Resurrection Day 2024 — Heidelberg Catechism Lord’s Day 17

As we consider Resurrection 2024 we must be mindful of the battle we are in and which now Easter has been caught up in. Of course Resurrection Sunday along with Christmas are the two high days on the Christian calendar. The fact that it is still so widely celebrated in the West and has always been a calendar reminder that some little residue of our original Christian nation status remained.

But now the Biden administration has brought even Easter under attack as it sought to displace Easter by recognizing Sunday as “Transgender day of visibility.” This is akin to the how the French Philosophers tried to change out the Christian calendar during the French Revolution.

Of course, to a people who have not been like the frog boiling away as the temperature in the pot is turned up, this is nothing short of Statist blasphemy and it demonstrates for us again that Governments are always hopelessly religious. Our current Federal Gov’t is revealing that it is a servant of the religion and God of Wokeianity. It continues, not least by claiming Easter Sunday as “Transgender day of visibility” to make war on God and by extension God’s people.

But Christianity is an anvil that many a pagan hammer has worn itself out upon and it will be so in this case as well. Christ is King — quite to the chagrin of Ben Shapiro and many Evangelicals — and as King the celebration of the Resurrection will one day cover the globe.

As we turn to the doctrine of the Resurrection we consider the honored Heidelberg Catechism on this score. It asks;

Question 45: What doth the resurrection of Christ profit us?

Answer: First, by His resurrection He has overcome death, that He might make us partakers of that righteousness which He had purchased for us by His death;1 secondly, we are also by His power raised up to a new life;2 and lastly, the resurrection of Christ is a sure pledge of our blessed resurrection.3

As we come to Lord’s Day 17 on the Resurrection we want to note that the thoroughness of this question and answer is not that for which we might hope. What the Catechism teaches here is true but there is a good deal more that needs to be said and so we will say a good deal more this  morning than what we find here though we will also incorporate what the HC teaches.

Before we get into the heart of the matter notice again how practical the HC is with its doctrines. This is something that we brought forth before but be alert again as to the desire by the HC for you to profit by knowing the doctrine of Scripture. The HC does not want to teach you a sterile understanding of the Resurrection. It wants you to know how it is that your Christian life is nurtured and sustained by understanding the import of the Resurrection.

But before we turn to how it is we profit from the resurrection we turn first to the fact of the Resurrection and the fact is that the Resurrection is the pivotal truth of Christianity. No Resurrection. No Christianity. Everything hangs on the reality and truth of the Resurrection. In the book of Acts, the two-fold Apostolic message everywhere the Apostles go is the Kingdom of God and the Resurrection as seen by the 24 references to Christ’s resurrection throughout the book of Acts. The Apostolic message was the message of the Resurrection. This is why the Apostle could declare in I Cor. 15

 if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty. 

It was that conviction that spurred the Apostles as they fanned out to the known world preaching Christ and the Resurrection;

It starts on the Day of Pentecost. Peter says there in His Sermon after properly pinning the responsibility of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ on the Jews,

24 whom God raised up, having [g]loosed the [h]pains of death, because it was 2not possible that He should be held by it.

And again in vs. 32

2:32 This Jesus God has raised up, of which we are all witnesses.

Peter put the resurrection front center in Acts 3 when God heals the lame man

14 But you denied the Holy One and the Just, and asked for a murderer to be granted to you, 15 and killed the [b]Prince of life, whom God raised from the dead, of which we are witnesses.

And then in 4:10 in explanation to the Jew leadership Peter again speaks of the resurrection

10 let it be known to you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead, by Him this man stands here before you whole.

Then later in chapter 4 after being released from Prison for preaching the Resurrection we read that these same Apostles;

“w/ great power gave … witness to the resurrection.”

As Acts begins to concentrate more on St. Paul we see St. Paul putting the Resurrection front and center when dealing with the Jews. In Perga, St. Paul proclaims that the Jews condemned and slew Jesus, adding;

30 But God raised Him from the dead. 31 He was seen for many days by those who came up with Him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are His witnesses to the people. 32 And we declare to you glad tidings—that promise which was made to the fathers. 33 God has fulfilled this for us their children, in that He has raised up Jesus. As it is also written in the second Psalm:

‘You are My Son,
Today I have begotten You.’

Make especial note that here the resurrection of the Lord Jesus is presented as the fulfillment of the promise of the Gospel, and in quoting Ps. 2 we learn that through the Resurrection God has begotten His Son.

Where else might we turn in the Missionary book of Acts to learn how the fact of the Resurrection was the message running like wildfire among stubble in that nascent Church?

In the Synagogue at Thessalonica in Acts 17, Paul, from the OT Scriptures

3 explains and demonstrates that the Christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead, and saying, “This Jesus whom I preach to you is the Christ.”

In that same Chapter, this time at Athens there we find Paul again banging this drum preaching;

 God has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead.”

32 And when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked…

In Chapter 26 the Resurrection again is front and center in speaking before King Agrippa while in bondage from the Jews declaring to Agrippa,

“23 that the Christ would suffer, that He would be the first to rise from the dead, and would proclaim light to the Jewish people and to the Gentiles.”

