It Is Finished
Luke 24: 4-8 While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that
gleamed like lightning stood beside them. In their fright the women bowed down
with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, "Why do you look
for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he
told you, while he was still with you in
This is Passion Week. The last week Jesus Christ walked the earth as both man and God. The culmination of the plan of Almighty God to reconcile His creation back to Him. The pinnacle of the love of God toward sinful man. Between the four Gospel accounts of this week there are many verses which stand out. Many powerful verses describing how far God would go to have communion with man again. One that always stood out for me, even going back to my Catholic upbringing, was verse five above "Why do you look for the living among the dead?" Hallelujah! We do not need to look for the living amongst the dead anymore!
Why do we look for the living amongst the dead? Let's face it beloved; that is what we used to do before we came to Christ. The word living, in this verse, is representative of God. The women here were going to the tomb expecting to find the body of Jesus. They were going there seeking a dead God but God is very much alive. How do we know that God is life itself?
Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. John 14: 6
We were made in the image of God. We were made to have fellowship and communion with God. Unfortunately, we are born into a fallen state. From the Bible we know the following is true:
- God is life (Living God) Psalm 84:2; Exodus 3:14
- God cannot commune with sin 1John 1:5; Psalm 145:17
- Man is sinful by nature Romans 3:23;
- The wages of sin is death Romans 6:23
So we are set in opposition. God is life and man, or the world, is death. We are born dead in our transgressions; dead in our sin. Yet we were made to have communion with God, to fellowship with Him. We spend our lives trying to fill the hole in our lives caused by the separation we have with God. Maybe we filled it with drugs and alcohol. Maybe we filled it with pornography or co-dependent relationships. Maybe we filled it with the psychiatric conditions the world sells us and the medication it peddles with it. Maybe we filled it with the pursuit of money or lust. We sought an altered state of consciousness or reality because there was too much pain in the one we were living in. The world does a good job of pushing this separation from God and then abandoning you when you are at your neediest. The result as my Pastor said yesterday is that your life ends up like a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle strewn all over the floor and someone has thrown the box top away; so you can't even remember what your life was supposed to look like. But God knows you from the beginning:
