On Easter Sunday, we specially celebrate the Savior's defeat of sin and death and hell for us. He died to pay the awful debt of sin, and because His sacrifice justifies His people, He rose from the grave, victorious over it.
Many try to claim that Christ's resurrection was merely spiritual, and that He never meant to defeat physical death for us. Rather, they say, His appearances were mere spiritual apparitions, holograms, or the like. Only the spirit counts, and the physical need not be redeemed at all.
But the Lord Jesus went to great pains to establish that His actual physical body was raised again, alive, tangible, and real. His grave where He was buried was emptied. His disciples held onto His feet. He nipped in the bud any notion that His body had been carried away by somebody else. He displayed the wounds of the cross that He still bore to show that no substitution had been made. He eat with His disciples, and cooked for them and broke bread with His own very real hands.
Christ's physical bodily resurrection requires that His people be so raised physically also.
We cannot take a platonic view of the creation, that God doesn't care to redeem the physical realm as well. He created it, called it very good, and has promised to restore it, to remove the rot of sin, and make it and His people's bodies glorious.
Indeed, we are promised that we shall be raised with physical bodies similar to the Savior's, glorified and without sin.
All this was clearly foretold by Job in the depths of his despair, surrounded by death and racked by disease and pain. Yet he knew that after his own death, he would one day see his Redeemer in his flesh with his own eyes! |