And then of course we have those beautiful words from I Cor. 15 that ties the Resurrection to the essence of the Gospel;

“Moreover, brethren, I declare to you the gospel which I preached to you…” and this gospel is briefly summarized in the words; “ How Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures,”

So, we see that Christianity is not Christianity without the supernatural bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Scripture teaches us that if we deny the Resurrection of Jesus Christ we are not Christian. Further, Scripture teaches us that if we deny the bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ we are not Christian.

And we have to add that insistence that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ was bodily. That is that the body that went into the tomb was a human body and so the body that came out of the tomb was likewise a human body albeit glorified.

We need to say this because legion is the name of clergy and theologians who deny the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. On the one hand they will affirm the resurrection of Jesus Christ but on the other hand they will redefine the word “resurrection” so what they mean by that word is antithetical to what the Scriptures and the faithful Church mean by that word. As in so many other examples many in the Church today use linguistic deception to redefine the truth of the Resurrection to make it mean “Imaginary or pretend Resurrection.”  And so, we are left to not being able to give men the benefit of the doubt when they affirm the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. We have to go on and ask just if their resurrected Christ ate fish w/ His disciples. We have to ask if their resurrected Christ put on display for His disciples His scars and wounds. We have to practice a hermeneutic of suspicion lest we be taken in by this clergy grift of affirming the idea of the resurrection while denying the meaning of the Resurrection because the Church is chock full of professional people who talk about the Resurrection but deny the supernatural foundation of it by embracing any number of fanciful naturalistic understandings of this so as to avoid the supernaturalness of it all.

Here are a few examples to provide the receipts on my claim of linguistic deception;

After denying a real biological virgin birth theologian Walter Banon wrote,

“No more do we consider the fact that the Christian Church is guided in her faith by an ever present, active Lord. (We are not) “dependent upon the realistic-materialistic conception that the same body which died on the tree of the cross after three days in the grave began to function again.”

To that another Theologian Walter Kunneth added,

“To insist upon the historic character of the resurrection has the result of objectifying it, … that means… that the assertion of its his­toricality leads to an irresistible process of dissolution, which omi­nously threatens the reality of the resurrection itself. “

Kunneth is saying here that if we consider the Resurrection historical the way that we consider the landing of the Mayflower historical we are led to a position where the Resurrection is threatened.

Mennonite theologian Gordon Kaufmann lets us know that “these alleged appearances were, in fact, a series of hallucinations”  and that “Contemporary belief… will not necessarily involve the conviction that the crucified Jesus became personally alive again.”

These are all expressions growing out of the thought of Karl Barth who taught that “If there is to be a genuine hope on the basis of Christ’s resurrection, this can only be if orthodoxy with all its rationalizations be brushed aside.”

One of those rationalizations that Barth desired to be brushed aside was the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ in favor of a Christ who arose into History — a linguistic maneuver made in order to avoid the physicality of Christ’s resurrection.

This is the position of what we generally today call “Liberal Christianity,” and theologian Machen way back in the 1930s wrote a book demonstrating that Liberal Christianity and Christianity were two distinctly different faith systems.

Well, a great deal more should be said on this score but we must press on.

Here we have this marvelous indisputable bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Catechism asks how it is that that Resurrection of Jesus profits us. The Catechism starts by teaching us;

First, by His resurrection He has overcome death, that He might make us partakers of that righteousness which He had purchased for us by His death

They then cite 1 Cor. 15:16 to sustain their point from Scripture;

For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised.

Of course the whole premise of all of I Cor. 15 is that Christ is raised and has overcome death. We get this even more explicitly in Revelation 1:18 with Jesus speaking;

I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.

So we are profited by the Resurrection of Jesus in that He overcame death. But lets talk a wee bit about this Resurrection that overcame death. We have to understand that when Jesus rose again, He rose as belonging entirely to the new Creation — the age to come.  Christ’s resurrection finds Him in His new creation body. Christ resurrection in overcoming death lives and operates now in the New Creation. Christ has arose to a new creation reality. It is why we can talk about Jesus having a glorified body. This explains passages like this;

 That Sunday evening[ a] the disciples were meeting behind locked doors because they were afraid of the Jewish leaders. Suddenly, Jesus was standing there among them! “Peace be with you,” he said.

So by His Resurrection our Lord and Master overcomes death and the Catechism says it is with the purpose that He might make us partakers of that righteousness which He had purchased for us by His death.

Here the great theme of substitutionary Atonement is brought forth. Christ died the death that we had earned and that should’ve been ours. Christ’s resurrection is to us the seal… the confirmation … that His death on the Cross in our stead satisfied the just wrath of God by purchasing our right standing via the price of His own blood . Through the power of the Resurrection we have confirmed for us that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

More than that the Catechism insists that we find profit in the doctrine of the Resurrection because it declares to us that we wear the righteousness of Jesus Christ. The resurrection reminds us that when God looks upon us He sees us not besotted with the sin that we contend against daily, but rather He sees us as clothed and garmented in the righteousness of Jesus Christ. In God judicial reckoning we have been declared righteous in Christ Jesus. We may not feel that way. The accuser of the Brethren may scorn us and rub our nose in the sin that we know is true about us, but the Resurrection reminds us that we are partakers of that righteousness which Christ purchased by His death in our place.

Folks … can you see why the catechism, following Scripture, says that this truth is a great profit to us? How can it not be but a profit to know we are partakers of Christ righteousness? How can it not be but a profit to know that because of that Resurrection nothing can separate us from the Love of God?

