Lifted

Experiencing The Resurrection Life

Sam Allberry

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781844747634
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Christianisme

For many the resurrection is a nice thing to believe, the 'happy' ending to the gospel, as though after the darkness of the cross Spielberg was brought in to do the finish.
But Lifted shows that itâ?Ts far more. The resurrection has overwhelmingly positive implications for our daily lives. Through it we can have real assurance of forgiveness and salvation. We are raised and empowered to live new, transformed lives. We have hope after death for our bodies and this physical world. We see the urgency of reaching all nations with the message of the risen Jesus. Life is now different: we have been lifted.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is not just for Easter. Itâ?Ts for all of life.

1. Assurance

How to shop in your PJs

I’m not a fan of shopping. My tolerance threshold is approx­imately eighteen minutes. After that I’ll buy literally anything if it means I can go home, which explains some of the clothes I wear. And so I approach shopping trips in the same way an SAS team approaches covert missions: identify the target; know where it is; do not deviate to the left or the right; be out of the store before the next customer has even advanced to the counter.

The solution to all this, of course, is online shopping. It is wonderful, for four reasons:

1. You don’t have to go outside. No need to face crowds, queues and tempers. You can do it in your pyjamas in between Scrabble moves on Facebook.
2. It means you get interesting post. Now that most personal communication is electronic, it tends to be just junk mail and bills that come through the door. There is nothing to look forward to in the post any more.
3. By the time the package arrives you can’t quite remember what you’d bought. It’s like someone has sent you a surprise present. And because that ‘someone’ is you, there is no risk you won’t like it. It is me in the past sending gifts ahead to me in the future. It’s virtually time travel.
4. You get to sign for stuff. I don’t know why this makes me feel significant – it just does. It’s something about someone in uniform presenting me with documents needing my signature.

When you think about it, this last point is quite important. If a company or person is sending something of particular value, then it is not enough for them to know that the parcel has been sent: they also need to know it has been received, that it’s all gone through and been completed.

Signing off on salvation

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is God signing off on our salvation. It is the proof that sin has been paid for. The payment has been made – we know this because Jesus said his death was going to be a ransom for sin (see Mark 10:45). But we can now know that payment of his blood has been received and accepted: we have God’s signature. This is why the true symbol for the Christian faith is an empty cross. A crucifix speaks of death, of a payment made. But an empty cross speaks of payment received: ‘He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification’ (Romans 4:25, my emphasis).

The resurrection means that we can be assured of our salvation. It confirms two things: that Jesus is who he says he is, and that he’s done all that he said he would. The Saviour is vindicated in the face of all who rejected his claims. Salvation is assured in the face of all our doubts.

The resurrection assures us of who Jesus is

We need to listen in on what the first Christians had to say. In particular, we need to listen to Peter, who had much to say about the resurrection to anyone who’d listen. We join him in Acts chapter 3. Peter has just healed a beggar, someone who had been crippled from birth and who was well known to many for his prominent begging spot at the entrance to the temple. He would have been there most days. But on this day he didn’t get change, but changed. He asked Peter for alms, but received legs!

Needless to say, this healing becomes a sensation. Very quickly, large crowds gather as word spreads. Peter begins to address them. But his focus is not on what has just happened – it’s on the resurrection of Jesus, to which the healing of this man points. In the course of his speech Peter gives us a quick three-pointer about Jesus: ‘You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this’ (Acts 3:15).

‘You killed him. God raised him. We saw him.’

Peter says three crucial things about Jesus that make sense of the time in which his hearers found themselves, and show us exactly what the resurrection means for our salvation. He says, in effect: ‘You killed him. God raised him. We saw him.’ In other words: condemnation, reversal, public vindication.

‘You killed him’

Peter doesn’t want the crowds to focus on what he had done for the beggar a few moments earlier, but on what they had done to Jesus a few weeks earlier. ‘You killed him,’ he says. Here they were, marvelling at the healing that had just taken place. But these were the very same crowds who had bayed for Jesus’ crucifixion. In these three words we have, concertina’d together, all the various forms of rejection Jesus faced in the last days and hours of his life. If we were to double-click on this statement the following four components would drop down.

Condemned by the Jews

In the Jewish religious court, Jesus was asked point-blank whether he was the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One. He didn’t duck the question, or attempt to side-step it with some nifty footwork. It was a direct question and he gave a direct answer: ‘I am.’ It was unambiguous.

It was also loaded with topspin.

The name we give someone to call us by indicates the kind of relationship we want to have with him or her. If I meet a newcomer at my church and tell him he can call me ‘Pastor’ or ‘Reverend’, it implies I’m not intending to have a very personal relationship with him: I’m only dealing with him in my capacity as a church leader. It’s all very functional. If I tell him to call me ‘Mr Allberry’, it’s a little more personal, but there is still a measure of distance. But if I give him my first name it’s all much closer. It’s personal. Friendship is on the table.

