He Was, He Is, He Is Not

Father, we praise you this morning for what you have done and what you do. We lift up our hearts to you, knowing that we are not worthy, knowing that we are not capable, but trusting that you are in your love for us, have shown yourself to be our risen Savior. May we exalt your name through our words and through our deeds this morning as we examine what your word says about your holiness. Amen. Well, if you have your Bibles, if you would open them to Mark, the book of Mark. If you don't, that's all right. I'll be reading. We'll be looking at the verses one through seven. So if you have your Bible, open it up to Mark, verse one. When the Sabbath was passed, Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James and Salome, bought spices so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb and they were saying to one another, who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb? And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back, for it was very large. In entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed. And he said to them, do not be alarmed. You see Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified. He has risen. He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go and tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. Well, we get to reflect this morning on Easter in a wonderful time to refocus our view of what the gospel is for us and from the Father. For when we say that we believe in the gospel, we do not see God as an extension of the gospel's grace, but we see that God's grace is an extension of His holiness and His goodness to us. For what we talk about on Easter morning forms the mainstream for all of our hope, joy, and peace for our praise throughout all of our eternity. So our goal this morning in worship and in prayer and in practice of lifting our affections towards Him is to align ourselves with He who is in heaven. Yet we are different than what was written about in Mark, for we arrived this morning on alarms of the things that are around us. For Easter is no surprise to us this morning. In fact, we spend a tremendous amount of time, and if it weren't so cold, we could actually see how everyone spent so much time in dressing up this morning. And it's a wonderful thing to put so much time into something that we see is so good and refreshing for us. But can we not refresh ourselves this quiet morning with a message of God's fulfillment and joy on our behalf? Even though we are far removed from the danger of belief in the possible falsehood of our gospel, we as Christians come to an expectation of what the Bible teaches about God's holiness. We sing to him with praises. We remind ourselves through teaching that he is good, and we are encouraged by the fact that we see his atonement as something that is complete for us. We expect comfort and joy and calmness when thinking about Christ this resurrection morning. Yet what were the women in Mark 16 6 expecting on their morning? Could you imagine waking up and going to a blood-drained body, hoping to anoint it with preservatives, only laying truth to the fact that that was custom at that time? Can you imagine following a rabbi in such a way for so long, yet feeling the confusion on why he is still dead in your mind, knowing that no one, no ordinary man can leave the tomb? Surely you can emotionally relate. to those women when they saw an empty tomb and then started looking at a beautiful angel who began to speak to them with great promise and authority of voice. In this passage, we see within these women a following a custom of mourning and fear. Yet we are different this morning when we come to worship. We do not come to practice mourning and fear, carrying spices to anoint a body, hoping to preserve it for as long as possible. We aren't here this morning to talk about an ordinary ceremony of Jewish custom. The burial which we remember about Jesus turned out to be a short-lived state of satisfaction for all of evilness, but not of good. Even though Jesus was buried, they are right, these women, to be confused. For surely a sacrifice as great as God sending His own Son on behalf of us as sinners is not something that a God of just and holiness would want to do for meek and meeble sinners like us. Surely God is so good that He wouldn't slay His Son for our behalf. But we shouldn't be baffled by these women's approach to the tomb that morning, thousands of years ago. We wouldn't approach a tomb, or who wouldn't approach a tomb, ready to care for this decrepit body with wonder and desire, yet still crepit with fear. Maybe Jesus was just a good guy after all. Maybe he was just a great prophet, yet still, like everyone before him, died. But can you imagine the first set of emotions rushing throughout the hearts of these women that morning when they saw a large stone rolled away, when previously they were pondering amongst themselves, how would we roll this stone away because of its massive size? They must be thinking, what has been done to the body that has already been crucified and beaten and bloodied? unlike anything they had ever seen. Where