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The Majesty Of
Jesus
Grace Emmanuel
Church
Pastor Sam Chess
(The
Meaning Of Easter)
Does it amaze you that lots and lots of people have so
little understanding of why we are here today? What is Easter all
about….the resurrection of Jesus???... Why is that significant? It’s
possible that some of us in this room do believe that Easter Sunday is
the day we celebrate Jesus Christ’ resurrection from the dead…but if somebody
were to catch you on the street and ask you why that is so important what
would you say?
If the resurrection hadn’t happened how would that
affect your life? Let’s see if we can figure this out together…
I. First comes _________... then comes resurrection.
In order for there to be resurrection you must first have
death. You can’t resurrect something that is already alive. Before you
can understand what a resurrection even is… you have to, first, take a
hard look at death.
And looking straight at death is not something we like to
do. Let me prove that..
How many people died on September 11th 2001? …3000?
Actually the number of people who died on September 11th
is:
151, 373
While our horrified gaze was on 3000 people, almost 150,000
other people were dying in nursing homes, and in their back yards and in back
alleys and on highways. It happened that day… and has continued to happen
every day since.
Shouldn’t we be concerned? 150,000+ people a day dropping
out of existence. Shouldn’t we have a moment of silence each day for all our
fallen, fellow human beings. Wouldn’t it be good if we at least thought about
them, once a month or so?....
We don’t ponder death… and there’s a reason. The only time
we think about death is when we are confronted by something especially tragic
or if the person who dies is someone we love. We are then
forced to think about it… and it is so painful.
If you watch movies you know that so many of them involve
death, and we are so fascinated by it… but if we were, actually, there
watching real people die we would have intensely negative reactions.
I used to think I was a tough, young man. I worked as an
EMT for several years and I remember, in the middle of one night crawling
into a demolished van on US#1 and finding my neighbor, from across the
street…dead. I took hold of his upper arm and there was nothing there to
grab. My reaction, physically and mentally, was far, far different than if I
was watching a movie!
We, instinctively, will do almost anything to keep from
looking at death…
I read, this week, about a church in Germany... during the
Second World War. The writer was recounting his boyhood memories… A train
track ran just behind the church… (just like the church I grew up in…as a
boy) and the train would come through during their Sunday Morning service.
Cattle cars full of people began to be hooked to the train and when the
prisoners on their way to the gas chambers…saw the church they would scream
out; Help us… save us!
The writer said that the noise was such a distraction that
the church leaders would plan their services to be singing when the train
came by… If they could still hear the cries they would consciously increase
the volume of the hymns… until they drowned out the distracting noise from
the train.
What is there about death that is so, inherently offensive
to us? And why are there other people on this earth who can kill other human
beings and actually take pleasure in it.
Life and death are completely linked to the presence of
God in this world… or lack of it!
God didn’t create human beings to die… God- who IS
life…invested his “power of being” directly into us….”breathed into our
nostrils the breath of life”.
Mankind was created to live forever. God didn’t choose to
bring death into the world…our sin did that…
Romans 5:12-21 When Adam sinned, sin entered the
world. Adam’s sin brought death, so death spread to everyone, for everyone
has sinned. (NLT)
Romans 3:23 For the wages of sin is death…
When mankind chose sin over righteousness we pushed God out
of our lives. Since all life comes from God we were pushing away the very
source of life itself. The absence of life left us “lifeless”
I illustrated last week with light and darkness. Let me
repeat that… As long as the lights are on… this room is filled with light.
When you take away the source of light… you are left with darkness. (Switch
off lights here) As soon as the source returns (Turn on lights here)
… light flood back in to the room.
The lack of light is darkness…the lack of LIFE is called
DEATH…physical, spiritual, eternal.
Death is what we are all owed as the wages for our sin. Our
rebellion against God leaves us Godless. We pushed away LIFE itself…do
you understand that. We did that to God…he didn’t do
that to us!
The whole point of Jesus death on the cross, that we
celebrated here on Good Friday evening, was that Jesus took our debt of sin
on himself…. God became a man, gathered all the sins of all of mankind to
himself and paid sin’s punishment for everyone by giving up his life so we do
not have to bear the punishment for our own sins.
He died our death…. so we could share his Life.
That’s a catchy statement…but let’s dive below the surface.
I’ve often been intrigued by the thought of satan using every bit of power he
had to bring about the murder of Jesus. When Jesus gasps his last breath, on
the cross, the evil one starts throwing the biggest party hell has ever
known. He’s won!
He took the Author of Life, reduced him to a human in a
failed attempt to save His creation, then snuffed the very breath of life out
of him leaving all humanity forever enslaved in their sins.
Satan was so ignorant and blind to the fact that there was
something so much bigger going on here.
You’ve got this God/man hanging on a cross bleeding the
last drops of his human blood out onto the ground. You know that he was all
man…I’ve explained many times why that had to be so… But you also know that
he was still God….so should have satan.
Maybe little things like Jesus stopping a storm, or turning
fish and bread into a banquet for 5,000 should have provided some sort of
clue. You would have had to be an idiot, to have watched all Jesus did on
this earth and not understood that he had to be more than just a man and
satan had a ringside seat to every event.
Hebrews 2:14 Because God’s children are human beings—made
of flesh and blood—the Son also became flesh and blood. For only as a human
being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the
devil, who had the power of death. 15 Only in this way could he
set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying.
If Jesus life is snuffed out, how can that break the power
of the devil who has the power of death?? How can He set free all who lived
their lives as slaves to the fear of dying… if he’s dead himself? (that’s the
kind of thinking the evil one was doing on crucifixion day)
If he’s just a human, then his blood can be drained out and
all you will be left with is a rotting corpse…..But if Jesus is not just a
man…if he is also, at the same time, God, Himself, wrapped in human form….
