It Seems Like Nonsense, But It’s Not

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. Death is the next phase in eternal judgment. When Jesus died, he took the sting of death into himself so that when you and I go into death, there's no more judgment, no more sting left for us.

It's not really even death. It's transition into a new life. Today, Pastor J.D. walks us down the path to Jesus' tomb. You know, we've all walked that lonely path in one form or another over the past 23 months, wondering where life is headed and what the future holds. The good news of this story is that because of the resurrection, the path to true life doesn't end at the grave. It actually begins there. So grab your Bible and let's join Pastor J.D. again in the book of Luke.

Luke 24. On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came to the tomb bringing the spices they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb. They went in but did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men stood by them in dazzling clothes.

So the women were terrified. They bowed down to the ground. Why are you looking for the living among the dead?

asked the men. He is not here, but he has risen. Remember how he spoke to you when he was still in Galilee, saying it is necessary that the Son of Man be betrayed into the hands of simple men, be crucified, and then rise in the third day? Verse nine, returning from the tomb, they reported all these things to the 11 and all the rest. Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary, the mother of James, and the other women with them were all telling the apostles these things. But these words seemed like nonsense to them, and they did not believe the women. Peter, however, got up and ran to the tomb when he stooped to look in.

He saw only the linen claws, so he went away amazed at what had happened. Some at church and guests. Jesus is risen. Amen.

Amen. The heart of Christianity is not a new approach to morality. The heart of Christianity is not new insights into spirituality or the nature of the universe. The heart of Christianity is a dead man who walked out of a grave and changed everything. And I know, I know some of you have a hard time believing that. But it seems to you maybe like it's wishful fairy tales that people have invented who cannot cope with the harsh realities of life.

And that's what today is all about. Y'all, what I can't help but notice as I read this passage is the sense of wonder that pervades it. Did you notice those kind of indications of wonder and unbelief all through those verses? Verse four, for example, says that they were perplexed about this.

Verse 11, their words seemed like nonsense to them and they just did not believe it. It was almost like it was too good to be true. As in, as in imagine, imagine you were going through your grandfather's assets and you learned that, that he had bought a few hundred dollars worth of Apple stock in the early 1980s, but he forgot to mention it to anybody.

And now it's worth like $500 million, something like that. Or, or my oldest daughter just turned 18 on Wednesday. Suppose she found out that Justin Bieber was going to emcee her birthday party. I don't know, is the Biebs still cool for 18 years old, eight year old?

I don't know. But for, say you found out that Nicolas Cage was going to emcee your birthday party. That's transgenerational, I think. Just too good to be true, right? That's, that's how they felt just a million times more intense. And so what they heard seemed like nonsense to them. You know, sometimes we read these ancient texts and we, we just assume that people back then were a lot more gullible. They didn't have all the sophistication that we have and knowing about medicine and knowing about death and those things. And so they were probably more likely to believe in a resurrection because everybody knew somebody that had been resurrected from the dead and all, right?

But that's just not true. They knew how death worked. Most of them had seen more dead bodies up close by the age of 12 than most of us will see in a lifetime. And when somebody was dead, I mean dead like, like I saw the man's heart punctured by a spear and blood gushed out of it, like it came out of a fountain kind of dead, they knew that you didn't come back from that. Plus they knew that a Roman garrison had been established to guard the tomb.

So, so the report that the body was missing seemed like nonsense to them. The point is these women who came to the tomb that morning were not looking for a resurrection. They were not starry-eyed, gullible, miracle-seeking groupies who showed up with lawn chairs and paraphernalia for Jesus to sign or hankies to wipe on his body so that they could go do miracles. In fact, verse one tells you what they showed up with. They showed up with spices. And when Luke says spices, by the way, don't think garlic, oregano, or Lowry seasoning salt the greatest of all the spices.

That's not what we're talking about. These were spices that were used to preserve dead bodies. And there would have been a lot of them, by the way, and they would have been very heavy.

It's not just something you threw around in your knapsack and carried around. It would have been dozens of pounds of spices. Again, the point is they didn't come to the tomb that morning expecting to meet a living, breathing Jesus. They came expecting to find a cadaver. They weren't looking for a miracle. They were looking for closure. The story was over.

It was time to anoint the body and to move on. Check out Peter's response in verse 12, in fact. Luke says that when Peter got to the tomb and he saw it was empty, he walked away dazed, confused, not really sure what it could all mean. He wasn't like, I knew it, I figured something like this would happen.

He was confused. In John's gospel, John, another one of the apostles, tells us that he also ran with Peter. In fact, let me just read you what John says in John 20, verse 4, the two. That is Peter and John were running together, but the other disciple, that's John referring to himself, outran Peter and got to the tomb first, by the way. Why did John point that out, that he outran Peter? What relevance does it have to the story?

