What Did the Resurrection Mean? Part 1Tonkawa,Disciples all over the world are fresh off of celebrating the bodily resurrection of Jesus. With that in mind, I’d like to take the next five weeks to look at what exactly that event meant and how we should understand it today.The central apostolic claim, that God raised Jesus from the dead, is not understood as some random miracle. When Jesus shows up in the house, or on the beach, and everywhere else up for those forty days, the Jewish disciples don’t look at Jesus and think, “Well that’s cool. What’s He gonna do next, pull a rabbit out of his hat?”No, it means something. For the apostles, it has a context.And what is the context?First, Jesus’ resurrection confirms God’s promise that this world will be changed to a world of life and not of death.Peter quotes David And says:“You have made known to me the paths of life (Acts 2:28)”“Life” in the scriptures is not generic happiness or butterflies or ice cream. Like everything else, “life” has a context. For instance, Psalm 116:8-9:“For you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears,my feet from stumbling; I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living.”Here the Psalmist essentially states that though he’s walked through death and sorrow and the stumbling and bumbling of this age, he KNOWS we will walk before the Lord ALIVE in the AGE TO COME, in a land of LIFE.And this is everyone’s goal, right? To attain life in the age to come conta the death of this present age?In Matthew 19, the man approaches Jesus and asks, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life? What must I do to attain to the coming age where all things are new and there is no sadness, sickness, and suffering?”After the man leaves, Jesus answers the question by telling his disciples that, “everyone who has left [EVERYTHING] for my name’s sake” will inherit what? “Eternal life.”The sin of Adam and our participation in it brought death.But the resurrection of Jesus confirms God’s promise that Death and Sin and the corruption they’ve wrought on the world do not get the final say.The Day of the Lord will actually come and this present home of death will from then on be a home “where righteousness dwells (2 Pt. 3:13).”In the end, Death doesn’t win out.