But the profit does not end here. The Catechizers go on to say that we profit secondly from this doctrine also by the fact that His power has raised us up to a new life.

Here they appeal to Rom. 6:4 to anchor their assertion.

Therefore we are buried with Him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.

Remember a few minutes ago we stated that in Christ’s resurrection He was raised as belonging to the New Creation. Upon Christ’s resurrection Christ was and is living in the new heavens and the new earth … in that age to come. He was a member of the new Creation.

Here we learn that we likewise are, in an inaugurated sense, those who belong to that new creation and belonging to that the new creation we also should walk in newness of life. We are not now what we will yet be but because we are in Christ we are not now what we once were when we were dead in our trespasses and sins.

St. Paul can say this explicitly in Colossians when he reminds us there;

13 He has delivered us from the power of darkness and [a]conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love…

You see, by the Resurrection we have been placed in the new Creation … into the Kingdom of God’s dear son, to walk in newness of life which the Catechizers quote to sustain this point.

Brethren we have been resurrected so that our relationship to the old Adam is superseded by our relationship to the new Adam… to the Resurrected Christ. This explains why the expectation is that we would walk in “newness of life.” We are resurrected beings and though we are not yet all that we one day will be we are creatures who live in this present age as walking and living in the age to come. Like Legolas in Tolkien’s work we live in two worlds at the same time but the creational age in which we have been resurrected is impinging on all around us that has not yet been resurrected. In some sense then we, as the resurrected, are the bearers of resurrection life to all that we come in contact with.

This reality of having been NOW resurrected with Christ is why Paul can write about our now being seated in the Heavenlies with Christ. It is why he could write that we have been NOW translated to the Kingdom of God’s dear Son, whom He loves. It is why he could write that our citizenship is in heaven, keeping in mind that heaven is invading this present wicked age via His resurrected citizenry.

The “NOW” of our Resurrected status can not be hidden under the bushel of the “not yet.” The Kingdom as come and we are citizens of that future creational age Kingdom bringing the aroma of Christ and that Kingdom unto all we come in contact with.

If we profit first by Christ’s resurrection by having the truth of our Justification declared, we profit now with the assurance of our ongoing sanctification. We are members of a new age and and a new Kingdom and because we are a peculiar people. Belonging to this Resurrection life changes us completely … changes our thinking… our behaving … our relationships. Changes all of this so much that to those who are not living the resurrected life or even those just beginning the resurrected life we are a strange lot. Because we have been risen with Christ we seek those things which are above in everything we handle here. (Col. 3:1)

Theologian G. K. Beale demonstrates I’m not being original here;

“We must not underestimate the resurrection that we have been given in Christ. As Christ has been raised to a new reality so Christians united to Christ has been raised to a new reality and are to live their lives in terms of this Resurrection New Creational Kingdom (Col. 1:13f)”

And so the Resurrection profits us by raising us up with Christ to live a new life.

Finally the Catechism teaches us that we profit from the Resurrection as it is a sure pledge of our blessed resurrection.

They anchor this in Scripture by appealing to I Corinthians 15

20 But now Christ is risen from the dead, and has become the firstfruits of those who have [d]fallen asleep. 

The whole chapter is dealing with the relation between Christ’s resurrection and our coming Resurrection. There is a linkage here that Theologian Gregory Beale makes out

In I Cor. 15 Paul portrays another version of this staggered resurrection fulfillment; The Messiah is physically resurrected first, and then later his people are raised physically. Remembering that the OT appeared to prophesy that all of God’s people together were to be resurrected as part of one event, Paul views the prophecy of the end time resurrection to begin fulfillment in Christ’s physical resurrection, which necessitates that the saint’s subsequent physical resurrection had to happen. In other words the great event of the final resurrection had begun in Christ but since the event was not completed in the resurrection of others, the completion of that prophesied event had to come at some point in the future.

Our ability to cheerfully come to the end of our days is accounted for by the certainty of our Resurrection and the certainty of that resurrection is lodged in the fact that Christ was indeed resurrected. Because He arose His own who have died in Christ will rise again. Death is not the final word.

So the doctrine of the resurrection profits us by giving us confidence of God’s good pleasure with us because Christ has paid for our sin and we are adorned with His righteousness. The doctrine of the resurrection profits us by the power it gives us to walk in a newness of life that is not characterized by the corruption and the death that those who hate Christ walk in. The doctrine of the resurrection profits us by the certainty and so courage it gives us to face our own mortality … to realize that there is even better life beyond this good life.

And so we see that doctrine is hardly boring.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Resurrection Sermon 2022

The Resurrection is the pivotal truth of Christianity. No Resurrection. No Christianity. Everything hangs on the reality and truth of the Resurrection. In the book of Acts, the two-fold Apostolic message is the Kingdom of God and the Resurrection as seen by the 24 references to Christ’s resurrection throughout the book of Acts. The Apostolic message was the message of the Resurrection.

And yet despite that fact, the Church has seemed to, in a counter intuitive fashion done odd things to and with the Resurrection.

For example, it is likely that the majority report in the Church today, if one counts the mainline Churches, is one wherein one finds a reinterpretation of the Resurrection in a way that seems obviously counter-intuitive to the Scriptural accounts and to people like us.