was this Jesus that they had been worshipping and following? For all their friends were calling them crazy to do so. Maybe their friends were right. Maybe it is just a normal occurrence. But immediately, Mark writes, an angel of the Lord confronts these women's fear with an assertion and commanding belief. Do not be alarmed, cries out the angel. And there entails the emotion that we should have this morning, the emotion of calmness when seeing and pondering the resurrection. A remembrance such as this burial should bring on emotions of high expectation and worry and fear. Coming to a tomb and knowing that there is a dead body in it surely gives us emotions of worry. But here we see that these women's emotions should react to the commands given from heaven to them. Do not be alarmed, says the angel. The almighty servant quickly calms their fears of the anxious, and they still do that to us today. Do not be alarmed. We know that the angels from heaven calm our hearts in the morning and in the evening. But what did this comforting word entail to these women? One of the greatest feelings we can express and feel from one another is almost feeling like we know what one other is thinking and doing. We can react and give credence to the fact that we know what you're going through. The comfort of one person being able to react to another person's necessary desires. We see this in marriage. We see this in sports. We see this in work, feeding off of one another. And almost in the same way, the angel knew exactly what the minds of these women needed to be comforted by their desire to know. He was, at this point, their great and high messenger, able to comfort with a declaration of the Gospels just days just after this crucifixion. In the midst of everything confusing and scary, and dismal, he knew the initial words they needed to hear was a confirmation of their rightful efforts. Yes, without vain, they were seeking Jesus. The paramount of our religious affections is just that, is it not? We are people defined by seeking Jesus. For our discipleship bears witness to this. We know nothing other to do than to seek Jesus for what he said he was. How could we not also want to go to the tomb when looking at the prophecies of Isaiah and even the laments of Psalms? We long for him. We think of him. Our actions are determined by our focus upon him. And we can't help but tell others of him in the same way of the anxiousness that these women had before them that day. Our view and practice of discipleship would hopefully reflect the same of these women's actions. For in the midst of everything tempting and confusing and distracting, they sought Jesus. But not just any Jesus, not just a rabbi or a good person, they sought Jesus of Nazareth, one who was crucified. You'll see again and again throughout the scriptures the inclusion of crucified when identifying the nature of Jesus. For by his crucifixion, we are brought into the saving unity of his lordship. By his crucifixion, the wrath that we deserve is replaced by the wrath that he endured. So we see him as Jesus of Nazareth, one who was crucified. For you and I approach the tomb knowing we deserve this tomb to be full, not empty, whereby we would still need to pay account for what we do. what we wrongly think and what we wrongly desire. We know that this tomb should still be full and not empty from this resurrected body. But the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth replaces all of this and frees us forever from what was coming for us. Our deaths and sins are gone, vanished like the blood drying up from our savior's hands and feet for the nails once were embedded. for this crucifixion and sacrifice, which satisfies the propitiation of our God, a substitute in our place, depicted by the animal sacrifices of the Old Testament past, but fulfilled only in the one great satisfaction and sacrifice of Jesus Christ, whereby with one substitution of his whole self, perfected forever those who believe Jesus was crucified. So it is rightly for the angel to say that he is such. But the uniqueness of His qualifier, was crucified, is that you will always see it as in past tense. Jesus' crucifixion is not something that defines Him forever, but it was an action that impacts us eternally. This reverberating effect of grace upon our lives was accomplished once. It is finished, He cried from the cross. So it is finished, we remember this morning. Yet the angels' comforting words of Jesus' past love for us don't stop at his description. This is why Easter is not remembered on a Friday evening, but this is why Easter is celebrated and rejoiced over on a Sunday morning. For the angel announces to the women that Jesus of Nazareth was not just crucified, but has risen from the very tomb that their eyes were gazing upon. This announcement surely set chills down the spine of these women. And isn't this how the prophets predicted the Lord of all to reign for us? As written in the book of Genesis, Isaiah, and in the Psalms, and confirmed through the testimonies of the epistles, our messianic Christ has been raised from the nature of death's embalmment to