Easter 14 Resurrection and Prophetic Hope Fulfilled

[HKHaugan]

Easter 14 Resurrection and Prophetic Hope Fulfilled

Jeremiah 29:11-14
11 For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. 12 Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. 13 You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. 14 I will be found by you," declares the LORD, "and will bring you back from captivity. I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you," declares the LORD, "and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile."

Let’s personalize this passage. When we approach Scripture we need to be aware of the scope of its themes. They are cosmic themes standing above history yet localized for our personal benefit. Consider the God of the universe whose breadth spans eternity actually desiring to make Himself known to individuals within it. The Holy Trinity, Creation, grace, love, the Fall, the devil, sin, evil, redemption, Heaven, hell, humanity, Israel, crucifixion, Resurrection and Body of Christ. The very fact that they are localized in time and space indicates the broader dimension of God out of which they come and His infinite personal concern and detail for each moment of every person’s existence. That is beyond comprehension yet this is precisely what Jesus made real and accessible for each human being.

God has localized them in four ways.
First, God entered time from a timeless existence and space through Jesus Christ.
Second, He chose a specific people to be His people through a personal relationship with His Son.
Third, He caused the writing of a set of documents to introduce His Son and the specifics of His plan of restoration.
Fourth, He sent His Holy Spirit to give each mind and heart access to God’s mind and heart and the power to accomplish His mission for and through them.

In these four living realities He has made central the fact that the past, the present and the future are covered in all four and made personally available to every generation.

He is not limited to our conscious history. All history is present to Him. He entered it with the purpose of redeeming every present moment through Jesus Christ. He is above it, beyond it and has revealed Himself within it. God is both before it and after it. God is there before and will be there after everything exists. Existence is totally dependent on Him.

It is our limitation and its cause that stands between God, eternity and us. That limitation is sin and its cause is the devil who exploits it. Sin is the blinder, the curtain and the invisible shield that stands between God and us, between His perception and ours. “Now we see through a glass darkly,” Paul rightly observes.

The consequence of Adam’s disobedience was the tearing of the interwoven fabric of Spirit and Creation dislodging its perfect design. It broke the tie between what is physical and what is spiritual, to what is visible and what is invisible. It disrupted the flow of the Spirit in the universe and brought the eruption of disease, conflict and disoriented thinking. Sin is the essence of Babylon and the captivity of the human race since Adam. This fallen world is Babylon, which emerges wherever people gather in communities without God and every soul is its captive until Jesus is received as the heart’s Savior and Lord. This is the broader view that Scripture draws for us.

Adam’s disobedience severed the unity between the spirit and the body. The harmony of Creation was interrupted and thrown into discord. Sin separated how we see, how we perceive and how we sense from the way God sees, perceives and senses. Instead of seeing, perceiving and sensing an eternal present relationship in an eternal here and now, we are locked into a self-centered aloneness encumbered by fear, death and personal insecurity in a body that is terminal with all that that means. We as individuals are separated fragments in an unbalanced space. Everything is before and after me. We are not only here trying to figure it all out but trying to get it right in mind, heart and body without God and that doesn’t work.

Understanding the problem is one thing. We must also understand God has a rescue plan. His grace and truth presented in Jesus prevail through the Holy Spirit who is the overall power of that plan. His intervention in Jesus, bridging the gap between man and God, is the plan personified. Jesus is the full revelation of God; His grace, His love and His plan of recovery. He is the light bringing God into our perception. He penetrates the dark glass, through time, through space, with His Spirit. He makes eternity a present reality for every heart. Jesus is reality now, eternity in the present. He is the One who re-stitches the torn fabric between spiritual and physical reality. He is the One who localizes God and eternity to recover us in spite of the limitations of exiled human existence. He recovers us through a personal relationship with Him.

The Resurrection is the event that lifts the local heart in time and place to a borderless existence in His Kingdom where the limitless God reigns. He takes the lonely specks of human existence called persons and raises their importance and dignity, restores their identity and brings them into a limitless sea of family and spiritual unity. He is Father, Son, Savior, Spirit, Lord, Redeemer, Sanctifier, Faith, Love, Hope, Grace and Truth. Justified by faith in Him we are being made right within and right without, for Him.

Jesus’ Resurrection tore the curtain, broke open the grave and shattered the veil of death the devil put between God and us. When the curtain of the Temple was torn from top to bottom at His Crucifixion, His light exposed the secular world, the kingdom of darkness, its prince and spirits. They were exposed and their power cancelled. The Crucifixion was the ‘Sonset’ that bled out the power of evil. The Resurrection was the ‘Sonrise’ that gave us the proof, the hope and assurance that the devil and evil have no more authority over us. Their domination through fear and uncertainty was drowned in the blood of Jesus who carried sin and its darkness to their final resting place, hell, and left them there. By His faith into and through death, we were lifted out of the quagmire of evil, the misty murky swamp of sin and returned to the eternal spring-fed garden of His embrace.

What God has done through the Resurrection is to localize Himself in Jesus that He may embrace each of us in the time we live and be restored to His timeless homeland, Heaven. Our task is to allow Him to do that through us and pass it on to others. That is His call to us. He has lifted us, anointed us and commissioned us to be part of His plan for universal recovery while we are here and to pass it on to the next generation. Each of us is God’s personal investment in the re-making of history. Are our footprints on its pages marking the way for others to follow?

The prophecy of vs.11 speaks to every exiled captive generation and is being fulfilled, “For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”