I. Introduction
A. Almost 2000 years ago some women witnessed something early one morning that radically changed the course of human history. It changed the course of eternity.
B. In fact, it is impossible to overstate the importance of this event.
C. They were not the only ones to witness it, of course. Hundreds of others did as well over the next 40 days. But they were the first.
D. After Christ died on the cross, He rose again on the third day. And for forty days He revealed Himself time and time again to His followers (1Cor.15:3-7). Then after those 40 days He was taken up into heaven in a cloud. And ten days after His ascension into heaven, He poured out His Spirit upon His people on the day of Pentecost, such that His apostles began to proclaim with great power the message of Christ and His resurrection.
E. I’d like to read from Acts 4:31–33 about what happened after one of the prayer meetings the people of Jesus had soon after Pentecost: “And when they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness. Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common. And with great power the apostles were giving their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.”
II. Resurrection
A. Make no mistake, people have come back from death before.
1. Just the other day in the news there was a story about a person who was declared dead and in the morgue in a zipped bag but came back to life.
2. A number of books have been written by people declared dead who’s bodies came back to life.
3. It even happened miraculously in the Bible a number of times.
4. But these were so different from the resurrection of Jesus that theologians call them resuscitations to distinguish them.
5. For instance, all these people came back to life only to die again. They all came back to the same body they had before.
B. Jesus’ coming back from death was so very different.
1. First of all , it was a divine vindication of who He said He was.
2. It was permanent, He was never to die again.
3. He came back in a new body, a new kind of body: an eternal body, the kind of body all believers will enjoy at the great resurrection on the last day.
4. His rising from the dead began a new era, a new creation.
5. He did not overcome only His own death, He overcame death itself, in the sense that His resurrection opened a door of deliverance from death. It paved the way for His people to escape death.
C. It was an event of such enormity and such world-changing and life-changing reality that it has been proclaimed all over the world ever since.
III. The other day my wife asked me a question: How come Jesus only stayed around for 40 days after the resurrection? This is what I told her:
A. He didn’t stay longer because the new reality, the new normal, the new age which He came to inaugurate was the age of the Spirit, not the age of Jesus present in His risen flesh.
1. This is the age of walking by faith in what Jesus said, not by sight of Jesus Himself. This is the age not of seeing the resurrected Jesus but of believing in the resurrection on the basis of a plethora of eyewitness testimony. This is the age of the Spirit living in us, representing Christ’s presence to each one of us in a way impossible while Christ was here in the flesh.
2. Jesus himself said that “it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.” (John 16:7)
3. There is another age coming when we will be with the risen Christ forever, but that’s not now. That’s later.
B. Jesus stayed as long as He did in order to solidly and firmly verify the fact that He had risen. He appeared many times to many different people over 40 days. But that was enough. If they weren’t going to believe based on that, they weren’t going to believe if he stayed another year or two.
1. This week I read a CNN article entitled, Did Jesus Really Rise From the Dead? You could tell in the article that the author thinks that probably Jesus didn’t actually rise from the dead in the way it is believed, but the author’s main point was that it really doesn’t matter; it’s the principle of resurrection which matters. The story of Jesus’ resurrection is a lesson about new life, about a new start, about not giving up hope.
2. Well, that’s not what the Bible says. Not only does it say that He did indeed rise from the dead, but it insists that the fact that He did so makes all the difference in the world.
3. Listen to Paul’s words in 1Corinthians 15:14–19: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ... If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins — and those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.”
4. Does that sound like it doesn’t really matter whether or not the resurrection actually happened?
5. My friends, people may not believe the eyewitness testimony of these women and men who turned the world upside down with their testimony that Jesus had risen from the dead.
6. But please don’t tell me it doesn’t matter. According to the Bible, if Jesus is risen, it makes all the difference in the world. It’s a matter of eternal life and eternal death. And if Jesus is not risen, then we are wasting our lives believing that He is and telling others that He is, and putting our hope in the fact that He is.