his present state of majestic glorification. Revelation properly reflects and describes him as holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is. Christ being risen as our savior causes our view of his death as something we gain ultimate hope from and no longer view with sadness and dreadfulness that you and I view a normal funeral of today. Now, at this point, the women must be listening with a weirdness in their emotions, for now they hold ointments that are invaluable to their current efforts, for they brought items in order to bathe the body, only to realize that Jesus's crucified body needed no earthly ointments for his righteousness to be exalted from what man put him in. The angel's words, he is risen, is not just a connotation that allows us to think of Jesus as doing something extra. But he is risen is a declaration of Christ's separate holiness from all of creation, and by that he is risen becomes the declaring deliverance towards all of God's created and specifically towards those created within his image. There is no body in the tomb to anoint, but only a risen Savior now to worship with high and lofty exaltations. The angel's statement of Jesus as risen is the capstone of God's ultimate power, for nothing like it had ever been done before. Yet we are still amazed that this promised effect of His resurrection was still once and done for us. For his power did not get nailed to the cross in vain, but was resurrected from the tomb in victory. But don't rest on the fact that Christ is risen, because this is not all the angel tells us in this testimony. What's amazing is that in all of this, we hear that Jesus is no longer here. Now, within this context, the angel was announcing to these women that the that Jesus was no longer here, for he had moved on immediately to finish finally the effects of his earthly ministry. But in our reading, we get to worship the same Jesus because he is no longer in the tomb and he is no longer with us, even around us. We often think about those that we lost and we wish that we could touch them and be with them. But Jesus is not with us. And by his words, he said this is for our benefit. And this is amazing and particularly odd to think about, for surely if the risen Savior was not only crucified for our ultimate atonement, but also risen from the grave, paying bondage finally for the wrath that you and I deserve, why would we not seek total joy in having him surrounding us forever? while Jesus' presence around us is not finally for our joy unless Jesus' righteousness can live through us. And so we see within the Holy Spirit that we are gifted with something greater than Jesus' presence before we have God within us, announcing outward His majesty and holiness. The announcement of him no longer being with us does not leave us with empty hands, but rather fills us with the Spirit's guidance towards hope and heavenly joy within our own hearts. And this is why we should exalt Jesus because of what Jesus went through in the tomb, but also in order to transform us from the inside out. We rejoice for up from the grave he arose. His tomb is empty. We remind ourselves on this day. And our Savior is at the right hand of the Father, where creatures are chanting towards His whole existence. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come. And so when we remember Jesus this morning, we do not remember Him like anything else around us. We remember Him as something as God is who is going to come for us. Oh, how we long for his future presence, knowing that he is arisen and our hope is in the fact that we can see his risen self in front of us. And so we sing greatly and proudly. And Lord, haste the day when our face shall be sight. And the clouds be rolled back as a scroll. The Trump shall resound and the Lord shall descend. It is well, it is well with our soul. And it's not well with our soul simply because Christ was crucified. It is not well with our soul because he is risen from the grave. But it is well with our soul because he comforts us with the spirit inside of our heart. It is well with our soul because we can trust in the promises of our exalted Savior, not only because of what he did for us on Earth, not only because of what he stands for in religion abroad, but also what he promises. And how can we not have trust in that final promise that we will rest with him for belief in him forever and ever? So on this Resurrection Sunday, as we have this sunrise service, we are reminded that the sun comes up. For the sun rose for us forever. But even as the sun will soon go over the horizon for us, we know that God had only gone down once and only died once and lives eternally for us for up from the grave. He arose and we exalt him forevermore. Let's pray. Father, we worship you for you have risen We worship you and sing Alleluia and hallelujahs. We thank you for what your angel comforts us with and that your trumpet sounds with your majesty and holiness on our hearts. May we worship you with good credence this morning, knowing that you have done what you needed to do to not only satisfy your father, but to save us eternally. Amen.