The Promise of the Resurrection
For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.
1 Corinthians 15:1
I’m a natural pessimist. A glass half empty kind of guy.
Yesterday I took some time to watch the Cincinnati Reds play the Philadelphia Phillies. The Reds are coming off a miserable season that saw them lose 100 games. The Phillies, on the other hand, were the National League champs last year. But going into the bottom of the ninth and against all odds, the Reds held a slim 2-0 lead, needing just 3 outs to claim the victory. My comment at the time was, they’re probably going to find some way to choke. And sure enough, they did. The Reds’ bullpen imploded, giving up 3 runs, the lead, and the game.
Oh well.
As the line from the movie A League of Their Own goes, “There’s no crying in baseball.”
Now in the ranking of life’s disappointments, watching your favorite team snatch defeat from the jaws of victory rates as a minor thing. But it is an example of the disappointments we all encounter in life. Maybe you didn’t make the varsity team in high school. Maybe you didn’t get into that college you set your heart on attending. That big promotion you thought you were going to get; it went to someone else. And to these examples can be added countless others.
I spend a great deal of time on this blog analyzing the news. Have you heard any good news lately? If you’re like me, probably not very much. It’s ugly out there.
Just last week, they arraigned Donald Trump on obviously trumped-up charges in what amounts to a persecution of the man and his supporters, not the legal prosecution it pretends to be. And all this while at the same time crooked politicians such as Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton are allowed a free pass for their obvious crimes because they’re friends with the deep state, globalist kingmakers.
Our economy is in decline. We’re probably already in recession and if the financial people I respect are right, we will be in full collapse mode by this fall.
The U.S. dollar is in the process of losing its world reserve currency status, implying a much lower value for the dollar and much higher prices for everything for those of us who use dollars.
Our national wealth is being siphoned off and sent to a Nazi-affiliated dictator in Ukraine contrary to the Constitution and Word of God, and there seems to be nothing anyone can do to stop it.
Antichrist is running wild, yet no one seems to notice or care. Jesuit Pope Francis and his henchmen are openly destroying the United States through a massive program of legal and illegal immigration socialism.
Our news media, our politicians, our universities, and our corporations lie about everything all the time. They are, in the words of the prophet Jeremiah, wise to do evil, but to do good they have no knowledge. Do you want an example? Just look at how the entire establishment sings from the same hymnal when it comes to the great transgender lie.
They actually expect you to believe that a man can become a woman and a woman can become a man. If you disagree, you’re “transphobic.” When an evil woman pretending to be a man shot up a Christian school two weeks ago killing 6, all the concern from the Biden Regime on down was for the sexual perverts. The thinly veiled message was that the Christians got what they deserved for their “transphobic” objections to “gender-affirming care.’ If you’re not familiar with the term, “gender-affirming care,” it is a euphemism for operations and treatments designed to permanently mutilate the bodies of young men and women, who have been deceived by their elders into thinking they were born in the wrong body. Because Christians oppose the mutilation of children, in the eyes of the world, they deserve to be led as lambs to the slaughter.
This is the world we live in.
It’s an ugly place. It’s a place of disappointment, despair, and death. As the Apostle John put it, “the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one.”
But that’s not the whole story.
For it leaves out one very important detail: the resurrection from the dead of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
The Apostle Paul in writing to the Romans noted that Christ “was raised because of our justification.” On the cross, Christ paid the price in full for the sins of God’s people. And though we live nearly 2,000 years after that day Christ came forth from his tomb never to return, it was this act of God that carried with it the promise of our justification and of life eternal.
As Christians, we know how this story ends. All of the disappointments, frustrations, and evils we find in this life, Paul called them “momentary light afflictions.” And he didn’t say this as some naïve man who knew little of suffering. Just read the New Testament and you’ll quickly find out that Paul was a man who suffered greatly for the cause of Christ. In the end, he gave his life for it. But in giving his life, he will receive the promised crown of righteousness on that Day. And that promise, Paul is quick to point out, is not to him alone, but “to all who have loved His [Jesus’s] appearing.”
For Christians, that is the promise of the resurrection. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.