One of the most precious truths for God’s people in the Old Testament was that God had given them his personal name. He had disclosed himself to them personally. They were on first-name terms. It had come about when God asked Moses to lead the Israelites (you can read about this in Exodus 3). Moses was reluctant for various reasons, one of which was not really knowing how to explain how he knew who God was. And so God gave Moses his card, if you like. The people now had a name by which they could know the God who was leading them. It came to embody the privilege they had in knowing him personally. It became so precious that they avoided speaking and writing it directly. The name? ‘The LORD’, in our Bibles; but in Hebrew ‘Yahweh’, literally, ‘I am’.

Jesus was doing more than answering the question in the affirmative. He was embodying his answer. He was claiming the divine name for himself. The court didn’t need any lengthy deliberations. The high priest spoke for them all when he condemned Jesus to death for blasphemy. And so they handed him over to the Romans.

Executed by the Romans

It was the Romans who sentenced Jesus to death. Pilate may not have regarded all this as anything more than the internal squabbling of the Jewish community. But given the claim of kingship being attached to Jesus, it was a squabble that had at least nominally imperial implications. Stability was the order of the day, and yet here was a situation which could potentially cause huge unrest. The crowds were baying for crucifixion. And yet Pilate saw an opportunity for both resolution and political capital. A popular insurrectionist, Barabbas, would be released and Jesus would be executed. The formal charge against him was sedition – he was, after all, claiming to be a king.

Abandoned by God

But Jesus’ rejection was not only ecclesiastical and judicial. It was spiritual. In each of the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion of Jesus, the details of his physical sufferings are very sparse. The whole lengthy and agonizing process is summed up in just three words: ‘they crucified him’. We are spared the unpleasant details of what this would have involved. We are not told how Jesus felt at each unbearable stage. But we are told what he said. In the thick of the darkness that engulfed the sorry episode, we hear these words being cried out, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mark 15:34).

We don’t need to know the blow-by-blow account of how Jesus’ body tore itself apart. What we do need to know is given to us in those words. Jesus is forsaken by God. This takes us to the heart of his death. His suffering was not ultimately physical (hard though that is to conceive), but spiritual: separ­ation from the Father as the Son bore the penalty of our sins. It was as though the Father turned his back on him.

Buried by his disciples

Burial is often the moment of final closure in the grieving process. A week ago I stood with a grieving family as they buried the ashes of their mother. She had actually died several months earlier and had been cremated. Up till now the family had kept the ashes at home. But they felt they hadn’t yet fully said goodbye. So they had come to bury them. I led a short service, and as each took a turn to drop a handful of soil down onto the casket, they said their final goodbyes.

The final confirmation of Jesus’ rejection is his physical burial. He is laid in the tomb of a prominent politician, Joseph of Arimathea. The body is disposed of. It’s the end of the story – a final, all-too-tangible confirmation of those words, ‘You killed him’.

‘God raised him’

Every other human story has ended at this point. When you get to the corpse being laid to rest, there’s no more story to tell. In a biography this is where the final reflection begins, or in a movie where the closing credits start to crawl up the screen. But Peter has only reached the conclusion of his first point, and as we reach for our coats and shuffle to the exit he calls us back with another three words: ‘God raised him.’ Again, he packs a wealth of information into this short statement. Having thought about the particulars of Jesus’ rejection we can begin to make sense of what his resurrection means.

The story of his resurrection is the story of a great reversal – the ultimate reversal. The one who was so roundly con­demned is raised to life. On the third day the grave is empty and Jesus is seen. The resurrection vindicates him, and as with his rejection this vindication is just as multifaceted. As we double-click on ‘God raised him’ we find it reveals and confirms his four-fold identity: the Son of God, the Christ, the Saviour and the Author of life. The resurrection shows Jesus was exactly who he claimed to be.

The Son of God

The Old Testament looked to the time when God would install his great King, one whose reign would somehow be ever­lasting. Psalm 2 describes something of his coronation. In the face of international opposition to him, God declares his commitment to his King with the words, ‘You are my Son’ (Psalm 2:7).

His enthronement would be public, and would confirm his status as the Son of God decisively. Yet the enthronement would not be as people imagined. Listen to what Paul says in connection to this: ‘[ Jesus]...through the Spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God, by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord’ (Romans 1:4, my emphasis).

The resurrection powerfully declares Jesus to be the Son of God. What Jesus has claimed before the Jewish court – to be the ‘Son of the Blessed One’, a claim that would have seemed so laughable as his lifeless body was lifted from the cross – is now demonstrated to be incontrovertibly true. God has raised him. The ‘blasphemer’ is shown to be right all along.

The Son of God – it means he is worth listening to. He has the inside track on God. He is able to speak authoritatively about God. One of the features of his teaching that immediately struck wonder into his listeners was that he spoke as one who had authority (Mark 1:22), unlike the rabbis of the day. The best they could do was quote the great teachers who had gone before, showing off their mastery of the spiritual classics. Not Jesus. He preached without footnotes, as it were. His authority came from himself. He had a unique relationship to God. He was God’s man.

