Holy Week (Part 3 - "He rose again the third day")

On Friday, Jesus’ disciples had lost their master, teacher, and friend.  That’s horrendous enough right there.  I’ve lost a loved one to death; it is the most excruciating pain.  But they were also mourning what might have been.  This Jesus, who had wowed the masses with His incredible words and miraculous power, had His life cut short – at least from their vantage point.  With His death, their dream of Jesus overthrowing the Roman oppressors seemed impossible.  But their sorrow turned to joy that Sunday morning!  Acts 1:3 sums it up: Jesus “presented Himself alive after His suffering by many infallible proofs.”  Jesus had walked out of His grave!    

I’ve often referred to Easter Sunday as the Super Bowl for Christians.  I once heard it from a worship leader, resonated with it, and have used it many times since.  It is the Super Bowl.  Without Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, Christianity is just a bad joke.  Why?  Have you ever stopped to contemplate the words Jesus said, that we easily take for granted?  I mean, Jesus once said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). You and I don’t make statements like that.  If we did, someone would want say, to quote John Madden: “his elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top.”  Or how about this one…

“I lay down My life that I may take it again.  No one takes it from Me, but I lay down My life of Myself.  I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again” (John 10:17-18).  It’s a bold, outrageous statement.  Jesus was actually claiming power over both life and death.  The onlooker might be tempted to ask Him what Lou Grant once asked Ted Baxter on “The Mary Tyler Moore show”; he asked, “Are you playing with a full deck, fella?”   But Jesus was.  He was telling the truth about His power and divinity; His resurrection proves it. 

Tim Tebow in his excellent book “Shaken” writes, “On the third day after Jesus was crucified, He rose from the dead.  The Christian faith is meaningless without this fact.  Former atheist turned apologist C.S. Lewis wrong that Jesus “has forced open a door that has been locked since the death of the first man…Everything is different because He has done so.”"

I love 1 Corinthians 15; it’s an essential chapter.  I’d love to delve deeply into it, but I won’t.  Instead look at these words: “Moreover, brethren, I declare to you the gospel which I preached to you, which you also received and in which you stand…that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, and He was buried, and that He rose again the third day, according to the Scriptures, and that He was seen by Cephas [or Peter], then by the twelve.  After that He was seen by over five hundred brethren at once” (verses 1,3-6).   

To conclude, Lauren Daigle has a great song titled “Thank God I do”.  She sings, “I don’t know who I’d be if I didn’t know You.  I’d probably fall off the edge.  I don’t know where I’d go if You ever let go, so keep me held in Your hands.  I don’t know who I’d be if I didn’t know You.  Thank God I do.”  I say the same thing for myself.  My life story, in a nutshell, is that God, by His amazing grace, transformed my life from darkness to light.  A few verses later in that chapter in 1 Corinthians, we read what might very well be my life verse: “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not without effect” (1 Corinthians 15:10; NIV).

Kevin