To know Jesus in suffering and glory

Welcome to this glorious celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They have arranged, prescribed, conducted, and preserved for us the incredible joy and victory of this moment. Christ is risen from the dead. When he first greeted people following his victory, he cried out, “All hail,” in the Greek language. “Rejoice, be glad!” The hold of death and sin, which had once sullenly blackened us, is broken. The greater one, the one who called forth Lazarus from the bondage of death, has broken free himself. The liberator has conquered for all mankind the hold of sin and the power of death.

But the resurrection is not good news for everyone. In fact, to the vast kingdom of darkness ruled over by Satan and the princes of this world, to all the spiritual minions, and to all the human beings who knowingly or unknowingly are citizens of Satan’s realm, the resurrection is a total horrifying cataclysmic disaster. This is because the resurrection is the authentication of God’s sovereignty and the assurance of his ultimate judgment. It is the guarantee of doom for all who reject the crown rights of the Son of God, who declares, “All authority is given unto me in heaven and in earth.”

I want you to know, friends, that Gethsemane and the cross are a bloody, terrible battle which was won–a victory over malignant and conscious forces that dominate this world, over all the unseen powers that control the darkness of the world, and the spiritual agents who are from the very headquarters of evil. That bloody battle is over. And no wonder all the concentrated intelligence and power of the kingdoms of this world under Satan’s lordship have done everything they can to keep people blind to the glorious victory of Jesus Christ.

Pilate told the men to do what was absurd and laughable when the chief priests and others came to him saying that “the deceiver said he would rise again on the third day.” We have to watch his trickery, they said, but in response to them, Pilate was hysterical in the light of truth. He said, “You have a watch. Go your way and make it as sure as you can.” In keeping with Pilate’s absurd and laughable attempt to keep Christ in the grave and keep the stone at the door are the more sophisticated attempts over the years, such as Schonfield’s Passover plot, and this year’s semi-tragic novel of an agnostic archeologist, befriended by a ritualistic and fearful priest, who discover what they believe to be the body of Christ.

How laughable are these moments? Rudolph Boltman partially whimsically speculated. What if, over the accidental discovery one day in Jerusalem, of an embarrassing body? No chance. In fact, the tide has turned. Now, the evidence has shifted, and in 1980 and 81, the most amazing news may be released, coming from even reluctant scientists themselves. As someone has said, even skeptics cannot be safe now.

In fact, skeptics hoping to find something to cause Christians doubt by looking to the tomb now find themselves shaken. I like C.S. Lewis so much, he’s a pal of mine through all of my days in secular colleges and universities. C.S. Lewis once remarked that religious doubt is not intrinsically more stable as an attitude than his faith. You remember he was an agnostic himself, and after he became a Christian, he said an agnostic cannot be too careful, for there’s no telling from which quarter the onslaught will come. In fact, he said everywhere Bibles are laid open, fine nets are laid, and millions of surprises await. And the last line of that paragraph is, “God is, if I may say so, quite unscrupulous.”

From the borrowed grave outside of Jerusalem in 1980 and 81 has come evidence not yet completely released concerning the Shroud of Turin, which, in its very manner, may be the most startling, the most amazing series of scientific investigations concerning religion to be conducted in the 2000 years since Christ’s living on this earth. In October of 1978, an international team of scientists traveled to Turin, Italy to bring an array of sophisticated equipment with them. The evidence now about to be released, at least from the leaks that are out, is amazing. The early reports are so startling that even the stodgy conservative Evangelical Monthly, Eternity Magazine, broke with its normal cynicism on these issues and gave a six-page report.

So, what is the Shroud of Turin? It is a strip of pure linen woven in a herringbone pattern, slightly more than 14 feet long and three and a half feet wide. There are two lines of black spots running the entire length of it that came from a fire in the Cathedral way back in the Middle Ages. But in the center are two full-length images of a naked male figure, front and back.

The two images are head to head, as if the body had been completely circled lengthwise with the cloth. The man’s hands are crossed over his groin. The face is striking, framed in long hair with a forked beard, mustache, and Semitic features. Even laying aside the wounds in the hands and feet and the circlet of wounds about the head and the wound in the side, the face seems strangely familiar from the middle of the centuries. In 1578, it began to be laid to rest at the cathedral, and there have been curiosities about it.

