The Story

(This is a repeat of a previous post while I am at a conference.)

So what do we mean when we talk about the "revelation" Jesus brought or the "deposit of faith" or the faith "given once and for all to the saints?" What was it that the Apostles were so busily "passing down" to the members of the Christian Movement? Yes, certainly the New Testament, but read on for a minute to see where I'm coming from. Before word one of the New Testament was committed to writing, Jesus' emissaries were teaching this revelation face to face.

I'm taking this from my site's 'Prologue' up at the top of the page. The other red boxes break up and discuss what this Prologue says. It's fairly short and I'll expand on it in future articles, but I'd ask that you notice two things as you read it through: First, how bare-bones it is. Jesus left a lot of the work up to his Movement. Another topic for a future post, I think!

And second, notice... that it's a story! The revelation Jesus left us with did not consist of a list of rules or a detailed chart of how Bible prophecy works out. When the last Apostles died they left us with a story.

___________________

Personally, I like a religion that can be summed up in a short poem.

In ancient times, when someone decided to follow Jesus of Nazareth, they would first have this poem recited to them, line by line. And after each line they would be asked, "Do you believe this?" "Yes," they would respond, "I believe."

Then they would be baptized.

That poem, of course, is the Apostle's Creed, dating back to the earliest days of the movement Jesus founded. During the first ages of that movement, Christian documents were expensive, cumbersome, and prone to be confiscated and burned by the authorities. But, although you might not be able to carry the Bible with you, you could carry this poem (composed of artfully arranged quotes from Scripture) in your mind.

Today, whatever else they may squabble about, Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and Protestant are united on the truth of these words. Even those groups that claim to eschew creeds will usually agree with it's teachings.

