by Scott H. Northrup
Near the end of his first letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul writes, "For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was resurrected on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared ... to more than five hundred people at one time." The man Jesus of Nazareth was literally brought back to life again after three days, all after being brutally slaughtered beyond human recognition, embalmed, and wound in grave clothes with a hundred pounds of spice. You mean to tell me we are supposed to believe that? EXACTLY! In fact, your eternal life depends on what you believe about that.
According to Paul and the whole New Testament, the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus is the most important message of all time - the Christian gospel in a nutshell. All of Christianity rises and falls on that one fundamental fact, for as Paul declares, "If Christ has not been resurrected, then our preaching is worthless."
Now I have had a number of well-meaning people of the respectable variety, both religious and non-religious, tell me that it probably does not matter whether Jesus was truly raised from the dead, and that He probably was not. After all, they say, it was the teachings of Jesus that are important. To that Paul would strenuously object, and so would Jesus. In fact, Jesus taught that He came to give His life as a ransom, that after His body was destroyed He would raise it up again in three days, and that He has the power to lay down His life and to take it back up again.
I remember struggling intellectually with the resurrection, back in the days when I was compelled by my secular worldview to find some natural explanation for everything in the Bible. Well, let me tell you my friends who are trying to do the same thing - GET OVER IT. Be set free from trying to explain away all the supernatural stuff. Jump on in, the water's fine. Christianity IS supernatural. The resurrection is a miracle, and it is the heart of the gospel. Not only was Christ raised, all who believe in Him will be raised.
Your eternal destiny depends on what your heart believes about Easter. You may think that simply by being a "good person" (ha! as if that's easy), you can be sure of eternal life in God's kingdom. Okay, but if you are not open-hearted enough to believe what God did for you on Good Friday and Easter, maybe you're really not such a good person after all. Maybe you're just too full of intellectual pride or cynicism to accept what a loving God did for you. Or maybe you just haven't really understood the message. That being the case, you had better get yourself into the church house. Any church house in America will do. It's what we all preach. We may fight holy wars about how to baptize, canonize, and harmonize. But one thing we all agree upon, Jesus died for our sins, He was buried, and on the third day He was raised from the dead. He is alive today and seated on the throne of the universe, from whence He will come to judge the living and dead.
@ copyright 2004 by Scott H. Northrup. All rights reserved.