If a Man Die, Shall He Live Again?

As we look back on the weekend in which we have remembered Jesus death and rejoiced in his resurrection, this portion of R.C. Sproul's book Following Christ seemed particularly poignant


.For three days God was silent. Then he screamed. With cataclysmic power God rolled the stone away and unleashed a paroxysm of creative energy of life, infusing it once more into the still body of Christ. Jesus' heart began to beat, pumping glorified blood through glorified arteries, sending glorified power to muscles atrophied by death. The grave clothes could not bind him as he rose to his feet and quit the crypt. In an instant the mortal became immortal and death was swallowed up by victory. In a moment of history Job's question was answered once and for all: "If a man die, shall he live again?"Here is the watershed of human history where the misery of the race is transformed into grandeur. Here the kerygma, the proclamation of the early church, was born with the cry "He is risen." We can view this event as a symbol, a lovely tale of hope. We can reduce it to a moralism that declares, as one preacher put it, "The meaning of the Resurrection is that we can face the dawn of each new day with dialectical courage." ...The New Testament proclaims the Resurrection as sober historical fact. The early Christians were not interested in dialectical symbols but in concrete realities. Authentic Christianity stands or falls with the space/time event of Jesus' resurrection. The term Christian suffers from the burden of a thousand qualifications and a myriad of diverse definitions. One dictionary defines a Christian as a person who is civilized. One can certainly be civilized without affirming the Resurrection, but one cannot then be a Christian in the biblical sense. The person who claims to be a Christian while denying the Resurrection speaks with a forked tongue. From such turn away. ...The Resurrection sets Jesus apart from every other central figure of world religions. Buddha is dead. Mohammed is dead. Confucius is dead. None of these were sinless. None offered atonement. None were vindicated by resurrection.If we stagger with unbelief before the fact of the resurrection we would do well to consider the plight of the two walked to Emmaus that weekend. Luke records the event for us (Luke 24:13ff.). As they were walking away from Jerusalem, Jesus joined them incognito. They presumed to inform Jesus about the events of the Crucifixion and were obviously impatient with his apparent ignorance of the matters. When they related the report of the women concerning the Resurrection, Christ rebuked them:
"O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?" And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself. One of the most painful rebukes we can suffer is the one contained in the four miserable words, "I told you so."When the two had their eyes opened and they recognized Jesus that night, they said to each other, "Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures?"A Christian is not a skeptic. A Christian is a person with a burning heart, a heart set aflame with the certainty of the Resurrection.