The Resurrection of Jesus is the great rift of human history. Every moment before that event led up to that event. Just as Jesus proclaimed as He rode into Jerusalem, if the people did not praise Him, “the stones would cry out!” Those who visited the tomb saw the stone rolled away; that stone and the empty tomb still rings out that Jesus is alive! Sunday we will unite our voices with the millions around the world and the millions that have gone before remembering and rejoicing. We revisit this event that was “The First Day of the New Creation.” He Lives!
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Buddy Hoffman
Series: One Story: Digging Deeper
March 31, 2013
Jesus: The First Day of the New Creation
1 Corinthians 15:1-23
If you’re here this morning and you don’t have a Bible with you, slip up your hand. We want to put a Bible in your hands. We have some Bibles down front. If you don’t have a Bible that is easy to read at home and you want one of these Bibles, take them. That’s why we buy them. That’s why we keep buying them and keep buying them and keep buying them and keep buying them.
Man, it has been a really good week around here. Were any of you at LUG Wednesday night? Yeah. Was that amazing? This room was just packed with middle schoolers. I think there were over a hundred kids who wrote their names on these rocks as symbols of their first faith in Jesus, that they came to faith. Amen. Isn’t that exciting?
What was interesting, at the end of the first service this morning… This room was just packed with people, and I said, “If you don’t know Christ as your Lord and Savior and you want to come into the kingdom and have your sins forgiven, come forward, and let’s pray with you, and put your name on one of these rocks.” Like three people came to faith in the 7:00 service.
I can’t believe lost people go to church at 7:00. Now I know there are some lost people in this group. You know who you are, and I’m coming after you, and the Holy Spirit is coming after you too. That’s the one you have to worry about. But at 7:00! Good heavens. How many of you have had like one of your family members or one of your close friends baptized today or this week? Let’s see your hand. Family member… Stand up! Stand up. I want to see you. Let’s celebrate this. Yes, that’s amazing. Yes, that is so cool. Yes, you can be seated.
Resurrection Sunday is a Sunday that is to be celebrated. That’s really what Resurrection Day is. Now I know there are some of you that you come in like Christmas and Easter, and you think we only have two sermons. That troubles me somewhat, but I got to praying and thinking about that this week, and if those are the only two sermons you get, you actually get a pretty good bit. The incarnation and the crucifixion and the death and the burial and the resurrection are two big, big messages. But there’s actually more. We invite you to come back.
This series we’re going to do this summer on Philippians about joy… If you feel like sometimes you’re just kind of angry and feeling like you’re just not living that life Jesus really provides of peace that passes understanding and all that, we’re going to break open Philippians, and I think you’ll really, really benefit and you’ll be blessed out of it.
If you have that Bible, open it to 1 Corinthians 15, and I want to read the passage where we’re going to end up, and then we’re going to look at a number of things, and we’re going to circle back around to this reality. First Corinthians 15: Look at verse 1. He says, “Let me now remind you, dear brothers and sisters, of the Good News…” (1 Corinthians 15:1) Those words Good News are usually translated gospel. It’s the euaggelion. It’s the word for the kingdom, the good kingdom, God’s kingdom.
“…I preached to you before. You welcomed it then, and you still stand firm in it. It is this Good News [euaggelion, the gospel] that saves you if you continue to believe the message I told you—unless, of course, you believed something that was never true in the first place.” (1 Corinthians 15:1-2) Then he goes down through here and talks about the resurrection and why it really is important. But look down to verse 20. He says, “But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead.” (1 Corinthians 15:20)
Now focus for a minute on that second phrase there in verse 20. “He is the first of a great harvest of all who have died. So you see, just as death came into the world through a man, now the resurrection from the dead has begun through another man. Just as everyone dies because we all belong to Adam, everyone who belongs to Christ will be given new life. But there is an order to this resurrection: Christ was raised as the first of the harvest; then all who belong to Christ will be raised when he comes back.” (1 Corinthians 15:20-23)
Now when you read through the resurrection accounts, when you read Matthew and Mark and Luke and John, they reveal different scenes, and they give different emotions, and different people are reacting to it. But one of the things that is really interesting is in every single one of those accounts, there is conversation about the stone. The women were going to the tomb before it is even light out, and do you know what they’re talking about on the way up to the tomb? They’re talking about, “Who is going to roll away the stone?”
