Resurrection Hope for the Christian

One of the disheartening things about Easter is how the secular world turns the event into a merchandising opportunity, all about selling candies and other stuff. It gets worse every year. Also, uninformed Christians join with professing atheists in wrongly saying that Easter is a pagan holiday.

It is of first importance to proclaim the bodily Resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Unfortunately, Christians can add to the distractions mentioned above by over-spiritualizing the Resurrection and forgetting about the physical aspects in our blessed hope.

Looking outward from the empty tomb, Unsplash / Pisit Heng

Sometimes when we write, we word things in such a way as to anticipate skeptics. This is common among apologists. Paul the Apostle added some details and explanations presumably because of heresies that were already developing. In contrast, the Resurrection accounts in the Gospels were straightforward narratives. Also, keep in mind that the disciples clearly believed what they were saying about Jesus rising from the dead — they were witnesses.

Jesus was resurrected and had a spiritual body that could do amazing things, yet he ate with them and could be touched. Those of us who have put our faith in Christ look forward to a glorious resurrection and new bodies. The pain of missing my wife will be gone (as will my physical ailments). She is free from bodily and emotional pain now, as are my oldest brother, mother, father, and others. We will all have a grand reunion and praise our risen Lord! You can share in the joy of believers as well. It is hard to comprehend that the Creator of the universe, God the Son, took the form of the man Jesus, died and was raised from the dead out of love for us sinners.

There are several lines of evidence that argue for early dates for the writing of the Gospel accounts, including regarding the resurrection. English New Testament scholar Tom Wright (though wrong on Creation) points out that the theology in the Gospels regarding the raising of Christ from the dead is largely missing, and not developed as it is in Paul’s writing. The Gospels remark freely on the physical and spiritual nature of the resurrected Christ without concern to counter later heresies. They speak openly of the witness of the women despite it carrying less weight than a man’s testimony in that culture, and they do not speak of the future hope of the believer as Paul does. Wright comments that “ … it is far, far easier to believe that the stories are essentially very early, pre-Pauline, and have not been substantially altered … ”

But sadly, not everyone believed. In Paul’s time there were those in the church at Corinth who denied that the dead could be raised—just as in the modern period today there are atheists and humanists (and even a few Bishops) who deny that people can be raised from the dead because it doesn’t fit with scientific naturalism.

You can read it all at "Hope in the Resurrection of Christ."