Resurrection: What Does It Really Mean For Me (Part 3)?

BY PR EVANGELINE CHEONG

From the first day that Jesus resurrected, the world has been trying to explain it away. Even when told by the guards that the tomb was empty, “the chief priests … devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.’…” And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day.” Matthew 28:12-15

And since then, other ways of explaining away the resurrection story continued to pop up with things like the Swoon theory, ideas that the women going to the wrong tomb, and even mass hallucinations. All in the name of disproving Christianity and to give one a reason to turn a blind eye to Jesus and His claims. Likewise, some Christians have stopped talking about the resurrection as a historical fact and reduced it to mere myth. Consequently, it is not surprising that the Christian concept of heaven and resurrected bodies looks more like Hollywood movies than what the Bible reveals to us.

When we try to explain away the resurrection and ignore the historical evidence, we perhaps are giving ourselves a reason not to obey God or suffer for the faith, to carry our crosses or to bear the embarrassment of talking about a suffering saviour to our non-Christian friends. We think we can protect our comfortable lives by rejecting the resurrection.

Yet the disciples kept preaching the resurrection even at great risk to their safety and that eventually cost them their lives and freedom. For if Christ was not raised from the dead, all that they preached were lies, many lives were lost for no reason, all we say and do at church is absurd, and all humanity is still in their sin. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 tells us we are to be pitied if there was no resurrection.

But thanks be to God that none of that is true. God has raised Jesus from the dead. Do our lives reflect the truth of the resurrection or are we trying to explain it away just like the rest of the world?

If we accept and live out the resurrection, we can have hope to say in times of illness, job loss, relationship breakups and death that “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18), “for our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all” (2 Corinthians 4:17).

“if Christ has not been raised,

your faith is futile and

you are still in your sins…

But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead,”

1 CORINTHIANS 15:17,20