Resurrection Sunday (Easter)

All right, let’s pray. Father, I thank you for your grace and your love for us. Help me now as we look through this text. Help me to communicate what you have for us and help us to receive it. We pray these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.

They had to hide. What else could they do? For they knew that they had committed the ultimate betrayal. Why had they listened to his lies? Why had they given in? This must be a bad dream. But this was no dream. This was reality. They had never felt anything like it before. Where before there was once joy, now they felt fear. Where there was once comfort, now they felt dread. Where they felt bliss before, now they felt pain. What would he say? But even more, what would he do?

“Where are you?” they heard him call out. But this time, instead of eagerly running towards his voice with excitement, now that voice was terrifying to them. Finally, the man mustered up enough courage to call back. “I’m here, but I was afraid, and so I hid.” “What are you wearing? Why did you cover yourself and hide? What did you do?” “It wasn’t my fault,” he replied. “She tricked me.” “Did you deceive him?” he asked. “It wasn’t my fault. It was this creature that tricked me. It told me that everything would be better if I listened to what it said.”

Looking at them both, he knew what must be done. But first he addressed the one who deceived them, and he said, “One day a descendant of one of these who you deceived will destroy you. You will bite his heel, but he will crush your head.” The serpent crawled off, satisfied in the outcome. Then looking to the couple, he said, “This world is not the same anymore because of your sin. Not only will you die and return to dust, but life will now be very hard for you. The paradise that you are used to couldn’t be more different than what you will now experience.”

And then the Lord God said, “Humanity has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. But we cannot allow them to know evil forever, and so we must banish them from the source of life.” And so the Lord God banished them from Eden and stationed mighty cherubim angels along the east side of the garden to guard it. And then, to ensure that no one could ever reach the tree of life, he placed a flaming sword that flashed back and forth, which would destroy anyone that might take from the tree. Adam and his wife Eve were forced to leave their home. But more tragically, they were forced to leave the presence of God.

As they lived in their exile, imagine how horrible this must have been for them. Living out in the wasteland, seeing Eden off in the distance, seeing the edges of the garden, seeing the cherubim that guarded the garden, which was a reminder of the terrible price of their rebellion against a holy God. But even though their rebellion brought a curse, it also came with a promise of blessing, a promise that God would one day defeat evil once and for all and make a way for them back into the garden. And He would do this through their offspring.

Adam and Eve, mostly Eve here, came to realize that God was serious. He meant business when he said that childbearing would be tough. And right after that, they bore two children, Cain and Abel. I don’t know if there had ever been more hopeful and excited parents than Adam and Eve as they remembered the promise of God and they looked to their two sons, wondering if maybe one of these two boys would be the one who would crush evil’s head. But then their hopes were crushed as the blood of their son Abel cried out from the ground. Their son was dead and the other son was the one responsible for killing him. The consequences of the rebellion never felt more real.

They needed to get back into the garden. But how? And even if they could, how would they get past the flaming sword? As the years went on, no one seemed to know a way back into the garden. But God had promised to make a way. But how long would it take? People were dying. Their son was dead. And over time, eventually Adam and Eve themselves died and turned back into the dust from which God had made them.

But still, time marched on over the ages. But God showed up again and spoke to a man named Abraham and promised him that a deliverer would come through his descendants. But the man and his wife were very old. They couldn’t have children anymore. Did God really know what he was talking about? Could he be trusted to actually do this? But sure enough, God could do what he said he could do. And he miraculously provided them with a son.

Time went on again, and the boy grew older until one day God showed up again to Abraham and he had instructions for him. “Abraham, I have something I need you to do. Take your son, your only son, whom you love, and kill him as a sacrificial offering to me.” The man was speechless. Surely God can’t really mean it. Kill the miracle child? The son of promise? Won’t this ruin all of God’s plans and promises? But then Abraham remembered the kind of God he was dealing with. He realized that this God was powerful enough to even raise his son of promise from the dead and make everything that he promised come true.

And so Abraham led his son up the hill. He fastened him down on the wood. He pulled out the knife. He held it high into the air. And right as he was about to plunge it down into his son’s chest, he heard a voice boom out from heaven. “Abraham, Abraham, don’t harm the boy. For now I know that you truly fear God. For you have not withheld from me even your son, your one and only son.” Over the years, this man and his son saw God’s faithfulness time and time again and how God always kept his promises. But still, the promise that was given in the garden to their descendants still remained.

Then, hundreds of years later, the promise was still unfulfilled, as the descendants of Abraham and Isaac now numbered in the millions. God had kept that promise. He had made Abraham’s descendants as numerous as the sands of the sea. Except there was a slight problem. The serpent was at work again trying to prevent God’s promises from coming true. For Abraham’s descendants, from whom the promised Redeemer would come, were living as slaves in the land of Egypt, which was one of the world’s most powerful military armies. Day and night, they cried out to be delivered from their bondage, to be set free from their cruel taskmasters. But no answer came. Maybe God had forgotten about them. Maybe he changed his mind.

