THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST

Jesus Christ’s resurrection represents a demonstration of the power of

God, the confirmation of the divinity of Jesus Christ and the grounds of
hope for Christian believers.
Jesus Christ’s resurrection was a demonstration of God’s power
The power of God the Father Eph 1:18-20 See also Mt 22:29-32; Ac 2:24;
3:15; 10:40; 13:29-30; Gal 1:1; Col 2:12
The power of the Holy Spirit Ro 1:4; 1Ti 3:16; 1Pe 3:18
The resurrection confirmed Jesus Christ as the Son of God
Jn 20:30-31 John calls Jesus Christ’s miracles “signs” (see also Jn 2:11;
6:2) and his resurrection is the climax, confirming his identity beyond all
doubt; Ro 1:4 See also Ps 2:7; Ac 13:33
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the basis of faith 1Co 15:14-15 See
also Ac 3:15; 4:33; 17:18; 24:21; Ro 10:9; 2Ti 2:8; Heb 6:1-2
The basis of believers’ justification Ro 4:25; 8:34
The basis of Christian hope Acts 24:15; 1Co 15:19
The basis of believers’ resurrection 1Co 15:20-23 The Law of Moses
(Ex 23:16) provided for an offering of the firstfruits of crops to God. The
firstfruits were the guarantee of the full harvest to come. The NT sees the
resurrection of Jesus Christ as the firstfruits of the full ingathering of all
God’s people when Jesus Christ comes again. See also Jn 14:19; Acts
26:23; Ro 8:111

Matthew 27:62-66

62 On the next day, which followed the Day of Preparation, the chief
priests and Pharisees gathered together to Pilate,

The "Day of Preparation" was Friday, so-called because preparation was

made on Friday before sunset for cessation of work till sunset on Saturday,
the Sabbath.

63 saying, “Sir, we remember, while He was still alive, how that

1Manser, M. H. (2009). Dictionary of Bible Themes: The Accessible and Comprehensive

Tool for Topical Studies. London: Martin Manser.
deceiver said, ‘After three days I will rise.’

64 Therefore command that the tomb be made secure until the third
day, lest His disciples come by night and steal Him away, and say to
the people, ‘He has risen from the dead.’ So the last deception will be
worse than the first.”

65 Pilate said to them, “You have a guard; go your way, make it as

secure as you know how.”

Typically a Roman "guard" was six men, one of whom was an officer.

66 So they went and made the tomb secure, sealing the stone and
setting the guard.

These guards were Roman Soldiers, the chief priests had temple guards at
their disposal, to use them the chief priests wouldn’t have had to make a
request to Pilate; nor would they later need to shield them from Pilate’s
anger for failure at guard duty, for their own guards weren’t answerable to
Pilate. (28:14). So “You have a guard," means that Pilate is providing them
with guards.

2892. κουστωδία kŏustōdia, koos-to-dee´-ah; of Lat. or.; “custody”, i.e. a

Roman sentry:—watch.

This guard was in addition to the large stone that Joseph of Arimathea had
placed in front of the tomb to block the entrance.

How was the stone sealed. (Daniel 6:17) Lions Den

28 Now after the Sabbath, as the first day of the week began to dawn,
Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to see the tomb.

Matthew renews his emphasis on the succession of days that now

eventuates in the resurrection of Jesus as a fulfillment of his predictions
that he’d be resurrected “on the third day”

2 And behold, there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord
descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from
the door, and sat on it.

The stone was rolled away by the angel, not to let Jesus out, but to let the
disciples in.

3 His countenance was like lightning, and his clothing as white as

snow. 4 And the guards shook for fear of him, and became like dead
men.

Read Daniel 10 to learn more about a similar angelic visitation.

The earthly life of Jesus was "bookended" between the announcement of

angels, beginning with Luke 2:9-14, "And behold, an angel of the Lord
stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they
were greatly afraid. Then the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid, for
behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. For
there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the
Lord. And this will be the sign to you: You will find a Babe wrapped in
swaddling cloths, lying in a manger.”

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host
praising God and saying:

“Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace, goodwill toward men!”

5 But the angel answered and said to the women, “Do not be afraid,
for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified.

Notice the angel did not tell the soldiers not to be afraid, only those who
were seeking Jesus.