In 1898, a photographer by the name of Secondo Pia took a picture of it in the one or two days that it was available to be seen. When he got home and discovered what had happened, it blew his mind and left ripples in the scientific world. The image he discovered violated all laws of photography. A negative is a reversal of reality, a distortion in which dark and light, right and left, are exchanged. But the negative he held from his picture gave a positive picture of the face. Pia realized there was only one explanation: the shroud itself was a negative. The image it presented to the naked eye was, so to speak, waiting to be printed, so Pia’s photograph created a sensation.

A few years later, a great agnostic, a zoologist in France by the name of DeLong, began looking into this, hoping, thoroughly believing he would prove it a fraud. His associate, Paul Vignon, undertook a study of the photograph, and from 1900 to 1902, they attempted to show some way that it had been put as a hoax upon the world. But finally, when this great scientist stood before the French Academy of Science to review the work of his associate, and this was in April of 1902, he came to the end of his presentation and paused.

He had explained that probably it had been formed, mean the picture, by ammonia vapors escaping from the body in which it had that had been wrapped inside. But when he came to the end of his report, he said this: “There is a condition for the formation of such an image. The body must have stayed in the shroud at least 24 hours for the markings to be formed, but it could not have stayed there more than a few days or purification would have set in, destroying the cloth and the image.” And then he said, “Tradition, more or less apocryphal, I would say, tells us this is precisely what happened to Christ, dead on Friday and disappeared on Sunday.” He concluded, “The man on the shroud is Christ,” and the agnostic DeLong sat down. When he did, so few interrupted around him that the academy expunged from its proceedings his report and read him out of the community in which he had been such a respected scholar.

Pierre Barbet, the famous French surgeon, inspected the photographs, blowing them up as large as he could, anatomically, and discovered amazing things unknown until that point concerning the manner in which a nail could be driven through the wrist in a point that had never been thought of before. Between two bone structures that had to give way a bit for the nail to go through, but then became very logical and strong places that would support the body of a man. A lot of Barbet’s conclusions concerning the blood and the congealing and all of the rest are amazing, beyond any description were you to read his report. But it remained until 1970 when the shroud was examined again, that 12 threads and two small fragments were removed from the cloth. When they were investigated, it was discovered that plant spores were on the shroud, which could only have come from plants very unique to the Middle East and Asia. Moreover, no chemical process known, even today, let alone then, could have produced it.

But the greatest discovery awaited two young American Air Force physicists, John Jackson and Eric Jumper, who, in 1977, took to Tehran huge computer and scientific investigating equipment that had been technically developed for satellite photographs. They were able to see something so amazing, so startling that when the report is fully understood, the world will have to find an excuse for not believing, for the figure they found was a three-dimensional representation of the body and face. It ruled out any direct contact as a means of forming the image that was on the shroud. The computer found the intensity and various markings varied exactly with their distance from the viewer. Without going into any more detail, an undistorted three-dimensional face produced in these two young men the same reaction that Segun had had 300 years prior, in believing that indeed, he looked and was looking at the face of Christ.

There could be only one explanation: some unique transformation of Christ’s body took place in the tomb. Perhaps a physical change of the body at the resurrection released a brief violent burst of some other radiation than heat, perhaps scientifically detectable, perhaps not, which scorched the cloth. It happened in the twinkling of an eye, so fantastic to leave the image and yet not burn the cloth. Interestingly, at Hiroshima, the exact processes occurred during the dropping of the atomic bomb, accounting for the fact that objects or shadows of objects were preserved on the walls in Hiroshima. The shroud is enigmatic. If it once enwrapped a human body to which something extraordinary happened, it is not explicable otherwise.

Now, I have questions yet to be answered, and I await with great interest the further study. I have read three books on the subject in the last five years, and I still have questions. My point is not at all to say, “Now we have this amazing thing, all men will be believers.” You see, the simple fact is, without the scripture, the shroud of Turin means nothing. And even with the scripture, it is purely an artifact. Even combined with the scripture, it will never compel faith. The skeptic may be compelled to change his ground of argument, and he may be forced to say the resurrection is provable, but that is all. In no way do I draw attention to this to say the evidence is in faith. Whatever else you say about it is never based on some means in which one is purely and perfectly and beyond doubt taken upon, taken beyond reason.

In fact, CS Lewis, interestingly enough, became a believer or started on his towards Christianity when he was talking with a hardened atheist setting across from him. The atheist simply mentioned the amazing historicity of the Gospels of Jesus Christ. “All those myths about a dying God,” the man said, “and this was his quote to CS Lewis rum thing. It almost looks as if it really had happened once.” And CS Lewis began a search.

