Word of Salvation – Vol. 46 No. 08 – February 2001

 

With Christ From Death To Life

 

Sermon by Rev. M. P. Geluk on Lord’s Day 17 (Q&A 45 Heid Cat)

Scripture Reading: Romans 6:1-14

Suggested Singing: BoW 90A; 310; 48:1,2,3; 529

 

Beloved in the Lord.

There are many exciting accounts of Christ’s resurrection in the New Testament.  On separate occasions the risen Lord showed Himself to the women, to the apostles, to the two men from the village Emmaus, to Thomas, and to more than five hundred believers at the same time.  From all these accounts you can read how seeing the risen Christ and touching Him, deeply affected the faith of these believers.  Their doubts vanished, and when Christ also explained the Scriptures and opened their minds, they began to understand why Christ had to suffer, die and rise again from the dead.

But what actually was this understanding that Christ gave to these believers?  It obviously had to do with them seeing the reason and necessity of Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection.  But it was more than just that.  As they began to understand, then their hearts were stirred and they were filled with great joy.  Christ’s resurrection did something to their person.  It had an effect on their knowledge and that in turn affected their emotions and their faith.

Lord’s Day 17 focuses on all this when it asks a simple question: How does Christ’s resurrection benefit us?  So not just you knowing that Christ’s resurrection is a fact, but how does it help you?  Most of you have probably accepted Christ’s resurrection as a fact for most of your life.  But has it done you any good?  Has it made a difference to your faith?

A farmer in a dry part of Western Australia might hear that good rain is falling in other parts of the State.  But that will not make him very excited.  When he sees good soaking rains fall in his area, then that will stir his heart and pump the blood through his veins a bit faster.  We hope and pray that today’s preaching about the resurrection of Christ will do something similar to you?

Lord’s Day 17 is quite brief on the meaning of Christ’s resurrection for believers, but it manages to say a great deal.  Look again at what it says.  It says first of all that Christ has won something for us by His resurrection from the dead.  What is it?  It’s righteousness!  We have been given a righteousness with God.  The Christian’s standing before God is no longer marked by sin and guilt because the risen Christ is covering the Christian with His own righteousness.  We call that our justification.  Then, secondly, Lord’s Day 17 says that Christ has also resurrected the believer to a new life.  Not a new life after we die but a new life now.  This affects our Christian living at the present.  We call that our sanctification.  And then, thirdly, Lord’s Day 17 says Christ’s resurrection guarantees the believer’s resurrection in the body in the future.  That’s our future life, our glorification.

Now as we look at all this, then we realise, of course, that not everybody accepts Christ’s resurrection as a fact.  The obvious difficulty some people have with the resurrection of Christ is that it is impossible from a scientific viewpoint.  No one can demonstrate that a dead body can come to life again.  The Christian accepts that but goes on to say that God who made the laws of nature and controls them can also override these natural laws and do things that normally do not happen.  In God’s plan of salvation it was vital that He have Christ live again and so God went over and above His own natural laws and made the resurrection happen.  It is a miracle to us but not for God.  As almighty God He has the power to do whatever He wishes to achieve His purposes.

But how, then, do people, who still show some interest in the Bible, deal with Christ’s resurrection when they cannot believe in miracles because these are scientifically impossible?  Well, they have several suggestions.  One is that when the Bible speaks about the resurrection, it is not really referring to Christ’s body but to the teaching and influence of Christ as it exists in the church.  For example, Islam accepts that Mohammed died a long time ago and did not rise from the dead.  But Mohammed’s influence and teaching continues to lives on in the faith and practice of Islam.  You can think of that as a kind of resurrection of Mohammed.  In the same way do some people who can’t believe in a physical, literal resurrection of Christ, continue to speak of Christ’s resurrection in the faith and practices of the Christian church.  But the bottom line for such a faith remains that Christ Himself is dead and just a historical person from the past.

But what then of all those appearances of Christ after He died, as described in the New Testament?  Well, these same people, whose reason and intellect prevents them from believing in the resurrection, suggest that the women, the disciples, Thomas, and the others who had seen the risen Christ, must have been hallucinating.  They so much wanted to see Jesus again, that they convinced themselves that they did.  When you then say to these modern doubters that Jesus’ followers did more than just see Him, they also touched Him and saw Him eat a piece of fish, then they will answer that maybe Jesus never really died but was just in a coma.  Perhaps Simon of Cyrene, who carried Jesus’ cross, was the one that got crucified and they thought it was Jesus.  When Bible-believing Christians’ say that such arguments do not carry much weight in the light of New Testament evidence, and that it is surprising that rational people actually use such arguments, then these people who reject the resurrection will finally say that you just cannot accept what the Bible says literally.  For them the Bible is a mixture of facts and ideas and you have to reject whatever cannot pass the scrutiny of modern science.

Now the basic problem with these people is that they have no faith.  They cannot believe that the whole Bible is the true Word of God.  In fact, they do not believe Christ to be as the Bible says He is.  Therefore they stumble over all the things in the Bible that they think contradict modern science and human logic.  And Christ’s physical, literal resurrection is one of them.

