For Part 1, click HERE.
The four Gospel accounts give us their strange and wonderful historical accounts of the resurrection of Jesus. The rest of the New Testament, either explicitly or by suggestion, refers to the resurrection in every book except 3 John. Unlike the Gospel accounts, however, most of the New Testament is teaching about the significance of Jesus’ resurrection for His people. By the time they wrote, His resurrection from the dead had been established as an indubitable fact, but the meaning of that fact had to be spelled out in clear, bold language.
This begins with Peter’s Pentecostal sermon, where he expounds a whole integrated set of events as the heart of the Christian Gospel. First, the incarnation itself, though not explicitly elucidated, is alluded to when Peter speaks of Jesus as both the son and Lord of David (Acts 2:34). Peter says that Jesus’ Messianic life and ministry were attested to by miracles, wonders, and signs (2:22). But the Jews, by lawless hands, in concert with Rome, crucified and put Jesus to death (2:23). However death could not hold Him. God vindicated His righteous Son by raising Him from the dead (2:24). That is not the end of the story, for God also exalted Jesus to His right hand (2:33) where He will reign until all His enemies are made His footstool (2:34-35). The story of Jesus does not end until the eschatological triumph, of which the resurrection of Jesus is the first fruits and guarantee.
Here in the first Christian sermon — that is the first sermon after the gift of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost — Peter outlines the fundamentals of the Gospel. In bare terms, which do not do justice to Peter’s sermon, we have 1) incarnation; 2) Messianic life; 3) death on the cross; 4) resurrection; 5) ascension to the right hand of God; 6) the gift of the Spirit and Trinitarian revelation; 7) Jesus’ rule until the eschatological end when all enemies have been defeated. This is not so much a linear series — though it is that also — as it is an integrated aggregate of inseparable elements, none of which can function without its proper place in the whole.
The story of salvation in the New Testament, the promise of the Gospel, has the resurrection of Christ as its center1 because the resurrection of Christ is the vindication of His redemptive work on the cross, the foundation for the gift of the Spirit for His church, and the covenant pledge of the glorification of the church with Him. It is true, of course, that each and all of the seven elements identified above in my inadequately elaborated list is no less essential than the resurrection, but the theology of the New Testament places such emphasis on Jesus’ resurrection that we may call it the central concern. It is the proof of everything else. Like Paul said, “if Christ is not risen, we are of all men most miserable” (1 Corinthians 15:19).
We might add, if Christ had not risen from the dead, He would have been of all men most miserable! As Isaiah says, “He was despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it wereour faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.” (Isaiah 53:3-4).
We do not really know the full import of the words “a man of sorrows” because we cannot begin to fathom the heart of Christ. Objectively speaking, Jesus’ sorrows may be said to begin with His birth, as Herod attempted to murder Him. Again, objectively speaking, His sorrow may be said to continue as He grew up in Nazareth — a town with a bad reputation for reasons that were probably legitimate. If people in power conspire to kill you at your birth and if you grow up in an immoral town, you have sorrows enough, even if you are not the kind of person to perceive all that is going on. Of course, Jesus was the kind of person who knew all that was going on.
I am not now speaking of Jesus as the omniscient Son of God, though, of course, He was and is that. I am not referring to it because I cannot begin to comprehend it. How can the eternal God be a man? What can we say about the thoughts and feelings of an incarnate God? I can confess what I believe about Jesus, that He was and is the incarnation of the second Person of the Trinity, but there is very little that I can actually comprehend about Him. He is utterly beyond all that any man can imagine, though in His grace, He delights to reveal Himself to us, so that we can truly know the incomprehensible One.
However, even if we only attempt to consider Jesus as a man, we have to say that He was and is utterly beyond us. Who imagines that they can enter the mind and heart of a man like Augustine, or Bach, or any of the other geniuses in world or Christian history? We freely acknowledge that there are men of genius who are in many ways far above us. Therefore, we do not usually imagine that we can imagine their subjective state or that we can psychologically dissect them, because we assume — rightly I believe— that they are in many ways beyond us, as Solomon wrote: “As the heavens for height and the earth for depth, So the heart of kings is unsearchable.” (Proverbs 25:3). Actually, to a lesser degree, that is true of anyone and everyone. In fact, I think that Solomon also implies that we cannot really understand ourselves: “He who trusts in his own heart is a fool” (28:26).
Remembering what Solomon has to say and setting aside the absolutely impossible task of imagining the heart of the incarnate Son, let us take on the only slightly-less-impossible task of imagining the heart of the greatest of all geniuses in the history of our race, the greatest man who has ever lived.
