Word of Salvation – Vol. 20 No.28 – April 1974
God Rolls Back The Stone
Easter Sermon by Rev. F. L. Vanderbom on Matthew 28:2
Readings: Matt.27:57 – 28:10; Acts 13:16 & 26-41
Psalter Hymnal 356:1 (all)
2 (sisters)
3 (brothers)
4 (all)
252:2 + 3 (with Rule)
233:5+6
sermon
357:1 (all)
2 (sisters)
3 (brothers)
refrains by all
361
Congregation,
Have you ever noticed how you can have just one thing in the memory, which reminds you of a whole lot of other things. Just a picture of something can bring back a whole host of memories out of the past.
A car can bring back lots of memories. When I was a boy, dad had a black Hillman car, 1949 model. Sometimes you still see that model on the road, and it reminds me of lots of things that happened when I was a boy: dad often coming home late at night, the house we lived in then, the service station we used to go to, and its Roman Catholic owner. Perhaps you have noticed the same thing: a certain model car on the road today can bring back memories, no matter whether you are old or young.
A picture of an old church building will do the same. You start thinking back. Perhaps to the early days of our congregation. Perhaps you remember the friends who used to live around here in those days. Perhaps you think of someone who got married in that old building.
Or, perhaps for you, it’s an old armchair or something like that, that brings back many stories. You think back to grandfather, the smell of his lounge room, the way he used to talk, the games he played with you.
We are all different. Our memories are different. But isn’t it true that certain things become a sort of SYMBOL! It may be a certain model car, or an old building, or an armchair, but it can bring back a whole PICTURE. It can bring back lots of FEELINGS; perhaps sad ones, or happy ones. It may make you relive old EXPERIENCES out of the past.
It was like that for the friends of Jesus too; the women and the disciples who had followed him through three long and busy years.
The disciples and the women now had a symbol which they could not get out of their minds. On the Saturday after Golgotha, this symbol clung to them; they couldn’t get it off their minds,
Everything that had happened: that terrible Friday; the horrible crucifixion of their Lord on Golgotha, on Skull Hill; the shameful, lonely death of their dearest Friend: it was all summed up in their minds by this one symbol.
And this symbol was not an old car. It wasn’t an old church building, or an empty armchair. The symbol which these broken people could not get off their minds was A STONE: a large, fat, round stone.
It really WAS a large stone. Mark chapter 16 verse 4 makes that clear. Even three or four women together didn’t have a hope of moving it.
The stone was not MEANT to be moved easily. Just like a coffin today is buried deep in the ground so that it won’t just be dug up. The stone at the entrance to the sepulchre was meant to keep people away from a dead body, and so it HAD to be large. The stone masons and funeral directors of those days had special tools to move these stones.
This large stone at the grave of the Lord Jesus had become a symbol to the friends and disciples of Jesus.
It summed up in a way how they felt about the arrest, the trial, and the crucifixion and death of Jesus. Everything that had happened on that Friday was symbolised by that stone.
We want to think about two things today:
1. The message of the stone.
2. The message of the angel.
FIRST: THE MESSAGE OF THE STONE.
….And, what DID the stone really say?
The stone was a crushing, smashing, pulverising stone. The stone had said, “Bang!” It had crushed the last fading hopes of the friends and followers of Jesus.
The stone said, “It doesn’t really matter how strong a man is!” The disciples had seen how strong Jesus was, how he commanded the winds and the waves of the Sea of Galilee, how he could walk straight through the middle of a crowd of angry Jews who wanted to murder Him. The stone said, “It doesn’t really matter. Look at Him now.”
The stone said more. “It doesn’t really matter how good a man is.” It doesn’t matter how good you are, it doesn’t matter whether you are kind, thoughtful, patient, forgiving. Jesus was all of these things, He was good, and He said that the child of God is like that too. But look at Him now.
It doesn’t matter how hard you try to keep God’s Law, how much you try to do what is right with God. It makes no difference, that you guide your family to love the Lord, In the end, it’s all the same, whether you build somebody up, or whether you tear him down with your tongue.
It doesn’t matter how hard you try, or how good you are, or how strong: we all end up dying in the end.
Good people and bad people; the sincere, open fellow, and the easy-talking hypocrite; the believer and the mocker; the family man with his worries, and the fellows and girls who call themselves “free”….!
The stone said to the women: “We all finish up the same way, in a hole, six feet by two, by six feet deep, or in a little jar in the cemetery wall.” No matter whether you lived with the Lord, like Jesus; or whether you were mixed up like Judas; or whether you want to sit on the fence like Pilate tried to.
This was the message of the stone for those women-friends of the Lord Jesus as they went down to see the sepulchre again on the Sunday morning.
“IT MAKES NOT A SCRAP OF DIFFERENCE. We all end up dying in the end.”
But this was not the only thing that the stone meant for the women after it had been rolled into place on the Friday night. It had another message too, just as terrible as the first.
The stone also said, “THERE IS NOTHING OTHER THAN THE POWER OF MAN.”
This was the message of the stone to the two men on the road to Emmaus, you may remember. They had lost hope. It seemed to them that there was nothing other than the power of man.
We read how they felt in Luke 24, starting at verse 19: “…Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and… our chief priests and rulers delivered Him up to be condemned to death, and crucified Him. But we had hoped that He was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, this is now the third day since this happened.”
The message of the stone was very much in the minds of Cleopas and his companion. There seemed to be nothing other than the power of man.