For example,

After denying a real biological virgin birth theologian Walter Banon wrote,

“No more do we consider the fact that the Christian Church is guided in her faith by an ever present, active Lord. (We are not) “dependent upon the realistic-materialistic conception that the same body which died on the tree of the cross after three days in the grave began to function again.”

To that another Theologian Walter Kunneth added,

“To insist upon the historic character of the resurrection has the result of objectifying it, … that means… that the assertion of its his­toricality leads to an irresistible process of dissolution, which omi­nously threatens the reality of the resurrection itself. “

Kunneth is saying here that if we consider the Resurrection historical the way that we consider the landing of the Mayflower historical we are led to a position where the Resurrection is threatened.

Mennonite theologian Gordon Kaufmann lets us know that “these alleged appearances were, in fact, a series of hallucinations”  and that “Contemporary belief… will not necessarily involve the conviction that the crucified Jesus became personally alive again.”

These are all expressions growing out of the thought of Karl Barth who taught that “If there is to be a genuine hope on the basis of Christ’s resurrection, this can only be if orthodoxy with all its rationalizations be brushed aside.”

In cases like this, we just have to understand that many if not most so-called educated self-referenced Christians in terms of sheer numbers approach the Scripture with an anti-Supernatural bias or failing that in order to protect the Resurrection seek to place the Resurrection in a realm where it can not be verifiable and in so doing make the apprehension of it completely subjective.

But that is not Paul’s thought here in I Corinthians. St. Paul does not argue that the apprehension of the Resurrection is completely subjective. He argues the Resurrection is objectively historically true.

I Cor. 15 Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. 2 By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.

3 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas,[b] and then to the Twelve. 6 After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8 and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

St. Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit basis the reality of the resurrection upon the historical record. Upon the objectivity of its truth. He does what any good lawyer does. First he calls in the documented record and then he call in the witnesses to substantiate the record.

His first appeal is to the documentation. The Scripture is appealed to as the primary basis of His authority. St. Paul speaks of Christ that He was raised on the third day according to the Scripture. Paul’s first appeal is to the Scripture record. And of course we see Scripture give testimony to this repeatedly;

Psalm 16:10

Because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead, nor will you let your faithful one see decay.

 

Peter touches this Psalm in Acts when he says; “Brothers, I may say to you with confidence about the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants on his throne, he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption (Acts 2:29–31).

Peter taught that, because David was a prophet who knew God would one day set one of his descendants on his throne and continue David’s rule through him (2 Samuel 7:11–12, 16), David was prophesying his future descendent, who would be the Messiah (Isaiah 11:1–4). Because God would not abandon this descendant’s soul to Hades (or Sheol, that is, the realm of the dead), nor let his flesh see corruption, he must have died1 and then been resurrected before his body could decay. In this way, David was indeed prophesying the resurrection of the Messiah here.

With that reasoning in our minds then we can read other Psalms and hear the resurrection prophesied from Scripture;

Psalm 49:15
But God will redeem my life from Sheol, for He will surely take me to Himself. Selah

Psalm 86:13
For great is Your loving devotion to me; You have delivered me from the depths of Sheol.

Then we have the one who was the Scripture Incarnated … the Lord Jesus Christ;

From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that He must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. (Matthew 16:21 ESV)

Matthew 12:40
For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

Matthew 17:9
As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus commanded them, “Do not tell anyone about this vision until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”

Matthew 17:23
They will kill Him, and on the third day He will be raised to life.” And the disciples were deeply grieved.

Matthew 20:19
and will deliver Him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified. And on the third day He will be raised to life.

Matthew 27:63
Saying, Sir, we remember that that deceiver said, while he was yet alive, After three days I will rise again.

John 2:19-21
Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up…

And this is only a whitman’s sampler. And it is this documented record that St. Paul first appeals to in his argument in I Corinthians for Christ’s resurrection.

So here are the documents. There is another point here besides how Paul appeals to the documents to argue for the resurrection of Christ and that is that Christianity does not allow us to merely speak of it as a “good moral system,” as if that is all that it is demanding of anybody. No, Scripture does not allow us to conclude that it only gives us good morals.

Come, Come, my friends, one who refuses the supernatural and the miraculous does not speak about the quality of a moral system where that moral system finds its chief actors testifying to the supernatural that they do not a-priori believe in. If people do not believe in the possibilities of resurrections they should not speak that they are glad for the morality they find in Christianity.

That is like saying the religion of the Mad Hatter is excellent even though the Mad Hatter was a Lunatic.

Well, back to the original point at hand. Paul appeals to the documented record and after that he appeals to the eye witness record. St. Paul is seeking to establish the fact that the resurrection sits on objective reality.

St. Paul calls forth the witnesses. He does not include all the witnesses but he includes enough. He calls forth Peter to the witness stand. He calls forth the 12 Apostles as eye-witnesses. He includes 500 more and then he himself takes the witness stand. Christ has risen. I saw Him with my own eyes.

You can imagine that if this really were a court scene how many days it would take to put all these witnesses on the stand to get their testimony on the record.

Yet, as stellar as this record is there is no convincing a jury that is already set on disbelieving the witnesses no matter how many they are.  Remember, the parable of Rich man and Lazarus;

30 “‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’31 “He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”

So, we have all these witnesses of the objectivity of the Resurrection. We have the documents of Scripture that spoke of it before hand and yet we have theologians — so called — who refuse to believe we have an objective word and instead want to base the reliability of the resurrection upon their own subjective experience.  Whatever that is it is not the way the matter is presented in Scripture.