But then, a shepherd saw a light blazing from a bush that would not be consumed. This was very peculiar. He had never seen anything like it before. And as he approached the bush, he heard a voice boom out. “Take your sandals off, for you are on holy ground.” And then the voice said his name, “Moses. Moses.” Trembling, the man responded, “Yes.” “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I have seen the misery of my people in Egypt, and I have heard their cries. I am here to rescue them and lead them to a land that I have prepared for them.”

Ten miraculous plagues later, a parting of a Red Sea, bread falling from heaven, and numerous other ways that God was faithful to his people, he led them to the promised land. Though Moses led his people out of Egypt, it was God who delivered them. It was God who gave them his law that told them how to live. And he also did many other wonderful things. But still, the promise remained. Though God led them to a wonderful land, this was not the garden. Not even close. They faced war. They faced trials. They faced testing. And to make matters even worse, no matter how hard they tried to follow God’s laws, the whispers of the serpent in their hearts led them to continually break it, over and over, which showed all the more that they still could not return to the garden.

Over the years, God sent judges and prophets to help direct his people’s wandering hearts back to him. But the results were always the same. More rebellion, more wickedness, more sin, and more alienation from God. The people couldn’t stop listening to the lies of the serpent. And many of them started believing that maybe they didn’t need to get back to the Garden of Eden. Maybe they didn’t need to get back to God’s garden because they could make their own garden here on earth. They didn’t need God. But this was the same tired old lie from Satan. And the evidence soon became overwhelming that life outside of God’s garden was a desert wasteland. There was no life at all.

Then, many years later, God started appointing kings. And after the first king was an abysmal failure, he said, “I will pick a shepherd boy who has a heart after me.” And this boy wasn’t like their first king Saul. Not at all. He loved God. He listened to God. And he led the people to listen to God. Even more so, he wrote beautiful poetry and songs to praise God. King David was a truly remarkable king, unlike any other. Perhaps he would be the one to crush the serpent’s head and finally lead the people back into the garden. But it wouldn’t be so. Even a man after God’s own heart wasn’t enough. For he too listened to the lies of the serpent and was unable to bring everyone back to the garden.

Kings came and went, some fairly good, some not so good. But still, no sign of the one who would bring God’s people home. In fact, things seemed to be only getting worse as God’s people eventually fractured and divided into two kingdoms, with Israel in the north and Judah in the south. And to make matters worse, both of these kingdoms eventually fell and the people were scattered, and they began to wonder if God had forgotten about them, if God had forgotten about his promise to bring them back into the garden.

Then, after hundreds of years of complete silence from God, with Israel living again under another empire’s rule, there came a man who was unlike any other man, who preached and taught like no one other. In fact, people were saying he was healing people miraculously. Cripples were walking. People born blind could now see. Who could do such a thing? Was this another prophet sent from God? Or did he do these things by the power of Satan? Many even started to believe that he was from God. While others started to believe that maybe this was finally the promised one from so long ago who would bring God’s people home. The one who would crush the serpent’s head and lead God’s people back into the garden.

This man was roughly in his 30s, and he was truly unlike any person to ever walk the face of this earth. He was compassionate, yet zealous. He was gentle, but strong. He was loving, but firm. He was meek, yet he was bold. This was a man whom when you heard him speak, you felt your heart burn like it was on fire. A man who made you wonder if everything bad in this world might come undone. A man who might break the curse and lead us all back to the garden.

Nearly three years into this man’s ministry, he then did something remarkable. Something that no one had ever done before. His friend Lazarus had died, and Jesus intentionally waited before he went to see him. They called for him and said, “Come and heal Lazarus. He is terribly and deadly sick.” But Jesus waited until he was dead for one purpose, so he could show up and raise him from the dead. Lazarus wasn’t just a little bit dead. He was four days really dead. And yet, he breathed again. They say that word travels fast, and word of a resurrection travels lightning fast.

As the crowds that followed him continued to grow, Jesus then made his way to the city of kings, the city of Jerusalem, where the crowds went wild. Was he going there to ascend the throne of David? Would he wear the crown and hold the scepter? Would he throw off our Roman oppressors? Rome was the most powerful empire that the world had ever seen. But still, as powerful as they were, they stood no chance against a king who could raise people from the dead. They were done for.

But then this man did something completely unexpected. He didn’t ride into the city of Jerusalem like a conquering king would on a white, powerful white warhorse. He rode in on a meek and mild donkey. Why did he do that? What does this mean? What kind of message is he sending? But not only that, after arriving at Jerusalem, his first stop wasn’t the king’s palace, it was the temple. Why would he go there first? That doesn’t make sense, the people thought. After entering the temple, looking around to see all that went on there, he quietly left for the night with his 12 disciples to get some sleep.