6 He is not here; for He is risen, as He said. Come, see the place
where the Lord lay.

What did the disciples see in the tomb? The grave-clothes lying on the
stone shelf, still wrapped in the shape of the body (John 20:5-7). Jesus
had passed through the grave-clothes and left them behind as evidence
that he was alive. They lay there like an empty cocoon, There was no
signed of struggle; the gave-clothes were not in disarray. Even the napkin
(which had been wrapped around His face) was folded carefully in a place
by itself. Citation: The Warren W. Wiersbe Bible Commentary, page 85

7 And go quickly and tell His disciples that He is risen from the dead,
and indeed He is going before you into Galilee; there you will see
Him. Behold, I have told you.”

In the 1st Century, the central meaning of the word resurrection, which is
the Greek word anastasis and its cognates really do refer to a new bodily
life given to a human body that had been dead. Anastasis was not a clever
or metaphorical way of speaking of a ‘spiritual’ or ‘non-bodily’ survival of
death. The ancient Greeks and Romans had plenty of ways of speaking of
such a thing, and anastasis was not one of them.

8 So they went out quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, and
ran to bring His disciples word.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, And the knowledge of the
Holy One is understanding. (Proverbs 9:10)

9 And as they went to tell His disciples, behold, Jesus met them,
saying, “Rejoice!” So they came and held Him by the feet and
worshiped Him. 10 Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go
and tell My brethren to go to Galilee, and there they will see Me.”

11 Now while they were going, behold, some of the guard came into
the city and reported to the chief priests all the things that had
happened.

“Behold” highlights the parallel between the women’s going to tell the
disciples about Jesus’ resurrection and the going of guards to tell the chief
priests and elders about it.

12 When they had assembled with the elders and consulted together,
they gave a large sum of money to the soldiers, 13 saying, “Tell them,
‘His disciples came at night and stole Him away while we slept.’

The chief priests and elders have no excuse for their unbelief. They have
just received unprejudiced eyewitnesses (some of) accounts from the
Roman soldiers that Jesus has indeed been raised from the dead, that the
sign of Jonah, which he promised to give the scholars and Pharisees
(12:38–40), has now been given.

"‘If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be
persuaded though one rise from the dead.’”

