He purposed in Christ to bring all things
in heaven and on earth together.
Ephesians 1:10

The Resurrection – what a theme! I would like to take time to meditate on it.

What will last for ever is not pre-fabricated and put together overnight. God is building the future and it is not synthetic or produced with a magic miracle or two. He made heaven and earth in six days but he has been working on the future across the millennia. At this very moment his own personal effort is involved. It is the divine hologram of what would be shown as his own Son descending to earth: “The Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world” (Revelation 13:8).

What is in God’s mind has not even entered our minds. That would be impossible. To achieve his intentions God needs time and the right materials, living materials, us humans. People are the raw medium of the world to come – hard, gritty, inflexible, animated stuff, people with a will of their own. His hand is shaping things of splendour and the architecture of endless ages.

Down to the last atom and particle, the universe is evidence of his all-encompassing wisdom. However, God’s new creation presented him with some new and intractable problems, as many problems as the people involved.

They could not be solved by exercising omnipotence, mere power. An amazing solution was laid down with the first line on his drawing board, namely, his Son! His Son would die, break death’s chains, live again, and then – more than that – by his victory would infect us all with new life, life beyond life, life upon life.

Resurrection is his benchmark

God’s plan is still being implemented now and is proving to be no fiction. Believers everywhere sense it and commit themselves to share in the divine programme. Every prayer, every word of witness, every victory, every penny given, with God the trillions of sacrifices and efforts all add up.

This resurrection event was no afterthought, a hastily contrived solution to a desperate emergency. God is never desperate, never surprised by an emergency. It meant resurrection, and resurrection there would be – and there was! God said it and he did it!

Soundless but hell-shaking

In the quiet, misty glimmer of a dawning spring day in Jerusalem, in a garden tomb chiselled out of the rock, an explosion of life occurred, soundless but hell-shaking. Jerusalem sits at the meeting point of three continents, Europe, Asia and Africa. From that garden tomb ripples of new life crossed continental borders and swept on to the ends of the earth, a century-old tidal wave reaching us today.

The resurrection was planned before the world began and was slotted into place by God’s precision engineering. Jesus rose from the dead as appointed and at the appropriate hour.

This was too big to be just a miracle. Miracles were no more than grains of wheat blown from the harvest field where God was at work. When Lazarus walked out of his tomb, when Jesus gave the widow of Nain her son back, when the little girl was given back to the synagogue president … yes, they were miracles, wonders, but to many onlookers only nine-day wonders. Yet what happened on that first Easter morning extended across all future horizons, changing the world and impacting us now in the third millennium.

Christ’s awakening on the stone shelf of the tomb, his standing up and walking to the entrance was a moment shielded from all observation by granite walls. There was no audience to witness his rising, but the audience of his being risen, present and alive comprises people around the whole globe – and over two thousand years of history. The first stage was a garden, but the true stage for that event is history. The cosmos is its backdrop.

When Jesus rose from the dead, the Shekinah glory of the Lord began to shine from ancient texts and passages of the Bible. “After the suffering of his soul, he will see the light of life and be satisfied” (Isaiah 53:11). A light blazed from the garden tomb and the old stories revealed a greater dimension; Israel leaving Egypt, Joseph in prison, the end of Babylon and captivity – the proper way to read them is see Jesus in them. He said that all the Scriptures spoke of him (Luke 24:27), the resurrected One.

Immersed in immortality

The resurrection was more than a miracle, and Jesus was greater than the event. It was not just about the rising but about the person who rose and stands before our eyes so amazing and earth-filling. He himself was a greater wonder than resurrection event. Jesus Christ the Lord was himself the resurrection. “I am the resurrection and the life,” he said (John 11:25), and that is still a profound, even cryptic statement. How can he be the resurrection? Can he be an occurrence? The answer can be found in the common statement that for every event there is a cause. Jesus is the cause of resurrection. He was life itself, and no tomb, no bond could hold him. Today he is life, its very source. It constantly pours from him, first springing up in the garden, resurrection forces, newness of life, new birth, new sons, new goodness, new riches, a flowing stream of goodness from the abundance of God, an endlessly flowing stream.

He is the resurrection and we are in him. We are in the resurrection now. Jesus said, “He who believes in me will live, even though he dies” (John 11:25). Jesus could die and rise again because life is a positive that overwhelms and overcomes all negatives, including death. In him, we are immersed in immortality and will shake off death like a dog shakes off water. The grave could not hold Christ and it cannot hold us, not for ever. Life flows from him to us for ever. “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life”(John 3:36).

He is life, the source of life. Nothing, no man-made cross, no tree twisted into a death rack, could block the fountain. An old hymn says, “Still it flows, as fresh as ever from my Savior’s wounded side.” The Prince of life took manhood upon himself to become vulnerable to human hatred. They took him, brutalised him, hung him up with iron nails, forcibly thrust him beneath the black waters of death, but he rose immortal from that Styx-like river. “I lay down my life only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father” (John 10:17-18).That is what he did. He performed a productive act specifically as a service to mankind, with not one ounce of advantage for himself. He did it purely because his Father and his own love gave him the desire to do so, and what he did then is for us now.

That Easter when Christ rose from the dead affects everybody and everything for ever. It has shaped the lives of hundreds of millions, but that is only an introduction, an overture to the music of God which will fill eternity. That resurrection, its holiness, its purity, its joy, its abounding vitality, will become universal, expanding, enveloping and permeating nature itself, all things, all creatures, and extending to the very heavens. All God’s plans pivot around the death and resurrection of his Son. Jesus himself called the future “the resurrection” (Matthew 22:30). Some are already “children of the resurrection” (Luke 20:36) and will be “united with him in his resurrection” (Romans 6:5). It is all resurrection to come.

Resurrection people

We will be resurrection people, a new order. We will be resurrection beings: “Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).

What grace, what a gift, what a wonderful Lord!