Jesus had died and was buried in a borrowed tomb. We can say “borrowed” because three days later, after the Passover had come and gone, the women who did not have the time to fully bury the body came to deliver and apply the burial spices, about sixty pounds worth, only to find the tomb open and empty. Jesus was gone. The tomb was sealed lest anyone steal the body and proclaim a Resurrection, and the Roman guard would be there with no chance of sleeping on duty under penalty of death. The seal wasn’t merely cracked; the entire stone slab, which weighed several thousand pounds, wasn’t just rolled away but more tossed out of the way. The description isn’t merely to just get the door open, but to knock the door off its hinges. And Jesus was nowhere to be found, and apparently neither were the guards.
The women were baffled until a man approached Mary Magdalene and asked why she was crying. The man comforted her and then called her by her name. Suddenly, she recognized Jesus and sought to cling to Him, but Jesus refused. His glorified body was not fit for that, as He was now preparing for His ascension. So the women ran back to the disciples. Peter and John didn’t even hesitate; they ran to the tomb. Though John beat Peter in the race, John stopped, and Peter ran into the tomb directly. While an angel announced Jesus’ resurrection to the woman sitting on the stone door, here two other angels sat inside the tomb at Jesus’ head and feet, and all that was left were the grave clothes.
There are multiple times in the Bible when someone had died and was brought back to life, but most had just recently died, like the same day, and only a couple of cases had several days pass. But even then, their life was merely restored to them temporarily. Each person who died and was brought back to life would die again when it was their time. But Jesus did not have His life restored to His body; He was resurrected. The body He was born in perished, marking the death of the sin-cursed, but it was changed, transformed, and made new in its glorified form. However, Jesus still bore the five scars from His crucifixion: the holes in both hands and feet and the spear-pierced side. The scars were there, yet fully healed.
Jesus was the first resurrected person, and no one else is going to be resurrected until the time for all judgment to come. One thing that is often missed is that literally everyone is going to be resurrected. Good, bad, young, and old, every person of every point in history is going to die physically (or taken to heaven in some rapture-type thing of which I am not going to delve into), and that body will be resurrected. This is how every person is going to give an account for their lives. We all are going to receive immortal and perfect bodies, bodies that will not die. Those who are in Christ will be welcomed to paradise, but those who are not will suffer the wrath of God for eternity in a body that cannot die. That needs to scare us.
The second “death” is not annihilation or an eternal slumber where even time will forget us. No, this lake of fire is where God’s eternal, righteous, and just wrath is going to be poured out without exhaustion. Unlike man, whose wrath can be exhausted, God’s wrath is never exhausted. While His love and grace and mercy are infinite, so is His wrath, and we are going to glorify God one way or the other: in paradise or in eternal judgment. Those who lived this life in sin and crime and did not meet judgment here on earth will face it with God. And those who did experience judgment here on earth faced their crimes against humanity, not their crimes against deity. The only escape from the judgment for crime against deity is Jesus Christ.
Jesus’ death took the just punishment against sin as though He were the only one to have sinned. But in His resurrection came the defeat of sin, Hell, and the grave, so that all who are “in Christ,” those who died to themselves and submitted themselves to a new Master, will escape it. Just as Noah and his family escaped the Flood by one means of salvation, so we can escape the judgment of God through the one means of salvation: the cross.
Just as Adam and Eve were clothed, Paul uses this notion of being “in Christ” so that when Jesus died, we died, and when He rose, we will rise with Him. However, it’s more than just that. God does more than just see Jesus in our place. When Jesus died, He came back the same God as when He came. He did not change other than having His human nature. When we die in Christ and when we are resurrected in Christ, we are changed. Jesus never had a sin nature to change from; we do. When we die, the law that demands our judgment is still fulfilled. But when we are resurrected, we are raised under a new law that gives us a new master. We experience the resurrection in part in this life because we have a new heart, new mind, new motives, and new drives, but we don’t have a new body yet. That still has to die as well, and then we will receive our new bodies that will not experience the curse of sin. They will be fully functional as they would have been had we never sinned.
How it is going to look can only, at best, be described with “glorified imagination” and I don’t have the time or space, let alone the vocabulary, to describe it. But Jesus’ resurrection is what gives us the hope that we have. It is the resurrection that will enable us to endure whatever this world gives us to offer if only we would start thinking eternally again. But in that eternal thinking is the doom people have if we do not tell them how to escape it. We must see both, and I fear too many of us have fallen for the intellectual game that keeps the reality of things “out there.” Jesus did die for us. He did rise from the grave. He did defeat sin, death, and Hell. But do we live like we believe that?
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