Just a few days earlier, when Jesus’ body was taken down from the cross, Joseph goes, and he’s a secret follower of Jesus. He outs himself to the Roman government and to the Sadducees and the Pharisees as a follower of Jesus. He goes and says, “I’d like to take down the body.” He takes down the body of Jesus, and he wraps it in burial cloths.
Now what’s not specified in Scripture, but it’s attested very deeply in rabbinical literature, is what they would wrap a dead body in was actually the strips of cloths from used priestly garments that were used in the temple. They’d put it in strips, and they would anoint it with perfume, and they would wrap that up. By the way, that’s the same thing they would use when a newborn babe was brought into the world. So Jesus is wrapped in these swaddling clothes that were most likely the garments of a priest. Then he was wrapped in garments again as he died.
Then they go to the tomb. It’s Matthew who tells us how the stone is rolled away. The angels, two mighty angels come down. I don’t know why they say mighty angels, because angels are mighty. It’s not like there are weak angels and strong angels. Every time you see an angel in the Bible, it scares people completely senseless. They just fall over.
This whole idea of angels being kind of like naked babies with wings, that’s wrong. That is wrong. Listen, angels are extraterrestrial warriors. One angel in the book of Revelation is going to go down and take the Devil by the nape of the neck, if he has one, and wrap him up in chains and throw him into the bottomless pit. One angel. One angel. So angels are pretty powerful.
They toss the rock back, go in there, and they sit down on that stone slab in that tomb that is carved out of the rock. I’ve gone to that garden tomb numbers of time. Do you know what one of the things that is really interesting about that tomb? It’s empty. There’s nothing in it. That stone was rolled away.
There’s a lot in the Bible about stones. When Jesus comes over the Mount of Olives and he goes across that valley there, that is part of the largest geological fault anywhere on the planet. It’s almost 4,000 miles. It starts up in Syria and goes all the way down into South Africa. When he comes up on that triumphal entry, the people are rejoicing and they’re crying out, “Hosanna! Save now.”
They’re expecting the kind of king like David, like the Maccabees. They’re thinking that God is right now going to restore to Israel the rightful rule and reign and defeat all these Roman guards. The Pharisees come out and say, “Your disciples shouldn’t be saying these things.” He says, “If they did not, the stones would cry out.”
Now what we’ve been looking at for the last few weeks is the symmetry of this One Story. It is like an orchestra playing a carefully crafted musical piece. You see all the way over, starting with Abraham and him building the altars. There are four altars Abraham builds, and Jacob, when he sets up the stone when God gives him this vision of heaven, and Moses, when he goes upon the rock of Mount Sinai, God carves the Commandments into stone.
When Joshua goes across the river, he takes 12 stones out of the river and places another stack of 12 stones in the river. When he gives the final commission to the nation of Israel, he says, “I’m going to call you to choose this day who you will serve. Who are you going to worship?” They said, “We will follow the Lord our God.” He rolls a big stone as a memorial to that stone.
All the way through the Scripture, even when you get into Isaiah, and they’re kind of like trying to figure out who they are, he says, “Look to the quarry. Look to the rock from which you are hewn. You are of the family, the lineage of Abraham himself.” Jesus, when they’re crying out about all these stones, he says, “I am the cornerstone, the One whom the builders rejected. It has become the chief cornerstone.” Today, as we gather and we rejoice that the stone was rolled away, every bit of that is actually pointing to Jesus himself. He’s resurrected. It’s real.
There are five thoughts I want to take you through this morning, and I won’t be able to cover them all, but they have to do with this thing we call Easter, Resurrection Sunday. Five things there. Two that sometimes get into debates and two that are very clear in our cheering and understanding, and the fifth one is where I really want to go with this.
