Understanding the Resurrection

[HKHaugan]

Understanding the Resurrection

Three factors mark this most dramatic event in man's history, Its Meaning, Its History and Its Function. Each of us is the place God has directed His presence to be experienced. Our mind, heart and spirit are created in His image to know His will, have a mutual relationship with Him and relationally share Him with others. But the devil and sin intervened to throw us off His spiritual track. To recover us and restore us He sent His Son Jesus. It is His life, death and Resurrection the Father asks us to receive as the way, the truth and the life. The Resurrection is the key to our recovery and restoration. Let's start:

The Meaning

We are beginning an eleven week study of the Resurrection. The twelfth week is the celebration of the Resurrection, Easter. To celebrate it in the fullness of its reality we will look at its record in the Gospels and then its effect and application in the Gospels and Epistles. The reason for this move is that the culture in which we live is abandoning the truth and reality of the risen Jesus and Babelizing itself with increasing rapidity. The very technology that has been developed because we have the freedom to do that, is also subject to its misuse. That misuse has opened us up to a new isolation and aloneness that distances us from God and one another (e.g., Facebook/Twitter obsession, cell phone texting, computer/TV games and viewing). Mankind is glorifying itself at the expense of its spiritual base. Divisiveness on every level of our social experience, our horizontal life, is the result of the erosion of our spiritual grounding. Our national citizenship which was built on a spiritual foundation is losing its leadership as a world spiritual pioneer. Our local communities are turning away in the same manner. The leadership in both is motivated by fear and are betraying the very ones they are called to serve. The spiritual air is filled with such things as political correctness, multicultural diversity, anti-family policies, anti-human abortion, anti-Israel sentiment, ethnic division, pornography and a growing moral malaise. “There are none righteous, no not one.” We all need a healthy dose of Resurrection awareness and teaching.

If it weren't for the Resurrection we would not have the vertical awareness of a personal God and His horizontal relational guidance to restore humanity that our civilization has heretofore pioneered. The very fact that self-conscious life is centered in the individual; its dignity, freedom and importance, should soften the objections of even the most ardent intellectually bound non-believer to their own personal reality. It takes a person to be a person. It takes a perfect person to show the way. It takes a specific perfect Person to demonstrate individual reality at its most meaningful point and that is death. Death causes us to look back at what went before it. The perfect Person dies and rises from death. His rising points us to the life He lived that overcame death. Death is about imperfection which is what sin is, the ultimate imperfection. The perfect antidote is faith in the perfect Person who perfects the imperfect. There is no other way and the Resurrection is the key to that understanding.

It is the Resurrection of Jesus, the perfect Person, who takes the final imperfection of death through bearing sin, the cause of death, on the Cross and destroys sin's power through belief, trust and faith in His Father. It is now the Father's will for us to center in Jesus that we too experience Jesus' death and Resurrection by taking up the cross of faith every next moment. The moment we accept the perfect Person, Jesus, as our personal guide we are spiritually reborn by His Holy Spirit who raises our heart, mind and spirit into His spiritual dimension. Our vertical view is restored, our horizontal view is changed. We seek those things that are vertical, above, spiritual and our horizontal sight is free to put everything in a spiritual context, to see as God sees and let Him direct our every next moment. Life awaits that moment. We await that moment. Excitement awaits that moment. Anticipation absorbs that moment. Jesus reveals Himself in that moment. That moment is a Resurrection moment. We are a Resurrection people!

The History

All four Gospels record the Resurrection, but each one authenticates the writer's unique experience of Jesus. There is a significant meaning in this individual perspective. They are spiritually ground, personally experienced and relationally intended. Just as each of the Gospel writers gives us a different account, it is the same Jesus, His Resurrection, their common but uniquely created humanity, receiving the experience of them. For each of us it means there is no one 'cookie cutter' experience. Our individual uniqueness is personal to God and therefore each of us apprehends God as He has intended us to do personally. No one has to be like Paul, knocked off a horse on our way to Damascus with Jesus asking us why we are kicking at the goads. No. Each of us comes to Jesus the way only we can be drawn in a personal way God has designed to fit us each according to our needs.

The impression of the first two Gospels is that while they were different their goal was the same, to authenticate the life of Jesus and seal it with their brief accounts of the Resurrection. The resurrected life of Jesus was summarized in all that went before it.

Matthew's approach is seen in the way he starts his Gospel with a genealogy to show Jesus' claim to Messiahship fulfilling Davidic kingship, the Messiah King. His Gospel closes with a kingly command.

Mark's method is centered in the prophetic. Therefore Jesus is the Messiah servant fulfilling prophecy, the Messiah Prophet. His Gospel closes with a prophetic prediction and Jesus' ascension as the seal.

Luke and John approached their accounts differently.

Luke's concern was historicating the life of Jesus. Therefore his account was laced with incidents of Jesus activity after the Resurrection before His ascension. The Historic Messiah. His Gospel closes with the assurance of the promised Holy Spirit, the ascension being its seal.

John's concern was the work of the Spirit in raising Jesus so he deals with the miraculous aspects consistent with those before the death of Jesus. The Spiritual Messiah. He closes his Gospel with Jesus calling the disciples to the spiritual feeding of those who will believe in Him. Spiritual feeding for spiritual sheep being the seal.

The Reason

First, the Resurrection is the proof Jesus is the sole foundation to understand spiritual reality.
Second, the Resurrection is the proof that seals Scripture being God's Word.
Third, the Resurrection is the assurance of our salvation, the guarantee of eternity with God.
Fourth, the Resurrection validates the claims of Christ.
Fifth, the Resurrection shows the Cross is the means to experience God.
Sixth, the Resurrection lets us look back so that we can look forward in faith.
Seventh, the Resurrection makes faith in Jesus the way of life.
Eight, the Resurrection allows Jesus to live in our hearts by the Holy Spirit through faith.
Ninth, the Resurrection is the revealing work of the Holy Spirit.
Tenth, the Resurrection is the proof of spiritual rebirth.
Eleventh, the Resurrection is source for confidence in giving our testimony.
Twelfth, the Resurrection is how we become part of His Body of which He is the head.
Thirteenth, the Resurrection defines our spiritual relationship to God and others.
Fourteenth, the Resurrection defines human beings as images of God.
Fifteenth, the Resurrection defines the nature and purpose of morality.
Sixteenth, the Resurrection defines our spiritual job description in the Body.
Seventeenth, the Resurrection was, is and will be for all people everywhere at all times until He returns.
Eighteenth, the Resurrection reveals, defines and empowers God's love in Jesus.
Nineteenth, the Resurrection is always getting us to look forward acting in faith.
Twentieth, the Resurrection is spiritual, personal and interpersonal.
Twenty first, the Resurrection gives us the purpose and function of all existence.
Twenty second, the Resurrection gives personal meaning and application to love, truth and grace.

I'm sure you can add to this list. My hope is you will as we begin this study. Its objective is to encourage our daily witness and testimony to bring hesitant believers back to exercise their faith and non-believers into the arena of faith. It's not easy in a culture anesthetized by its own inventions and wilting under the pressures of conformity. Its spiritual absolutes are lost in the fool's gold of moral compromise. It takes the qualities of God, separates them from Him and redefines them for momentary self-justification and pleasure.

“The Lord is risen! He is risen indeed!”