Episode 139: Firstfruits and the Resurrection–The Foundation of Our Faith

HE IS RISEN! Although we take it for granted, it was very controversial among both Jews and Gentiles–but why? We will look at this obscure day on the Biblical Calendar, what it meant in the first century, and why Yeshua’s fulfillment of it is the most important event in the history of the world. We’ll also talk about why it is the foundation of our faith and what it means to live in belief and why so many of us really don’t.

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⁹ The Lord spoke to Moses: ¹⁰ “Speak to the Israelites and tell them: When you enter the land I am giving you and reap its harvest, you are to bring the first sheaf of your harvest to the priest. ¹¹ He will present the sheaf before the Lord so that you may be accepted; the priest is to present it on the day after the Sabbath. ¹² On the day you present the sheaf, you are to offer a year-old male lamb without blemish as a burnt offering to the Lord. ¹³ Its grain offering is to be four quarts of fine flour mixed with oil as a food offering to the Lord, a pleasing aroma, and its drink offering will be one quart of wine. ¹⁴ You must not eat bread, roasted grain, or any new grain until this very day, and until you have brought the offering to your God. This is to be a permanent statute throughout your generations wherever you live. (Lev 23:9-14)

It may be a bit early when you listen to this or read this but just let me say my favorite three words of the year—HE IS RISEN! Who would think that just this seemingly insignificant event on the Biblical calendar, the presentation of the first sheaf of the barley harvest on the day after the Sabbath during the Passover week, aka the week of Unleavened Bread? For us, so far removed from the context of their lives, it doesn’t seem like a huge deal but this was the day when the barley that had been harvested could actually be eaten—in the form of barley bread, roasted heads of barley, or however else you wanted to eat it. As barley was the poor man’s food, this was especially important to those who were vulnerable. If they could not afford wheat, and many could not, this was what they ate all year for their bread. When Yeshua/Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes, the loaves were small barley rolls. It is the food of the Resurrection, the food that peasants would most identify with. It is symbolic of the unexpected Messiah!

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist, and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have six years’ worth of blogs at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that shows them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah. All Scripture this week will be quoted from the Christian Standard Bible—I will be sticking with the ESV through the end of Mark but when I begin teaching Matthew we are going to make the switch to the CSB—my friend Matt, a Torah Teacher who is getting his PhD in OT Studies, hooked me up with this version that he uses in his teachings and it reads so well that I use it for the kids and I am going to use it with the adults now too.

Paul refers to Yeshua as the firstfruits offering on a few occasions and today we are going to talk about why, as well as discuss what the big deal about the Resurrection is and why it was the single most important event in history—why it is more important than the Cross or the Nativity (birth story). We take the crucifixion and resurrection for granted but it was a very controversial thing in the ancient world—a shameful, nonsensical kind of thing that both Jews and Gentiles had problems dealing with. Even Paul called it foolishness and a stumbling block in I Cor 1:20-25—but why? ^“Where is the one who is wise? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the debater of this age? Hasn’t God made the world’s wisdom foolish? For since, in God’s wisdom, the world did not know God through wisdom, God was pleased to save those who believe through the foolishness of what is preached. For the Jews ask for signs and the Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles.  Yet to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God, because God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”

Why was the crucifixion and the resurrection so controversial when we see it as absolutely normal today? For the Jews, the claims were tantamount to the allowance of human sacrifice—and although Yeshua served the purpose of a sacrifice in that He was that korban, the Hebrew word for sacrifice, which means “to draw near” and that is what a sacrifice did—it allowed the offerer to draw near to Yahweh in some way. Yeshua came, which was Yahweh taking the initiative to draw near to us instead of the other way around. Yeshua chose to die, at the hands of the Romans but through the insistence and even manipulation of the chief priests, the cronies of Annas and Caiaphus. Not that Pilate hated killing innocent people, mind you, he was a truly evil man. To spite the chief priests, He would rather have released Yeshua and executed the lestes, Barabbas, one of the social bandits plaguing the land in the decades before the destruction of the Temple. But the entire idea of the Yahweh-warrior of Isaiah, a Messiah who would die instead of kill, forgive the Gentiles instead of slaughter them, of the fulness of the deity dwelling in someone who could be killed? It was all unthinkable. It was a stumbling block and an offense of the highest caliber. You know, just the sort of thing Yahweh likes to do to show that He makes the rules independent of our expectations and hopes.

