C i j r t ë t ’ g E e ó u r r e c t to n anb <ëloty By Arthur Hedley* W HY were the Apostles so astounded at the resurrec tion of Christ, and so enthusiastic over it that they bore witness to it on every possible occasion? They to awe, reverence and worship. The deity of His Master was proved beyond all doubt, and from his heart came that great confession “ My Lord and my God” (v.28). Something Even Greater
had seen the dead raised during the ministry of their Lord, and the raising of Lazarus after he had been in the grave four days. It was an amazing miracle, yet they seem to express no astonishment, and no mention is made of these miracles in any of their addresses or epistles. When Paul refers to the resurrection in Ephesians 1:19, 20 he uses such emphasis and energy of expression, as if he were laboring under the greatness of his theme and lacked words to express the magnitude of his conception. What is the explanation of Peter’s enthusiastic witness to Christ’s resurrection in the early days of the church and the extraordinary strength of Paul’s language? Thfe answer is to be found in the unique character of our Lord’s resurrection. Whenever Peter or Paul refer to Christ’s resurrection, they invariably associate it with His ascension and exalted position in glory. In respect to those whom our Saviour raised from the dead, it seems they returned to the places left vacant by their death, and carried on as before until old age and decay crept on and death claimed them a second time. It was truly a great experience to be raised from the dead, but we have no evidence that any remarkable change was witnessed in their after conduct. There is no reason to believe that Lazarus received any enlargement of his intellectual powers, or that his moral life rose to any extraordinary height of grandeur after his resurrection. He moved among men as before, and in those days when the public mood was so fickle, his return to life from the dead would be regarded as a nine-days’ wonder. Christ’ s Resurrection Vastly Different Now the resurrection of Christ was something vastly dif ferent from anything that had ever happened before since the creation of man. It was not the return to a life inter rupted by death, but the beginning of a new life under new conditions. Within the silence and secrecy of the tomb, unseen by any human eye, God, by a great creative act, restored life to that crushed and mangled body of our Lord, which had been drained of its life blood. It is well to notice that the Apostles always refer to our Lord’s resurrection as a direct creative act of God (Acts 2:32, 3:15, 4:10, 13:30). When our Lord eventually appeared to His disciples He was so transfigured that they failed to recognize Him at first (Luke 24:16; John 20:14; 21:4). Such a change had taken place in His body that bolts and bars proved no obstacle to Him. “When the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you” (John 20:19). But it was the same human Christ though His body was transformed and His face transfigured, for He made Himself known by the wounds in His hands and His side (v.20). When the skeptical Thomas saw these wounds, his doubt gave place
But it was something even greater than the resurrection which explains the language of the Apostles in their reference to it. The resurrection was unexpected, and the death of Christ had meant the end of all their hopes and ambitions. They had been looking forward to the day when Christ would reveal Himself to the world in some spectacular way as the King of the Jews. They looked for ea/rthly power and glory, and anticipated great rewards. The death of Christ had shattered their hopes. But now there was given to them such an amazing revelation of Christ’s Person, position and power, that their previous conceptions and anticipations faded into insignificance. They saw with the eye of faith, their Lord seated not on an earthly throne, as they had expected, but at God’s right hand, exercising dominion over angels and authorities and powers (1 Pet. 3:22). With His ascension there was an expansion and exaltation of Christ’s power. In His earthly life, our Lord lived in absolute dependence on the Father. There was an immeasurable distance between the earthly humiliation to which our Lord submitted Himself and His pre-existent glory (John 17:5). Now, in His exalted position, He who took upon Himself the form of a servant is Lord over all. Paul saw Christ exercising a real effective sovereignty over all worlds, seen and unseen. “ Far above all principality, and power, and might and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come” (Eph. 1:21). Even before His as cension our Lord told His disciples of the honor conferred upon Him. “ All power is given unto me in heaven and earth” (Matt. 28:18). He spoke as one who was about to rule and reign, and who knew that He would have power to do it. It is the transcendent position to which God had raised His beloved Son which explains the difficulty of Paul to express in language the mighty power of God. To raise the despised, crucified Jesus of Nazareth to be the sovereign Lord of Heaven, was something so transcendently great that it was beyond the human mind to comprehend it fully. God’s Amazing Power Available To Believers Paul believed that the amazing power which God wrought in Christ was available to believers by faith. He realized what mighty things could be wrought if he and his converts grasped the significance of the miracle of Christ’s sover eignty and would lay hold of the omnipotent power of God. In his intercession for his Ephesian converts, he prays that they may know “what is the exceeding greatness of his power . . . which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places” (Eph. 1:19, 20). They had already experienced, in some measure, the power which had raised Christ from the dead to a position of exaltation and power.
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