On Easter Sunday, I think it is especially important to remember that Isaiah said that the Servant of Yahweh was a “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (53:3). Although Isaiah 53 is especially about Jesus’ death on the cross, Jesus’ sorrows were certainly not limited to the cross. Think, for example, of Jeremiah or Nehemiah. Their sorrows and suffering were not primarily about themselves or their personal issues — though they had personal trials enough. What made them men of sorrow was the agony they endured because of their love for their people. Israel’s sinfulness and the oppression the people faced filled Jeremiah and Nehemiah with anguish.
With Jesus, it must have been much more. The words of lamentation in Jeremiah would have also been the words of Jesus from early on.
Oh, that my head were waters,
Jeremiah (9:1-3)
And my eyes a fountain of tears,
That I might weep day and night
For the slain of the daughter of my people!
Oh, that I had in the wilderness
A lodging place for travelers;
That I might leave my people,
And go from them!
For they are all adulterers,
An assembly of treacherous men.
And like their bow they have bent their tongues for lies.
They are not valiant for the truth on the earth.
For they proceed from evil to evil,
And they do not know Me, says Yahweh (9:1-3).
The lamentation of Jeremiah and the lamentation of Yahweh converge. Commentators disagree about which parts of the lament belong primarily to Jeremiah and where it is Yahweh’s, but the point is that Jeremiah shares Yahweh’s love and sorrow. Needless to say, this sympathetic unity of prophet and Lord would have been much more true in the case of Jesus. Thus, I think we must assume that He was a man of sorrow from His youth, surrounded by the immorality and unfaithfulness of Nazareth and the people of His day.
Therefore in His baptism, He identified with the sinful nation that needed repentance and submitted to the baptism of John because it was righteous for Him as Messiah to be one with the people who needed to repent (Matthew 3:15). Their sinfulness put them under the curses of the covenant, but the curses of the covenant aimed at provoking repentance and renewal (Leviticus 26:18, 23-24, 27, 40-42, 44-45). The God of the old covenant was the God who sought His people’s blessing, the God who cared for them and who was grieved at their sinfulness.
So when the God of Israel becomes a man, He is a man who eats with tax-collectors and sinners, a man who invites sinners to repent. Jesus, like His Father in heaven, rejoices over the repentance of a single sinner (Luke 15:7, 10), but at the same time, like Jeremiah and Nehemiah, He was distressed at the hard-hearted leaders of the nation and its tragic trajectory. He was not a man of sorrows primarily because of what He personally suffered by being hated and rejected by the people of Israel, though of course, that was a very real aspect of His suffering. More than anything, He was a man of sorrows because of His grief for the people He loved.
Jesus took upon Himself all the curse of the covenant, even being forsaken of His Father. But, as the book of Hebrews tells us, we trust in One who endured in hope: “looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God (12:2). Jesus’ resurrection was His vindication, the initial stage in the public proof that He was and is the Son of God and Israel’s Savior. His sufferings, too, fit with the words Paul wrote in Romans 8:18, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthyto be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.”
Jesus rose from the dead, never to be humiliated again, though He still suffers with His people. Now, however, His people can endure all suffering and sorrow with a new hope because Jesus conquered death and the grave — not only for Himself, but, as Paul shows in Romans 8, for each Christian individually, as well as the church as a whole, and even more, for the renewal of all creation, which “groans and labors,” waiting for the glorification of the sons of God, when all with be “be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (8:21)
It is because Jesus rose victorious that “we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:38). In Greek the word order is different. Young’s literal translation has: “And we have known that to those loving God all things do work together for good, to those who are called according to purpose.” There is emphasis here on “to those loving God,” because loving God is, as Jesus taught, the first and greatest command, the very heart of the life of the covenant.
But the love of God does not begin with us, for “we love Him because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19). We love Him because He called us and poured out His Spirit in our hearts so that we cry out, with Jesus, Abba, Father (Romans 8:15).
“What then shall we say to these things?
(Romans 8:31-39).
If God is for us, whocan be against us?
He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all,
how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?
Who shall bring a charge against God’s elect?
It is God who justifies.
Whois he who condemns?
It is Christ who died, and furthermore is also risen,
who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us.
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
As it is written:
“For Your sake we are killed all day long;
We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.”
Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing,
shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Ralph Smith is a pastor of Mitaka Evangelical Church.
- Richard Gaffin, The Centrality of the Resurrection: A Study in Paul’s Soteriology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1978). ↩︎