For the Gentiles (aka the Greeks, the Hellenistic world), it was every bit as bad and it was so offensive and foolish to them that a god could die by human hands that we still see graffiti about it carved into a wall near the Palatine Hill in Rome, which is one of the seven hills of Rome, of a man with the head of a donkey nailed to a cross with the epithet, “Alexamenos worships his god.” It was a boys’ school during that time so you know how boys are—and this was sometime during the late second or third century, depicting Yeshua as a donkey god, which was a grave insult. Christianity was viewed as a superstition because it didn’t mesh easily with Judaism’s Messianic ideals (as seen in their embrace of Simon bar Kochba in the early second century) and in fact, there would be no formal mention of a suffering Messiah until Pesikta Rabatti in the 8^th century. This put the early believers in Yeshua, who found themselves on the outskirts of Judaism and on a different planet than the Romans, in a tough position. They weren’t meeting anyone’s expectations for genuine religion.

Another problem with the Greeks and the more Hellenized Jews (of course, by this point, all of Judaism was Hellenized in ways large and small and still is—from the codification of the Torah as a law code instead of the wisdom literature it originally served as, to the ways they set up their schools and synagogues, etc.) was in the area of philosophy because there was a big push in some circles that the physical world is a bad thing instead of something created by God to be good. So for Yeshua to have a real body in the first place was offensive to them, and so the Docetes got around this horrifying reality by saying that Yeshua had a celestial body, a phantasm, that only appeared to be human—therefore He didn’t die and He also wasn’t resurrected. This was declared a heresy at the First Council of Nicea and we will talk about the problem with belief this later. Others were so embarrassed by the crucifixion—claiming as divine and also as king someone who was weak enough to be tortured by mere mortals, and killed, and not just killed but in the way the lowest of the low were killed, displayed naked on a cross and mocked and who didn’t even last a few days before dying—that they claimed that He didn’t die, He just fainted and the Romans were too stupid to figure it out—you know, those kinds of workarounds. The closest I can come to relating the shame of the crucifixion would be in modern times having a relative who was a convicted serial child molester, caught in the act. That visceral reaction of disgust and shame you just had—that’s what it was like to have a relative or friend crucified. Even if they were innocent.

The problem with finding ways around the crucifixion being as terrible as it was, is that now the resurrection is meaningless and everything about our faith hinges on that resurrection. What did Paul say in I Cor 15:12-14? ^“Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say, “There is no resurrection of the dead”? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain, and so is your faith.” Why were people saying there is no resurrection from the dead? Well, we can credit that to Gnostic beliefs that, as I mentioned briefly before, the physical world is evil and the best thing that can happen to us is to escape our physical bodies and this physical world—where we have to eat and use the toilet and we get hurt and sick—and to become spirits. This is known as dualism, which can be found in Christianity today even though the Bible clearly says that Resurrection gave Yeshua and will give us, a real physical body that can eat and be touched. Dualists believe God hates bodies but resurrection is proof that He cares very much about bodies. When people talk about dying and going to heaven as spirits, or becoming ghosts or whatever, that is dualism, the concept of life apart from the body because life can be distinct from it. God created us to be part and parcel with our bodies. That was how He chose to be imaged by His image-bearers—not to be disembodied spirits but complete humans. But all this was developed because the reality of Yeshua and what He did was so upside down and counter to everything that everyone had ever believed—both Jew and Gentile. And this is why prophecy is never clear ahead of time. The Jewish scholars weren’t idiots. The truth was hidden and can only be seen in retrospect—which is why everyone who has ever predicted end times events based on what they think is ”clearly spelled out” has been proven wrong for thousands of years. Jew and Gentile alike.

