Matter Matters

So does it matter what we think about matter? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

We’ve been doing a study on the difference that the resurrection of Christ makes. Note that in this study I am assuming that the resurrection is true. There are other times that I have answered the question of the resurrection, but for now, rather than give an apologetic, it is simply to point out that there is much more that the resurrection means for us than what we take from it. It certainly means we are forgiven and have eternal life, but we are missing far more than we realize with our approach to the resurrection.

In the Greek world, there was already growing a movement against matter that later comes out more in the Gnostic heresy. From a Platonic perspective, this world was the world of change and the good and perfect world was the unchanging world of the forms. For the Gnostics, matter was a creation of an evil god and it was the role of Jesus to free us from the material world and take us to our real dwellings.

Thankfully, we are past this in the church today. We never have any ideas in the church that the world is going to go away and that we’ll all live forever in an immaterial Heaven. Oh? You mean we still have that kind of belief. Of course, most Christians would realize that we are in Heaven bodily after the resurrection, but many times that line is blurred. I think of the time I heard a pastor speaking at a sermon about a friend who had died and how the next day, he knew his friend was walking on those streets of gold.

Now we can quibble about how we will interpret the description in Heaven in Revelation and if it’s literal or not. (I say not) However, the point to make is that his friend was not walking on those streets of gold if they were real. Why? It is because the body of his friend was still in the ground and until the resurrection took place, his body would remain in the ground. I advise pastors doing a funeral to simply say that the Christian who has died is in the presence of Jesus. Don’t talk about the body being up there. It is not and will not be until the final resurrection.

What we need to realize is that in the resurrection, we get the realization coming in that the creation of the world was not an accident. It was not a plan B. It was not that God’s angelic world didn’t hold up since the devil rebelled so he figured he’d just try with another world altogether. No. This world was part of the plan all along. In fact, it would seem odd for God to create a world of even less perfect creatures than the angels and say “Maybe they’ll do better.”

My wife happens to be a great lover of nature and she is right when she tells me that it is a shame that the New Age movement outdoes us it seems in environmentalism. Christians can too often write off proper care for the environment. Now I am not in any way saying to go out and be a tree hugger or join PETA or something of that sort. I happen to think man is to be in charge of the environment and master and use it, but he is also to have a respect for it as the creation of God.

When we do our environmental duty, perhaps we could go out singing the hymn of “This Is My Father’s World.” It is created for us to use, but not to abuse. We are the caretakers of the creation acting on the behalf of God. It is certainly the case that while we do not worship the creation, we should be the ones doing such a job taking care of it that we put the New Age movement to shame. It is not a sin for the Christian to love the world God created. In fact, I would say it is a sin for him to not do so.

When God resurrects Jesus from the dead, we find that He is really saying that the other side is wrong. This is a good world. It is a good world because Christ rose in a material body. Does the fact that He rose in a body say anything about our bodies? We’ll save that for next time.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Jesus Was Right

Jesus made some strange claims. What to make of them? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

We’re looking at the topic of the resurrection now and what difference it makes. We’ve made the point in our introduction that there is something different about the resurrection of Jesus. If all we had was the resurrection of Lazarus, well that would be nice, but we would not have a new religion. We have one because Jesus rose again. For many Christians, the resurrection is a demonstration of the deity of Christ, but is that all? Even if it is, how does that work?

Throughout the gospels, one finds Jesus making great claims about Himself. There will not be an exhaustive list here, but He claims to have the power to forgive sin, He claims to be Lord of the Sabbath, He claims that your response to Him will be what determines your final destiny, He interprets the Law of Moses by His own authority, and claims to have a unique relationship to YHWH unlike anyone else. Jesus was not explicit with His claims in a modern sense, but His claims were easily understood by His audience.

It was these claims along with actions like the cleansing of the temple that led to the crucifixion of Jesus. Let’s pause to see what the crucifixion in itself would say about Jesus. To the Roman world, it would say that Jesus was someone who was opposed to Caesar and died for it. For the Jewish world, it would mean that Jesus was one who was opposed to YHWH and died as a blasphemer to Him. Thus, Jesus was wrong whichever way He turned. He could not please the Romans and He could not please the Jews.

Did God agree with that decision?

The resurrection is God’s way of saying “No!” It is giving the stamp of approval to the life of Jesus. In resurrecting His Son from the dead, God showed that Jesus was truly who He claimed to be and He has the authority to make those kinds of judgments. Now we will get later on in another post as to the kind of body Jesus rose in and what a difference that makes, but for now, let it just be stressed that the act of resurrecting Jesus was a reversal of the claims of His opponents. In biblical language, God vindicated Jesus.

What this means for us today is that the claims of Jesus are to be taken with an emphatic seriousness. In no other person has God spoken in such a way and to such great claims. He was not, to use the trilemma, someone who was insane or someone who was the devil out of Hell. He really was and is the rightful king of this world.

What has this to do with deity? It means that Jesus’s claim to have that authority in Himself is backed. Now I do believe it is a mistake to go to the gospels thinking that these were only written to show that God walked among us. They do show that, but they also show more than that and we dare not miss out on the whole because we are fixated with a part. We know that God has acted in Jesus by the resurrection as in resurrecting Jesus, God also upholds His own honor. God sees someone speaking with this kind of authority and says “Yes. That one is right. He speaks for me.” This is not something adoptionist by the way for those who are concerned. This is just recognition. Jesus speaks for God perfectly because He only perfectly embodies the nature of God.