1. When should we celebrate the resurrection? I heard somebody actually give the right answer, and it’s every Sunday. Did I hear somebody say that? Well, every day, but Sunday is… Yeah, every moment. But it might come as a surprise to you (it shouldn’t), Jesus didn’t have a smartphone. They didn’t own clocks. It didn’t mean they were out of tune with time.
The Hebrew calendar was calibrated to the lunar time. They knew what time it was and they knew the seasons. They watched the moon. As civilizations overlapped and languages overlapped, some started using more of the solar calendar. Then there was the Gregorian calendar. Then the languages moved from Hebrew to Greek to Latin, and now nobody speaks Latin except really, really strange people.
There are all kinds of debate. This may come as a massive surprise to you, but the Eastern Church and the Western Church celebrate Easter on different Sundays a few weeks apart. This might even come as a bigger surprise to you. The word Easter is not in the Bible. Did you know that? Easter is not in the Bible. Even the word Easter has a sort of a pagan rootedness.
Now we know what we mean when we say, “Happy Easter,” right? We mean the resurrection. Words change. Words have meaning, and then they change in their meaning. So they’re not some magic set of syllables. We don’t believe in spells and that kind of thing. If you have kids, you know language changes so much. If you help your kid get a car, and they come in one day and say, “Dad, that car is just absolutely sick,” it’s a compliment. You go, “Oh, what’s wrong with it?” “Nothing! Nothing. It’s amazing.”
You may be here and you’ve grown up in a church where, “Is it Thursday? Is it Good Friday? Should we say Easter? Should we say Resurrection Sunday?” I’m just going to say this to you. The church has been kind of discussing this for so long. How many of you are married? How many of you have ever been in a kind of discussion with your mate in front of the kids, and one of the kids said, “You guys shouldn’t be arguing,” and you said, “We’re discussing”?
Do you know what? You are the most honest service we’ve had! Everybody else goes, “No, that never happens to us.” The liars come at the other hours. The church kind of debates this. “What should we call it? How should we celebrate it?”
2. How do we celebrate it? I grew up in a more traditional church, and the way we celebrated Easter was wonderful. I loved it. It was amazing. It was great. Every year when Easter came along, we would have a sunrise service, but the week before Easter… It was when Loganville was the end of the world. I lived in Tucker, and that was farmland. We would drive all the way to Loganville because there was a suit factory there. Do you remember that? How many of you remember the suit factory? They didn’t order them from China. They made them right there.
They would measure you and they would build you a suit while you waited. There was no place to eat even. Waffle House wasn’t there yet. You’d just sit around hungry while he made your suit. Then you’d go to church on Sunday, and everybody wore a suit, and women wore those fancy hats. Does anybody remember the hat days? If you got in church behind some woman with an exceptionally large hat, it was not quite as fun.
When I got dressed this morning, Jody said, “Are you going to wear that to church on Easter?” I said, “Yes.” She said, “You do have a suit.” I said, “Yes I do, and it’s going to stay right where it is.” She said, “But people are going to come who don’t know us, and they’re going to be thinking you should have a suit on.” I said, “Yeah, but then if they come back, they’re going to be disappointed because I’m not.” So you might as well just get it out there who you are right away. If they leave in two weeks or one, what difference does it make?
How we celebrate it isn’t really the point. I mean, if you like the liturgy and you like the robes and all the candles and all, that’s wonderful. It’s good. There’s nothing wrong with it. Don’t let people judge you by, “Don’t say Easter. That’s a pagan holiday. The Easter eggs are like you’re entering into some kind of…” Listen. God has redeemed all kinds of things. One of the things he has redeemed is us! Praise God!
3. What are we celebrating? This is where we really get so much agreement across the board. I actually tweeted this out this morning to see how many people would respond to it. See if you recognize this. “He is risen.” He is risen indeed. Yes! You’ve done that better than any service today! Every other service, I’ve had to get them to do it again to practice.