If all of Life itself is also wrapped up in that bleeding
human form hanging on the cross… then you can kill the man part ….but you
haven’t yet dealt with the God part …. satan!!!
You might have been clued in when just a few days earlier
Jesus had raised his friend Lazarus from the dead in kind of a dry run for
what was to come….satan!!
As the last drop of Jesus blood spilled out and his human
heart stopped beating, the still throbbing eternal Life of God set out
to accomplish the rest of the mission… to destroy the very curse of sin…. To
go underground and sever the tap root of sin… to squeeze DEATH itself until
it releases it’s hold on all of humanity.
Romans 5:18-19 Here it is in a nutshell: Just as one person
did it wrong and got us in all this trouble with sin and death, another
person did it right and got us out of it. But more than just getting us
out of trouble, he got us into life! One man said no to God and
put many people in the wrong; one man said yes to God and put many in
the right. (MSG)
I wonder at what point in satan's "we-murdered-Jesus"
celebration that it began to nag in the back of his mind that he had just
stepped in it?........... At some point after the crucifixion, he had to have
paused, furrowed his red brow and muttered…. Uh-Oh!
It's Jesus, himself, when talking to Peter, who uses the
phrase "the gates of hell" so lets picture that…. The evil one and his
fallen angels in one of those "conga" dance lines…then comes the first rattle
of the gates… then the gates exploding off their hinges.
This Jesus… who stands ready to take on every, single evil
angel and satan himself single-handedly, all at the same time, is not the
bruised, broken, bloodied Jesus laying back in the tomb… this is the same
Jesus who stood on the edge of time and said "Let there be" and all of the
universe exploded into existence.
Satan and his 10 million-fallen-angel-conga-line pause and
say the shortest, greatest, line of pure irony in all of time:
Oops!
Oops - an exclamation uttered in attempting to regain one's
balance
We are not told exactly what happened in those few hours
between Jesus death and his resurrection. It had to have been the most
cataclysmic clash of all time. Jesus had taken on this same group before…
when Archangel Lucifer tried a coup in heaven …. that time, Jesus and all
the angels of heaven prevailed and satan and 1/3 of the angels were cast
out of heaven. Now…. Jesus has to take on the same millions of evil hoards
all by himself…. on their own turf.
I've been trying to get my mind around this. Jesus….
sinless, incarnate God, descends into the pit of hell. Everything that is
evil… the very agents of evil in the world surround him, reinforcement line
after reinforcement line stacked millions deep. The very source of
evil…though shaken by Jesus re-appearance is not going to lay down like a dog
with his stomach in the air…
Satan, and his evil hoards, spent thousands of years
scheming to infect God's creation with sin and even murdered God's incarnate
Son, sent to redeem his creation…. Like the movie hero backed into a corner
fighting for his very life….millions of times over…. They must have come at
Jesus with every drop of power they could condense out of the universe..;.
Completely alone, just like he was when he carried our sins
on the cross, he took on all the forces of evil. Can you even imagine the
violence of such a clash.
If hell were in the center of the earth…as some have
suggested… I could imagine the clash pushing up whole mountain ranges where
flat land had been and volcanoes erupting just from the release of pure
energy as Jesus, king of the universe takes on every evil being with every
drop of their combined power…
We'll never know, until we get to heaven, how that whole
explosive, cosmic battle went down….. but we do know
who won!
Revelation 1:17….I am the First and the Last. 18 I am
the Living One; I was dead, and behold I am alive for ever and ever! And I
hold the keys of death and Hell!
It's like Chuck Norris……Walker, Texas Ranger…..
times a billion
The prize was not the killing of the others …everybody in
the fight were eternal beings, destined to live forever. The ultimate prize
was one thing….
Control over death!
Hebrews 2:14 …only by dying could he break the power of the
devil, who had the power of death. 15 Only in this way could he set free all
who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying.
It wasn't just his death… it was what happened in the hours
after his death.
As he left hell and climbed back into his, now decomposing
body resting in the tomb, no human eyes were watching what would come next.
But millions of eyes were glued to that six-foot mummy. If that mummy started
to move… all the powers of hell would be toast…. Every evil eye was locked
onto that mummy….then came a twitch… then a toe moved…then a leg… and then
the Savior of the world…King of the universe stood up and pealed the grave
clothes off. A shudder went through evil fallen angel and even satan himself.
Now Jesus words to Lazarus sister Martha, just days before, made sense… in
fact they were like a migraine banging inside their skulls…
John 11:25 I am the resurrection and the life. He
who believes in me will live, even though he dies; 26 and whoever lives
and believes in me will never die.
I AM alive…I AM the defeater of satan and sin…I AM
conqueror over death and the grave…I AM the resurrection and the life!....I
AM life, and the giver of life. I AM, now offering freedom from death to all
who will accept my gift… I AM giving to all who will believe the power to say
no to sin and yes to righteousness. I am the one to whom you can bring all
that you are and all that you're not…
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Video: Know that I am
You can pre-view this video on sermonspice.com
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Conclusion:
I Corinthians 15:51 But let me reveal to you a wonderful
secret. We will not all die, but we will all be transformed!.. 53 For our
dying bodies must be transformed into bodies that will never die….56 For sin
is the sting that results in death..57 But thank God! He gives us victory
over sin and death through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Repent: Turn away from your sin.
Believe: Jesus Death and Resurrection was on your behalf
Accept: His freely offered gift of forgiveness and
salvation
Invite: Him into your life as Savior and Lord
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