We can often spend so much time looking at the deity of Jesus that we can miss the message of Jesus and realize that that message is right. The first lesson we need to learn then is that Jesus was, nay, IS right.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Why The Resurrection Matters

Jesus rose from the dead. So what? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

We Christians do know, supposedly, that the resurrection is the most awesome event ever. It is the event that changed the world. If I ever say Jesus’s resurrection turned the world upside-down, my Mrs. is always quick to remind me of what I really mean to say as I’ve told her before. It did not turn it upside-down. It turned it right-side up. Christians will happily go to church on Easter and you will hear “He is risen! He is risen indeed!”

But then comes the time when you ask why it matters so much. So Jesus came and died and rose again. What does that have to do with anything? We believe that Lazarus was resurrected as well, but yet you do not hear anything about celebrating Lazarus day in the church. We frankly don’t know what day it took place on. Throughout the Bible we can find occasional resurrections taking place, but only Christ’s is celebrated. Why? Is it just because we like Him more?

The most common answer we can get is that because Jesus rose from the dead, we can be forgiven of our sins. Yes. This is true, but again, is that it? Now don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that that is a small part of the matter. Forgiveness of sins is a huge deal and it is something we should all be thankful for and frankly, if that was all that it established, then that would be reason enough to celebrate.

Yet what if we’re throwing a party for the good news when we do not have all of the good news? What if there is even more that we can tell people in our evangelism? What if in fact we can find that the resurrection makes a difference in how we approach our lives entirely? What if it means something not just for us as individual Christians but rather means something on a grander and universal scale?

Keep in mind in all of this writing that I plan to do on the resurrection, I am not going to be giving a defense of the resurrection. That is important to do. I have done it before as well. There are numerous books out there that you can get to get a defense of the resurrection. The problem is most of us get to the point of establishing the resurrection if we are apologists and then it’s “Christianity is true,” and we move on from there. Yes. Christianity is true then, but then what is it that Christianity is saying that is true?

So in all of this, I am going to be for the sake of argument assuming the resurrection to be true. I want to write to the Christian in the pew who believes the resurrection and then say “Now here is what this means to you.” It is my sincere hope that as we look at various topics, we will transcend what we have earlier said about Christianity. We are not going to forsake that, but we are going to past it. The resurrection of Jesus means Christianity is true and that we are forgiven, but it also means more than that, and if we can grasp this, and this includes myself, how much better could our lives be?

Barring nothing else coming up, I hope that the next blog post will really start to dig into some of the ways the resurrection changes reality. I hope you’ll come along for the journey.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Creation and Easter Saturday

What is it like in the in-between time? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

If there’s something that can often frighten us, it’s the future. In fact, everything we fear is in some way future-based. We fear what will happen if X is true. If we have a disease, we fear for our future. If we are going to a job interview, we fear whether we will get the job or not. The future is the big unknown.

The in-between time between what we have anxiety about and where we are can be a difficult time. I, like many young men, was quite nervous the day before my wedding and I am sure I only got one hour of sleep that night. There’s also a picture of my bride before the wedding downing a 5-hour energy drink. I believe she had a similar problem. It was a really big step and we were both nervous. The unknown was looming ahead.

Before we moved to Knoxville, I was quite nervous. I didn’t know what was going to happen and in my mind, I was undergoing all the disaster scenarios. As we’ve got here, I’ve found out that most of those have not happened. Of course, I still have some anxiety, mainly over how are we going to pay all those bills that keep coming in?

We can often think of the unknown from the perspective of the apostles. There their leader had been crucified and who was going to be next in line? They would. They were hiding out away from the danger. There was no desire any more to be identified with Jesus.

That’s a fascinating topic and something to look on and indeed, I have looked on it before. However, let us suppose that we were to personify the creation and look at it the way it is presented in Romans 8:18-27. What would it mean to the creation when it looks at the death of Jesus supposing that somehow it could know what was coming?

Romans 8 tells us that creation does look forward to being set free from bondage. Israel already knew they were in bondage. They had been in slavery in Egypt and here after their captivity, they were still in bondage in that the rule had not been restored to Israel and the pagans were the ones in charge.

Israel’s problem was that for a number of them, they were looking at only themselves. Did God plan to set free Israel? Of course. He was not thinking of doing it however in conquering Rome. There was a greater power that held Israel bondage and that was the power of sin.

This power held the world in bondage. Indeed, it held creation in bondage. The accuser had done his work and Jesus throughout His ministry showed that He was going on a battle against the devil and was going to defeat Him and bring about the Kingdom of God.

Creation watches on Easter Saturday then and sees the Son of God in the tomb but realizes that surely the journey is not coming to an end. Surely at this point in the story there will not be a let-down. The very Son of God has come down. Is that the way it’s going to end?

We today are in a similar position, though afterwards. We have seen the resurrection and as we live, the story is going on, but there is a part of us that says “This story is reaching its conclusion isn’t it?” We do await the return of our Lord and the resurrection when evil will be totally removed from the world. Creation itself waits and while there is rejoicing that Christ rose, we rejoice not just because of what happened in the past, but because of what we know is to come in the future.

When we celebrate Easter tomorrow, let us remember that we are not just celebrating that Christ rose and we shall be with Him. We are celebrating that the Kingdom has come and that Christ is Lord and He has demonstrated that by rising from the dead. We are looking forward to the final fruition of the Kingdom on Earth and living our lives aware that the King is going to return someday. We are seeking to be found to be good servants for when He returns.

Easter is a time to celebrate indeed, but let us not forget we celebrate not just for a past reason, but a future one too.

In Christ,
Nick Peters