But this is what the early church would say on Resurrection Sunday and oftentimes even greeting one another in passing. “He is risen,” and they would respond… He is risen indeed. Yes! This is the reality that Jesus Christ has risen from the dead, and he is alive, and we rejoice in that.
Sometimes I’m asked, “In this sophisticated world of rational thinking, is it possible that we can actually believe in the dead coming back to life?” Do you know what? Yes, it is possible. I’m not here to do debates and polemics with you this morning, but if you’re one of those people who are just struggling with this, here’s what I challenge you to do. Get some intellectual integrity.
There are plenty of books out there. Josh McDowell wrote a great book, Evidence That Demands a Verdict. Read it. Don’t sit around saying, “No, that couldn’t have happen. I don’t believe it,” if you won’t do the research. Who Moved the Stone? Order it. Read it. The Case for Christianity. Order it. Read it.
If it’s your rational mind that keeps you from coming to this place of reality, let me just tell you something, you will not be the first person who researched this and came face to face with the reality Jesus did indeed rise from the grave.
4. Why are we celebrating it? First Corinthians 15 says, “It is this Good News…” and I just want to put it out there, “…that saves you…” (1 Corinthians 15:2) It saves you. It is the good news, and it saves you, that Jesus Christ, he who knew no sin, was made sin for us that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. It’s the amazing exchange.
Read Colossians. He took our sins with him. He nailed them to the tree. We hung on the cross with Jesus. It’s the great exchange. It is forgiveness. It is not only forgiveness; it is the imputing of all the righteousness of Jesus into our account. It is not by the works of righteousness we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us. We are celebrating it because we’re free! I like that.
Have you ever had a bill that just hung over your head? Say yes. Listen, we know who we are. We aren’t trust fund kids. We work for a living. I remember the first time I got a credit card. It was a JC Penney’s Card. I was like in high school. What kind of idiot organization lets a high school kid get a credit card? It was over when Northlake Mall was the only mall around. There was a JC Penney’s in there. They said, “You can sign up for a credit card.” I thought, “Well, why not?” I went in there and I signed up. They sent me one.
Do you know what? When they sent me one, I said, “Well, I have one. I need to use it.” I went in there, and I just bought a bunch of stuff. Then all of a sudden, the bills started coming. My dad was a truck driver. He goes, “That bill has your name on it, and your name is my name, and you will make sure you pay that bill.” So I just thought, “I’ll pay the minimum.” You never get a bill paid off paying the minimum. That’s the purpose of a credit card. It’s to put you in slavery.
I was working at McDonald’s for, I think, $2.35 an hour. It took me seven months to pay off that JC Penney’s card, and then I cut it up. I just hated going out to the driveway and pulling that bill out and feeling the weight.
Now let me tell you something. Some of you are weighted with your sin. You really are. Your past just haunts you. I have some really good news. You don’t have to live that way. You do not have to live that way. Jesus paid for our sins. It is in his death, burial, and resurrection that we find salvation and forgiveness and freedom. Amen? Yeah, that’s good news. Now then, I want to take us a little bit further in this journey. You notice up on the top I call this The First Day of the New Creation. This number five is important.
5. Why is Jesus’ resurrection different? In this reality of the resurrection, we find reconciliation, and that’s wonderful, but the resurrection of Jesus goes beyond reconciliation, and it is the beginning of the restoration, the recreation. What you find in Genesis 1, when God created the heavens and the earth, it was a place of perfection. It was a place of beauty and goodness and truth. That’s the wow.
Then as soon as chapter 3 is done, it’s the now. It’s a place of brokenness, of disease, and all kinds of death coat the life we now have. What God gave us as a garden we turned into a graveyard. The how of that is we committed treason against God. Sin isn’t just something you did; it’s something we are. We do not have a problem; we are the problem. What happens in the resurrection is the new creation, the restoration, begins.
