HOLY WEEK SERIES: THE ASSURANCE OF RISING

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

Now Jesus was going up to Jerusalem. On the way, He took the Twelve aside and said to them, “We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn Him to death and will hand Him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified. On the third day, He will be raised to life!”

Matthew 20:17-19

Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in Him. According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord Himself will come down from Heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.

Therefore encourage one another with these words.

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

This ends this reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

During his years of ministry, Jesus was nearly always an open book, especially with the Twelve, His hand chosen disciples. We find one example of this from Matthew’s Gospel as Christ conveys His future to His special followers:

Now Jesus was going up to Jerusalem. On the way, He took the Twelve aside and said to them, “We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn Him to death and will hand Him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified. On the third day, He will be raised to life!” Matthew 20:17-19

Jesus was on His way to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover in what would be His final week of human life. It was just before the Triumphal Entry that Jesus tells His disciples for a third time of His coming fate, a fate that had distinct steps.

First, He would be “delivered over to the chief priests and the teachers of the law”.

He then would be condemned by them to death, handed “over to the Gentiles” (talking about the Romans here) to be “mocked and flogged” prior to His execution by crucifixion.

Finally, He would “be raised to life” on “the third day”.

I often wonder how much of this really registered with the disciples at the time. Surely, the words of Jesus came rushing to the forefront of their hearts and minds as they watched things unfold just as Jesus said they would.

For Jesus was betrayed by Judas (He let His followers know this would happen as well, led to the Sanhedrin, convicted of a crime He never committed, delivered over to Pontius Pilate and the Romans where He was first scourged, then crucified, dying within a matter of six hours. He was laid to rest in a newly cut tomb and there He stayed until, you got it, the third day when God raised Him up in resurrection power. The women at the tomb were told as much by the angels of the Lord when they arrived to anoint His body at dawn after the conclusion of the Sabbath:

On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; He has risen! Remember how He told you, while He was still with you in Galilee: ‘The Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.’ ” Then they remembered His words. Luke 24:1-8  

Jesus had risen from the dead, just as He had assured His disciples He would, and the good news we hold onto, not just on this Resurrection Sunday but every day, is that all Christian believers since the time of Jesus have been assured that they too will rise one day to be with the resurrected, ascended Jesus, the Savior of the world.

Look at these words from John’s Gospel when Christ gave all His disciples that assurance:

"Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in Me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with Me that you also may be where I am.” John 14:1-3

Jesus gave the assurance He would ride from the dead and He did. But He didn’t depart this world without keeping His beloved followers in mind, particularly when it came to their eternal futures.

For in our scripture passage from John, Jesus promises that He would come back to take all those who believe in Him to the place He was going, the very blessed eternal Kingdom of God (aka Heaven) where they would abide with Him and His Father (and ours) forever. In other words, all disciples of Christ were assured by Him that they too would rise one day and the Lord tells us what that will look like through the Apostle Paul as he wrote to the church in Thessolonica. Look at these words again here:

Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in Him. According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord Himself will come down from Heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.

Therefore encourage one another with these words. 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

Jesus promised that He would come back for His disciples to take them to where He was. In the passage from 1 Thessalonians, He paints the scene for the day that will happen.

For Jesus will indeed come back and it won’t be quietly. His majesty will be proclaimed, first by a loud command spoken by the “voice of the archangel” and the mighty “trumpet call of God”. Everyone in the world will know He has returned. That is a certainty.

After the announcement of His arrival, look at what happens. The assurance of rising again will come to be as the dead in Christ leave their graves to meet Him in the air. At rest for a long time, they will experience the promised glory that they carried with them when their worldly life ended.

After this, we read where those who are alive in Christ will then rise and join Jesus with those who were dead in Him (this is referred to as The Rapture). It will be an amazing, divine assembly of saints, for sure.  

So on this Resurrection Day, we celebrate Jesus rising from death to life but we should also be rejoicing in the assurance that one day we too will rise to meet Him in the air and abide with Him forever, even if our earthly life ends before then. For it’s this promise that is our blessed hope, a hope that can never be taken away from us.

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

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