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If there are those who want to anchor the Resurrection in their own subjective word even among the good guys in the white hats the Resurrection often gets short shrift. One can find a great deal on the death of Christ but work on the Resurrection is sometimes sparse.

Richard Gaffin, Jr., has shown in his book “Resurrection and Redemption” a paucity in our Theological texts on the significance of the Resurrection. Gaffin cites that Theologians such as Charles Hodge, William Shedd, Abraham Kuyper, Louis Berkhof, and John Murray virtually ignored the resurrection’s significance in their discussions of Christ’s salvific work, even though they had a great deal to say concerning His death. (page 12)

This has also been apparent in the Theologies of other solid orthodox men like Robert Reymond, and A. H. Strong as well as less rigorously orthodox theologians such as Lewis Sperry Chafer, John Walvoord, and Wayne Grudem.

So given both this heretical theology which reinterprets the Resurrection in a baleful direction and this neglecting of duty which hasn’t adequately drawn out the meaning of the Resurrection what might we say are some effects of the Resurrection upon our Christian World and life view?

I.) Dispositional — Joy Unspeakable

John 20:20 After He had said this, He showed them His hands and His side. The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.

We perhaps easily understand the Disciples joy. They had thought that their Master and friend … the one they had thought was the Messiah, had been successfully eliminated by their Judean enemies. Doubtless, they may have thought they were next on the hit list. Therefore, it is understandable that they would find joy that the Jesus was alive.

_____________

“Joy is the normal condition of a believer. His proper state, his healthy state, is that of happiness and gladness.”  Charles Spurgeon

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This joy we should gain from the truthfulness of the Resurrection is, first of all, connected to the fact that the Resurrection verifies all the realities in which we have so invested ourselves.

A.) God reigns … the world is not governed by irredeemable death. We do not live in a time plus chance, plus circumstance world.

B.) God’s justice is certain Scripture teaches that the resurrection was a vindication of the ministry of Jesus.

Scripture teaches that Jesus “Was vindicated in the Spirit.” This refers to the omnipotence of the Holy Spirit raising Jesus of Nazareth from the dead on the third day in fulfillment of the Old Testament Messianic prophecies and according to the Father’s will.

This act “vindicated” Jesus of Nazareth in the sense that it demonstrated that His claims that He was the Son of God were true and that the accusations of His enemies were false and that His execution was a travesty of justice.

The resurrection vindicated Jesus of Nazareth’s claims that He was the Son of God and that faith in Him alone was the only way to receive eternal salvation and escape eternal condemnation.

There are many injustices that are left without vindication on this side. The Resurrection of Jesus gives us certainty that the vindication of God’s cause on all counts will be seen. Injustices will be set right.

C.) Death is not final… We win.

This is the one that means the most to me. I never thought 39 years ago that the toughest part of ministry would be watching people die and seeking to give comfort in a situation that on the face of it looks very ugly.

How often have I turned to the Resurrection accounts to remind myself that is not final. It does not get the last word. This life, as wonderful as it is, does not end in absurdity. It ends with glorious Resurrection.

The Resurrection of kith and kin. Resurrection of those I could only admire from afar. Resurrection of the flock. Christ’s resurrection delivers me from … delivers all God’s people from the absurdity of ignoring death right up until the point that it can no longer be ignored. Our loved ones will die. We will die.

But because of Christ’s resurrection we will live again. This should give us joy.. and all the more we get closer to that inevitable date.

Out of the verity of Christ’s Resurrection, we can find joy in the midst of the hardships, disappointments, and trials of life.  He who is Resurrected is at the Right hand of the Father praying for us. He who is Resurrected has promised He would never leave us nor forsake us. He who is Resurrected has promised that we are more than conquerors in Him. These are the concrete truths out of which joy is constructed.

But there is another aspect of where we find Joy in the Resurrection that I want to briefly speak of and that is the Joy found in the certainty that because of the Resurrection of Christ, the Resurrection of the World has begun.  The Resurrection of Christ has set off a chain reaction of Resurrection. St. Paul often will call it “the age to come.” The “age to come” might also be called the Resurrected age.  In Colossians Paul writes that we have been translated into the Kingdom of God’s Dear Son…. we have been placed into the Resurrected age. We are the Resurrected people. Scripture teaches we, even now, have been raised with Christ (Col. 3:1). Having been raised with Christ even now we have tasted of the age to come (Hebrew 6:5). With the coming of Christ, the blessings of the future are manifested among God’s people in the present age.

Christ’s victory over death has far-reaching ripple effects.  Our postmillennial hopes are pinned upon the age to come which has been inaugurated by the Resurrection of Christ.  This age to come is the Resurrected age. All of this is why the Apostle can say,

II Cor. 5:17Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away.Behold, the new has come!

So, here we are a people who share in Christ’s resurrection who have been translated into the Kingdom of God’s Dear Son. This by itself provides the sinews and tendons of irrepressible joy.

Summarizing, with Resurrection comes joy and part of this joy is the joy of knowing that with Christ’s Resurrection God inaugurates His new age as the means by which the old age will be pushed back and overcome. This truth is our Joy and the World’s fear and trembling.

