Easter 2023

Come behold the wondrous mystery

“Come behold the wondrous mystery Slain by death, the God of life But no grave could e'er restrain Him Praise the Lord; He is alive

We are a mysterious people.

We have gathered from all over Tucson to talk about a Palestinian Jew who 2000 years ago was dead, who then... wasn’t.

Used to be dead. Oxymoronic statement.

Dead things stay dead.

Right?

True.

Until it wasn’t true.

Colossians 1:18 calls Jesus the first born from the dead.

Everything that follows is now different.

I like to think of all history coming to a pinpoint here with Jesus.

Everything in history has been leading up to this moment where there is a grave,

the only way into the future is through the grave.

And Jesus walks out first.

Everything that follows is now seen in light of this event.

This is a cosmic event.

Meaning it effects the whole universe.

It affects the reality of heaven, earth, and hell.

This is the mystery of God!

That something that starts so weak,

naked, on a cross,

becomes the most powerful event in cosmic history.

It’s effects stretch across time and space and invades this very minute.

This resurrection of God from the grave is an event that brings power NOW.

For the Christian, every Sunday is Easter Sunday.

The power of the Spirit in this age is our guarantee that we will one day raise with Christ.

Philippians 3:10–11 HCSB

10 My goal is to know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, 11 assuming that I will somehow reach the resurrection from among the dead.

If we want the power of the resurrection,

or in other words,

if we want to not stay dead, we must know Him.

But knowing Him is the goal,

the resurrection is the product of the goal.

What does it mean to know Him?

The Bible is a binary story.

At it’s most fundamental level it’s the story of two men.

Two sons of God.

The first man is Adam.

Created to be a mini creator.

Created to cultivate the creation and draw out it’s potential.

Created to love his wife and fill the earth with people who love God and His earth.

But instead of cultivating creation he cultivates sin.

And sin, being insidious,

touches everything.

If God was a hateful god,

this would be a singular story.

No rescue would be had,

the creation would collapse in on itself.

But because God is love,

this is a story of two men.

The second man is Christ.

And this man is different because He is not created by God, He IS God.

And His life stands to reverse the insidious sin.

But he doesn’t just stop there.

If all Jesus came to do was stop sin he could have stayed in the grave.

But Jesus came to restore!

Jesus, being fully human, is redeeming his brothers and sisters, us.

Not just from sin, but FOR purpose.

And not just a future purpose.

2 Corinthians 5:17–20 HCSB

17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away, and look, new things have come. 18 Everything is from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: 19 That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed the message of reconciliation to us. 20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, certain that God is appealing through us. We plead on Christ’s behalf, “Be reconciled to God.”

There is an age coming when all of the sad things will have passed away.

There will be no more cancer.

No more house fires.

No more dead children.

No more wars.

No more hatred.

No more destruction of the good things God has made.

No more dehumanization.

This age is an age marked by God making this earth his dwelling place again.

When the city of God is reunited with the earth of man in such a profound way that they become the same thing.

The message of the cross is the great message of reconciliation.

This is not merely a future thing!

Being a christian doesn’t mean that you have to live in boringville USA just waiting for the day that you die so you can go someplace nice.

No!

Being a Christian means knowing Christ.

And Christ is Lord NOW!

The cosmic event already happened.

God died,

God rose.

If that’s our leader,

than everything has changed!

We can start living the good life now!

And that doesn’t mean getting fat, rich, and comfy.

It means getting our hands dirty with the beautiful work of gardening.

Gardening an earth that God made good.

Cultivating it to draw out the potential that God baked into it.

And do you know what the most valuable thing God made on the earth is?

People!

When your body is sown like a seed, we will one day be resurrected in power.

“The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”

We live in a time of shifting truth, and shifting reality.

Truth is hard to come by,

reality seems to change before our very eyes.

We want guarantee.

We like for things to be verified.

Unfortunately,

The most guaranteed thing ever,

is that you will die.

It is a statistical fact that your heart will stop beating one day.

But Christian, because Jesus’ heart started beating again, yours will too.

Because when we KNOW Christ, then we know the power of His resurrection.

2 Corinthians 4:6 HCSB

6 For God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ.

‘You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be,’ said Aslan.

Lucy said, ‘Were do afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often. ‘No fear of that,’ said Aslan. ‘Have you not guessed? Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them. ‘There was a real railway accident,’ said Aslan softly. ‘Your father and mother and all of you are as you used to call it in the Shadowlands, dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning. And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at least they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

“What a foretaste of deliverance How unwavering our hope Christ in power resurrected As we will be when He comes”