Read Luke 16:19-31 - The Rich Man and Lazarus

14 And if this comes to the governor’s ears, we will appease him and
make you secure.” 15 So they took the money and did as they were
instructed; and this saying is commonly reported among the Jews
until this day.
There is a real danger that we will simply short-circuit the process and
force the resurrection to mean what we want it to mean, without paying
close attention to what the first Christians actually said. In the closing
chapters of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and in the opening chapter of
Acts, we do not find anyone saying that because Jesus is alive again we
can now get to know him, or that he is the second person of the Trinity
(though Thomas does say ‘My Lord and my God’). We do not, in particular,
hear anyone in the gospels saying that because Jesus has been raised we
are assured of our place in heaven. What we do hear, loud and clear in the
resurrection narratives and in the early theology of Paul, is something like
this.
To begin with, Jesus was crucified as a messianic pretender; all the
gospels say that the words ‘King of the Jews’ were stuck up above his
head. The resurrection appears, then, to reverse the verdict of the Jewish
court and the Roman trial: Jesus really was God’s Messiah. But at this
point hardly any modern Christians have realized the significance of the
Jewish vision of the Messiah, going back to passages like Isaiah 11 and
Psalms 2 and 72.[3] The point about Israel’s Messiah is that when he
appears he will be king, not of Israel only, but of the whole world. Paul’s
vision, that ‘at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow’, is an essentially
messianic vision before it is even a vision of Jesus as the second person
of the Trinity, though it is that as well, and Paul believed the two were
made to fit together.
But unless we grasp the essentially Jewish vision of Messiahship, and the
early Christian belief that Jesus was the Messiah based on his
resurrection, we won’t get to the heart of it. ‘Jesus our contemporary’ is
Jesus the Jew, Jesus the Messiah, Jesus the one who launched God’s
kingdom on earth as in heaven. For many centuries the western church
has done its best to avoid the plain meaning of the four gospels, and the
Enlightenment pushed us further away yet. The gospels build on the
ancient Jewish belief that God’s call to Abraham was the call of a people
through whom he would rescue humans and the world from their plight.
The long history of that people often seemed to have lost its way, but the
four gospels tell the story of Jesus, climaxing in his death and resurrection,
as the story of how God’s plan for Israel, and his plan through Israel for the
world, was fulfilled at last. The resurrection of Jesus means what it means
in the four gospels because it is the fulfillment of that vision and hope. It is
the moment when, as Jesus himself explains to the disciples on the road to
Emmaus, all that the prophets had spoken was now fulfilled. ‘We had
hoped,’ said the sad and puzzled pair, ‘that he was the one to redeem
Israel’; and now the risen Jesus explains that he has not only redeemed
Israel but is sending this redeemed Israel – his Spirit-equipped and
scripturally-taught followers – out into the world with the message that
Israel’s God is its true and rescuing lord and king.
If Jesus’ resurrection is the fulfillment of Israel’s story, it is also, and for the
same reason, the fulfillment of the story of God himself. Here we have to
be careful. How easy it is for us, with our developed Trinitarian theology, to
rush in with Augustine or Aquinas, with Gregory or Athanasius. Let’s put
that on hold for the moment and think about how first-century Jews were
telling the story of Israel’s God. Israel’s God had abandoned Jerusalem
and the Temple at the time of the exile. Ezekiel, who describes the divine
glory leaving the Temple, promises that this glory will return, but never tells
us that it’s happened. In fact, several prophets speak of YHWH coming
back to Zion as the climax of the return from exile, but nowhere does
anyone say it’s happened. Isaiah spoke of ‘the glory of YHWH being
revealed, and all flesh seeing it together’ (40.5), and of Jerusalem’s
watchmen shouting for joy because they could see YHWH in plain sight,
returning to Zion (52.8). But nobody ever suggested, throughout the four
centuries of post-exilic Judaism, that it had happened at last. Zechariah
says it will happen (14.5). Malachi, addressing the bored priests, insists
that ‘The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple’ (3.1). But
he hasn’t done so yet.
But the evangelists tell the story of Jesus precisely as the story of how
YHWH returned to Zion at last, unexpectedly, shockingly and shamefully.
That isn’t our subject today, but I suggest that this, with all its overtones of
the Jewish expectation of Israel’s God returning to the Temple, is at the
very heart of New Testament Christology. Suffice it to say that when we
come to the resurrection accounts, the case has already been made.
Matthew and Mark insist that at Jesus’ baptism the prophecies of Isaiah
and Malachi began to be fulfilled. Luke says that when Jesus came to
Jerusalem the residents did not know the time of their divine visitation.
This, in other words, was the moment when YHWH came back at last.
John says ‘the word became flesh, and tabernacled in our midst, and we
beheld his glory’ (1.14): in other words, Jesus is the revelation of God’s
glory, returning to his people at last in the form of the temple which is his
body. That is the reason why, balancing that opening statement in John
1.14, we find Thomas in 20.28 declaring ‘My Lord and my God’. He is
seeing and recognizing the glory of God in the face, and in the wounded
hands and side, of the risen Jesus. We never knew God’s glory would look
like that.
You see, it is all too easy for us to slip into a form of docetism at this point:
to think, simply, ‘Well, the resurrection proves that Jesus is divine’, and to
forget the rich human dimensions of the story. But our theme this week
demands that we recognize in the resurrection that (so to speak) the divine
is Jesus: that in the man from Nazareth we see not only Jesus our
contemporary but also God our contemporary. We recognize God standing
before us, wounded for our trespasses and bruised for our iniquities, and
we hear the prophet say, ‘Who would have thought that he was the Arm of
the Lord?’
So if Jesus’ resurrection, in the gospels, is the point where Israel’s story
and even God’s story come to their final climax, it is also of necessity the
moment when the church is truly born. Of course, there is a sense in which
the church is born with the call of Abraham; another sense in which the key
moment is the call of the first disciples; another again in which Pentecost is
all-important. But we cannot read the stories of the resurrection without
realizing that this is the great turning-point, when a bunch of frightened and
muddled men and women stumbled despite themselves on the truth that
world history had turned its greatest corner, that a new power was let loose
in the world, that a door had been opened which no-one could shut. The
church was born in that moment, not as an institution, not as an inward-
looking safe group, but precisely as a surprised gaggle of people coming to
terms with something far bigger than they had dared or wanted to imagine.
The church was born as Mary, Peter and John ran to and fro in the half-
light, half-believing and with tears and questions. The church was born at
the moment when the two disciples at Emmaus recognized the stranger as
he broke the loaf. The church was born as the angel told Jesus’ followers
to hurry to Galilee because he was already on his way there. The church
was born as he opened their minds to understand the scriptures. And all of
this is in service of the mission of the kingdom. Something has happened
in the resurrection because of which Jesus is now the challenging
contemporary not only of his first followers, but of the whole world. He
goes before us still, and we have to hurry to catch him up. (NT Wright,
University of St Andrews, "Jesus, Our Contemporary," February 2012.)