My point to you this morning is very clear. The early Christians made the resurrection the whole touchstone of their belief. They who lived closer to that event than we live to the Korean or Vietnam conflict, said to the skeptics, “Find the body and we have.” What a bold declaration for those who lived within that short period of reference point. They obviously had no doubt. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15, “If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is vain.” Jesus himself had laid the daring imperative when he predicted his coming resurrection in Matthew 12. He said, “There will be no sign given to this generation but the sign of the prophet Jonas.” And then he said, “The son of man will be in the belly of the earth three days before the resurrection.” In Romans 1:4, Paul says, “Jesus was designed, delegated or designated the son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead.” By every principle, from the fact of God’s love, from the kind of life Jesus lived, from the message of the Gospels to the churches, from the influence of Jesus in history, from the blatant claims of Christianity, sir, it’s this simple.

If Christ is not risen, three things cannot happen. One, there is no hope. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.” The resurrection, he says, is imperative to our hope. Secondly, he says, the resurrection is imperative proof concerning verse 18 of 1 Corinthians. He says, “If Christ be not risen, then they who are falling asleep in Christ are perished.” Thirdly, in verse 17, listen to this, sir, “If Christ be not risen, then your faith is vain and you are yet in your sin.”

Now, to all of those friends of ours around the world, even within the Christian confines who treat the resurrection as an interesting myth, hear those who walked and lived among the contemporaries said, “This is the touchstone. If it isn’t so, there is no faith. There is no hope. There is no resurrection. Our dead are perished, and we are in our sin.”

Now, we’ve been studying the book of Philippians, and the Apostle Paul in the very ending moments of his life in Philippians chapter three, writing to a church he dearly loved following the founding of more churches than any man in the Christian message. The writing of what ultimately was to become half of the books of the New Testament, cried out from his heart, “That I may know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his suffering, being made conformable to his death.” Paul could say to the Corinthians, “If he be not risen, our faith is vain. We are yet in sin. Our dead in Christ are perished.” He could say that because his first meeting with Jesus, in the placing of a nuclear power brighter than the noonday sun, was to meet face to face, the resurrected Jesus Christ.

To know him alive, to know the power of his resurrection, and Paul would preach resurrection even when people didn’t understand it. In fact, on Mars Hill, he preached the resurrection, and they thought he was talking about the name of a new God. They wondered who this God Resurrection was. Resurrection was the central theme, belief, heart, and I want you to say something in your spirit. I want you to know something in your heart. Coming to grips with the resurrection of Jesus Christ is experiential. Sir, it isn’t a matter of saying “I believe.” You know, we stodgy evangelicals have practiced what we believe, “I believe,” and we recite the Apostles’ Creed and other creeds as well, and we know what we believe.

But Paul, the resurrection becomes not only the foundation of belief, but also the foundation of experience. To know Him in the power of His resurrection is to know something different from just being saved, converted, or on our way to heaven. It is to know that He was the offering for sins once and for all at the end of the earth, and that we are freed therefrom the guilt or condemnation of sin. However, to know Him in that power is to experientially enter into the vibrant nowness of God’s life. Romans 8:11 gives us a tremendously important word. “If the spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He shall quicken your mortal bodies by the spirit that dwelleth in you.”

Therefore, Paul says, “Brethren, we’re debtors not to the flesh to live after the flesh.” Now, whenever you see “therefore” or “wherefore” in the scripture, you immediately find out what it’s there for. What’s the conclusion? If the same spirit that raised up Jesus from the dead dwells in you, it will quicken your mortal body. Therefore, experientially (not theologically), we are not debtors to live after the flesh, but we have within us the power. Interestingly enough, the word “quicken” there is an extremely vital word in the Greek language. It means to revitalize, make new, or give life. And it’s used throughout the Word of God about a whole new kind of stirring within man experientially.

When Paul cried out, “I know, but I want to know Him,” he meant that he had received the forgiveness of sins, and he knew what it was to be born again and have newness of life. He knew what it was to base everything upon His resurrection power because of his experience with Jesus Christ. But knowing Him in that degree, he came to know Him until that quickening authority within him was strong enough to break every hold the flesh still had, just like the grave clothes of Christ at the tomb.

To the Ephesians, Paul wrote, “I pray that the eyes of your understanding will be enlightened so that you will know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of His glory towards the saints” (Ephesians 1:18). Verse 19 adds, “and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe according to the working of His mighty power, which He wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and set Him at His own right hand, far above principality and power.” Do you hear that?