Now if you remember the passage we were reading, look at it again, because I want to take you there again. Verse 20: “But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead. He is the first of a great harvest of all who have died.” (1 Corinthians 15:20) Now how is Jesus’ resurrection different? In the Bible, there are numbers of people who actually rose from the grave.
In Kings, you have Elijah. He raises a widow’s son from the dead. Elisha raises a widow’s son from the dead. One of the funniest ones is that Elisha is dead and in the grave, and somebody decides to double use his tomb, and they throw a dead man in the tomb with the prophet’s bones. When he touches the bones of the dead prophet, he comes back to life! That would be a shock, wouldn’t it?
My favorite story of one who comes back to life is Lazarus. I love that story of Lazarus. When people talk about, “If you could be anybody in the Bible, who would you want to be?” for me, it would be Lazarus. Obviously, we don’t get to be Jesus, if that’s what you’re thinking. When Jesus goes down to the tomb, and he says, “Lazarus, come forth!” do you know why he says that? Because if he had just said, “Come forth,” they all would’ve come. The whole group would’ve come.
But Lazarus comes out, and he’s wrapped up in grave clothes, and he has been dead for four days. I don’t want to get into details about embalming, because they didn’t do it back then, but everything inside him… It even records it in the story. (And if you grew up reading King James, it says, “By now he stinketh. He has problems.”)
Lazarus isn’t actually called a disciple of Jesus. Lazarus is called a friend of Jesus. It’s somebody Jesus just liked hanging out with. Everybody else follows Jesus. Jesus goes to Lazarus’ house and hangs out. I think he slept on the couch every once in awhile. Wow!
Do you know the reason I wouldn’t want to be one of the disciples? Because you follow around Jesus, Jesus asked them all kinds of questions, and they answered stupid things. I know I would’ve been like Peter. I would’ve just answered all the wrong things, and all through eternity, you would, “Oh, you’re the one who said that.” No, not Lazarus. Lazarus is just a friend of Jesus.
All those people who came back, who were reawakened, we really need to draw a line and recognize that Jesus’ resurrection doesn’t even resemble those resurrections. Those weren’t really resurrections; they were a healing of death. It was a calling back from death. All of those people who were brought back died again. They were brought back in a broken body. They were brought back in a corpse that was one day going to die.
But when Jesus came out of the tomb, he came out with a life and a body that would never die. Isn’t that good? Do you know one of the reason that that’s good? Because that’s the kind of body you’re going to have. Here’s what the Bible says. We don’t know what we’re going to be like, but we know we’re going to be like him when we see him as he is. Whoa. Man, that’s going to be fun. I mean, Jesus could like walk through walls. He still ate fish. He wasn’t a vegan.
We’re going to eat stuff. We’re going to sit at the table. The people who have gone on to be with Jesus, Jesus is going to bring them back with him, and he’s going to restore the entire earth. Do you understand that? It’s what Revelation says. Heaven is going to come down, and it’s going to dwell on earth, and he’s going to recreate and restore planet Earth.
I don’t know where I got this from, but as a child growing up, I thought I was going to live out there in the stratosphere somewhere and I was going to be like a spirit, kind of a blob, and maybe with a harp. I was going to walk around with spirits. As a matter of fact, somebody told me one time… I said, “What’s heaven like?” and they said, “Well, it’s like a church service that never ends.” I said, “That sounds like the other place.”
Do you know what heaven is like? It’s like here, but perfect. It’s like here, but nobody dies. It’s like here, but all that which is will be as it was meant to be. Wow! That’s why the resurrection matters. Let’s pray.
Lord, thank you so much for you. You’re beyond imagination. You’re beyond description. You’re beyond our words. You’re beyond our imagination. Lord, thank you that you resurrected. Thank you that all over the world there are millions of people today who are celebrating this reality.
But Lord, I pray that we as a church will go deeper into this reality, that you are this firstfruits of the new harvest that is to come. Lord, help us to look forward with an informed, biblical mindset as we look to the moon and the stars and we enjoy the fellowship we have with one another, that we anticipate this new recreation. In your holy name, amen.