But now most of you, and I hope all of you, believe Christ’s resurrection to be fact.  Though we have never seen Christ in the flesh, we accept God’s Word for it.  The question is, how does it benefit us?  Does it stir your heart?  Can you see how Christ’s resurrection affects the Christian’s standing before God – how it enables God to justify you?  And can you see how Christ’s resurrection gives you, the Christian, a new life now – how it sanctifies you?  And can you see how Christ’s resurrection shapes your future as a Christian – how it assures you of future glory?

But be careful now that you don’t put things back to front.  Don’t say that Christ’s resurrection must be real because it gives you joy and happiness.  The fact of Christ’s resurrection does not flow out of your joy and happiness; it’s the other way round.  The Christian’s joy and happiness are there because the resurrection of Christ is a fact.  The fact comes first and then the wonderful emotions are a result of the fact.  To mention this is not just a trivial thing.  In the early church a number of Christians were persecuted and thrown to the wild animals in the Roman arenas.  Or the authorities caused them to die in other violent ways.  We know from history that many Christians, notwithstanding their suffering, faced death in a positive way.  The account in the book Acts about Stephen’s martyrdom shows that he did not despair or panic when he died.

Other Christians have been known to sing psalms and hymns when they went to their deaths.  Their faith helped them be like that.  They focussed on the fact of Christ’s resurrection and other fundamental biblical truths, and that helped them in their emotions.  It is always the historical facts on which the Christian faith rests, the knowledge of those facts, and believing them, that enables the believer to face the traumas and hardships of life.

So how does the resurrection of Christ benefit you?  Well, you must see it as Christ’s victory over death.  That victory enables you, even whilst you still struggle with sin, to stand before God with the righteousness of Christ about you.  Christ’s death was for the sin of others.  By removing sin from us He gives us a right standing before God.  So through Christ’s death the believer is righteous before God.

But we need the risen Christ to bring the blessing of His death home to us.  For it is the risen Christ who is there to remind Satan that he has lost the battle.  A dead Christ is no good to us.  Every time Satan tries to get to you, to destroy your Christ-given righteousness before God, to challenge your faith in what Christ has done for you, then the risen Christ is there to secure your salvation by saying to Satan, “hands off, this Christian is mine”.  Now knowing that, and believing it, gives you deep joy and happiness.  Imagine, Christ the King, is there to fight for you, to stand in for you, defend you and to let no one snatch you away.  I tell you, your emotions run deep with all this and your heart opens to God and you thank and praise Him for His love for you in Christ.

But these emotions will not always be with you.  There will be times, as every believer knows, when God seems far away and that you seem to be struggling along all by your lonely self.  But don’t trust your emotions.  Don’t go by your emotions to tell you how God sees you and what your relationship is with God.  Go by what God Himself says about all that.  And, in time, your emotions will catch up with the facts.  Live by faith in what Christ has done in His death and what He is doing for you right now as the risen One.  Don’t let your emotions feed your faith.  What is faith again?  What did you learn in catechism class?  That faith is made up of two things – knowledge and trust.  So first, let the believer remember what He knows from God’s Word and then, second, trust it again to be true.

Do what the Bible tells you to do, to serve and obey the Lord so that His will and purposes are done in you and through you.  God may send you trials, life may be difficult, but see it all in the context of the great battle between Christ and Satan.  You are part of these battles but all the time there is the risen Christ fighting for you and making sure that Satan cannot undo your right standing with God.  You see, then, how Christ’s resurrection benefits you!  He makes you share in the righteousness He has won for us by His death.

What I have been saying so far has all to do with your justification before God.  But there is also your sanctification.  It means, of course, that you are alive to God even right now at this very moment.  The risen Christ, by His power, has resurrected the believer to a new life in the here and now.  Again there will be times that the believer wonders about that.  Here you are still struggling to keep that temper under control.  Maybe you are still battling with lust.  There are still those impure oughts in your mind.  And you still quarrel from time to time with the very people you otherwise love deeply.  So how alive with Christ are we then?  That old nature of sin seems to be still alive and well in us.  Yet, because of Christ’s resurrection, the Word of God says to all believers that the old self is dead and buried.  Romans 6:6,7 says, “For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be rendered powerless, that we should no longer be slaves to sin – because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.”  So God Himself says that the old sinful self has died with Christ.  Christ’s death killed your sinful self.  But how come we still do sin?  If you and I still sin, then doesn’t that mean that the old sinful self is still alive?

Think of it this way.  If the old nature was still alive then it would rule you.  A sinful nature that is under the control of Satan will never let up trying to influence the owner of that nature.  It will get its way every time.  What’s more, where the sinful nature is in control, there its owner doesn’t mind and doesn’t care.  People whose sinful natures are alive and well even take perverted pleasure in doing evil things.  They don’t mind having impure lust in their minds.  In fact, they feed it by looking at pornography.  They don’t mind swearing every time they say something, they don’t fight it.  They think it gives them a tough image.  And people who are very good at abusing someone else, either yelling abuse or inflicting physical abuse, it doesn’t seem to bother them.  The old nature of sin is in full control.

