Luke 24:1-12 | Crushing Chaos

The Hook: The Reality of Chaos & The Magic Wand

Who in here ever feels like their life is just absolute chaos?

I mean, parents... how was your morning today? Trying to get everyone dressed, matching, and looking cute for Easter pictures, while also prepping for family meals and navigating the rain. Trying to juggle all the things.

And that's just the low-level chaos of family life. Whether we have families or not, all of us know the reality of chaos in our lives. Managing schedules, finances, responsibilities… again that’s the low level chaos… now pile on top of all that when the big stuff hits the fan?

Work stress. Terrible bosses. Financial pressures. Disease, sickness, the death of loved ones, or the death of a marriage. Pure, utter chaos.

Is this not where most of us live on the daily? Just trying to manage the chaos? Wouldn’t it be great to get some peace from all this?

That’s what’s at the core of our hearts, isn’t it? Aren’t we all just trying to find some peace?

We want order over the chaos.

I don’t know about you, but peace is what I ask Jesus for the most. Peace in my mind. Peace in my marriage. Peace in my parenting. Wouldn't it be nice to just get a little peace?

Today, we celebrate the hope of that peace through the power of resurrection!

Which is awesome, but it doesn’t come to us exactly how we first expect!

You see, whether you’re a lifelong follower of Jesus or just checking out faith today, there is a trap we all fall into when chaos hits. If we’re not careful, we can think that Jesus brings peace to our lives by waving a magic wand. We’ve all heard of His power, surely a magical wand solution is not outside of His abilities, remember all the miracles!! And so when chaos hits, it’s easy to start talking to God and trying to convince Him to instantly zap the chaos we experience in our hearts and lives out of existence.

We all often go to God for the finished, peaceful house and we expect it to come to us without having to endure the noise of the construction site.

But friends, Jesus rarely uses a magic wand. He can and does perform miracles, but miracles are called miracles because they aren’t the norm! To understand how God actually deals with the chaos of our lives, we have to look back to the very beginning.

In Genesis chapter one, the Bible tells us that before there was light, the earth was a dark, formless, chaotic void. It was covered in deep waters, an abyss. But the Spirit of God hovered over that chaotic abyss. And that hovering wasn't passive; it was the calm before a divine, creative storm.

You see, God’s defining characteristic from page one of the Bible is this: He steps into the dark and speaks Order into Chaos. He speaks to the deep abyss and gives it boundaries so dry land can emerge. He speaks to the darkness and orders it with light. He brings His order to the Garden of Eden, and then He invites humanity to partner with Him to extend that order out into the wild, untamed world.

Increase and multiply He says, fill the earth and subdue or govern it!

Subduing the earth is simply the joyful process of ordering chaos alongside God!

But sin broke that beautiful order. Adam and Eve distrusted God's design, choosing their own path. They were pushed out of the Garden and into the wilderness. And because of that rebellion, death entered the world. Death became the ultimate, undefeated agent of chaos in our world. And for thousands of years, humanity was losing the battle against that chaos. Every human life ended in the grave.

Until one fateful morning in Jerusalem where everything changed!

Today is Easter Sunday. And today, we are looking at Luke chapter 24, where Jesus steps into a literal graveyard to pull off the ultimate Genesis moment. Because listen to me: Jesus didn't defeat the grave to give you a magic wand; He defeated it to prove He is the ultimate Chaos-Crusher, inviting you to anchor your life to His promises.

To show you exactly how He does this, I want to give you a quick roadmap of where we are going today. We are going to look at three specific things in this text: First, we’ll look at The Reality of Chaos—what happens when our world collapses. Second, we’ll see God’s Commitment in the Chaos—how He meets us in the dark. And finally, we’ll look at Our Choice in the Chaos—how we can respond when life feels completely out of control.

I. The Reality of Chaos

Let’s look at the text. Luke chapter 24, starting in verse 1.

Luke 24:1–3 NIV

1 On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. 2 They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3 but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus.

Now, I know this is a familiar story to most, but try and pretend you don’t know the ending! Put yourself in their shoes for a second. It is now the third day after their entire world has just collapsed.

Do you have a day where you experienced a collapse on this level. A death in the family? A diagnosis? A career ender? A relapse? Remember the hopelessness, the darkness, the confusion, fear, frustration, terror as your world spiraled out of control. The lostness, like you were drowning? Sorry to bring it up, but that’s where these ladies are Church. Their world was forever altered. They are at the bottom, it a pit. Darkness is their closest friend. The Grief, sadness, confusion, it’s suffocatingly heavy upon their souls!