But the following day, on his way back, he saw a fig tree and he went to pick some of the fruit from it. But when he came up to it, he found no fruit, only leaves. This tree was completely fruitless. And then his disciples overheard him pronouncing a curse on the tree, saying, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” They weren’t sure why he was doing this, what this meant. And it wasn’t until later that they realized what Jesus was teaching them.

Finally, they arrived back at Jerusalem, and Jesus seemed on mission as he headed straight for the temple. The disciples knew that look, the look of zealousness. They had seen it before at the very start of Jesus’ ministry. In fact, it was after he had turned water into wine at the wedding in Cana that Jesus went into the temple, forged a whip of cords, and began striking the merchants and the money changers, driving them from the temple, warning them not to make his Father’s house a house of trade. Evidently, these years later, the people still hadn’t learned the lesson from the first cleansing of the temple, because here they are again with the money changers set up and the merchants making a killing on selling animals for sacrifice. But this was not what the temple was for.

See, the story of the temple, it goes all the way back to the garden. Because the Garden of Eden actually is a temple in a way. It’s a sanctuary. Why? Because God dwelt with Adam and Eve in the garden. His presence was there with them. Eden was a paradise because in the presence of God, deformity, evil, imperfection cannot coexist. The Hebrews had a word for this. They called it shalom, which means peace or absolute flourishing, joy, and happiness. See, in the presence of God, there is perfect shalom. But when Adam and Eve rebelled against God, shalom was lost. And humanity was separated from God by the flaming sword of judgment and righteous justice.

And not a single one of us can get back into God’s presence unless we pass through the sword. Unless we make things right and atone and pay for the sins that we’ve done. But there’s a problem. None of us can do that. And God knows that none of us can do that. None of us can ever make our way back to Him. None of us could ever pass through the flaming sword and survive it. And so what would be required was that God would have to make a way for us.

And the tabernacle and then later the temple were a temporary solution and a picture of this truth for us. The temple was the place where people who are alienated from the living God could go near His presence and still worship Him by providing animal sacrifices as a temporary substitution for their sin and spend time in prayer. In the center of the temple, see, there was the Holy of Holies, which was the earthly dwelling place of God’s presence, which was separated by the rest of the temple where the people dwelt by this massive 60-foot-high veil that was roughly around four inches thick. That’s a big curtain. And this curtain separated the Holy of Holies from where God dwelt, from the rest of the temple. It kept the people out of God’s presence.

And no one was allowed to enter the Holy of Holies except for one person, and they could only do it once a year. Only the high priest was allowed in to the Holy of Holies once a year in order to make an atoning sacrifice for the people’s sins. See, anyone else who entered otherwise would be struck dead on the spot by the holiness of God, including the high priest himself, if he didn’t go through the extravagant preparation that he had to to enter God’s presence and survive. See, we have to remember: God’s immediate presence is lethal to sinners. If we want to be in God’s presence, we have to pass through the sword. But even the blood sacrifice that the priest carried out was merely an inadequate symbol of the true atoning work that still needed to be done. And to make matters worse, it didn’t apply to everybody else. It didn’t apply to the Gentiles, just the Israelites.

So that day, Jesus enters the temple. He stands in the outer court, which was the court of the Gentiles, where the non-Jewish people were allowed to come, pray, sacrifice, and worship God. And he saw that it looked more like a stock market with cattle than it did a temple for prayer. What a shameful thing this was. The Jewish people were meant to be a light to these people. They were meant to take the truths God had given them and bring it to the rest of the world. They were supposed to be witnesses to them. What kind of witness is that to turn Almighty God’s temple into a place to exploit foreigners and the poor? It was a horrible witness.

And so Jesus comes in with zealousness and begins overturning the tables and driving out the money changers. And when he was done, after it was clear, he began to teach them, saying, “Is it not written, my house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations? But you have made it a den of robbers.” The religious leaders understood exactly what Jesus was saying. They received his message loud and clear. They knew that he was quoting both the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, and it enraged them.

You see, first Jesus quoted Isaiah 56:7, which is a prediction that one day all of the nations, not just the Jews, the non-Jews too, would have access to God. And not just access to God’s temple, but eventually, as Isaiah explains to us, access to the Holy of Holies. Though the people of Jesus’ time believed that Messiah would remove the Gentiles from the temple completely when he came, they wrongly believed that, the Old Testament prophets kept promising of a day when people from all nations, races, and social standings would be welcomed to worship God. And not just in the outer court of the Gentiles, but in the Holy of Holies. This was unthinkable at the time.

