EASTER 2008

What a special time of year for the believer in Christ! Easter. Resurrection Sunday. The pain and suffering that the Lord endured when He bore our sins on Calvary was immense and beyond our comprehension. We do not rejoice in the physical abuse that was inflicted upon Him or at the insults that were intended to belittle and disgrace Him. We do not rejoice at the thought of Him suffering the cruel punishment of crucifixion or His agonizing separation from the Father that prompted that horrific cry, “My God, My God why hast thou forsaken me”.
But we do rejoice in an empty tomb! We do rejoice in a risen savior! We do rejoice in our High Priest, seated at the right hand of the Father! We do rejoice in His promise to prepare a place for us! We do rejoice in His fulfilled promise to send the Holy Spirit, our Helper! We do rejoice in our hope of a promised return of our Lord and our gathering together with Him! We do rejoice at the thought of seeing Him face to face and being in His presence forever! Because He is risen, O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?
In a recent men’s bible study we found ourselves reading the account of Jesus restoring life to the only son of a widow from the city of Nain. The account is in Luke 7:11-15 and is as follows:
11Soon afterwards He went to a city called Nain; and His disciples were going along with Him, accompanied by a large crowd. 12Now as He approached the gate of the city, a dead man was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow; and a sizeable crowd from the city was with her. 13When the Lord saw her, He felt compassion for her, and said to her, "Do not weep." 14And He came up and touched the coffin; and the bearers came to a halt. And He said, "Young man, I say to you, arise!" 15The dead man sat up and began to speak. And Jesus gave him back to his mother.
As we were reading I became focused on a particular part of the verse and what it was saying. We see in verses 12 and 14 that a dead man was being carried out of the city in a coffin. Then we see Jesus walk up to the coffin and speak to the dead man, saying “Young man, I say to you, arise!” The dead man then sat up and spoke. Yes, Jesus speaks to the dead! We may have spoken words to a loved one who has passed away but there was no ability for our words to be heard and certainly not to be responded to.
Ephesians 2:1 tells us that we were dead in our sins and trespasses. It seems that we have all been in our own coffin, not made of ornate wood but rudely constructed of our sins and trespasses. But like the widow’s son, God has made us alive by the power of the resurrection. We read in Ephesians 2:4-5 “But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved),”.
Following the death of Lazarus, in John 11:25-26 we see Jesus saying to Martha, "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?"
The apostle Peter wrote in 1 Peter 1:3, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,”
So this Easter, let us rejoice and be filled with hope as we in awe remember, He speaks to the dead! By Greg Engebretson