John sits back, lowers the quill, strokes his beard and looks at the drying parchment. The introduction: finalized. The material: organized to steadily reveal flashes of glory. He remembers the means He used to glorify God….
…and he remembers how God the Father glorified Him.
He died of His own volition; Pontius didn’t have a choice in the matter. He died a criminal labeled King and was buried without a dime and yet within a rich man’s tomb—only to have the tomb be vacated.
The sight of that stone, moved aside and for whom? The one who commanded the waters to be still, the one who raised the dead by calling them by name, the one who could make rocks sing if he so wanted; he didn’t need to roll away that stone. After all, he showed up behind closed doors, not once but twice!
That stone was rolled away for us. We could see. An event that none of us saw, but there was the evidence: glory had flashed and death died as God, laid aside his burial clothes as if waking up from a nap, and walked out of closed tomb.
Everything has changed.
We now look forward to that day when he returns in glory and power, thinks John. What a day of rejoicing that will be.
Maybe it will be soon? I hope it’s soon, he thinks as he blows out the candles.
He’s old. He can’t move as he used to. But he remembers these things as if it were yesterday.
You can’t put a cap on this revelation of glory.
Everything has changed.
Technorati Tags: christ, easter, flashes of glory, resurrection
Tags: christ, easter, flashes of glory, resurrection
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I’ve underscored that: it would be inconsistent to believe the Gospel and not believe in a physical resurrection; there are dire consequences of holding to a non-physical resurrection; and that there is no biological and cosmological grounds to outright deny a future physical resurrection. (I even shared some thoughts on how important the resurrection is to me in my experience.) Now, although I touched on some of this with the consequences of holding to a non-Physical resurrection, I wanted to delineate a theological necessity for a physical resurrection.
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Technorati Tags: physical, preterists, resurrection
Tags: physical, preterists, resurrection
Posted in apologetics, christ, salvation | Comments (7)
Ideas have consequences. It’s easy to say, slips stealthily across the typed keys, rings exceedingly true; and in the end it’s ignored. Paul pointed this out to the Church in Corinth when they tried to make their concept of the resurrection more palatable to foreign, and likely their own, ears.
People do it today. In an effort to make one of Christianity’s key doctrines more palatable to the public religious palette, some confessing Christians have taken to modifying the future resurrection of Christians. So instead of a future people getting up from the grave, we put off this flesh and are freed from it: we become happy Ghosts, “resurrected” on a cloud in heaven.
I’m reminded of Yoda, pinching Luke in disgust while talking about “This crude matter”.
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Technorati Tags: gnosticism, gospel, resurrection
Tags: gnosticism, gospel, resurrection
Posted in christ, salvation | Comments (1)
