Significance of the resurrected Christ
My personal search as a teenager for answers to the questions, “Is Jesus real and is the Bible true?” boiled down to a search to discover whether the resurrection of Jesus happened. Once I became convinced that Jesus really did rise from the dead, everything changed. My life as a teenager and into my adult years to the present followed a different path, one inspired by the lordship of Jesus of Nazareth.
Christians have greeted one another since the earliest times with the refrain: “He is risen!” followed by “He is risen indeed!” These are statements in the present tense, not in the past (He has risen; he rose indeed) because believers have understood from the beginning that Christ’s resurrection from the dead began a new present tense for those who believe. One of my pastors said it this way: “Despair went out with the resurrection.”
With Christ’s resurrection, everything changed. A new natural order has begun to be ushered in. Jesus was called by the early Christians “the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20, 23). Further, early believers saw themselves as first fruits for those who would follow in their and Jesus’s footsteps (2 Thessalonians 2:13; James 1:18). Just as Jesus was offered up as a sacrifice to God in hope of something better to come, believers also are offered as a sacrifice to God in hope of a great bounty of souls made right with God and inheriting eternal, abundant life in Christ.
Believers understood, although they didn’t know exactly what kind of a body to expect when they were raised from the dead in the last day, it would be like Jesus’s (1 John 3:2). Like many things that are clearer in hindsight, the resurrection of Jesus was not at all what the disciples expected. In fact, reading their stories now in the twenty-first century, it’s not really what we expect, either. As the urbane sage C. S. Lewis put it:
The picture is not what we expected... It is not the picture of an escape from any and every kind of Nature into some unconditioned and utterly transcendent life. It is the picture of a new human nature, and a new Nature in general, being brought into existence. We must, indeed, believe the risen body to be extremely different from the mortal body: but the existence, in that new state, of anything that could in any sense be described as “body” at all, involves some sort of spatial relations and in the long run a whole new universe. That is the picture - not of unmaking but of remaking. The old field of space, time, matter, and the senses is to be weeded, dug, and sewn for a new crop. (Miracles, Lewis, 1947, pp. 244-245)
Lewis then went on to clarify how different this new resurrection body was by comparing it to a resurrection in the New Testament. “The raising of Lazarus differs from the resurrection of Christ himself because Lazarus, so far as we know, was not raised to a new and more glorious mode of existence, but merely restored to the sort of life he had had before” (1947, pp. 245-246).
Finally, Lewis describes and compares our present nature with that of the glorious new creation.
There is in our present pilgrim condition plenty of room (more room than most of us like) for abstinence and renunciation and mortifying our natural desires. But behind all asceticism the thought should be, “Who will trust us with the true wealth if we cannot be trusted even with the wealth that perishes?” Who will trust me with a spiritual body if I cannot control even an earthly body? These small and perishable bodies we now have were given to us as ponies are given to school boys. We must learn to manage: not that we may someday be free of horses all together but that some day we may ride bareback, confident and rejoicing, those greater mounts, those winged, shining and world-shaking horses which perhaps even now expect us with impatience, pawing and snorting in the King's stables. Not that the gallop would be of any value unless it were a gallop with the King; but how else – since he has retained his own charger – should we accompany him? (1947, p. 266)
This new resurrection, introduced by Jesus and seen by the early Christians, is a foreshadowing, a kind of sneak preview, of the New Creation promised by God since ancient times (Isaiah 65:17, 66:22; 2 Corinthians 5:1-10; 2 Peter 3:12-13; Revelation 21:1).
In order to explain the four minimal historical facts (previous post), through understanding the peculiar Gentile mission of the first-century church, and through looking at the historical appearance of this new resurrection, we see that the most plausible explanation, as amazing as it seems, is that Jesus rose from the dead. Jesus’s resurrection has great explanatory power for these historical evidences. At the same time, because of the nature of his resurrection, we can have hope both for this world and the world to come. God showed his love for us in the crucifixion of Jesus and showed that Jesus really was God through his resurrection from the dead. Everything else is detail.
This post is an excerpt from my book, Is Jesus Real?
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