Benefits of the Resurrection

WHAT THE RESURRECTION GIVES US

THERE are some of the riches of this blessed Truth gleaned by from the Pauline Epistles. What does His Resurrection mean to the Christian in his daily life? John 19:31-37 tells us of His death, of the spear thrust in His side, and of blood and water pouring out of that great gaping wound. It is told in the plainest language that He died of a ruptured heart.

The blood flowed through the rupture in His heart into the sack that holds the heart, and as the body grew cold, the blood had separated and the white serum had settled to the bottom. The red corpuscles had risen to the top and coagulated, and when that Roman spear pierced it, the white serum gushed out. Then followed clots of the coagulated blood rolling down His side to the ground. Jesus was dead.

John 19: 38-40, “And after these things Joseph of Arimathaea, being a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews, asked of Pilate that he might take away the body of Jesus: and Pilate gave him leave. He came, therefore, and took away His body.

“And there came also Nicodemus, he who at the first came to him by night, bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred pounds. So they took the body of Jesus, and bound it in linen cloths with the spices, as the custom of the Jews is to bury.”

Here is a drama worthy of inspiration. Joseph and Nicodemus showed their friendship openly after His death. “Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden; and in the garden a new tomb wherein was never man yet laid. There then because of the Jews’ Preparation (for the tomb was nigh at hand), they laid Jesus.” (Verses 41-42.)

John 20:1-10 gives us a picture of His Resurrection. “Now on the first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, while it was yet dark, unto the tomb, and seeth the stone taken away from the tomb.

“She runneth therefore, and cometh to Simon Peter, and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and saith unto them, They have taken away the Lord out of the tomb, and we know not where they have laid him.

“Peter therefore went forth, and the other disciple, and they went toward the tomb. “And they ran both together: and the other disciple outran Peter, and came first to the tomb; and stooping and looking in, he seeth the linen cloths lying; yet entered he not in.

“Simon Peter therefore also cometh, following him, and entered into the tomb; and he beholdeth the linen cloths lying, and the napkin, that was upon his head, not lying with the linen cloths, but rolled up in a place by itself. “Then entered in therefore the other disciple also, who came first to the tomb, and he saw, and believed.

“For as yet they knew not the scripture, that he must rise again from the dead. “So the disciples went away again unto their own home.” What a shock it must have been to Mary.
She had come to the sepulchre to finish the embalming and saw the stone rolled away.

She never stopped to look in but turned and ran back to the room where Peter and John were stopping. Bursting in upon them she cried, “They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.” Who had dared to desecrate the tomb? No people among all the nations paid such reverence to the dead as the Hebrew Nation.

The Romans had stripped Him; they had scourged Him; they had nailed Him to the cross, with a mock crown on His Head. That wasn’t enough. Had they dared to desecrate the grave? Peter and John would not wait; they both started toward the tomb. John outran Peter and arrived there first.

Stooping down, he looked into the tomb and was staggered by what he saw. Peter came. He hadn’t the fine feelings that actuated John, He just bowed his head and stepped into the sepulchre and John followed him. Notice the language: “And he beholdeth the linen cloths lying, and the napkin that was upon his head not lying with the linen cloths, but laid in a place by itself.”

When Jesus came out of the grave clothes there was no hurry. He picked up the napkin that had been upon His face, folded it up and laid it in a niche in the tomb. There is something about that act of the Master that reaches deep into my spirit-consciousness.
He doesn’t act like a man, does he?

Only God would act like that in an hour of such triumph. “Then entered therefore that other disciple also who came first to the tomb, and he saw and believed.” What did John see in the sepulchre that made him believe that Jesus was resurrected? “Up to this time, they knew not the scripture that he must rise again from the dead.”

You understand Jesus’ body had been embalmed as the custom of the Jews was to bury.
Nearly every rich family had a slave who understood embalming. They had one hundred pounds of a mixture composed of myrrh and aloes and a bundle of linen cloths.

They cut the linen up into strips, smeared it with this mixture as you would a bandage to wrap around a wounded finger, and then wrapped the body of Jesus. Every finger was wrapped separately and then the hands; and arms, until the whole body was wrapped as an Egyptian mummy. When it was finished, they took the embalmed body and put it into the sepulchre, and it was sealed by Roman authority.

Notice, the body of Jesus likely weighed 180 to 200 pounds in his health. He would shrink about twenty pounds in the crucifixion. There was a hundred-pound weight of myrrh and aloes, besides the linen cloths they used in embalming. Then the body would weigh about 280 pounds. When they had finished the embalming, His body was completely encased except for His face.