Already in the NT this joy is everywhere evident. It sings the praises of God, “who according to His great mercy begat us again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”

II.) Anthropological — Man has an eternal destiny and so significance

20 But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. 21 For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. 22 For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. 23 But each in turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him.

The Resurrection of Christ reminds us that man as man has meaning.  Without the Resurrection of Christ, there is no transcendent reason to think that man is anything but matter in motion.

But in the Resurrection of Christ we see that man has an eternal destiny and in having an eternal destiny we learn of the significance of man who was made a little lower than the angels.

Because the Resurrection teaches us that resurrection is in each man’s future and so man has significance we command all men everywhere to Repent out of compassion.  Because the Resurrection teaches that resurrection is in each man’s future and thus that man has significance we try and treat people on the basis of that significance.

C. S. Lewis,

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people.

The Resurrection of Christ as we connect it to the promise of Resurrection of all men reminds us that there are no little people. No people who are insignificant or unimportant. No people who deserve any less from us than any image bearer of God might expect.  When we deal with people we are dealing with those who have lived between the eternities and who will live for eternity.

As Calvinists, we would do well to remember this. Too often we are guilty of treating people abruptly and abrasively. The Resurrection reminds us that all men will be resurrected and so all men have eternal significance.

III.) Supernatural

The Resurrection is one of the greatest Miracles in the Scripture. In terms of Worldview, it reminds us that we live in a Universe that is sustained and Governed by God and it reminds us that we are Spiritual as well as corporeal beings.

The Supernatural is part of our Worldview. We are not governed by time plus chance plus circumstance. We are not, as I noted earlier, matter in motion.

Because of the Resurrection and so our confidence in the Supernatural, it is not the case that,

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Or as more recently said in a novel by ― Janne Teller, Nothing

“The reason dying is so easy is because death has no meaning… And the reason death has no meaning is because life has no meaning. All the same, have fun!”

But because of the imprint of the Supernatural, which the Resurrection bears witness too, we are a people who lean into life differently than the consistent pagan. Because of our conviction of the reality of the Supernatural, we know life has meaning and that the meaning of this life will be taken into the next.

Our certitude regarding the Supernatural gives us the strength to hold the hand of a loved one dying of cancer knowing all is well. Our certitude regarding the Supernatural means the confidence of knowing that the colossal injustices in this life will one day be properly adjudicated. Our certitude regarding the Supernatural means that we adopt the ethic, law and so lifestyle of a God to whom we know we have one day to answer. Our certitude regarding Supernatural resurrection is that which makes marriages last, binds the generations together, and convinces us that all of life is not merely a social construct that can be redefined in any way we might imagine.

The Resurrection is riven with the supernatural and its reality reminds us daily that nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight and so everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.

What kind of Christianity is it that desires to strip out the Supernatural in the Resurrection? It is a Christianity that leaves man as God with all the cruelty that arrangement has demonstrated time and again through the centuries.

Conclusion

And so these are just three ways that we might note wherein the Resurrection affects our worldview and so the way we understand and lean into the world. We might also have noted, had we time, how it is that confidence in the Resurrection gives us a future orientation. We might have spoken about how it is that the Resurrection confirms that our sin and guilt has been removed. We might have examined how it is that the Resurrection fills us with confidence and hope and how that impacts the lives we live.  We might also have examined that because of the Resurrection we have been empowered with the Spirit of Christ who has been poured out upon God’s people for service, obedience, and perseverance.

It is our certainty of the Resurrection of Christ that has so much made us the people we are that we can say that there would be no hope apart from the Resurrection. The West would not be the West and we would not be who we are were it not the steady abiding conviction of the Resurrection of Christ. Ideas have consequences.

We can well understand how it is the case that if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins.

 

Good Friday 2024 — The Cross & Reconciliation

I Cor. 5:17.) if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here 18.) All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: 19 that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.

Note 1st that verticality of this passage

“All this is from God”

The Spirit inspired Paul has been writing about the new creation… the full salvation in Christ and He plainly says that “All this is from God.”

This reminds us that that the all Paul speaks of includes the provision of Christ to go to the Cross to bear our sins. Christ going to the Cross was part of the “All this is from God.” The triune God is the alpha and the omega of our Christian faith.

This needs to be said repeatedly in our current climate. It needs to be said again to those who grew up with evangelism that began with “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” That statement might be true but it misses the God-centeredness of the Cross and misses that “All this is from God.”

The point here is that “All of this” that St. Paul speaks of teaches us that the all this is all about God before it is at all about us. The “All of this from God” not man centered. The “All of this from God,” is God centered.

Our Christianity is theocentric — God centered and not man-centered.

Even when Christ is hanging on the Cross as the center of Paul’s “All of this is from God,” we understand that it is not primarily about us. The cross wherein reconciliation is effected is ultimately about God.

The main thrust of this point is that the Cross, where reconciliation takes place, is not ultimately about us. In point of fact the Cross of Jesus Christ is only proximately about us. Before we can say anything true about the Cross in relation to us, we must first speak about the Cross and its meaning in relation to God.

At this point we are seeking to talk about what Theologian C. E. B. Cranfield in his commentary on Romans talked about as “the innermost meaning of the cross” (The Epistle to the Romans, 213).