None. Just that whenever you're a guy telling a story and it involves you besting another guy in a feat of strength, you always include that detail, even if it's not germane to the plot at all. He outran him. Verse 5, stooping down, though, John saw the linen claws lying there, but he did not go in. He couldn't even bring himself to go in. It was like he glimpsed something too good to be true, something so wonderful that it took his breath away, something he couldn't let his heart entertain for fear that his hopes would be crushed again. So he stood outside the tomb, and he refused to go in for fear, for fear of being disappointed.

Do you see the theme here? Nobody's expecting a resurrection. Everybody doubts it. It seems like nonsense. It's just too wonderful to be true. And by the way, I have to point out the irony of God choosing women to be the first ones to testify to these things.

You say, irony how? Well, in the first century, the testimony of a woman was not considered valid evidence in court. Josephus, for example, the Jewish historian, the Jewish historian for the first century, tells us that the witness of multiple women, even multiple women, would not be acceptable in court because of, quote, his words, not mine, because of their levity and hysteria. Sure enough, by the way, Celsus, who was an early Roman critic of Christianity, he mocked the gospel accounts of the resurrection because they depended so much on the testimony of women. He said, he said these women were clearly, again, his words, not mine, they were clearly hysterical females deluded by sorcery, and so none of their testimony should be considered adequate. Now, obviously today we know that that's not at all a fair assessment of women.

It's quite misogynistic and bigoted. But here's the question. In that day, if Luke was making up stories to bolster a fairy tale, why would you choose women as your first witnesses if you were making the things up? If you were trying to invent evidence, you wouldn't choose those whose testimonies were considered to be the most unreliable at that time.

No, the gospel writers reported women as the first witnesses because that's what happened. And it was God's way of embedding into the story a clue for you and I 2,000 years later that these are not made-up stories. But the main thing I'm trying to get you to see is that for everybody who heard these things, this was just not something they expected. They weren't expecting or looking for a miracle, and when they found evidence of it, it still seemed like nonsense to them. It just seemed too good to be true. So the question is, what was it about the resurrection that made it too good to be true or made it seem too good to be true? I'll give you four things.

I think they're pretty straightforward. Number one, number one, if the resurrection is true, it means that Jesus has redeemed us from our sins. You see, the apostle Paul explains in Romans 4 that Jesus' resurrection was the verification that God had accepted Jesus' sacrifice as the payment for our sins. Think of it like a receipt.

When you are shopping at Walmart and you pay for your items, they give you a little receipt and tell you to hold on to it so that when the kind elderly gentleman stops you at the door, you can show him that receipt and say, this is the proof that my items have been paid for. The resurrection, Paul explains, is the proof, the validation, the receipt that God has accepted Jesus' death as the payment for our sins. It means the redemption worked. Look down at verse 21 in chapter 24. Two of the disciples later that afternoon are walking along this dusty road to Emmaus when they are suddenly joined by a stranger who starts to walk with them, a stranger, by the way, who turns out to be Jesus incognito, but they don't know that yet. And the stranger asks them why they're so depressed. And so they explain to the stranger that they were just devastated by Jesus' death.

Here's what they say. You see, we were hoping that Jesus was the one who was about to redeem Israel. We'd hoped he brought redemption. See, the Old Testament prophets had promised that God would send a redeemer, a deliverer, and they had always assumed that that would be a political redeemer, a warrior king who would end injustice and bring peace on earth and end world hunger. And for a while, it certainly looked like Jesus could do all of that, right, with the miracles and the feeding of the 5,000 and the walking on water and whatnot.

But then when he died, well, they just naturally assumed that he'd failed. The redeemer of the world wouldn't be killed by the evil world powers. The redeemer of the world was supposed to overcome, not succumb.

The resurrection, however, showed them that Jesus was attempting a different kind of redemption, and he was successful. You see, in addition to prophesying that a warrior king would come who would bring peace on earth, the Old Testament prophets also taught that our sin had incurred a penalty. Go all the way back to Genesis 3, the first sin, the Garden of Eden. God had said that the soul that sins will die. Every single one of us have repeated the pattern of the sin in Genesis 3. Now, bears took the form of eating a forbidden fruit off of a forbidden tree, and we haven't done that, but every single one of us has repeated the same thought pattern that they went through, which is basically, I am wiser than God. I know better than him how I should lead my life.

