People of God, this is the Fourth Sunday of Resurrection! We are still immersed in this season of joy and celebration. And we have chosen I Corinthians 15 as the background theme to this feast. Why? Because the resurrection is God’s response to death and Caesar. God does not make false promises. He fulfills His creation purpose: to renew all things and to make the Light the center of His universe. Namely, that Light is Jesus. The Light is so powerful that the darkness of the tomb cannot contain it.
The great Princeton Seminary professor, B.B. Warfield, enjoyed saying to his students: “Gentlemen, I like the supernatural.”[1] We are believers in a supernatural God who made an unknown tomb to be the center of a supernatural faith.
Out of this empty tomb God is making something new. We call it the New Creation . This New Creation was not the invention of man; it was the entrance of God’s kingdom into this world. It was not the Church that created a story to keep their dying faith alive, it was the resurrection of Christ that created and sustained the Church. As F.F. Bruce wrote:
“The early Christians did not believe in the resurrection because they could not find his dead body. They believed because they did find a living Christ.”[2]
The tomb is empty because the threats of death are empty. And this is the apostolic goal in this chapter: to re-affirm and to revel in the resurrection of the Messiah. Continue reading “Fourth Sunday of Easter: The Empty Threat of Death, Part III, I Corinthians 15:20-28”