Bible Studies for Life
Associate professor of divinity, Beeson Divinity School, Samford University
When Easter Becomes Just Another Holiday
1 Corinthians 15:1–4, 12–19, 54b–58
God’s Pattern of Engagement
A pattern of divine engagement emerged from the earliest days of God’s dealings with His people Israel. This pattern of relationship remains in effect today for every Christian and church and lies at the heart of Easter faith. Unless and until we comprehend and embrace this pattern, we will endure unnecessary confusion and frustration in our relationship to God. The pattern boasts three parts: promise, faith and fulfillment. The first and last parts belong to God and the middle one to us.
It has pleased our heavenly Father to deal with us by making promises that we gratefully embrace with the faith of loving, trusting children, promises for now left unfulfilled on purpose by our wise Creator. These promises must be believed if we are to live as God’s children in this world. This dynamic of promise, faith and fulfillment defines God’s dealings with us. God told Abraham that He had prepared a promised land He would give to the patriarch’s offspring and that through his offspring, all the nations of the earth would be blessed. Following the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of the Israelites in Babylon, God, through His prophets, promised that He would one day restore His people to Zion. And we, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, are not only taught that we serve and belong to a crucified and living Lord but also are promised that we, too, will one day rise from the dead with new eternally incorruptible and painless bodies. In these new bodies, we shall live together with our brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ and our crucified, risen and ascended Lord and Savior Himself. We shall look in His face and see Him as He is because we shall be like Him.
Tomorrow and Today
Do you believe these things today, brothers and sisters? They are true. This is what Easter is all about. The consequence of faith in these promises need not be a kind of pie-in-the-sky faith that becomes too heavenly minded to be of any earthly good. In fact, the promise of resurrection and eternal bliss should have and does have just the opposite effect. God the Holy Spirit sees to this. According to the Bible, when we believe, embrace and benefit from the promise of Jesus’ resurrection, we become so heavenly minded that we become of the greatest possible earthly good. That is what happened for those in Hebrews 11–12 who died “not having received what was promised” (Heb. 11:39) but lived in robust, courageous and sacrificial love because they looked forward to that city that has foundations and was not made with human hands. They knew themselves to be strangers and pilgrims in this world.
While they recognized that their home was not here but beyond this world, it did not lead them to treat this earthly life with contempt but freed them to expend their lives here for the sake of others and their Lord.
There are those today as there were then who treat the promise of resurrection and eternal life as perhaps optional, obsolete or even pernicious dimensions of biblical teaching. Those who do so typically insist that longing for heaven leads to the despising of this present life. But the apostle Paul would have none of this. “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is without foundation, and so is your faith.” “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins.” “If we have placed our hope in Christ for this life only, we should be pitied more than anyone.” Truly, according to the teaching of Holy Scripture, belief in Christ’s resurrection, our own future resurrection and the eternal life made possible thereby belong to the very heart of the Christian faith and are absolutely essential to the Christian life itself.
Likewise our focal passage makes clear the effect faith in our future resurrection must and will have. Easter resurrection faith makes us “steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the Lord’s work, knowing that [our] labor is not in vain.”
If we would live as we should here and now, then we may and must keep one eye open to what is promised to us there and then.
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