Sermon Tone Analysis
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The title of the sermon this morning is called “What does the empty tomb have to do with active shooters?”
On Sunday evening, last week, I pulled up the news on my phone to see the headlines one last time before I went to bed.
I enjoy the news - I like to pick it apart, I like to ask critical questions like, “Why is this story on the news and that one isn’t?”
or “Why did the editor word the title this way rather than that way?”
I like to find the bias within the news story, because every news story is biased.
Reading the news is normally enjoyable for me.
Sunday evening, it was not enjoyable.
Not after I saw the headline that read, “Southern Baptists Refused To Act on Abuse, Despite Secret List of Pastors”.
Once I read that story, and a few others about that same story, I thought that was the worst news we could possibly receive this week.
Then come the news of Tuesday’s shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde TX.
(Because of the sensitive nature of that awful story, I’m not going to talk more about it from up front.
If you’ve seen this, and you want more information on it or want my opinion about it, or if you want to know what our state Baptist leaders are doing to address it, please contact me privately.
I’ll give you whatever information you want.)
And if you pay attention to the questions people are asking, this is what you hear: “How much worse will it get?”
We don’t know.
“What other tragedies are on the horizon?”
We can’t answer that.
As Christians we can’t answer those questions.
But there are some questions we can answer.
We can answer questions like: “Where did we go wrong?”
The answer is that human beings have rebelled against their Creator, and as a result two things have come in to God’s good creation: sin, and its consequence, death.
Nothing has been the same since.
Those two things entered in and brought chaos where they was peace and disorder and pain where there was order and joy.
Created to love God and others, instead we disobey God and turn on others.
That’s the root that sexual abuse and school shootings come from and every other form of brokenness.
And we can answer questions like this one: “Where will this end?”
What if we could be assured that one day all of this sin and death would be behind us?
What if we had a hope that at some point in the future all of this evil would be destroyed?
What if we were convinced that there was a divine answer to all of this trouble, and that one day God would reign supreme in a world in which everything that destroys His good creation would be gone forever?
What if we could know that God has looked at all the sin and death and the world and has said, “Enough!”?
For the world around us, those things sound like wishful thinking.
But not to believers.
How can we know that?
We can know that, because we know that Jesus is risen.
The empty tomb has everything to do with active shooters.
With the resurrection of Christ, God has pronounced a death sentence upon death and all that goes along with it.
Evil and death rage all around us.
But death itself has been sentenced to death at the cross.
Presently, death sits on death row, awaiting its fate.
Because the tomb was empty, death will one day be fully put to death.
Sin will be eliminated.
Evil will be destroyed.
The universe will be restored.
And the resurrection of Christ is the divine signal that all of this has already begun to take place.
Jesus
#1: The resurrection of Jesus from the dead
a.
There were some in the Corinthian church who denied the resurrection, claiming that it wasn’t possible.
People just don’t rise from the dead, they were saying.
And what Paul has been doing up to this point in his letter to them, is laying out for the Corinthians the implications of an un-risen Christ.
You say Christ is not risen?
Here’s what things are like if that is actually true.
If there is no resurrection, then...
all preaching is pointless
all faith is pointless
we’re telling lies about God
there is no forgiveness of sins
all who have died are gone forever
First, all gospel preaching is pointless – in vain – empty.
After all, the gospel centers on the death and the resurrection of Christ.
Second, all faith is pointless – in vain – empty.
If Jesus was never raised, that means our faith in a risen Savior is empty, pointless.
Third, we are telling a lie about God.
If God did not raise Jesus, and we say that He did, we are found to be false witnesses against God.
Fourth, there is no forgiveness of sins.
If Jesus was not raised, that sin offering was unacceptable to God and ineffective for us.
And that means we must bear all the unbearable guilt of our sins.
Fifth and finally, if the resurrection is untrue, then all the dead are gone forever.
If Jesus has not been raised, that door to heaven remains closed.
This is how things would be if there were no resurrection – faith is in vain, preaching is in vain, no forgiveness of sins, loved ones are enduring God’s wrath.
Pretty depressing?
It’s no surprise, then, that Paul writes in verse 19-20:
In fact, not only did Jesus rise, He is risen.
Do you see that in the text?
It doesn’t say “Christ arose”; it says “Christ has been raised from the dead”.
In other words, Jesus didn’t just rise from the grave at some point in time which has no impact on us now today; no, not just that Christ arose; Paul writes, “Christ has been raised from the dead.”
In other words, even now, living, acting, interceding, reigning from heaven, working through His church by the Holy Spirit.
The real importance of the resurrection is not so much that Jesus arose; the real importance of the resurrection is that He is still living.
Jesus raised many dead people back to life during His earthly ministry – the daughter of Jairus and Lazarus, just to name two.
They died again.
Jesus, on the other hand, has risen never to die again!
“I am the first and the last,” Jesus declares in Rev. 1:18, “and the living One; and I was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of death and of Hades.”
#2: Our resurrection from the dead
Now Jesus is risen.
Does that have any impact on us who have trusted in Christ?
Both Adam and Christ are associated with something.
Adam and Christ both accomplished something.
What did they accomplish?
Verse 21: “For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead.”
“…by a man came death”, meaning, the first Adam, the first head of the human race, all he managed to do was to bring death into God’s good creation.
The second Adam, Christ, the second and true head of the human race, he brought life: “For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead.”
Adam and Christ: what did they accomplish?
Adam, the 1st head of the human race: DEATH
Christ, the 2nd head of the human race: LIFE
Christ succeeds where Adam failed!
So Adam accomplished death.
Jesus, the second Adam, accomplished life for us.
Got that distinction?
Adam = death; Christ = life.
Where do we come into that?
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