and the world will continue without the Blessing, that is the Church. Already today, we see that there are many, I would even say most, that would prefer to see the Church gone from the world. The divide is already occurring. And when the time is right, God will take His Church from this world. At that time, Paul tells us that there will be a trumpet sound and in the twinkling of an eye, the Church, the believers in Jesus, both dead and alive, will be changed. Our perishable bodies will become imperishable. Our mortal bodies will become immortal. Our imperfect bodies will become perfected! No more suffering! No more sorrow! Death is overcome. Instead, God’s people, the sons and daughters of God, will have eternal life in their new bodies.

What are these new bodies? The same as the resurrected body of Jesus. That is why in 1 Corinthians 15:20, Jesus is called the firstfruit of those who have fallen asleep. Jesus was the first of the dead to return to life in his resurrected body. Verses 20-26 tell us that Jesus was the first to be raised from the dead with his resurrected body and that all in Christ will have the same. That one day, Jesus will hand over the kingdom to the Father but only after he has reigned for a thousand years (we learn from Revelation) and has put all things under his feet, including death. This means that there is coming a day that all of us who believe in Jesus will have resurrected bodies like Jesus’. The body he had when Mary Magdalene saw him in the garden, the one that was able to appear in the Upper Room where the disciples were locked in and hiding, the one that was taken into heaven. This is the same type of body we will have. Jesus’ body was the same as his old one – it had the nail holes in it, the wounds in his side, his disciples were able to touch him and recognize him and he ate real food – but it was made perfect, imperishable, immortal. Jesus was the firstfruit and we await our turn – when it will be our turn to have our resurrected bodies.

But when will this happen? No one knows. Even Jesus said that only the Father knew the time. 1 Peter 3:8-9 tells us that God is not slow, but that a thousand years is like a day to Him. So why the long wait? Because God is a loving God who does not want to see anyone perish. He wants everyone to come to Him, to Honor Him, to Love Him. He wants everyone to be saved. But He also knows that we are a hardhearted people and that we would rather trust in ourselves than in Jesus and He knows that we need more time to understand that we need to trust in Jesus if we are to have eternal life. And so He continues to wait, so that more hearts can be softened by this good news of eternal life. However, there is coming a day when He will stop waiting and the doors will be closed and those who have not accepted Jesus will be left to their own desires – a life without God. Some people say that they kind of believe in Jesus, that there are parts of the Bible that they believe, that they are maybe 80-percent believers. You can not be 99-percent pregnant. You either are or you are not. You cannot drink water with one drop of arsenic. Even a little drop will be deadly. In the same way, you cannot mostly believe in Jesus. You either trust Him completely for your eternal life or you trust in yourself. God waits for those who are desiring to trust in Jesus but He will not wait forever.

But you say, “Well I’ve been hearing about this Second Coming for a long time. It hasn’t happened in 2,000 years.” 2 Peter 3:3-5 warns us that there will be those who scoff and say these things and will consciously forget that God is the God of Judgment and has already judged the Earth in the past. If He did it then, what makes you think He wouldn’t do it again? Are you that sure? How can you be that sure of something you have no control over? How can you be that sure of something that you know nothing about?

God’s Word tells us that the time is coming. For those of us who believe, we have the power of the cross and the truth of the Resurrection. For us, we look forward to Jesus coming again to take us to be with him, giving us our new resurrected bodies and living eternally with the infinite God who loves us. In the end, God wins this game – it’s not a war or a battle for that would imply that there is doubt of the outcome or that there is even serious opposition. God is God. He is in control. He has already told us what the end looks like. He wins! We can join in celebration knowing that we are part of that victory and the resurrection of Jesus is the proof of that victory.

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Last modified: April 12, 2009