All of these clever scientists with their boxes of computers and satellite-developed technology go to study a shroud that has been in one place since 1578, and that purportedly is the burial shroud of Jesus Christ. And when they examine it with all of their technology, they say, “This could not have been produced except by some tremendous nuclear-like release of power.”

Whatever Bobby was in here, suddenly, miraculously, by a power we are not even able to trace directly, would leave an imprint but not burn the cloth. Paul says, “If you just knew the exceeding greatness of the power by which God raised up Jesus from the dead, and if you just understood that that power is toward you, who need to be quickened, to be vitalized, and we’re not interested in the powers separate from the person.”

When Paul said, “I want to know Him and the power of His resurrection,” the emphasis was still on Him, not on the power. But Paul was saying, “Pushing into intimacy with Jesus, pushing into intimacy with His suffering, pushing into intimacy with His death. I will touch that core. I will know Him even in the power of His resurrection. You see?”

When Jesus was raised from the dead, He set forth a new humanity. One of the things I struggle with Bible teachers about is the subject of the kenosis of Christ in Philippians two, and they all play these neat little games about Jesus having emptied Himself with this kind of temporary playacting thing. They say He couldn’t have made any mistakes, He couldn’t have really sinned. It was all just kind of playacting. You know, my feeling about that is, in this pulpit, Jesus emptied Himself of all the prerogatives and rights, though He was God. The Bible says He became like unto His brethren in every detail. The Greek word “brethren” is “adelfoí,” which means He was born of the same womb.

Jesus was baptized with the Spirit and went about doing good, as you may be baptized with the Spirit. He resisted Satan by quoting the Word, as you may resist Satan by quoting the Word. But the significance of resurrection is when Christ came out, He did not come out as God. He came out as man quickened by God. Now He was perfect God and perfect man, but the resurrection was not a neat little trick of divinity.

It was the power of the Father upon the body of the Son in His humanity, bringing forth a new level of humanity. And let me tell you something. The reason the ascension is as important as the resurrection is that He took that body to heaven. And He is at the right hand of the Father interceding for us because He was tempted in all ways like as we are, yet without sin.

Oh, lady, do you understand that the resurrection was not done in some godly mentor? It was He who, as a Son, learned obedience by the things that He suffered, whom God brought forth in His power, designating Him to be the Son of God in that divine moment. Jesus broke through as man, and He sets a new course.

Paul’s favorite word for Jesus, it’s translated so weakly by our translators: the author of Our Salvation. The forerunner, the Go Firster, the one who opens the way. He broke through to establish a new humanity that we, by the power upon our bodies, might establish.

A new humanity, a quickened, finalized, changed, powerful, victorious humanity. Secondly, the resurrection was the crowning blow against sin and against the law, and against all that condemns man for not being able to keep up with God’s. All the weakness and broken expectation in man is shattered; for when Christ comes forth, man is forever justified in the offering of Christ.

Most Christians I know think the only justified people are me and my wife and my son, John and his wife, and us four no more. When Christ paid by his blood, he put away all sin by the offering of himself.

There is no one in this world, however perverted, distorted, corrupt, sinful, who has not been reconciled by the offering of Christ. They have but to receive that reconciliation. Oh, do you understand that? That’s the thing that I stagger at: why we are not running into this world saying, “God has reconciled you unto himself by the offering of his son.”

One message we have: be reconciled unto God.

The resurrection forever silenced the law, forever silenced condemnation, forever silenced the separation between God and man based on our sin. And man must only walk in that reconciliation. There is a right standing with God because of the resurrection. What a power to break centuries of division, centuries of inadequate men groveling in the ground to be right before God, attempting to keep law, ritualistic serving of God in whatever form they knew, broken by one act of power.

To know the power of the resurrection is to know a victory in our life. Christ is not only a redeemer; he’s the author of a new life in them that believe. Old things are passed away.

There is to be a resident nuclear reactor upon which the believer draws upon in his marriage, with his children, in relations with people who are unkind to him. It’s to change relationships. It’s to change the whole dynamic from which you live.

I can imagine Paul, in the moment he wrote those words to the Philippians, sitting in that prison chained by hand, bound to two Roman guards, two young, fine guards trained for the elite Pretorian Guard of the emperor who represented the pride of Rome, the conqueror of the earth, the heel of the governing power of the world.

And I can imagine Paul, at this point, kind of smirking to himself and realizing that the resident power within him was sufficient to blow to smithereens the entire Roman government, and that the power within him would reign over worlds, plural, kingdoms.

