I sat at the oak desk answering questions that could take me to China. I breezed through the final query: Explain the gospel to me. Twenty years of Sunday school, church camps, and Christian college rushed to answer. After I finished, she said, “You explained forgiveness really well, but what about the resurrection and ascension?”
After my embarrassment drained off–I was the kid with the all right answer in Sunday School–I resolved to never forget the resurrection again. But when I thought about the gospel, it still seemed that all the action–forgiveness, substitution, promise of eternal life–really happened at the cross.
Photo by Andrew Preble on Unsplash
More than a decade passed before I realized how often Christians talk about eternal life without ever mentioning bodily resurrection. Or how we look to Good Friday as the day that changed history, rather than the following Sunday. Not that we ever stopped believing in the resurrection, we just sort of left it in the shadows. The cross took center stage in God’s solution to the problem of evil.
But resurrection burns at the heart of the gospel. The metatarsal bones that Jesus stood on as he talked to Mary in the garden. The twitching biceps as he extended his wrists toward Thomas. The esophagus peristalsing fish down to his stomach by the Sea of Galilee. His brown skin rising into the clouds. All of these broadcast something new about God and his plans for creation. The resurrection expands the gospel beyond what the cross has to offer.
1. Resurrection reveals God’s commitment to the material world.
Resurrection is one of God’s best kept secrets–only a couple verses in the Old Testament glimmer towards it. And the raising of Jesus’ body reveals something shocking that nothing else in the Bible divulges to the same extent: God is deeply committed to the material world. Genesis tells us that God delighted in his creation, calling it good, but human sin tainted it. Without resurrection, the world would stay under God’s cursed and sin would have the final say.
Even the incarnation, which brings us God in the flesh, could be reduced to pragmatism. Without the resurrection, Jesus only needed skin long enough for his stint on the cross. Then he could ditch his body and whisk us away to a blissful, spiritual eternity.
Resurrection, though, is God’s bold statement that even though sin has tragically destroyed his good earth, he hasn’t given up on creation. With Jesus’ empty tomb and bodily ascension, we see our own humanity taken up into the Trinity forever. With resurrection we hear God say loud and clear that he won’t let human sin abort his plans for creation. He will redeem it all–not just human spirits.
2. Resurrection frees the created world.
Resurrection isn’t just for humans. Even creation “waits with eager longing” for our bodily renewal (Romans 8:19), because when God’s image-beares sinned, everything under their dominion suffered. God commissioned humanity to cultivate his new earth and when they rejected him, he cursed the ground. Thorns and thistles would choke out grain. Volcanoes would erupt, killing plants and insects. Animals would be killed to cover human nakedness.
The earth hopes for our resurrection, because only when God renews humanity will creation “be set free from it’s bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). In these verses, Paul sounds like an environmentalist. He sees creation suffering under our broken rule, and his vision of redemption isn’t just spirits wiped clean from sin, an evil world destroyed, and eternal life with Jesus in heaven. He sees humans being reestablished as the sons of God. Princes. Rulers. Living out our imago dei fully once again–with the direct result of creation being released from its curse and flourishing under human dominion as God first intended.
3. Resurrection fuels investment in the physical world.
A robust view of resurrection corrects our view of the physical world now. Yes, the earth is damaged by sin. Yes, the world systems are opposed to Jesus. And yes, God will eventually purge all evil from this blue planet. But, resurrection means God has bound himself to creation and still intends for us to care for it.
When we lose the weight of resurrection in our everyday theology, caring about doctrinal accuracy becomes much more important than caring for the environment. Social justice get prioritized somewhere far below evangelism. Churches preach about cultivating our spirits, but offer little help when it comes to our bodies–whether in regards to exercise, gluttony, or community health. We create spiritual hierarchies where pastors and missionaries get more honor than plumbers and lawyers.
Without resurrection we lose our sense of diving calling in earthly work. What N. T. Wright observes about English Christians is true of Americans as well. “They gave up believing in the urgent imperative to improve society…about the time they gave up believing robustly in resurrection and settled for a disembodied heaven instead.”
Let’s not settle for a thinner hope than Jesus offers. From God’s point of view the problem is not just our sin and how it separates us from him, it’s also how that evil affects his good creation and the role he want us to play in ruling it. We need resurrection to show us what Jesus died for, and to help us recover our calling as humans in God’s good world.
If only I had sat a little longer with my humiliation, that day in the dorm room, and dug into why I’d forgotten the resurrection. Perhaps the scope of the gospel might have gripped me sooner–electrifying my hope and jumpstarting my investment in the physical world. But better late than never.
Question: How can you live out the truth of resurrection today?