I know what's good and what's not. I should play the role of God in my life. God, you shouldn't be in charge, because I know better what's best for me than you do, so I'm going to be in charge of my life. A lot of times we think of sin as these grossly immoral acts, and it certainly gets there, but sin at its core is simply rebellion, cosmic treason, it's mutiny, and all of that brought a curse of death on every single one of us. The cross of Jesus was Jesus redeeming us from that curse. That's why Isaiah, the prophet, had said, Isaiah 53, that God would lay on Jesus, the Messiah, the iniquity of us all, and that the price for our peace with God was going to be placed on his head.

I used to explain that to my kids like this. I'm like, say that this book right here represents your sin. This book represents your sin, and this is you, this is your sin, this is God up here.

It doesn't matter how much you try to get close to God, how many times you pray, how often you go to church, how much you give in the offering, how many commandments you keep, because no matter how close you try to get there, that sin is always an obstacle between you and God. Now, some of you are like, well, that works for my kids, but JD, you don't know my sin, right? So now this is yours, right? And let's just start flipping through this book and imagining what's on the pages. And this is the story of that relationship you wish you'd never gotten into.

And here's the story of that series of mistakes. And here's that broken promise and that broken trust and all this stuff between you and God. And you can try and try to get close to God, but the point is, no matter how close you get, how hard you work, there's always this obstacle. What Isaiah 53 is telling you is that God took our sin, our iniquity, and he laid it on Jesus, right? And when Jesus died, he put it away forever so that there's nothing that remains any longer between you and God. That's what the death of Christ was.

It was redemption. It was Christ taking the curse in our place so that the curse was gone because it had actually been laid on Jesus. That's why the apostle Paul says in Corinthians that when Jesus died, he took the sting out of death. The sting of death is not the pain of death. It's the curse in death. Death is the next phase in eternal judgment. When Jesus died, he took the sting of death into himself so that when you and I go into death, there's no more judgment, no more sting left for us. It's not really even death.

It's transition into a new life. Do you know, by the way, that a honeybee cannot sting you twice? A honeybee cannot sting you twice. That's because when a honeybee pushes its stinger out, it measures the bee's digestive tract, which leads to a quick and certain death. Death put its stinger into Jesus, and when it did, the internal workings of death itself were disrupted, and death itself died. You see, at some point, the honeybee of death is going to come for each one of us. But if Jesus has taken that stinger already, then your death is not going to have any curse in it.

There's no sting. In fact, it's not really even going to be a death at all. It's a transition to new life. No guilt in life, no fear in death. This is the power of Christ in me. From life's first cry to final breath, Jesus commands my destiny if the resurrection is true.

Number two, if the resurrection is true, it means that the power for new life is here. You see, our sin, Scripture tells us, not only put a curse over us, it had released a curse into us. Death is not just something that you're going to encounter one day. Death is at work in you right now, Jesus said. And that shows up in the form of addictions, hate and selfishness in our hearts, codependent relationships, dysfunctional relationships, anger and idolatry and ruined relationships. Many of you, if you were honest, you got that brokenness in you this morning, and you've tried to clean it up, and you've tried to change, and you've tried to do better, but you're honest, none of it's really worked.

There's still a darkness in you that you just cannot overcome. Jesus' resurrection means that there is a power in the world that can overcome that in you. It is the power of resurrection from the grave. The way Paul says it's like this, 2 Corinthians 5.17, if any man is in Christ, he's a new creation. Not a reformed creation or a cleaned up creation, but a new creation. Old things are passed away, behold, all things have become new. By the way, that word behold in the Bible is always the indication that a miracle is about to happen. You never say behold like, you know, behold, look, I did the dishes.

Behold means God is just doing something. So when Paul gets to the end of that verse, he's like, hey, old things have passed away, behold, all things are becoming new. The newness in your life is not you resolving to be better. It's not you becoming more religious, being a better person. The newness is the release of his resurrection power in you.

That means this morning that Jesus is not only able to forgive every sin because he died for all of them on the cross, he can release you from the power of every sin because he resurrected from the dead and he can reverse and restore whatever sin has ruined. So let me tell you about one of the women that came to the tomb that morning. Her name was Mary Magdalene.

You might have seen her referred to there in that story. Mary, when she first meets Jesus, the Gospel of Mark tells us, she had seven demons. Not one, not two, seven demons. That is Mark's way of saying that she is hopelessly consumed by the demonic.

I mean, think for a moment about a life with seven demons. I mean, it would have been a disaster. She would have looked like she was mentally ill. Scripture says she'd been a prostitute. She had destroyed every relationship in her life. Her parents didn't even want to talk to her or about her. Everybody thought of her as beyond redemption. She'd ruined every relationship and alienated everybody she'd ever been close to. I mean, just imagine her life before Jesus, hopeless, destitute.

