Empty Tomb - Symbol of New Life
Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.
- Isaiah 43:19 [ESV]
Passage: MaTthew 28
Reflection
What would it take to make the most religious group of people in the world change their definition of the word “God”? This is the nagging historical question arising out of the early Christian phenomenon. Jews undeniably and passionately affirm that there is one God, and they’re willing to die for that belief. The early Christians, still Jewish by ethnicity, continued to call themselves monotheists while simultaneously referring to a man who’d recently been crucified as God, an affirmation that this one God could mysteriously be thought of as a being existing in multiple persons. Something had shifted. Their core belief about the nature of God had changed.
What would it take to shift the whole world’s calendar? Imagine if the weekend suddenly changed to Tuesday and Wednesday. What sort of event would have to take place to make that happen? It did, indeed, happen, when those same Jews, who had for their entire existence as a nation recognized Saturday as the day on which God’s people gather to celebrate Him, consider the truths of His Word, and rest, suddenly began gathering on Sunday instead. Their most important and longest-lasting religious practice changed in one weekend.
The only historically-satisfying answer to these two plaguing questions is that the man Jesus, the miracle-working carpenter, actually, bodily came back from the dead one otherwise quiet, ordinary Sunday morning, and over the next few days proved over and over again that He welcomes all those who doubt, who see faith the way the Bible presents it — as the most natural, logical conclusion to an honest search for the truth.
Application
Times of change open us up to our most important lessons. We need new hope for new seasons, and the resurrection serves as an eternal reminder that we can trust the God who held out wounded hands to Thomas, who offered deeply personal forgiveness and renewed purpose to Peter, and chose to show Himself first to Mary, who had every reason to fear that she’d forever be invisible and forgotten. This is the Savior who offers streams in the wasteland and goes with us into the new things that He has prepared for us.
As you consider this next season and prepare for what is next, do so with great hope and assurance that the God who rose from the dead is doing a new thing in you. At times you’ll be tempted to hide away in an upper room like the disciples did, to demand some proof that God really is with you and willing to provide for what He’s called you to like Thomas did, or even to give up in despair and go back to the familiar, safe, and unsatisfying like Peter did. But when those doubts and fears get loud, return to the resurrection, and to the secure and settled hope that we do not rest our faith on some transient wish, but on the rock-solid foundation of a fact of history, a fact that can only mean that our God is for us, and He is a God who brings life from the dead.