If Jesus had not died of a ruptured heart and the spear thrust, He certainly would have died in the three days and three nights of embalming. No one could have lived through that.
The embalming cloth had grown hard and stiff in that dry cell in the seventy-two hours He was there. The cloth had not been rent or torn. He had come out of the grave clothes through the narrow aperture where His face had been.

What do you think Peter and John did? No sooner had they left the sepulchre, than they rushed through the streets crying, “He is risen! He is risen!” Their hearts were so overcharged with emotion they couldn’t resist proclaiming the fact. The tremendous stir His resurrection made in the city, three thousand men that accepted Christ on the Day of Pentecost, all prove the historical fact, the absolute certainty of His resurrection.

The whole Jewish nation knew it. They were shaken to the foundation. I Cor. 15:1-8 declares that five hundred people saw Him at His ascension. The early Church did not try to prove that Jesus arose from the dead. It was a self-evident fact. No one ever questioned it in Jerusalem. They were there when it happened. They saw the tomb and the empty grave clothes.

Tens of thousands of Jews went to that empty sepulcher and stood there smiting their breasts and rending their garments. They knew Jesus had risen. Now what does it mean to us today? Rev. 1:17, 18, hear the Resurrected Master speaking now “And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as one dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying, Fear not; I am the first and the last, and the Living one; and I was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of death and of Hades.”

Satan had been conquered. What a thrill went through the whole spirit world when Jesus came from the dark regions, a Master, holding aloft in His hand the keys of death and of hell. He had stripped that foul spirit of his authority. He had left him defeated before his own cohorts. There was a spiritual earthquake in the region of the damned.

Heb. 2:14 tells us, “Since then the children are sharers in flesh and blood, he also himself in like manner partook of the same; that through death he might bring to nought him that had the authority of death, that is, the devil.” Rotherham translates it “that he might paralyze the death-dealing authority of the devil.” Either translation is clear enough.
Before Jesus arose from the dead, He had conquered Satan and stripped him of the authority of which he had robbed man in the Garden.

The story of the triumph of Satan’s defeat wouldn’t be fully described unless we gave you Col. 2:15: “Having despoiled the principalities and the powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it.”

The margin reads, “Having put off from himself the principalities and the powers.”
You see, Jesus was held down there and only God knows what he suffered until He had satisfied the claims of justice, had been made Righteous, and made a New Creation.
Then Satan’s dominion over Him ended. He hurled back the hosts of hell. He crushed their death-dealing ability.

He stripped Satan of his authority and left him paralyzed and broken. Then He arose from the dead and shouted, “All hail,” for Redemption morn had come! Redemption was a fact. Satan was defeated. Now we can quote Col. 1:13 once more. I want you to become familiar with this scripture. I want you to know it as you know two and two are four.

“Who delivered us out of the authority of darkness, and translated us into the kingdom of the Son of his love; in whom we have our redemption, the remission of our trespasses.”
That was the greatest moment in human history.

That was a moment that will be remembered through all eternity when Jesus stood before the wondering disciples and shouted, “All hail!” Angels must have wept before the throne.
The great Father God-what could it have meant to Him? Humanity, the hope of His Love and the reason for all Creation was Redeemed; the claims of justice were satisfied.
The Throne could never be assailed. God had legally redeemed man.

All the ages of eternity will remember the heroic battle that Jesus wrought in order to prove to humanity that God was just and He could on legal grounds justify the ungodly because His only Begotten Son had redeemed them with His own blood. Now God can on legal grounds give man Eternal Life.

John 5:24 and 6:47 can become a part of human experience. “He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life.” I wonder if your heart takes this in? There will be no judgment for us like there was for the Master; there will be no cross and no crown of thorns. There will be no suffering in hell for the man who takes Jesus Christ as his Savior-and it is so easy to take Him.

Hear this Scripture: John 6:47, “He that believeth hath eternal life,” or he that acts upon the Word that God has spoken, has Eternal Life the moment that he acts. The man outside of Christ cannot confess the Lordship of Jesus and declare that he knows Christ died for his sins and arose when He was justified, without receiving the Nature and Life of God.
You ask, what is the greatest miracle of all the miracles connected with Redemption?

It is not the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus, because the Father and the Son were working together in that. But the greatest miracle happens when a man receives Eternal Life when a child of the devil becomes a Child of God. Notice again: When a man who is spiritually dead passes out of the realm of Satan into the realm of Life( into the Kingdom of the Son of God’s Love) that is the miracle of miracles.