As the prophet Isaiah said, someday the glory of God, which was confined to the Holy of Holies, would cover the earth as the water fills the seas. This was a reminder of the promise that was originally given, that one day God would make a way home to the garden where we could live in his presence again. We would not need synagogues. We would not need temples, nor would we need sacrifices. What Jesus was doing when he entered the temple here the second time and cleansed it and began teaching, what he was really doing was he was laying the axe at the tree of the entire temple system.

The religious leaders were infuriated by this. They were infuriated that Jesus called them out. By quoting the prophet Jeremiah, Jesus pointed out that the entire temple system, which was meant to be a place of worship and prayer, was like a den of robbers, a place of refuge for criminals and the unjust, which is exactly what these religious leaders were. Jesus was boldly telling them that all of their religious activity and fervor was really just a way of trying to find security and feeling accepted before God when they weren’t. Upon hearing this, the religious leaders began, Mark tells us, plotting to kill Jesus.

But knowing that the city was no longer safe, Jesus and his disciples left it that evening. As they traveled, they passed by the fig tree that Jesus had cursed, and they noticed it had withered away to its roots. Peter then remembered what Jesus had said, turned to Jesus, and said, “Rabbi, the fig tree that you cursed has withered.” With the illustration now of the temple’s fruitlessness and corruption now complete, Jesus looks at his disciples and he responds, saying, “Have faith in God.”

But have faith in God how? Have faith in God to make a way back into the garden. Do not put your faith in man, in our vain, hypocritical, religious busyness, okay? That needs to be cleansed. Don’t put your faith in that, but put your faith in God, which leads to fruitfulness, to spiritual fruitfulness. See, true faith leads to a transformed character. True faith doesn’t just trust in ourselves to make a garden within our own self, within our own hearts, or even in the world around us. True faith trusts in the promises of God to bring us back into the garden where we can dwell in his presence again.

What did God do to bring us back into the garden? He sent his one and only son to crush the serpent’s head, though it would bruise his heel. While God held Abraham’s hand back from letting the knife come down on his son, God did not hold his hand back from the knife coming down on his son, Jesus. Isaiah 53:8 foretold that Jesus would be cut off from the land of the living. In the book of Revelation, when John looks upon the throne of the universe, what does he see? He sees a slaughtered lamb. Behold the Lamb, as John the Baptist said, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

Jesus is the perfect, spotless Lamb. He is the perfect and final sacrifice that all of the millions of other sacrifices, the inferior sacrifices, pointed to. He is both the descendant of Adam and God Himself made flesh, who passed through the flaming sword of judgment for us. Christ took the sword’s blow for us. He took it for you. He took it for me. He absorbed all of our sin upon himself when he was nailed to that cross. Why? So that God’s prodigal sons and daughters might return home on the path of faith back into the presence of God.

On the night that Jesus died, at the moment Jesus died, the scriptures tell us that he cried out with a loud voice, saying, “It is finished.” And do you know what also happened at that very same moment? Mark tells us that the veil that separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the people in the temple ripped in half from top to bottom, which was God’s way of loudly telling us that the way back into God’s presence was accomplished. The work was finished. The flaming sword of judgment that God Himself placed claimed its victim. And remarkably, that victim was God Himself. And because it had, the way back into the garden was permanently reopened for all who travel back to it on the road of faith.

Make no mistake about it. This world we live in is not Eden. This is not a garden. In fact, this world, our existence, is more like a living death than anything. But for those of us who have trusted in God by faith, we know that death has no hold over us. As one theologian put it, through the death of Christ, we find the death of death. We find resurrection. For death could not hold him. The grave could not keep him. And so that is what we celebrate on Easter. Not a dead and decaying Savior, but a gloriously risen Savior who conquered death and saves all of those who put their faith and trust in him. As we sang just a moment ago, “Up from the grave he arose with a mighty triumph o’er his foes. He arose a victor from the dark domain, and he lives forever with his saints to reign. He arose. He arose. Hallelujah. Christ arose.”

Amen. Father, I thank you for Jesus and the resurrection. I thank you that in Jesus, all of your promises come true. We thank you for your grace and your love for us and for Christ absorbing the blow of the sword when we cannot. Father, if there’s anybody joining us today, hearing this, who does not know you through Christ, who has not made their way back to the garden on the path of faith, we ask, Lord, that your Holy Spirit would change their hearts and draw them close to you. Father, I thank you again for all you do for us and how you love us. I thank you that we’re able to meet even in this awkward way, but we praise you for it, and we know that you are in full sovereign control of everything that is happening. We pray these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.

In Romans 6:8–11, it says:

Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died, he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

Romans 6:8–11

And mostly on this Sunday, I ask you to remember the resurrection. Remember the hope that we have in Jesus and live for him.