It is this poem that we present here. These are the core truths Jesus and his Apostles taught. This is what the ancient martyrs died for. This is the Authentic Light.

~~~

I believe in God the Father Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth.

And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, dead, and buried.
He descended into hell.

On the third day he rose from the dead;
he ascended into heaven,
and sits on the right hand of God the Father Almighty.
From there he shall come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,

the holy catholic Church,

the communion of saints,

the forgiveness of sins,

the resurrection of the body,

and the life everlasting.

Amen.

All Live

by RadicalBender

So all live to God.

Gospel of Luke 20.27-38, Voice



God lives in eternity, outside of time. When he looks at us humans he sees all of us all at once from the beginning to the end, everyone who ever was or ever will be. And so, "All live to God."

And also -- everyone who ever lived, lives now, or ever will live in the future will continue to live. We are not eternal, of course, because we had a starting point but after that point we will continue to live -- somewhere.

God's bias on the subject of where you should continue to live is plain. In one of our ongoing series here, here, and here so far) I'm spelling out what details we have about where we go when we die, but we all do go somewhere.

And so, "All live to God."

A Revelation About Revelation

Read more in Part 2a>>

(The first part of this series is Life After Death, Part 1. Think of this article as an interlude in the discussion where we bring up a different but closely related subject.)

Revelation is progressive

Before starting Part 2 of our Life After Death series, there is one small thing I'd like to point out first. It's a simple point and will be blatantly obvious once I type it, but you'd be surprised how many people down through the ages have gotten tripped up by it. So many bad Bible interpretations and misunderstandings have stemmed from not getting this that it's really rather embarrassing.

The Big Reveal

Ready? Here it is: Revelation is progressive.

This has nothing to do, incidentally, with whether your theological views are "progressive" (i.e., liberal) or "traditionalist" (conservative). Instead it just means that Adam didn't understand as much of God's program for humanity as Noah did, Abraham didn't know as much as Moses, Isaiah could grasp more than Moses, and Jesus of Nazareth, well... he himself was the final, complete, and sufficient revealing of that program.

"Spoken through his Son"

So God did not reveal all the truth he had to reveal at the beginning in a blinding flash of light. He revealed it by dribs and drabs within the stream of history as it flowed along. "In the past God spoke to our people through the prophets. He spoke to them many times and in many different ways. And now in these last days, God has spoken to us again through his Son," (Letter to the Hebrews 1.1-2, ERV ). Previously obscure or unknowable, God has made his truth known in events of finite history (Letters to the Colossians 1.26-27 and the Ephesians 3.3-6).

Why bring this up now? Because what God reveals about death and what comes after was revealed gradually over time. You can see it grow as we trace it throughout the Bible until in the New Testament Jesus gives it definitive form.

Two Difficuties

But there are two things that happen with alarming frequency with the subject of life after death (and many other subjects for that matter):

1.)  Sometimes people will reach right into the middle of the process of God revealing this teaching and cherry-pick a bit that they like. A variation of this is, in effect, ranking the earlier bits over the later, more complete bits of God's revelation.

So someone who, for instance, believes the dead are all unconscious until the resurrection (sometimes called "soul sleeping") will support that by quoting Book of Ecclesiastes 9.5 - "the dead don’t know anything." But when "the Teacher" wrote that, God wasn't done revealing things yet; that whole process was still going on. In fact, it still had a long way to go.

With anything we try to understand from God's revelation, like the afterlife, it is crucial that we take everything he has taught, as a whole, leaving nothing out. We need to try and hold the entire revelation God gave on that topic in our minds at once, and grasp the "story flow," not just cherry-pick our favorite proof-texts. And it is equally crucial that we look back at the whole long flow of what God revealed through the lens of the supreme revelation of the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth.

2.) The other thing that happens with alarming frequency is that people chuck the revelation on any particular subject and substitute some other idea instead -- often because they weren't even aware that their substitute isn't what Jesus and his Apostles taught.

Greek philosophers

Photo by Matt Neale

With the afterlife for example many people believe that when you die, if you've lived a virtuous life, you shuffle off your old body and live forever as an immortal disembodied soul in Heaven. And this despite the fact that the Christian Movement has recited innumerable times over the centuries, "I believe in... the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting."

That first belief is actually a hodge-podge of old Greek ideas (like this one as an example), not at all what Jesus or his Movement or the Hebrew scriptures teach.

Forward

So, forewarned of these two muddy ditches on either side of our path, let's begin tracing out the trail of what God reveals about life after death.

Read more in Part 2a>>

Life After Death, Part 1

Read more in Part 1a>>

What happens to us when we die? Do we lie there moldering in our graves? Do we head off to Heaven to live a disembodied eternity with God? Are we conscious or do we "soul sleep" until the resurrection?

As the Apostle Paul said in the scripture I posted Sunday (1st Letter to the Corinthians chapter 15 verses 22 - 24), whatever it is that happens to us, it will be the same thing that happened to Jesus when he died. Followers of Jesus live "in Christ," bonded together with him. Like him we will die and be resurrected; only the timing is different. As the Messiah, he went first, and we will all follow him by being bodily resurrected when it's our turn -- "when Christ comes again."

Jesus' younger brother once wrote, "A person’s body that does not have a spirit is dead." Christ's body, we know, died and was buried in a tomb for 3 days, but what about his spirit? Where was the spirit of the Son of God during what the Christian Movement has long called "Holy Saturday" -- the time between his burial and resurrection?

Wherever it was, or whatever condition Jesus' spirit existed in, our spirits will experience the same thing between our deaths and resurrections -- with one important caveat: the universe was altered on a cosmic scale with the death and resurrection of the Messiah. That was sort of the point, after all: "The Son of God came for this: to destroy the devil’s work," (1st Letter of John chapter 3 verse 8, ERV). So conditions may have changed even in the world of the dead since those epic 3 days, but the overall situation of those who will be resurrected remains.

 It's never been our main topic of conversation (that, of course, would be the announcement of the arrival of the Lord Messiah and his Kingdom) and we never fleshed it out as much as you and I might like, but the early Christian Movement was aware of where Jesus was, and where we go, between death and resurrection.

So this will begin a series of posts on the after life. The scholar N.T. Wright famously calls being resurrected "life after life after death," something Jesus and his Apostles were much more interested in. But we won't go quite that far for now. We'll be looking at what they taught about what comes before that: "Life After Death."

Read more in Part 1a>>

Just Like Him

 Meditation for a Sunday Morning

"The Resurrection" by William Blake

Courtesy of the Art Renewal Center

In Christ all of us will be made alive again. But everyone will be raised to life in the right order. Christ was first to be raised. Then, when Christ comes again, those who belong to him will be raised to life. Then the end will come. 

(1st Letter to the Corinthians chapter 15 verses 22 - 24, ERV)


Jesus coming back to life is just the beginning. We will all follow him through death and out the other side.

_______________________

We believe also in the resurrection of the dead. For there will be --  in truth there will be -- a resurrection of the dead, and by resurrection we mean resurrection of bodies. For resurrection is the second state of that which has fallen. For the souls are immortal, so how can they rise again? ...It is then this very body, which can decay and dissolve, that will rise again incoruptible.

John of Damascus (AD 676 - 749)
Exposition of the Orthodox Faith Bk. 4 Chap. 27

"It's Really Me"

"The Unbelief of Thomas"

The Jewish people in the 1st century were not unfamiliar with the idea of people appearing after they died. In fact the entire Roman world was familiar with it too, and sometimes even today some of us will look up and see a deceased loved one.

That sort of thing is what those who rule out a supernatural explanation frequently use to explain the Christian Movement's belief that Jesus had been resurrected. A current example of this is the scholar Bart Ehrman's new book How Jesus Became God.

Interestingly though, unless you count Jesus, there is no record of anyone seeing that sort of vision and taking it to mean that a resurrection in the 1st century Jewish sense (i.e., bodily coming back to life) had taken place.

The early Christians were quite aware that this kind of explanation would occur to people. But they would have none of it. Here is one of them writing on the subject 30 to 50 years after the event:

While the two men were saying these things to the other followers, Jesus himself came and stood among them. He said to them, “Peace be with you.”

This surprised the followers. They were afraid. They thought they were seeing a ghost. But Jesus said, “Why are you troubled? Why do you doubt what you see? Look at my hands and my feet. It’s really me. Touch me. You can see that I have a living body; a ghost does not have a body like this.”

After Jesus told them this, he showed them his hands and his feet. The followers were amazed and very, very happy to see that Jesus was alive. They still could not believe what they saw. He said to them, “Do you have any food here?” They gave him a piece of cooked fish. While the followers watched, he took the fish and ate it.

(Gospel of Luke chapter 24 verses 36 - 43, ERV)

The Meaning of the Resurrection

Resurrection

by James Tissot

Yesterday we celebrated Easter, also known as Resurrection Sunday, the most important day in the Christian year. But have you ever wondered what it is about Jesus rising from the dead that makes it so significant? What does a resurrection prove?

Here's a little confession: when I was a little kid, growing up catholic, I thought of Jesus as a kind of religious superhero and his resurrection was his mightiest super-deed. By coming back from death he somehow blew open the doors to Heaven so we could all go there when we died.