The man they believed was the Savior of the world was just brutally executed by the Roman empire. Their hopes are literally dead. The chaos is absolute. It has been the most confusing and crazy, like truly insane, last week or 2. The highs of the triumphal entry. The city chanting Jesus’ name, swearing their loyalty to Him. The fear as Jesus flipped tables in the temple. The threats of violence, the exuberance of anticipating political over thrown. The mob’s cheers turning from chants to crown Jesus to chants of crucifixion in stead!

A roller-coaster of emotion culminating in crucifixion.

Chaos. Confusion. Grief like an abyss so deep and dark you can’t imagine any way out or through… these people are just barely hanging on.

And notice what they do, as their world fills with chaos and spins out of control: they bring spices to the tomb.

Why? Because when life breaks down, our natural human instinct is to just try and manage the smell of the decay. Fake it till you make it. Pretend like everything’s fine. Cover it up, sweep it under the rug. Move along, nothing to see here.

These folks expect death to have the final word. They expect the chaos to be permanent. So they are just trying to make it a little more bearable, to survive.

But when they get there, the stone is gone and the body is missing. To them, the chaos is actually escalating here. The situation has gone from tragic to terrifying.

How many of you know exactly what that feels like? You try to manage a bad situation, you try to put a little spice on the decay of a broken relationship or a failing bank account, and the stone starts rolling away down the hill, the bottom drops out entirely. You panic. You assume God has left the building, He’s no where to be found!

But here is what the women at the tomb didn’t know, and what we so often forget: The chaos you are experiencing isn't the end of the story. Because while chaos is confusing, and while chaos is undeniably shocking, in the hands of Jesus, chaos is just the raw material for a New Creation.

II. God's Commitment in the Chaos

Look at what happens next in verse 4. God is about to meet their chaotic confusion with something truly awesome—and I mean "awesome" as in AWE inspiring sense of that word.

Luke 24:4–8 NIV

4 While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. 5 In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? 6 He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: 7 ‘The Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.’ ” 8 Then they remembered his words.

Notice what happens here. The women are absolutely terrified. The chaos has escalated into pure shock and awe. The stone is gone, the body is missing, and now lightning-clothed beings are standing in front of them. It is complete sensory overload.

But the angels don't just pat them on the back and say, "Hey, cheer up! Everything is fine!" First, they ask a piercing question that begins to reorder the universe: "Why do you look for the living among the dead?" Which at face value, to us humans, sounds like a crazy, almost insulting question. Doesn’t it? I mean, these ladies saw Jesus die. They laid His lifeless body in the tomb. Where else would you look for a corpse other than a cemetery? You all know why they put fences around cemeteries right? People are dying to get in…

Where else would you look for a corpse other than a cemetery?

If anything, the angels are the ones who sound completely out of touch with reality!

But the angels aren't being sarcastic. They are just operating from a completely different paradigm. You see, you and I, the women in our text, they expect death to be the final word, since Adam and Eve it always has been. But the angels have seen this story before. They were there at the dawn of creation when God spoke into the dark, chaotic void, when He hovered over the abyss. They know that God takes the absolute chaos of death and uses it as the raw material for Creation.

To us, death seems like an absolute, but to the angels and to God, death is the thing that is out of order. Death is the anomaly.

Jesus is the Author of Life; of course He isn't in a cemetery!

And right here, in the middle of their terror and confusion, God does what He always does: He doesn't abandon His people to the chaos. He intervenes. He shows His commitment to them. And sometimes, He intervenes with shock and awe. Here He sends divine messengers clothed in lightning.

But notice what these angels do next. This is incredibly important for us today. These are literal messengers from Heaven, wearing clothes that gleam like lightning. But they don't point the women to their flashy clothes, pun intended… They don't point them to a magical, instant fix for their trauma.

Where do they point them? Right back to Jesus’ word.

They say, "Remember how he told you..." and remind the women that Jesus had already laid out the plan for this weekend months ago in Galilee. He told them exactly what the demolition phase was going to look like: betrayed, crucified, buried.

I cannot emphasize this enough. When chaos and confusion hit our lives today, what do we naturally do? We frantically turn to Google, AI, experts, and podcasts for answers. Or, on the flip side, we sit back and demand that God drop a miraculous sign from Heaven right into our laps.

Now, does God still remind us of His promises in shockingly awesome ways? Absolutely. Sometimes it’s the still small voice of His Spirit. Sometimes it’s a perfectly timed word from a friend. Sometimes it’s even a license plate—there’s a family in our church who actually received confirmation about adopting their little girl through a license plate! God works in a multitude of mysterious ways.

But don’t get hung up on the method. The message is what matters.

When chaos hits, God doesn't leave us to figure it out on our own, but He also doesn't usually give us a magic wand. Instead, He gives us a framework to bring order and peace back to our lives: He uses the Word of God, illuminated by the Spirit of God, and confirmed by the People of God, to lead us into the Wisdom of God.