And frankly, in all my reading and study one doesn’t stumble across very often this God-centered understanding of the Cross. In all the sermons I’ve listened to it is only been occasional the the case that the sermon was dealing with the God-centered understanding of the Cross.

I want to be clear I’m not denying that the Cross has effects, consequences, and glorious implications for man. However, I am convinced that before we talk about the secondary meaning of the Cross we should talk about the primary meaning of the Cross.

Steve Camp captured something of what I am going to be driving at this morning when we talk about what it means to think theocentrically about the cross.

Camp wrote these lyrics,

Christ died for God and God was satisfied with Christ
Pure, unblemished sacrifice
Oh, Son of Grace

Christ died for God and God has made Him Lord of all
For He drank the bitter gall
The cup of wrath

Christ Died For God
Steve Camp

There it is. The theocentric meaning of the Cross.

Christ died for God.

The deep inside meaning. The Ultimate meaning. The theology from above. The primary meaning. The theocentric meaning.

How many times have you heard this from pulpits? From your own reading? I was in the ministry for almost a decade before I stumbled across it in Jonathan Edwards and before him for John Owen.

Hear Owen for example in a catechism he used to teach.

Q. In what does the exercise of his priestly office for us chiefly consist?

A. In offering up himself an acceptable sacrifice on the cross, so satisfying the justice of God for our sins, removing his curse from our persons, and bringing us unto him. — Chapter 13.

John Owen

Note that before Owen speaks about the curse being removed from our persons he notes that Christ satisfied the justice of God for our sins. There it is. Christ died for God. Theocentric thinking on the Cross.

Well, where did they get this idea that Christ died for God? They saw it in Scripture.

Romans 3:23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, 26 to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

There it is. “The Father sets forth the Son as a propitiation by His Blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness.”

Christ died for God.

The Old Testament anticipates Romans when in Isaiah we read,

“But the LORD was pleased To crush Him, putting Him to grief; If He would render Himself as a guilt offering, He will see His offspring, He will prolong His days, And the good pleasure of the LORD will prosper in His hand.”

Isaiah 53:10

There it is. The theocentrism of the Cross. The Lord is pleased to crush the Son.

There is a vertical dimension of the Cross that must be spoken of before we speak of the horizontal dimension. Christ dies for God before Christ dies for man.

Note secondly the reconciliation

When we look at the idea of reconciliation we first notice that the text reinforces what we just noted … it is God who reconciled us to Himself. God did all the doing.

This kind of language from the Apostle explains why the Reformed have always been so put out with Arminianism (such as you find targeted in the Canons of Dordt) and with Roman Catholicism which the Reformation defined itself against.

It is God who reconciled us to Himself. No contributions on or part. Dead men can’t contribute anything to coming back to life.

This is a significant reason why we are Reformed. We believe in God’s sovereignty in all things w/o exception and that includes salvation. We affirm with tenacity and without equivocation that God alone reconciled us to Himself.

When we consider reconciliation we understand that the premise here is that there are two parties who are at enmity with one another. Reconciliation is the work by which that alienation between the two parties is put to an end.

Of course the two parties at war w/ one another are God and fallen man. And the passage teaches that it was only as through Christ the reconciliation was effected. And this reconciliation was effected by Christ on the Cross. Indeed this is why we call this day Good Friday. Good Friday is good because a reconciliation has been accomplished that otherwise could have never been accomplished.

Christ dying on the Cross is our reconciliation and the reason that we have an interest in gathering to worship on Good Friday. If not for Christ being our reconciliation on the cross the last place we would be on a Friday evening is a Church.

So, God is the author of our reconciliation but He elected to provide that reconciliation only through Christ. This explains why Biblical Christians insist on the absolute necessity of a known Christ in order to have peace with God. There is no concourse with God apart from the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Christ is the one who extinguished the necessary and just opposition of God towards fallen man that was an immovable force set against us, while at the same time removing our opposition to God. That opposition and hatred of God is sin that is paid for, for God’s people, in Christ’s death on the Cross.

You see then the reconciliation provided by Christ on the Cross was not only a reconciling of the elect’s sinful hatred against God but it is also a reconciling of God’s just wrath against man. So on the Cross there is a two-fold movement of Reconciliation that is occurring in Christ.

The plain meaning, thus, is that through Jesus Christ on the Cross, God established the basis of agreement between men and God as estranged, removed the barrier to the sinner’s approach to Himself, and accepted the work of propitiation in Christ.

Note thirdly here that the reconciliation was costly

God did not let bygones be bygones. The sin of man required restitution to God’s Holiness. God could not remain just and holy and merely be reconciled. No, reconciliation had to be on the basis of the satisfaction of man’s debt against God.

So, yes reconciliation was accomplished in and through Christ but that reconciliation was a work of restitution satisfying the father’s just claim against sinful man.

This reminds us of the necessary connection between reconciliation and restitution.

And all of this is from God

Out of love the Father sends the Son forth to take upon Himself the Father’s just penalty for sin so that reconciliation can be accomplished. Out of eternal love the Son defends the honor of the Father’s promise to give sin it’s full recompense. Christ died for God. Died for His glory. Died to give Him all honor. Died that the Father might be just and justifier of those who have faith in Jesus. Died that reconciliation would have its proper foundation found in a restitution that satisfied the loving Father.