When I got a little older I thought of it more as a wager. You probably remember this episode from one of the times Jesus and the Pharisees clashed:

"Then some of the Pharisees and teachers of the law answered Jesus. They said, “Teacher, we want to see you do a miracle as a sign from God.”

Jesus answered, “Evil and sinful people are the ones who want to see a miracle as a sign. But no miracle will be done to prove anything to them. The only sign will be the miracle that happened to the prophet Jonah. Jonah was in the stomach of the big fish for three days and three nights. In the same way, the Son of Man will be in the grave three days and three nights.

(Gospel of Matthew chapter 12 verses 38 - 40, ERV)


In other words, "So you don't believe I'm the Messiah, eh? Tell you what I'm gonna do: you guys kill me. Then if I can come back to life in three days, I'm the Messiah. If I don't, I'm not. Deal?"

That's how I thought of it -- sort of an ancient David Blaine stunt. And I don't think I was alone, although most people wouldn't put it in these crass terms. (Side note: If you've ever wondered about the various ways Jesus' time in the tomb is described -- three days, after three days, three days and three nights, etc. -- I'll cover that in a future post.)

But it wasn't a stunt and it wasn't just a mighty deed (although it is that).

What is a Resurrection?

Think about the word "resurrection;" what did it mean to the average first century Jew? True, there were lots of ideas about the afterlife among them, including that there wasn't one. But for the people back then who spoke of a resurrection (which included the Pharisees, interestingly enough, and most of the devout common folk), it meant a specific thing.

We've talked before here about what the Messiah was supposed to do. There were different ideas about him too of course, but broadly speaking most people agreed he would: be a warrior, ride into Jerusalem, defeat the enemies of God (i.e., the Romans, naturally), purify the temple, and set up the Kingdom of God, which ushered in an age of unending bliss.

"I Am the Resurrection"

For people who believed in a resurrection, every righteous Israelite would come back to life, body and soul, when the new age began. You can see this belief for yourself in that famous scene where Jesus and Martha talk at the grave of her brother Lazarus.

When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went out to greet him. But Mary stayed home. Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will give you anything you ask.”

Jesus said, “Your brother will rise and be alive again.”

Martha answered, “I know that he will rise to live again at the time of the resurrection on the last day.”

Raising of Lazarus

by Rembrandt van Rijn

She was expecting her brother to come back to life, along with everyone else, "on the last day" of this age. And incidentally, no one was expecting some sort of mass hallucination when this resurrection happened. Believers in a resurrection meant a real, honest to goodness coming back to life in a body in the Kingdom of God. In our day, of course, some speculate that Jesus' resurrection was just a nice, comforting vision, or a feeling that Jesus was still alive somehow beyond the grave. Visions and spiritual feelings were quite familiar to the Jewish people. They happened regularly. Neither one would convince them that a resurrection had occurred.

But back to Lazarus' grave, notice how Jesus answers Martha.

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection. I am life. Everyone who believes in me will have life, even if they die. And everyone who lives and believes in me will never really die. Martha, do you believe this?”

Martha answered, “Yes, Lord. I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God. You are the one who was coming to the world.”

(Gospel of John chapter 11 verses 17 - 27, ERV)

Here and Now

Here's the point: to Martha and other faithful Jews like her whenever the resurrection finally happened it would mean that the Messiah had come and defeated God's enemies, that the Kingdom of God was here, that the end of this evil age had arrived.

But for the the resurrection to happen now, in the case of Jesus, meant that the Messiah and his Kingdom were here now -- in the middle of history. And that was unexpected to say the least. The Apostle Paul wrote:

God promised long ago through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures to give this Good News to his people. The Good News is about God’s Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. As a human, he was born from the family of David, but through the Holy Spirit he was shown to be God’s powerful Son when he was raised from death.

(Letter to the Romans chapter 1 verses 2 - 4, ERV)

He is "the resurrection" indeed!

At the beginning we asked, "What is it about Jesus rising from the dead that makes it so significant? What does a resurrection prove?"  As the Christian Movement has always proclaimed in the Great Announcement (a.k.a., the Gospel) it means that the Messiah has been crowned, God's Kingdom is here, and we are those upon whom "the ends of the ages have come."

"Repent and believe this Good News!"

Easter: "...If Christ has never been raised..."

The Holy Women at the Tomb

by James Tissot

If what we celebrate on Easter didn't really happen, says the Apostle Paul, then there is really no point in being a member of the Christian Movement at all.