But now the Christian is different.  There the sinful nature has been put down and Christ has resurrected the believer to a new life.  The old self is no longer running the show.  The believer is not ruled and controlled by sin but by the risen Christ.  Romans 6:8 goes on to say, “Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.”  We live with Christ.  We are raised to a new life with the risen Lord.  In this new life He rules us through His Word and Spirit.  The Christian has to believe that and act on what he believes.  Verse 11 says “Count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”

How does all this work out in practice?  Well, you all have television sets.  Suppose you are watching some show or film of which at the beginning you’re not quite sure where it will go.  It might be something worthwhile to watch.  It may not be.  If at the end it was worthwhile then you don’t feel bad having watched it.  If, however, the whole thing gets worse and worse, or if it never rises from the questionable level it began, the blasphemy, the gutter jokes, the senseless violence, the immorality — it’s all there at every twist and turn, then it won’t be long before the believer’s conscience starts to protest.  The believer’s mind is sending messages: “Hey, this is rubbish, it’s just trash, it’s insulting to God, flouting His standards and dishonouring His Name.”

What’s happening is that Christ is working in the believer through His Word and Spirit.  And when the believer let’s Christ have His way, then he will switch off the TV set, or walk away if it’s not his.  The Christian will do this not only because he ought to, but also because he wants to.  The Christian has been raised to a new life and he must not let sin rule him, nor does he want sin to rule him.

However, the Christian’s weakness will show when he continues to watch what he really doesn’t want to.  Here he is doing the very things he hates.  When he finally breaks away then he is not happy and he’s sorry that he did not do so earlier.  He is conscious of his own weakness and when he next prays to God he is humbled and unburdens his heart.  He asks for forgiveness and is thankful for God’s mercy in Christ.  He’s also more determined to live the new life in Christ a bit better.

But if, while you’re watching, you enjoy the blasphemy, the gutter jokes, the senseless violence, the immorality, or if not enjoying it you don’t mind it, or you can put up with it, then it would seem very much that the old nature of sin is very much alive and well in you.  Christ does not live in you and you have not been raised to a new life.

Now I mentioned the television by way of example.  But the same thing applies, of course, to a lot of things in life.  If Christ’s death has benefited you, then you are a new person.  And you honour God by living the new life that Christ has put in you.  Christ is your Master and not sin.  Its power has been broken in you.  The old sins that controlled you before will seek to come back and control you again.  That’s Satan for you.  But remember, whilst sin is something that is alive, you must play dead to it.  Don’t give in to it.  It would be best if we don’t even give it an opportunity to get at us.

Sometimes the Christian feels like giving up because he seems to fail so often.  And he remembers Paul’s cry, “What a wretched man I am!  Who will deliver me from this body of death?”  But don’t only remember that, remember also what Paul said straight after: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord” (1Cor.15:24,25).  Yes, for every believer, Christ is the Victor yet.  With all our weaknesses we may well wonder if we will make it to heaven.  But getting to heaven is never dependent on us.  It depends on Christ.  The Christian’s fight against sin is not a struggle to get into heaven.  The fight against sin has to do with whether or not we glorify God with our new life in Christ.

You see, then, the risen Christ living within us has everything to do with our sanctification.

As for the Christian’s future, Christ’s resurrection is a wonderful blessing there also.  It has guaranteed our complete glorification.  Christ is so great a Saviour that He is right now busy fulfilling His wonderful plan of salvation for all those whom He has saved and will save.  Satan will never be able to tear the Christian out of Christ’s hand.  In the end Satan will be thrown into the bottomless pit and the Christian will live on the new heaven and earth.

This wonderful benefit from Christ’s resurrection will enable you to face whatever is around the corner.  Many people dare not think about what is around the corner.  They like to think that life should be always pleasant.  Even some Christians think that.  But we know that it seldom goes like that.  Not all of us are going to live long and healthy lives and then die quickly and neatly.  Senility, long-term illness, a nursing home are distinct possibilities.  We may now not know just what’s around corner for us, but we do know it can be any of those things mentioned.  But the Christian also knows that whilst the Lord has never guaranteed an easy life, He has guaranteed the believer a wonderful destination.  And what’s more, Christians will be raised imperishable and immortal – meaning, when believers receive their glorified resurrected bodies, then, like Christ’s resurrected body, these will not be subject to perishableness and death.

Christ’s resurrection, then, benefits the Christian in a wonderful way.  We share in the righteousness He has won for us by His death.  Right now, in the present, the believer stands justified before God because he is covered by Christ’s victory over sin.  Satan can no longer condemn the believer.  But the Christian still has to fight sin in the here and now.  Yet, even now the believer has been raised to a new life, which he lives by faith in Christ.  In this new life, sin is not his master.  Christ is, and the believer lives to glorify God.  As for the future, Christ’s resurrection guarantees the Christian’s resurrection of the body.

And so the Christian’s standing before God, our present life, and our future life – Christ rising from the dead has touched it all.

Thanks be to God, and praise His Name forever.

Amen.