To the Sense-knowledge man, the Resurrection is the greatest miracle, because that is something the senses can register. But the New Birth is an unseen miracle. It is in the Spirit Realm. Man’s soul or reasoning faculties cannot be Born Again. They cannot receive the Nature of God independent of his spirit. His spirit is the part of him that is Recreated.
2 Cor. 5:17-21 had become a Reality the moment Jesus carried

His blood into the Holy of Holies and sat down at the right hand of the Father. Now a man can accept Christ and know that the moment he does, he becomes a New Creation. The old things of his life have passed away, and behold all are become new; and all these things are of God, who has reconciled that man to Himself through Jesus Christ.

What a miracle the New Creation is! Think of taking a man out of the very dregs of our modern civilization and Recreating him in a single moment from a convict to a Son of God.
And not only that but notice that 21st verse. Here God whispers, “Him who knew no sin, I made to become sin, that I might make you my righteousness in Christ.”

That is the Father speaking, and the moment you accept Christ as your Savior and confess Him as your Lord, that moment you become the Righteousness of God in Christ.
We could stop here, for this is enough to thrill the ages, but we haven’t reached the climax of Redemption yet. I Cor. 1:9, “God is faithful, through whom ye were called into the fellowship of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord.”

It took me a good while before I could adjust my heart to the reality of that statement, that the great Eternal Father God, the Creator of the Universe, should call me, should call you to fellowship with His Son, to become Identified with that Son, to become one with that Son.

Here are a beautiful father and mother. They have a lovely boy, and oh, how careful they have been in his upbringing. Could you think of them going down into the slums and finding a non-descript child to be his associate, to fellowship with that boy? No.
But here is the miracle. The Father knows when a man accepts His Son as his Savior and confesses, His Lordship, that moment He will give that man something that will snake him absolutely a New Creation.

He will be in the same class as Jesus. He will be an actual Child of God. The old spiritual nature that links him with Satan has ceased being, and a New Nature, God’s own Nature, is imparted to him. Now he is as really the Father’s Son as was Jesus in His earth walk, and he is as Righteous as the First Begotten because that First Begotten is his Righteousness. You may talk about miraculous things, but I declare to you, that this New Creation miracle outstrips everything in all Creation.

Taking a child of the devil with his hands wet with the blood of his brother, and changing that man’s nature! No sir! giving that man a New Nature, destroying the old nature; giving him the position of a Son; giving him the rights and privileges of a Son; giving him the very place of a Son in the Father’s heart and Family -here is Grace; here is Love let loose.
This is a picture of Paul.

This is the climax. Now you are ready to turn to 2 Cor. 2:14¬16: “But thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest through us the fragrance of his knowledge in every place.” Now note this: “For we are a sweet fragrance of Christ unto God, in them that are saved, and in them that are perishing; to the one a savour from death unto death; to the other a savour from life unto life. And who is sufficient for these things?”

And then hear this cry: “For we are not as the many, corrupting the word of God: but we have been made sufficient to fulfil this ministry.” But I want you to notice a little sentence taken from the Conybeare Translation commenting on those verses. “But thanks be to God, who leads me on from place to place in the train of his triumph, to celebrate his victory over the enemies of Christ; and by me sends forth knowledge of Him, a steam of fragrant incense, throughout the world. For Christ’s is the fragrance which I offer up to God.”

The metaphor is taken from the triumphal procession of a victorious general. God is celebrating His triumph over His enemies; Paul (who had been so great an opponent of the Gospel) is a captive following in the train of the triumphal procession, yet (at the same time, by a characteristic change of metaphor) an incense-bearer, scattering incense (which was always done on these occasions) as the procession moves on.

Some of the conquered enemies were put to death when the procession reached the Capitol; to them, the smell of the incense was an odour of death unto death'; to the rest who were spared,an oduor of life unto life.’ The heart can hardly grasp the significance of it. We now reign as Masters and Kings. Once more I want to give you Rom. 5:17 for it fits here perfectly. (Weymouth’s Translation, 3ed Ed.) “For if, through the transgression of one individual, Death made use of the one individual to seize the sovereignty, all the more shall those who receive God’s overflowing grace and gift of righteousness reign as kings in Life through the one individual, Jesus Christ.” We are now reigning as kings in the realm of life. We have become Masters. We are conquerors. What does the Resurrection mean to us?

It means that He has taken us from slavery to the Throne. We were defeated, conquered, and held in bondage. We are set free, and in the name of Jesus, we become the bondage-breakers for the rest of the human race. He has made us Masters where fear held us in captivity.

New Creation Realities – EW Kenyon
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