True, Jesus taught very high ethics but, as C.S. Lewis showed in his book The Abolition of Man, other people taught them too. It wasn't being a great ethical teacher that made Jesus different. It was his resurrection -- and what it means -- that made him different. And if that never happened, then you might as well move along. Find an easier religion or philosophy, one that hasn't gotten people insulted and martyred for the last two millennia.

After all, "If our hope in Christ is only for this life here on earth, then people should feel more sorry for us than for anyone else."

On the other hand if this really happened, if the Messiah came back from the dead, well... That changes everything.

______________________

"I gave you the message that I received. I told you the most important truths: that Christ died for our sins, as the Scriptures say; that he was buried and was raised to life on the third day, as the Scriptures say; and that he appeared to Peter and then to the twelve apostles. After that Christ appeared to more than 500 other believers at the same time. Most of them are still living today, but some have died. Then he appeared to James and later to all the apostles. Last of all, he appeared to me. I was different, like a baby born before the normal time.

"If Christ has never been raised, then the message we tell is worth nothing. And your faith is worth nothing. And we will also be guilty of lying about God, because we have told people about him, saying that he raised Christ from death...

"If Christ has not been raised from death, then your faith is for nothing; you are still guilty of your sins. And those in Christ who have already died are lost."

First Letter to the Corinthians chapter 15 verses 3 - 8, 14, 17 - 19, ERV

"The Power of His Resurrection"

Meditation for a Sunday Morning

"My aim is to know him, to experience the power of his resurrection, to share in his sufferings, and to be like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead."

Letter to the Philippians chapter 3 verses 10-11

__________________________

(The great evangelist of the Christian Movement, Charles Spurgeon, reminds us that simply believing Jesus rose from the dead is not enough.)

"The resurrection is the corner-stone of the entire building of Christianity. But to know that he has risen, and to have fellowship with him as such, communing with the risen Saviour by possessing a risen life, seeing him leave the tomb by leaving the tomb of worldliness ourselves -- this is even still more precious.  

"I would have you believe that Christ rose from the dead so as to sing of it, and derive all the consolation which it is possible for you to extract from this well-ascertained and well-witnessed fact, but I beseech you, rest not contented even there. Though you cannot, like the disciples, see him visibly, yet I bid you aspire to see Christ Jesus by the eye of faith, and though, like Mary Magdalene, you may not “touch” him, yet may you be privileged to converse with him, and to know that he is risen, you yourselves being risen in him to newness of life.  

"To know a crucified Saviour as having crucified all my sins, is a high degree of knowledge, but to know a risen Saviour as having justified me, and to realize that he has bestowed upon me new life, having given me to be a new creature through his own newness of life, this is a noble style of experience. Short of it, none ought to rest satisfied. 

"May you both “know him, and the power of his resurrection.” Why should souls who are quickened with Jesus, wear the grave-clothes of worldliness and unbelief? 

"Rise, for the Lord is risen."

"...The claims of Jesus Christ..."

"Resurrection of Christ"
by Guerau Gener

Meditation for a Sunday Morning

"If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is futile and your faith is empty... if Christ has not been raised, your faith is useless; you are still in your sins."

1st Letter to the Corinthians chapter 15 verses 14, 17

______________________

It is well to bear in mind that faith is deeper and wider than a spiritual experience: it is an acknowledgement of the claims of Jesus Christ and an obedience to his commands. It consists primarily in personal devotion to a living Savior, but it also entails a confidence in the apostolic testimony concerning who he is and what he has done. Our faith is directed not simply to the mystical presence of Christ or to the unconditional, but to Jesus Christ crucified and risen according to the Scriptures. The act of believing (fides qua creditur), though supremely important, must never prevail over the content of faith (fides quae creditur).

Donald Bloesch, Essentials of Evangelical Theology, Volume 1: God, Authority, and Salvation

Behold The Man

(During this period of Lent I have called upon several wise Christians from the past 2000 years to speak on the subjects of Self-Renunciation and Spiritual Formation. Today, the 2nd Century teacher Melito of Sardis explains in ringing terms what Jesus Christ accomplished on the first Easter Sunday.


Easter Sunday

"But he arose from the dead and mounted up to the heights of heaven. When the Lord had clothed himself with humanity, and had suffered for the sake of the sufferer, and had been bound for the sake of the imprisoned, and had been judged for the sake of the condemned, and buried for the sake of the one who was buried, he rose up from the dead, and cried aloud with this voice: 'Who is he who contends with me? Let him stand in opposition to me. I set the condemned man free; I gave the dead man life; I raised up the one who had been entombed.

"'Who is my opponent? I', he says, 'am the Christ. I am the one who destroyed death, and triumphed over the enemy, and trampled Hades under foot, and bound the strong one, and carried off man to the heights of heaven, I, he says, am the Christ.'