God Himself — whose justice required the price of propitiation in order to be reconciled. God Himself who rendered up the price of the just penalty required by God. We see thus that it is God who justly required the penalty, and God who paid the penalty. God who required Justice and God whose Justice when it fell, fell as mercy for us.

Christ died for God.

Donald Macleod gets at all this in his “Christ Crucified: Understanding the Atonement — p 71”

“It was no part of the work of Christ to make God love us, The very fact of his being on earth at all was proof of the divine love. The business of the atonement, therefore, was to propitiate the God who already loves us: to lay the foundation for an advocacy directed towards him specifically as Father (1 John 2: 1). God unequivocally requires such propitiation, but in the last analysis God also provides the propitiation and God even becomes the propitiation. The whole cost of our redemption is borne by the triune God. In that sense, the atonement is a transaction entirely internal to the trinity. But by virtue of the incarnation, it is also external. It takes place not in heaven, but on Calvary; not in eternity, but on Good Friday.”

May God grant us His grace on this Good Friday to once again be lost in wonder love and praise for the great gift of the Christ on the Cross providing a reconciliation that can never be revoked.

 

Poking Holes In Andrew Klavan’s “Argument”

“The Holocaust was the crucifixion compulsively reenacted on a grand scale: an attempt to kill God’s people in order to extinguish the Light of the World that shows us where we are(1). Sigmund Freud called this the ‘return of the repressed,’ a concept he discusses, not so oddly enough, in his essay, ‘The Uncanny(2).’ According to this idea, we bury the trauma and guilt of our past — in this case the murder of God — and then we keep reenacting that trauma helplessly, in this case through the murder of God’s people (3). The things we face come back and back to us, shaping our actions, getting bigger and bigger, until finally we either face the cause of them or they destroy us.(4)”

Andrew Klavan
In leaked book extracts arguing that the Holocaust was a reenactment of the Crucifixion and that it justifies Talmudist claims to be a chosen race. 

Errant categories

(1.) We, as Christians, have exactly zero reasons to believe that Talmudists are the light of the world. Indeed, Christians are required to believe that is not the  case. Scripture clearly has Jesus Christ saying “I am the light of the world.”

(3.) Who is Klavan’s “we” who are burying the guilt of our past? St. Peter, in Scripture says that the “we” that Klavan references are the one’s “who by the hands of wicked men put Him (Jesus) to death by nailing Him to the cross..” So, in order for Klavan to be accurate in his “we” above in sentence 3, he would have to think that it is the Talmudists who killed themselves in the Holocaust in order to bury their guilt for killing their Messiah. That is the only way the sentence could make sense. Of course Klavan doesn’t mean that but instead by using the “we” in the way he does he obfuscates historical reality.

(3.) We must ask Mr. Klavan, who was it, per scripture, that “murdered God.” I’ll give some hints… 1 Thessalonians 2:15, Acts 2:23, Acts 7:52.We should note here that God being God He can not be murdered. Teasing that out would take us far afield from critiquing this statement by Klavan.

(3.) The Talmudists are not God’s people any more or any less than Inuits, Peruvians, Japanese, or Mongolians are God’s people. The only people that God has had since Pentecost is the Church as it exists in nation by nation. The idea that Talmudists remain God’s people even though they “crucified the Lord of glory,” is a Dispensational idea birthed at the end of the 19th century and then popularized in the 20th century by C. I. Scofield’s bible notes. It is not a position that was ever advanced in Church history until that time. Of course Talmudists may become God’s people if they repent and trust Jesus Christ alone as their Messiah, and so cease being Talmudists.

(3.) If we want to see the murder of God’s people in History we’d have to look at the Holodomor by the Jewish Bolsheviks against the Christian Ukrainians, or the slaughter of the Christian Armenians by the Turks at the beginning of the 20th century or perhaps even the slaughter of the Christians at Vendee during the French Revolution or the slaughter of the Huguenots in the 16th century. Here we see genuine examples of the attempt to murder God’s people, and that because they belong to God’s Church.

The Salvific Malfeasance of Egalitarianism

“Scripture presumes and defends the natural order of things. If we twist nature we’ll twist Scripture too. It’s also Satan’s major point of attack against the church today. That alone should make it (Egalitarianism) a major focus.”

Rev. Michael Spangler

Is the combat against Egalitarianism a matter of battling against a doctrine that affects salvation? Is the battle against Egalitarianism a battle waged in favor of a doctrine of the first order?

Egalitarianism is Christological heresy since if there is no distinctions among peoples as peoples the necessity for Christ to be born of the line of David, of the tribe of Judah is implicitly denied. Egalitarianism would have to say it didn’t matter what people Jesus belonged.

Egalitarianism is theological heresy because in the claim that all men are the same is the eventual inescapable outcome that man and God are likewise the same.

Egalitarianism is anthropological heresy since it denies the distinctions that God Himself makes between men and women and as between the nations.

Egalitarianism is soteriological heresy since implicit in the claim that all men are equal is the parallel claim that all men can be equally saved by other gods equal to Christ. Show me a consistent egalitarian and I’ll show you a universalist.

Allow me to posit that an Egalitarian who refuses to repent of his Egalitarianism can no more be saved than an Arian who refuses to repent of his Arianism, or can no more be saved than someone who refuse to repent of his insistence that we are not saved by Christ alone. Opposition to Egalitarianism is opposition to a teaching that, if allowed in the Church, would abominate the Church.