The chief priests and the rulers had had the last word; they had decided what would become of Jesus. It was the power of man. Man had built a grave for Joseph of Arimathea. Man had arrested and legally murdered Jesus. People had taken the Lord’s body down, and wrapped it in cloth, and buried it. Men had rolled the large stone over the opening of the cave. Officials from the government in Jerusalem had come to seal the grave with their official seal. The men of the government had set a guard at the cave, to stop people from interfering.
They couldn’t risk having somebody come to steal the dead body of Jesus. If that happened, it could perhaps start people talking about the resurrection of Jesus, and about a miracle, and the power of God.
And so the government officially sealed the grave shut, and set the guard.
The women, and the disciples, and Cleopas and his friend – they knew what the government had done, and they knew about the heavy stone, and they had seen what men had done to Jesus.
The message of the stone was: There is nothing other than the power of men. Man decides what happens. God doesn’t exist, and if God does happen to exist, He doesn’t care about us. He has no power here!
In other words, there is nothing other than the power of men. The Lord Jesus had once said, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.” (John 11:25)
In Matthew’s Gospel, we read at least twice that Jesus warned his disciples that all this would happen. Jesus said to them, “The Son of Man is to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him, and he will be raised the third day.” (chaps.16:21, 17:23)
But the women and disciples had forgotten the last part. They could only see the stone, and the power of Godless man.
Even their Saviour Jesus had been put away forever, trapped behind the stone. Once you come to that stone, your grave, that’s the end.
“There is nothing other than the power of man, and man ends at the grave.” That was the message of the stone.
But then, What about…
THE MESSAGE OF THE ANGEL?
This is the second thing we should remember. There was not only the crushing, hope-destroying message of the stone, Our text, verse 2, tells us that “an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone and sat upon it.”
This is THE REAL MESSAGE for Easter Morning!
The first thing the women noticed when they reached the grave on the Sunday morning was that the stone had been rolled away!
The last thing they remembered of the Friday night was that heavy stone, rolled over the grave’s entrance. The first thing they saw at dawn on the Sunday: the stone rolled away, and the angel of God sitting on it!
But I’m sure that for them, not just the stone had been rolled away. Everything the stone stood for had disappeared. The angel of the Lord was sitting on that stone; and in a way, the angel was sitting on all that that stone had come to mean.
What the Lord God did on Resurrection morning had changed everything! It meant that death is NOT the end. A hole in the ground six feet down is NOT the end. It is NOT TRUE to say that man’s power is the only power there is.
“The angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone, and sat upon it.” That stone, rolled away, means: a lot of old ideas rolled away. The way so many people think about life – rolled away by God’s angel when he rolled away the rock, and when Jesus rose from the grave.
When the angel sat down on that big heavy stone, it showed that God is stronger than that stone, and what it stood for.
Someone has suggested that the angel who sat on the stone when the women arrived, was laughing. Can you imagine an angel laughing? In the Bible, you don’t read very often that people laughed. But I think that the angel who sat on that stone may very well have been laughing when the women first saw him. Just imagine what these friends of Jesus would have looked like: sad-faced, eyes red and swollen from hours of crying, shoulders sagging. They had been thinking too much about the message of the stone.
I’m sure that the angel on the stone would have laughed!
“You thought that this was the end of Jesus! You thought He was no more than a wonderful person, a great man, a first-rate teacher! You forget all that he said about the purpose of His going to Jerusalem. About laying down His life, so that He might take it up again. About His death as a ransom for the sins of many. About His being the Resurrection and the Life! Did you really think that all this was meaningless talk, hard to listen to?
“Do you think that a stone IS the end? That you KNEW all the answers about life and the meaning and end of life? Do you think that God CANNOT act in this world? That man is the only one who has power to do things?
“Then you explain this stone rolled away! Explain the earthquake earlier this morning, and the empty grave.”
Explain who would have thought up the resurrection story! Explain how a few frightened men and women changed themselves into the blossoming Christian Church! Explain how it was that people were prepared to die for what they saw and heard…!!!
People today keep telling themselves: Man is the top dog. Death is the end, so man can really do more or less what he likes. God (if there is a God) is a prisoner in His own creation. We can leave God out.
That was the message of the stone.
But the Bible laughs at the so-called wisdom of this message. The Bible says, in our text, “An angel of the Lord descended from heaven and rolled back the stone, and SAT upon it.”
Jesus rose from the grave! He is alive!
This means that God’s power is greater than our power. The Lord can give us a sort of life which goes a lot further than all OUR ideas about life.
This is what Jesus meant when He said in John 10 verse 10, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”
Today we notice quite a bit about the power of man. Some people complain about the power of the government. We notice the power of the trade unions. We get worried about the rising price of everything we need.
But do not forget that the power of man can go only so far, and no further.
There is far more to our life than the power of man. There is also more to our life than food, and good fun, and money coming into the house. There is nothing wrong with these, but there is more!
That is the message of the angel. To the friends of Jesus, to Stephen, the first Christian to die for his loyalty to Jesus; it is also the message of the Lord’s angel to you and me.
There is MORE than this life. It DOES matter what we do, and how we live. There is MORE than the power of man! Do not leave the Lord out of your thinking!
There are so many people who DO leave the Lord out. They live as if God has no say and no power. It’s as if it is man only that matters: man and his power, man and his plans, man and his money, his successes and his failures.
But, it is NOT like that!
God has been good to us. In His great love, He did not leave us at the mercy of our own sinful selves, or at the mercy of the power of other people. Through faith in the Lord Jesus, the angel has a message for us too!
Man no longer is the stronger;
Death itself is captive led.
Christ has risen from death’s prison;
O’er the tomb He light has shed!
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