And that power was released to change the way he would deal with that Roman soldier. I know many Christians who get all excited about the power without understanding its focus. All of that tremendous power is focused on preventing you from saying the sharp, biting word that is true to your own humanity, and instead speaking forth a word of gentleness.

All of that power is focused to enable you to forgive someone for whom in humanity you would feel bitterness. All of that power is focused to change your conversation and your life.

The interesting thing about the resurrection of Jesus Christ, devils, hell, all of the events of the resurrection weren’t for them. In fact, isn’t it strange and interesting? You would think that the heavens having been opened and the veil being rent and the stone being moved, and the darkness having been shattered, that the spontaneous response in the world would be an intense crescendoing, hallelujah chorus breaking out through Jerusalem and around the world.

But look for a moment after the resurrection. Mary weeping, saying, “Where have you taken his body?” After the resurrection, the huddled received the report of the resurrection. Now these are the disciples, mind you, and Luke says, they received it as idle tales, madness, feigned things, nonsense. And they did not believe.

Luke and Cleopas were walking, trudging home to Emmaus, having attended the somber wake of the depressed disciples. And the Bible says their eyes were holding. And they shared with this stranger who appeared along with them, they shared with him their disillusionment and their disappointment.

Can you imagine, the resurrection is over, the victory is won, but when the stranger, whom they do not know to be Jesus, asks, “What is the discussion you’re exchanging as you walk together?” Luke 24 reports, they stood still looking sad and down. The hosts of the world’s spiritual power stand in awe at the conquering savior and Lord.

And meanwhile, back at the church, the wake goes on. Funeral dirges are being sung. Hopeless deafening depression and defeat fill the air. And hear me, the resurrection victory was not the conquering of Christ. It was enough for Satan, it was enough for demons, but it wasn’t enough for people, even the believing people.

And so it is with us. Is Paul somehow misguided, senile, or slipped the cog somehow when in the last moments of his life he says, “I want to know him in the power of his resurrection”?

No, he just recognizes humanity. The greatest release of power that could change and revolutionize everything about your life is available to you. And yet Paul understands that’s not enough for most of us. We’re still singing our little depressions and conducting our funeral wake, playing our little games about reality and unreal reality, and we have within us a nuclear generator that could blow apart every area of problems that devastate us, a quickening power within us.

But like Mary and the disciples, Peter, Luke, and Cleopas, we’re still looking sad and discontent. And as hard as it’s been for some of you to wave a palm branch last Sunday and to get up a couple of hours early this Sunday and sing “Hosanna,” and you’re already planning your depression for the next three days when this is all over, do you see the difference between “it happened” and “it can,” between “It’s true” and “it’s personal,” between “it’s doctrinal, I believe it” and “it’s experiential, I live it”? That’s to know Him in the exceeding greatness of His power. His word and the power by which He raised up the Lord Jesus from the dead.

Will you bow your hearts with me please? At whatever level you have come to this service this morning, sir, God loves you, died for you. Every sin in the world was placed upon Him, imputed to Him, that He put away sin by the offering of Himself. Now you can walk on as though it hadn’t happened, in guilt, condemnation, habits bound, or you can press through and in one glorious moment say, “He is not here, He is risen. He is Lord of all,” and begin to draw upon His victory for you.

Would you stand with me now please? The prayer room is open here to my left, right through these folding doors. There will be elders and counselors there to pray with you. The elements of communion are there for believers who did not receive communion this morning during the sunrise service, and you wish to receive communion when you leave this.

The gift is yours. We’re going to give you a gift on behalf of our church. It’s specially printed with these words: “Historic evidence that Jesus Christ arose is even more abundant than historical evidence that Caesar ruled in Rome, yet greatest historic evidence is surpassed by the resurrection power in the life of the believer.” That’s God’s gift to you.

Shall we pray? Father, as we bring this moment of celebration and joy to a close, Father, with my heart, I pray that sleepy believers who have yet to draw on this power to revolutionize their lives may suddenly be quickened, that condemned or sinful, bound, and enslaved unbelievers in this building might come to press through to new life. And I know, Father, that’s Your work. It’s not a preacher or an altar or a prayer room. It’s Your work as we make ourselves available to You. Finish and complete that work which You’ve begun.

Now, Your benediction and blessing, Father, rest upon us, and as we gather again together this evening in a glorious time of fellowship, bless and anoint all we do for a release of Your victory in our lives through Jesus Christ. Amen. You are dismissed. There’s a time of fellowship on the patio if you’d like to join us for that for the next half-hour. God bless you.