Believe, Because He Lives - Pastor Tom Loghry
As we celebrate the resurrection of Christ, we are reminded of the truth our salvation through His sacrifice.
Hey there, Pastor Tom here. I hope you enjoyed this sermon I offered to Rockland Community Church. Rockland Community Church is located at 212 Rockland Road in North Scituate, Rhode Island, just around the bend from the Scituate Public High School. We invite you to join us in person or virtually this Sunday as we join our voices in song in a special service led by Deacon Dennis Prior. It's our joy to welcome you into our community.
Transcription:
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don't know where they have put him.
So Peter and the other disciples started for the tomb. John 20:1-2.
Before Jesus was crucified, while his life still hung in the balance before Pontius Pilate, he told the Roman governor something interesting in his interrogation. He told Pontius, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me and to this, the governor replied, dismissively, what is truth?
We live in a world that tends to take the same posture as Pontius Pilate when it comes to the truth, we live in a world in which the truth is what we make it. The truth is whatever fits my narrative, brings me comfort, gives me hope. The truth is whatever works for me, it is my truth. If we think about religion that way, if we think about Christianity that way, it commends the assessment offered by the father of communism, Karl Marx, who offered this commentary on religion. He says, religious suffering is, at one in the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.
It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them, to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them, to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore an embryo, the criticism of that veil of tears of which religion is the halo. Now, if you weren't tracking with what Marx was saying there, what he's saying is, is that religion is just a drug. It makes us feel good in the face of the pain of this world, and if our religion entails any suffering, then we're just taking that up as an act of protest.
Again, just as a feisty sort of feel good measure. It's just some truth we've made up. Karl says we'd do better to drop the religious illusions and try to create real happiness on Earth, but if we were to take Marx at his word, we might imagine that religion would've been dropped off long ago if we could so easily obtain real happiness with just some focused effort.
The news cycle brings no hope of a coming Marxist utopia or any sort other sort of utopia. We continue to suffer. We continue to come up short again and again. Marx was a naive fool in thinking we can drum up some solution by the dent of our efforts. At the same time, though, I can sympathize with Marx if religion is all just some concoction to help us grin and bear our lot in life.
Why bother with the illusion? And this is what brings us to the matter at hand. The resurrection of Jesus from the dead. It either happened or it is a mere illusion. If Jesus was not raised from the dead, the Apostle Paul joins the opinion of Marx in 1 Corinthians 15:32 saying, if the dead are not raised, let's eat and drink for tomorrow we die. But if Jesus is raised from the dead, what then? We're going to examine this morning, this reality. Contemplating it based on the record of the Apostle John and his testimony of Jesus' resurrection from the dead. So we look at John 20, and we've already heard verses one and two read. It says that early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw the stone had been removed from the entrance.
She came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said they have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we don't know where they have put him. It appears here in this situation that Mary Magdalene is functioning as a spokeswoman of sorts, because while we don't see the other women explicitly mentioned here, we do know that there were other women with her based on the testimony of the other gospels.
And we also have a little hint here because notice in verse two she says they have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we don't know where they have put him. In any case, Mary's taking a, a leading role here and reporting this shocking discovery that the tomb is empty and they've gone to Peter and John, who's not named here explicitly. He refers to himself simply as the other disciple, the one Jesus loved. Now, in saying that he does, he's not, he's not suggesting that Jesus didn't love the other disciples. It's simply that John believes the most significant thing about his identity, simply that Jesus loved him. And if you really contemplate the depths of Christ's love for you, you would probably do the same. Mary goes to Peter and John because they, she supposes they'll know what to do. They can find out what has happened with Jesus' body. Now notice that Mary does not suppose that Jesus has been raised from the dead. She thinks someone's taken his body. She says, we don't know where they've, they've put him.
Peter and John don't suppose that Jesus has been from the dead either. They're concerned and so they take off to see the tomb for themselves. So in verses three and four it says, so Peter and the other disciples started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there, but did not go in.
Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus' head. The cloth was still lying in its place separate from the linen. Finally, the other disciple who had reached the tomb first also went inside.
He saw and believed. They still did not understand from scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead. Then the disciples went back to where they were staying. Now we just get a sense of just the utter authenticity of this record based on the details that are given to us here by John. He could have just simply said that they both ran to the tomb, but he includes the detail that he beat Peter there.