"'Therefore, come, all families of men, you who have been befouled with sins, and receive forgiveness for your sins. I am your forgiveness, I am the passover of your salvation, I am the lamb which was sacrificed for you, I am your ransom, I am your light, I am your saviour, I am your resurrection, I am your king, I am leading you up to the heights of heaven, I will show you the eternal Father, I will raise you up by my right hand.'

"This is the one who made the heavens and the earth, and who in the beginning created man, who was proclaimed through the law and prophets, who became human via the virgin, who was hanged upon a tree, who was buried in the earth, who was resurrected from the dead, and who ascended to the heights of heaven, who sits at the right hand of the Father, who has authority to judge and to save everything, through whom the Father created everything from the beginning of the world to the end of the age.

"This is the alpha and the omega. This is the beginning and the end -– an indescribable beginning and an incomprehensible end. This is the Christ. This is the king. This is Jesus. This is the general. This is the Lord. This is the one who rose up from the dead. This is the one who sits at the right hand of the Father. He bears the Father and is borne by the Father, to whom be the glory and the power forever. Amen."

--Melito of Sardis, On the Passover

Jesus' Family Tomb?

Last Sunday the Discover Channel ran a documentary that claimed a tomb found near Jerusalem in 1980 is actually where Jesus and his family -- including Mary Magdalene, whom he supposedly married -- are buried.

First century middle eastern people had the rather macabre custom of letting the dead rot for a year, then gathering up their bones and putting them in a limestone box called an ossuary. Sometimes they scratched the dead person's name on the box, but in most cases they left it blank. If a particularly honorific person's bones were inside they might put some effort into the inscription (as was the case with the famous "James Ossuary"). Usually, it was just chicken scratchings.

The main reason the show gave for this being Jesus' tomb seemed to be that the names on the bone boxes found inside were, with a little stretching in some cases, similar to the names of some people in the Gospels -- names like Joseph, Mary, Jesus, among others. There was also some DNA evidence introduced from 2 of the boxes (the bones were long gone, buried when they were first discovered), which was only able to show that they weren't genetically related.

And quite a lot was made of the odd version of the name "Mary" on one ossuary because it appears in a book written at least 300+ years later possibly referring to Mary Magdalene. This was followed in the inscription by the word "Mara," taken by the producers to be the aramaic word for "Master" and to refer to Mary Magdalene as well. Linguistic scholars say this much more likely the name "Martha" and was either a second name or the name of another person whose bones were put in the same box -- a baby daughter, for instance.

As Dr. Ben Witherington points out in his blog, virtually all historians and biblical scholars -- including those interviewed during the program -- do not accept it's conclusions. The scholarship on the show was mediocre in my opinion -- on the level of the search for Atlantis or the Da Vinci Code. But most people do not have the time to deeply study ancient greek and aramaic scratchings on 2000 year old bone boxes. An exciting TV show backed with selective use of facts and cool reinactments can seem quite convincing.

Something that weighs more heavily with me is this simple fact: This was not a secret tomb. In the 1st century, as all admit, this was an easily seen tomb sitting in a field near the major city of Jerusalem. As you can see in the photograph, it was even nicely decorated.

But the Christians asserted that Jesus of Nazareth had come back to life and that this verified he was really the long-awaited Messiah. Rather than go through a lot of trouble, all the Powers That Were had to do to stop the Christian movement was produce his body. If it could be demonstrated that Jesus hadn't come back from the dead but was actually still lying among them, the whole thing would go to pieces.

This was not lost on the early Christians. As St. Paul said, writing 20-something years after the crucifixion, "If Christ hasn't come back to life, our message has no meaning and your faith also has no meaning, " (First Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 15, verse 14).

I'm not going to make the more obvious point that nobody -- Jew or Roman -- ever claimed back then to have found the body of Jesus. Those who opposed Christianity always had to do so on other grounds. But I will point out that if the truth actually was that his followers spirited their crucified master's body away and reburied it so they could rather pathetically continue spreading his teaching and pretending he was alive, they certainly wouldn't have done so in this tomb.

If you're trying to say a dead man is alive, you do not put him in a visible tomb near the place his enemies killed him. You also do not have his relatives and supposed wife interred there in their own burial ceremonies over the years, acting as pointers to the location. And you don't write his name on his ossuary.

If the body of Jesus is in a grave somewhere (which, incidentally, I do not for a moment believe), it is in an inconspicuous hole far away from Jerusalem, and his bone box, if he got one, is anonymous.

To quote Paul again: "But, in reality, Christ has risen from among the dead, being the first to do so of those who are asleep. "