Who hires somebody with seven demons? She's outcast. She's forgotten.

She's given up on. But in Luke 8, she falls at Jesus' feet and she finds healing. She's the first one to go back to the tomb alone. And evidently, there was a small garden area near the tomb and she was in it weeping. It was there that Jesus appeared to her, the first person he appeared to directly after the resurrection, Mary. And through her tears and in her rage, she doesn't recognize him.

Again, she's not really expecting a miracle. Through her tears and her rage, she thinks he's the gardener. So she starts yelling at him. Hey, where'd you take his body?

Tell me where you took his body. And John says he speaks her name, calls her name Mary. And immediately she recognizes him. What an incredible moment. The first person that Jesus appears to after being resurrected is a former prostitute with seven demons and he calls her by name. I'm pointing that out because he's doing the same thing with some of you this morning. Don't miss the significance, by the way, of where they are either.

Where are they? She came to a grave looking for a dead man. Instead, the living man found her in a garden. That grave to garden is a metaphor for her life. She had been in a grave of seven demons and now she's in a garden of new life in Christ. And that's the first person Jesus appears to and it's because it's teaching something to you and to me.

I don't care what's going on in your life. I don't care what kind of sin, what kind of demonic activity, even if that's what it is, I'm telling you that there is more forgiveness in him than there is sin in you. There is more healing in him than there is sickness in you.

Right? If you listen right now, he's calling your name. It's not going to be audible.

I mean, you're not going to hear voices or anything like that. It's this sweet draw in your heart just beckoning you to come right now. Listen, maybe like Mary, you are literally struggling against spiritual forces. Maybe it's against addictions or sinful habits.

You can't break relationships that you've ruined. Mary says to you this morning, I know I was there. I had seven demons in me. But the gospel truth is that there is more grace in him and more power in him than there is death in you.

There is no struggle. There is no addiction, no brokenness that his power cannot heal. He can turn your graves into gardens.

That power is available to you today if you will receive it. Number three. Number three, the resurrection means that if it's true one day, every sad thing in our lives is going to come untrue.

The apostle Paul calls Jesus's resurrection the first fruits of the new creation, a taste of what is to come. You see, back in those days, farmers weren't always sure how a crop was going to turn out. They lacked all the tools that we have. They couldn't take the seed and look at it under a microscope and see if it was good seed. They didn't know all the things about crop rotation and soil. So they couldn't analyze the soil. They didn't involve almanacs and all the weather predicting patterns.

And so they just weren't sure. So when those very first fruits appeared, they gave an indication of what the rest of the crop was going to be like. Right now, it's the prettiest time in North Carolina. For those of you that are new to our state, it's because those first flowers on the dogwood tree are here.

Right now, by the way, it's bad news. It only lasts for a few days because there is a sea of yellow that is coming that is going to cover everything and it's awful. But for about three or four days, maybe a week, it's just like heaven on earth, temperature and beauty and all that stuff. But those dogwood flowers show you that a sea of green, the new creation of spring is on its way. The resurrection is the dogwood flower of the new creation. It is an indication of what is to come.

Listen, y'all, there's nothing more terrifying, nothing that feels more final to us than death, right? I know that some of you have dealt with death this year. You're sitting here broken with sadness over somebody that you've lost this year. Maybe it was expected. Maybe it was a mom or a dad or a grandparent, or maybe it wasn't expected.

Maybe it was sudden, tragic, the death of a spouse or a brother or a sister or even a child. Maybe you're afraid of your own death. Because, by the way, apart from Christ, you really should be. It's not a question of if, it's just when. It's just a matter of time. It may not be Easter quite yet, but Jesus is risen.

What Mary Magdalene and the other women discovered seemed too good to be true, but it wasn't. If you missed any of today's message on Summit Life with Pastor J.D. Greer, you can listen again to this message by visiting jdgreer.com. There are only a few more days to get our latest resource. It's a handy set of 50 scripture memory cards. You might remember we offered something similar this time last year, and it was so popular that we decided to bring it back. So if you want to carry God's promises in your heart, these new Summit Life memory verse cards make it easy and convenient to memorize scripture. The cards are a small two and a half by three and a half inch size for quick reference, putting on the fridge or even sticking in your wallet.

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That's eight six six three three five fifty two twenty. Or you can give online at JD Greer dot com. By the way, if you haven't checked out Pastor JD's newest podcast called Ask Me Anything, you'll want to do that today. Pastor JD gives quick, honest answers to tricky questions. And you can find it online at JD Greer dot com or through your favorite podcasting app. I'm Molly Vinovich inviting you to join us again Monday when Pastor JD concludes this teaching series called In Step. Join us again Monday for Summit Life with JD Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.