It was a foot race. It was like, I'm faster than him. It has been supposed that maybe John was a little bit younger than Peter. Any case he's a little faster, and so he beat him there and he looked in the tomb, but he doesn't go in. We don't know why. Maybe it was just too much for him to take in and he didn't want to go in by himself.
Maybe he wanted to allow Peter to go in first. Any case. He's waiting. Peter finally shows up and Peter just goes straight in. In keeping with his personality, he just dives right in and what he discovers is that the strips of linen that had been wrapped around Jesus' dead body, the cloth that would've covered his face are now empty, and they're simply lying there on the tomb.
In other translations, this is the NIV translation, in other translations, in fact says that the head covering was in fact folded or rolled. So they're looking into the tomb and you can imagine what it would've looked like for Jesus' body to be wrapped. We have a depiction here of Lazarus. It's kind of like a mummy.
A lot of you kids have maybe seen some books or television, some mummies. That's what Jesus' body would've looked like when he was buried, wrapped up in cloth. But as they go into the tomb, again, they just find the cloth that had been covering him, wrapped, they, they're just laying there on, on the tomb right in place.
Now, this is an interesting detail to include. John mentions it because he believes it's significant. And when you think about it, it truly is significant because if someone had stolen his body, why would they have gone through the trouble of removing the wrappings? Certainly the Romans wouldn't have gone through the trouble of of doing that.
And if it was anyone that was Jewish that had done that, they would've not wanted to have done that because the touch of dead body, it's contaminating, not in a medical sort of sense, but in a, like a ritually, unclean sort of sort of sense. It's, it's told in the Old Testament how they shouldn't touch dead bodies.
Yet here we find that Jesus' body wrappings are left behind. Who would've gone through the trouble of doing that? And in fact, it's been suggested that maybe even the face covering itself had been underneath all the other wrappings, and it's difficult because we just don't have enough detail here to know if maybe the wrappings themselves were just simply left in place.
We don't know how Jesus came out of the wrappings, whether his body was just transported out or if he was raised up and then unwrapped like that, and then it was put on the slab on which he was lying. But in any case, the point is, is that this is truly unusual, and it's not in keeping with what someone would do if they just decided they wanted to steal the body.
They would've just grabbed it, grabbed his body, and ran. Now John finally decides to go in and when he sees this, when he sees these strips of linen laying in place where Jesus' body has been, it says that he saw and believed. Now, some commentators have suggested that, well, maybe when he, when it says that he believed he, it meant that he simply believed the report of Mary, that bodies, Jesus' body had been removed from the tomb.
But that's self-evident. It's self-evident that obviously his body's not there. It seems rather that he actually believed that Christ was raised from the dead. And yet his reasons for that are not based on what Jesus has told them or what the scriptures have said because it says right in the next verse that of both he and Peter, they still did not understand from scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.
And so it was more of like an intuition thing. It seems as though that, that John said, just said, I think he's alive. It wasn't based on what the scriptures told him he should have expected. It was just based on what he was seeing there. And in Luke 24: 12 it, it says that Peter, as he went away, it said that he was wondering to himself what had happened.
So maybe Peter himself was even rolling around in his mind, this idea that Jesus was raised from the dead, even if he didn't express that belief. Now as we go to the Old Testament, when we're talking about the scriptures in the time of the apostles, that's what they're referring to. The New Testament hasn't been written yet.
They're talking about the Old Testament. We find prophecy given, which should lead them to expect that the Messiah would die and be raised from the dead. We look at Isaiah 53, and this is one of the most significant prophecies in all of the Old Testament because it sounds like it's straight out of the New Testament.
It sounds as though it was written at the time of Christ as right at the moment in which he is being nailed to the cross and yet is written something like 700 years prior. The prophet Isaiah writes this in Isaiah 53 verses nine through 11. He was assigned a grave with the wicked and with the rich and his death.
He had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth yet it was the Lord's will to crush him and cause him to suffer. And though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand after he suffered. He will see the light of life and and be satisfied by his knowledge.
My righteous servant will justify many and he will bear their iniquities. So notice. Yes, it says that this suffering servant, the one who would be the Messiah, Jesus, he will bear the sins of mankind. He would be our substitute. He would share a grave with the wicked, with the rich in his death, which seems to be pointing to the fact that he was laid in the tomb of that belonged to Joseph of Arimathea.
