The Doctrine of Revelation: The Storyline of Scripture (Part 18)

It’s sometimes really easy to forget how strange Christianity can be. Those of us who grow up in the church hardly bat an eye at the strangeness of talking snakes, or talking donkeys, giant floating zoos, parting seas, or walls that crumble at the sound of trumpets. We can overlook so much of this strangeness that we even miss how wild it is that the King we worship was once dead for three days. If I pause and really look at it from the perspective of an outsider it’s crazy to say we worship a God who rose from the dead. But this resurrection is crucial to the storyline of Scripture, in fact, the story is completely different without the resurrection.

The resurrection is a key piece to the storyline of Scripture. We saw last week how the work of Christ on the cross is related to the sacrificial system in the Old Testament. We’ve seen how Jesus’ death is the fulfillment of all that that pointed to. But if Jesus is still dead, if there is no resurrection, then Jesus is just one more dead lamb. The whole sacrificial system is meant to deal with man’s sin problem. God cannot dwell with sinful humanity and so he establishes a system that allows for some form of punishment to be dealt out, but knowing that each year on the Day of Atonement the same thing would have to be done again. So when Christ cries out on the cross just before breathing his last, “it is finished (John 19:30),” we have to ask, “how can he say that?” How can Jesus declare that the sacrifice is actually finished, done, over with?

Acts 13:29 gives us a clue when Luke writes, “And when they had carried out all that was written of him, they took him down from the tree and laid him in a tomb.” The events of Jesus’ death were written about previously, he was fulfilling something. When it was “finished” it mean that that fulfillment had happened. And then Luke adds the important words: But God raised him from the dead. That resurrection happened because the sacrifice was perfect. It couldn’t have happened any other way. In fact Paul makes that abundantly clear in 1 Corinthians 15, he writes:

 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. (1 Corinthians 15:17 ESV)

We must remember that everything in the storyline of Scripture is pointing towards God’s victory and His redemptive plan. Without the resurrection that story has a different ending. In fact that story has an “ENDING.” But because of the resurrection there is no end! Forgiveness is given, hope is received, and God wins!

The resurrection is not just the Easter event, it is a key piece to the entire story of Scripture and without it we a very different, a very sad, story. It may seem strange…okay it is strange, but it’s truth and it is crucial to our salvation, our future, our present, and God’s story.