Does the resurrection make that big of a deal? Let’s talk about it today on Deeper Waters.
Every apologist and their mother today is writing about how we know the resurrection happened I am sure. That is an important topic. That is a topic I have written on. That is something I am not going to write about today. Instead, I would like to not ask the question of “Did Jesus rise?” but rather “Why did Jesus rise?”
I got the idea of doing this when a Facebook group I’m a part of had the question asked of “If Jesus’s death was a sacrifice, why did he stay dead for such a short time?”
The problem is that one assumes that unless a condition one enters is permanent, there is no sacrifice. Let us take an example such as surrogate motherhood. I am not interested in discussing the rightfulness or wrongfulness of the action, but using it as an example. If one woman offers her body to raise a baby for a woman who can’t for some reason, that woman will not stay permanently pregnant, but do we deny that she has made some sort of sacrifice?
So at the start, I consider the objection to be flawed. We could ask how long did Jesus have to stay dead before it was a sacrifice? Would it have been a week? three weeks? A year? A decade? Exactly how long? What would be the criteria whereby one could even establish that such an event was at that point a true sacrifice?
Let us now suppose that we ask if there is any relevance to the fact that Christ came back and for that, we can ask why is it that nothing else came back. Why is it that when an animal was sacrificed, that it never came back. Why is it that when the ancients sacrificed their own infants, that those infants never came back. Why?
The answer is that all of those were subject to a system of death and decay. They were trapped in the circle and by their own power could not escape the circle. They were included in what is called the curse in Genesis 3 and part of the whole system described in Romans 8, particularly in verses 18-27.
Now we have Jesus here who is outside of the system due to being fully God as well as being fully man, but since He is fully man, He is able to enter the system as well and take it on. The hypothesis I am wanting to put forward is that Jesus came to undo the damage done to the creation due to sin. Let us call that force He took on “Uncreation.”
So in the God-Man, creation and uncreation together meet and face off. The question is, which is going to be stronger? Can the creator take on Himself that which was unleashed on His creation? Can He face the intruder and win? Keep in mind throughout the gospels, that Jesus speaks of going and fighting against the devil. This is not an accidental inclusion in the gospels. This was the reason for His mission. This was not just the redemption of our souls, but the redemption of the cosmos.
Jesus’s sacrifice was not about how long He remained dead, but more about what His death did. Why did He stay dead until Sunday? There’s a powerful statement there due to the creation narratives. Jesus dies on the sixth day of the week, the day that is about the creation of man. Jesus stays dead on the seventh day, the day that God rested. Jesus arose on Sunday, the start of the new week, to show that Jesus is the start of the new creation.
Because Jesus took on uncreation, He is able to restore the creation. Think of the analogy that is used in “The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.” It is the counter of Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time by Deeper Magic from the Dawn of Time. Jesus being a man could enter and be put subject to the rules of the creation as a man. Jesus being divine however and fully God could take on all of that and defeat it. Jesus was not inherently bound by the system. Jesus could reach in from outside the circle and set us all free and Jesus did just that.
Thus, it is not just that Jesus gives us eternal life. Is it that He brings a Kingdom we can Have life in. It’s not just that He forgives our sin, but that He renders sin powerless. It’s not just that we can be freed from death itself one day, but that death itself will be bound. It’s not that He has made the way for us to go to Heaven, but that He has made the way for Heaven to come to us.
The resurrection is the ultimate reversal. It is the ultimate healing to all of the cosmos and the message of the gospel is to join in this redemption as Jesus brings it about through his rule.
Yes. He is risen and thank God He is! We have hope not just of life, but hope of everything else as well because He is risen.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
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