A rich, a rich man. All of that applies. He is this offering for sin, and yet he's gonna live. He's going to die. And yet it says he will see his offspring and prolong his days. And the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand. He will see the light of life and be satisfied. How can that be possible? How can he go to the grave and that be said to be true unless he needs to be raised from the dead?
Scriptures should have been pointing John and Peter to this reality, but it was not coming to their minds at that moment. All they had was, all that was coming to mind to them was just a scene that was before them, and it was enough it seems for John to believe that he had been raised from the dead.
Now we could move on to how Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene, the other women, and, and that's just an important note, the fact that the women were the first ones to see Jesus, because in ancient societies at that time, women wouldn't have been considered reliable first reporters. The disciples don't care in making their record, they said, this is what happened.
The women were the first ones to see him. We could look at their testimonies, we could also look at how he eventually went to the disciples and ate and talked with them. And this testimony, all of it would point toward the reality of Jesus' resurrection. But I wanna take you to the skeptical disciple. The disciple who thought the rest of them were high on opium, the disciple Thomas.
So we jump down to verse 24. It says, now Thomas, also known as Didymus, one of the 12, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, we have seen the Lord. But he said to them, unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were and put my hands into his side, I will not believe so.
Thomas was not there, but he did hear their testimony and think about this. He knew the other disciples personally, we don't know them personally, we're believing in their testimony. Thomas knew them personally. They're saying, no, really, Thomas. We saw Jesus alive. He talked with us. He ate with us. Thomas is insistent, says, I'm not gonna believe, I saw him die. Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were and put my hands into his side, I will not believe. A pretty notable contrast here between John and Thomas. John, who just saw the, the cloth laying on the tomb and, and believed and Thomas who was like, I've gotta touch him. I've gotta put my hands right where he was wounded to believe.
Well, as it would turn out, the opportunity would arrive for him to believe based on that revelation. Continuing on in verse 26, there's a week later. You have a whole week going on here where the rest of the disciples believe, Thomas is like, Nope, I don't believe unless I see him. It says a week later, his disciples were in the house again and Thomas was with them.
Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, peace be with you. Then he said to Thomas, put your finger here. See my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe. Thomas said to him, my Lord, my God. And Jesus told them, because you have seen me, you have believed.
Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. The disciples were all together in the house. The doors were locked, and yet Jesus enters into their midst. This is just another signal to us that the resurrection body of Christ is a transformed body. I showed you that depiction of Lazarus, Jesus' resurrection is different than when Lazarus is raised from the dead 'cause Lazarus is raised from the dead and he died again. Jesus was raised with a transformed body that obviously could do different things like enter into a, a locked room. But as we see here was also actually material. So that he could be touched. And so that's something to keep in mind. When we look forward to our own resurrection, we are going to receive the same sort of resurrection bodies, the same sort of body that Jesus himself received on his resurrection.
So Jesus says, essentially, after it's saying, peace be with you. 'cause you can imagine it might be a little startling for Jesus to show up like that. He invites Thomas, does You want to know if I'm alive? Go ahead. Put your fingers in my hands. Put your hands on my side.
And in doing so, at least we might suppose or maybe just from seeing him, but as we might suppose, he actually went ahead and did that. Thomas concludes my Lord and my God. He believed. Now the thing that's interesting about, again, how this all transpired is you gotta imagine this was kind of embarrassing for Thomas to say, yeah, that's what happened to me.
I didn't believe, I was stubborn about it and it took Jesus showing up like that for me to believe is again pointing to the authenticity of these gospel accounts. If the disciples were concocting all this up, they could have written the story much differently in a way that would've put them all in a much better light.
But instead, what we find is that they are very human. They're very much like you and me. And Jesus anticipates that, yes, it will be difficult for many of us to believe without having this opportunity that Thomas had, but he calls us blessed, he says. Because you have seen me, Thomas, you have believed.
Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. So Jesus calls all us blessed who have believed without having that opportunity. And part of the reason why we have come to believe no doubt is because of our personal experience, our personal encounter with the presence of Christ and how he has worked upon our own hearts.
