Day 19
Our Risen Lord

God raised Him up again, putting an end to the agony of death, since it was impossible for Him to be held in its power.

Acts 2:24

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is without question the pinnacle of redemptive history. It proves beyond a doubt the deity of Jesus Christ and guarantees our own resurrection. Most important, it is the crowning proof that God accepted the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, “who was delivered over because of our transgressions, and was raised because of our justification” (Rom. 4:25). Paul’s imagery in that verse pictures a criminal being remanded to his punishment. In a similar manner Jesus Christ was delivered up as our substitute to serve the sentence of death our transgressions deserved. But He was also raised up to provide the justification before God we could never attain on our own. The great nineteenth-century theologian Charles Hodge wrote:

With a dead Saviour, a Saviour over whom death had triumphed and held captive, our justification had been forever impossible. As it was necessary that the high priest, under the old economy, should not only slay the victim at the altar, but carry the blood into the most holy place, and sprinkle it upon the mercy-seat; so it was necessary not only that our great High Priest should suffer in the outer court, but that He should pass into heaven to present his righteousness before God for our justification. Both, therefore, as the evidence of the acceptance of his satisfaction on our behalf, and as a necessary step to secure the application of the merits of his sacrifice, the resurrection of Christ was absolutely essential, even for our justification.1

The fact is, “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins” (1 Cor. 15:17). If Jesus did not rise from the dead, then sin won the victory over Christ and therefore continues to be victorious over us all. If Jesus remained dead, then when we die, we too will remain dead and damned to eternal punishment. If Christ did not defeat death, His death was useless, our faith in Him is useless, and God still holds our sins against us. If Christ was not raised by God, then He did not reconcile us to God, redeem us from the penalty of our sin, bring about the forgiveness of sins, or provide the one and perfect sacrifice for sins. If all of those things were true, then His death would be nothing more than the heroic death of a noble martyr, the pathetic death of a madman, or the execution of a fraud. All men would be damned and eternal heaven empty of all but God and the holy angels.

But God did raise Jesus from the dead (see Rom. 4:25). His death did pay the price for our sins, and His resurrection proved it. When God raised Jesus from the dead, He demonstrated that His Son had offered the full satisfaction for sin that the law demands.

Not only that, Christ’s resurrection proves His power over the supreme penalty of sin—death. The grave could not hold Jesus because He had conquered death, and His conquest over death bequeaths eternal life to every person who trusts in Him. The apostle Peter said, “God raised Him up again, putting an end to the agony of death, since it was impossible for Him to be held in its power” (Acts 2:24).

Death was powerless to hold Jesus for several reasons. First, death could not contain Him because He possessed divine power. Jesus was “the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25) who died “that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil” (Heb. 2:14). Satan’s power to kill us had to be broken for us to be brought to God, so in His resurrection, our Lord robbed Satan of his supreme strategy. Death is a powerful satanic weapon, but God has a weapon that is more powerful—eternal life—and with it Jesus destroyed death. The way to eternal life is through resurrection, so Jesus went into death, through death, and came out the other side.

Divine promise was a second reason that death was not able to hold Jesus. John 2:18–22 records the following dialogue:

The Jews then said to Him, “What sign do You show us as your authority for doing these things?” Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “It took forty-six years to build this temple, and will You raise it up in three days?” But He was speaking of the temple of His body. So when He was raised from the dead, His disciples remembered that He said this; and they believed the Scripture and the word which Jesus had spoken.

“Thus it is written,” our Lord told the disciples, “that the Christ would suffer and rise again from the dead the third day” (Luke 24:46). Jesus Himself, who is the Truth, the incarnate God who cannot lie, promised that He would rise from the dead.

Third, death could not hold Him because of divine purpose. God planned that His people be with Him for all eternity. But to be with Him, they needed to go through death and out the other side, and Jesus had to blaze the trail (see 1 Cor. 15:16–26). He promised the Father He would raise all God’s people up and lose none of them but bring them to heaven (see John 6:37–40).

So, by demonstrating His ability to conquer death—a power belonging only to God Himself, the Giver of life—Christ established beyond all doubt that He is God the Son (see Rom. 1:4). Thus the resurrection is proof that Christ’s sacrifice was acceptable to God to atone for sins, and as God, He has the power to conquer death and raise the dead.

Daily Challenge

Consider the awesome power of God on our behalf as you read theologian Benjamin B. Warfield’s rousing description:

That He died manifests His love and His willingness to save. It is His rising again that manifests His power and His ability to save. We cannot be saved by a dead Christ, who undertook but could not perform, and who still lies under the Syrian sky, another martyr of impotent love. To save, He must pass not merely to but through death. If the penalty was fully paid, it cannot have broken Him, it must needs have been broken upon Him. The resurrection of Christ is thus the indispensable evidence of His completed work, of His accomplished redemption. . . .

If it is fundamental to Christianity that Jesus should be Lord of all; that God should have highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name; that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, and every tongue confess Him as Lord: then it is fundamental to Christianity that death too should be subject to Him and it should not be possible for Him to see corruption. This last enemy too He must needs, as Paul asserts, put under His feet; and it is because He has put this last enemy under His feet that we can say with such energy of conviction that nothing can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord—not even death itself: and that nothing can harm us and nothing can take away our peace.2