That is exactly what these angels are doing—acting as the People (or messengers) of God to confirm the Word of God to these grieving women. The methods God uses are infinite, but His goal is always the same: to boldly confirm His promises to us when we need them most.

In fact, God promised through the prophet Jeremiah that He would put His law in our minds and write His Word directly onto our hearts. He is relentless in His commitment to getting His truth into us, so that when the bottom drops out, we have an unbreakable anchor to hold onto.

So when your life feels completely out of control—when the grief feels suffocating and you are tempted to assume God has abandoned you—remember how He works. He doesn't usually rescue us by zapping our problems away instantly; He rescues us by fulfilling His promises over time. And sometimes, moving through the darkness is part of the plan.

Your job, when the lights go out, is not to frantically scour the internet for a quick fix. Your job is to do exactly what the women did in verse 8: Remember His words. When you don't understand His methods, you have to remember His promises.

III. Our Choice in the Chaos

So, if God’s way of handling chaos is often slow, confusing, and sometimes shocking, how are we supposed to respond? Look at how the first disciples reacted in verse 9.

Luke 24:9–11 NIV

9 When they came back from the tomb, they told all these things to the Eleven and to all the others. 10 It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them who told this to the apostles. 11 But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense.

In the original Greek, that word "nonsense" is lēros. It is actually a medical term. It was used to describe the delirious, feverish babbling of a sick and dying person. The disciples hear the news of the Resurrection, and they don't say, "Wow, praise God!" They say, "You sound like a crazy person." Why? Because their current paradigm had been entirely shattered. They had been so traumatized by the chaos of Friday that they could no longer believe in the possibility of Sunday.

When faced with God's confusing and slow ways of bringing order, you really only have two choices.

The first choice is Cynicism. And if we are honest, a lot of us are sitting exactly where the disciples were sitting. You have been so bruised by the brokenness of this world, so exhausted by the chaos of your own life, that when someone stands up here and offers you the hope of a resurrected life, you just write it off as lēros. It sounds like religious nonsense. You let your heart harden.

But listen to me: Cynicism is not a sign of intellectual superiority. Cynicism is just a defense mechanism to keep you from being disappointed again. It is a shield we hold up when we are tired of getting hurt. Cynicism tells you God has checked out. We don't want to get our hopes up, so we just stay in the dark.

But look at the second choice. Look at what Peter does in verse 12.

Luke 24:12 NIV

12 Peter, however, got up and ran to the tomb. Bending over, he saw the strips of linen lying by themselves, and he went away, wondering to himself what had happened.

Peter is just as confused and heartbroken as the rest of them. But Peter refuses to stay in the cynical seat. He gets up. He runs to the chaos. He investigates the evidence—the strips of linen, left behind by a King who didn't need them anymore. And he walks away wondering.

Peter drops his defenses just enough to let wonder in. And friends, wonder is the threshold of faith.

Wonder plants its feet on the empty tomb and declares that God is still working. Wonder pauses in the face of the impossible and says: "God is big. He can. He promised."

If you want God to bring order to your chaos, you have to do what Peter did. You have to stop settling for a cynical survival mode. You have to run to the empty tomb, look at the evidence, and step into the wonder of the Resurrection.

IV. Allegiance to the Chaos-Crusher

Jesus went into the grave and did the grueling, cosmos-shattering work of defeating the ultimate chaos of death. He did that for you. He did that so that the grave would not have the final word over your life.

If your life feels completely out of control right now, I want you to hear this: Jesus is not asking you to clean yourself up before you come to Him. And He’s also not going to wave a magic wand and instantly make all your problems disappear by tomorrow morning.

Jesus didn't defeat the grave to give you a magic wand; He defeated it to prove He is the ultimate Chaos-Crusher, inviting you to anchor your life to His promises.

There is no magic wand. But there is the wonder of allegiance. You stick with God even when it feels chaotic because you know He is truly the only one who has the power to crush the chaos of life and death!

Instead of a magic trick, He is offering you His hand. He is inviting you to simply begin walking with Him. He is asking you to trust Him enough to step into His framework: to crack open the Word of God, to ask for the illumination of the Spirit of God, and to lean on the People of God.

He is faithful. If you will link your life to His—if you will surrender your brokenness to Him today—He will use those things to lead you into the Wisdom of God, slowly, gently, and lovingly bringing order back out of your chaos. You don't have to figure out the whole plan today; you just have to trust His promises for tomorrow.

The tomb is empty. Our God is a Chaos-Crusher and He’s risen. Which means, you and I don’t have to live in the chaos alone anymore.

He can and will restore order and give us peace if we’ll follow Him out of the cemetery and grave!

Let's pray.