We also believe on the basis of the testimony of the apostles, not just what they have said, but how they lived their lives thereafter. We think about Thomas, so many of the disciples suffered and died from the faith tradition says that Thomas went to the East, he traveled as far as India tradition says, bringing the gospel. A guy who said, I'm not gonna believe unless I touch him and see him. A guy like that doesn't change his tune unless he actually sees and believes. You don't just do that for kicks. And the disciples are utterly clear about the nature of their testimony. They don't claim that they just had this experience, a visionary experience of seeing Jesus.
They don't just go back and try to say, well, Jesus' death was really significant and he's spiritually alive in heaven. No, they insist upon the res, his resurrection from the dead. John, in his letter first John, verses one one through three says this. It says that which was from the beginning, which we have heard.
Which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched. This we proclaim concerning the word of life. The life appeared. We have seen it and testified to it, and we proclaimed to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We've proclaimed to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us, and our fellowship was with the father and with his son, Jesus Christ.
Jesus really lived. Jesus, really dying, and Jesus really rose from the dead.
And John brings his gospel to his conclusion. In John 20, verses 30 through 31, he says, Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of disciples, which are not recorded in this book, but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. It is possible for us to have life in Jesus' name by believing in him only because he lives. Because Jesus lives we can believe as he said, that he is in fact ransom for our sins. In Mark 10: 45, he says, the son of man, for even the son of man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. We can believe what he says in Luke 24, that after, after he would suffer and die and be raised from the dead, that repentance for the forgiveness of sins would be preached in his name to all nations.
Beginning at Jerusalem, we see that happen. And we can believe that because he lives, we can in fact be forgiven for our sins. Because Jesus lives, we can believe that we too can live again, that death does not have the final say. In John 11, Jesus says, I'm the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live even though they die, and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Great claim Jesus. You can imagine at the time, sounds great, Jesus. But how can I know that's gonna actually happen? How can I know that's gonna be true for me? We can know it's gonna be true for us because it was true for him, because though he was crucified, he was professionally killed.
Three days later he rose from the dead. And because Jesus lives we know that we can become a new creation in him. We can become new people. We can be born again and bear good fruit. We can live our, leave our old lives behind us. The past does not define our future because we have a new future in Jesus Christ.
He tells us in John 15, I'm the vine. You are the branches. He who abides in me and I in him bears much fruit. That holds true if he is alive. If he's dead, we have no promise of anything coming alive in us. But because he lives, because we know he lives, we know that people can change, not because there's some shred of goodness in them, but because of the power of Christ, who indwells those who put their faith in him. And so we have an invitation now to join Thomas in making this confession, my Lord and my God. The apostle Paul says in Romans 10:9, if you declare with your mouth Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you'll be saved.
It's as simple as that. We abandon our allegiance to sin, our allegiance to the demonic rebellion against the reign of God over his creation, and we make our confession God, I need a savior. I need Jesus. And I believe that his death is a sufficient ransom for my salvation, that because he lives I know that he's accepted by you, and I know that I too will live again.
All this is ours, forgiveness and eternal life, if we confess that Jesus is Lord and believe in him for salvation. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the pivotal truth upon which real hope for humanity rests. Apart from Jesus we are left with our self-help spirituality in utopian schemes. The resurrection of Jesus is something solid.
It's real. It's not mere opium. And when you comprehend this truth and what it means, you'll make your confession of faith and not look back. So to those who have yet to believe, I urge you, believe, and to those who do believe, be encouraged by our strong foundation of hope. Don't look back, don't look elsewhere.
Look forward to the new creation Jesus will bring at his return. Look forward to your resurrection, as you remember, and celebrate Christ's resurrection. Let's pray.
Father,
thank you.
Thank you for not abandoning us.
Thank you for not leaving us in the rottenness of our own evil and rebellion against you. Thank you, father, that in Jesus Christ, we have a confident hope of salvation. Jesus is not any mere theory, but he is a concrete reality because you sent your son to take on human flesh to live the life all of us were supposed to live. To die the death that we all deserved, and you raised him from the dead so that we may share in his resurrection life. Thank you, father, that this has really happened.
Thank you, father, that there is more to come when Christ returns and the dead will be raised and we will live forever with you. We give you praise in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Intro/Outro Song
Title: River Meditation
Artist: Jason Shaw
Source:http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Jason_Shaw/Audionautix_Acoustic/RIVER_MEDITATION___________2-58
License:(CC BY 3.0 US)