There are times when it is hard to live according to this man’s teachings. It might be that they rub up too painfully against our own desires and instincts, or against those of someone close to us. We might be tempted to downplay the importance of his words. Many have, after all. But an empty tomb reminds us why we need to take him seriously. His resurrection has powerfully declared Jesus to be the Son of God. It shouts his credentials at us.

The Christ

Peter was the first to preach an Easter sermon. His conclusion was electrifying and, to his hearers, not a little pointed: ‘Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ’ (Acts 2:36).

It is the resurrection that supports this conclusion. Peter’s reasoning is clear and unanswerable. The Christ was to be far greater than great King David. David himself acknowledged this in Psalm 110, to which Peter directs his listeners:

The Lord said to my Lord:
‘Sit at my right hand

until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.’

(Acts 2:34–35, quoting Psalm 110:1)

The psalm refers, confusingly to our ears, to two ‘Lords’. The first refers to God himself. The second is unidentified in this psalm. All we know is that David is subject to him – ‘my Lord’. So David says in effect, ‘God said to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand...” ’ This ‘Lord’, to whom David is subject, is given the place of highest honour by God: to sit at his right hand. This is not some temporary arrangement. He is granted this exalted position, and in the meantime God is going to defeat all his enemies. No rejection of this King will persist. All his enemies will be humiliated before him – a footstool for him. His rule comes from God himself and will ultimately be irresistible. It has divine sanction, and will be universal and enduring. Whoever this figure is, David clearly recognizes his own subordination before him. However great David was (and to those listening to Peter, David was pretty much as good as it got) this figure is greater. He outstrips David on all criteria.

Peter’s point is therefore this: David has told us (note, David has told us) that there is one greater than he. David’s kingship is but a shadow of this definitive King. Yet, since David was the greatest king in Israel’s history, this expectation was still to be fulfilled. Israel was still waiting for her true Christ. And that wait is now over. One man has been raised up from death to life, from earth to heaven, exalted at the right hand of God. David’s Lord has come, and his rule is now established. The resurrection shows Jesus to be the true Christ, the true King. The man charged with sedition is shown to be the Ruler that God himself has appointed for the whole world.

Jesus may not be popular in the public square. Actually, it was in the public square that his execution was called for. But it is that same public square over which the resurrection shows him to be sovereign.

Western society in many ways doesn’t like Jesus – unless he’s in a crib, and even then there’s a debate. He is like mobile phones and cash: not to be flashed about in public. It’s fine to believe in him, but you’re asking for trouble if you start displaying him where everyone can see him. Keep him to yourself. Stick him in your pocket, and don’t take him out till you get home.

The resurrection does not give us that option. He left the grave, not to stand in some discreet corner, but to take his throne in heaven – a throne that is universal and everlasting. He owns and rules the public square. We mustn’t keep him indoors, no matter what the neighbours think. He is God’s King.

The Saviour

Those watching the crucifixion of Jesus were well aware of the irony. This man had styled himself as everybody’s Saviour. Yet here he was in utter helplessness. And so the jibes came: ‘He can’t save himself!’ What kind of Saviour is that? It was laughable. And yet there is a double irony at work here. For it transpires that he won’t save himself because he is the Saviour. His crucifixion was to be the means by which he did save others. Had he chosen to save himself, he would have been no Saviour to anybody else.

Back to Peter’s preaching – this time a little later, to the Jewish council and high priest: ‘The God of our fathers raised Jesus from the dead – whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him to his own right hand as Prince and Saviour that he might give repentance and forgiveness of sins to Israel’ (Acts 5:30–31). Jesus is described as having been hung on a tree. In Jewish thought, to be hung on a tree and to be nailed to a cross amounted to pretty much the same thing – the two are synonymous. In fact, describing Jesus as being hung on a tree gives his death extra meaning. In the Old Testament this form of execution was a sign of being under a curse from God.

The manner of his death showed that Jesus was accursed. He was paying for sin. But not his own sin: this death is the means by which forgiveness will come to God’s people. Jesus is the Saviour. He became the curse sinners deserved (see 2 Corinthians 5:21). The purpose of his death is indicated by his resurrection. The curse is overturned, Jesus’ life is restored. He saves because it is our curse he is bearing.

If we are in any doubt that the cross did its work, the resurrection is where we need to look. There need be no uncertainty. The payment has gone through. His sacrifice has been received and accepted. He really is our Saviour. He didn’t come just to teach us and live for us, but to die for us and be raised up for us. Those outrageous claims about his death paying for sin have been proved right. God is holding him up high for everyone to see.

The Author of life

Death is final. When we say goodbye at death we don’t expect to say hello again. But not in the case of Jesus – and not in the case of those who follow him (more on that later). In his case the natural processes of death are arrested and Jesus comes through death to new life. Here is Peter, our resurrection tour guide, again: ‘You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead’ (Acts 3:15).

Jesus died. Billions of people have – great leaders and philosophers and teachers ...