So much of Yeshua’s ministry was about bodies, and He never told anyone that we would ever not have one. Yeshua spent so much time curing the sick, cleansing the lepers, making it so that the blind could see, the lame walk, the deaf hear, filling stomachs, restoring the unclean to their families—and raising the dead. But why on earth would He raise the dead if they were better off dead—as spirits without bodies? He wouldn’t. And of course, here is where we have to talk about how raising the dead and resurrection are so entirely different. If you have ever played an online MMO—massively multiplayer Online computer game—you know that when you die and come back to life, you have your same body but like your armor is damaged. Your body isn’t new. It can still get killed again. That’s what Yeshua did for Lazarus, Jairus’s daughter, the widow’s son, and what Elijah and Elisha did for those boys as well. Those people were fixed but they all had normal bodies that could get sick, die of old age, or be killed. There was nothing special about them or their bodies—even though what happened to them was totally cool. What happened to them was like a video game rez. Resurrection is entirely different. Resurrection is so different that if it didn’t happen then Yeshua died as a criminal, handed over to the enemy, and never experienced vindication—making every claim empty, every miracle just something He did by maybe collaborating with Beelzebul, His teachings blasphemy, His predictions of the end of the Temple coincidental, and the almost complete overturning of polytheism in the Western world inexplicable.

Resurrection is a big deal. Resurrection was the vindication of Yeshua—that He was everything He claimed to be, that His miracles were the outworking of the Gospel that the Kingdom of Heaven was finally invading earth and would begin to conquer to the ends of the earth, that Yahweh was finally bringing the Gentiles back into the family after narrowing humanity down to one family for the express purpose of creating the Messiah who would undo the curses of the Garden and bring humanity back into balance and into relationship with the Creator as it was meant to be in the beginning. As Adam and Eve were stones in that living Garden Temple and were meant to create more living stones but failed, Yeshua fulfilled Yahweh’s promise to Eve. But it required something far greater than being raised from the dead. A body raised from the dead is just as sinful and susceptible to death as it was before it died in the first place. Resurrection, which Yeshua experienced, is what we are seeded with now but will experience the fulness of later. It is also our vindication, in the end, and also in the here and now, that what we say and believe about Yeshua is true. We are vindicated in part now, because of how the New Creation life grows from that seed and radically changes us, and we will be vindicated fully in the Great Resurrection. I want to go back to talking about Yom HaBikkurim, that day of firstfruits again because Paul mentions it with respect to the resurrections—Yeshua’s and ours:

Ro 8 ¹⁸ For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is going to be revealed to us. ¹⁹ For the creation eagerly waits with anticipation for God’s sons to be revealed. ²⁰ For the creation was subjected to futility—not willingly, but because of him who subjected it—in the hope ²¹ that the creation itself will also be set free from the bondage to decay into the glorious freedom of God’s children. ²² For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together with labor pains until now. ²³ Not only that, but we ourselves who have the Spirit as the firstfruits—we also groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. ²⁴ Now in this hope we were saved, but hope that is seen is not hope, because who hopes for what he sees? ²⁵ Now if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly wait for it with patience.

Now, of course, this is Romans and absolutely as clear as mud but the reference to firstfruits is so incredibly important. Before that Bikkurim waving of the sheaf of barley, absolutely no one could enjoy the benefits of the new crop. The first fruits of the harvest had to be presented to God—hence Yeshua’s warning to Mary Magdalene not to touch Him because He had not yet ascended to the Father (John 20, beginning in verse 14). This was His first High Priestly duty, in my opinion—presenting Himself as that firstfruit offering to Yahweh in the Heavenly Temple, as the firstfruits of the dead, thereby inaugurating the New Creation existence in all who believe. This is not the same as some people claim, that the patriarchs and all the faithful before this are like in hell or something like that, but in the eternal way of looking at things—Yeshua, Messiah, Christ is always and has always been first—the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world (I Peter 1; Rev 13). As Hebrews tells us, Yeshua could not be a priest while alive (Heb 8:4) but He has been given a superior priesthood in a superior Temple—one which has never and will never be abandoned by the Spirit of Yahweh due to the sins of mankind as we saw in Ezekiel’s vision. And the Spirit never returned to the Holy of Holies of the Second Temple. Yeshua Himself would never have even gone beyond the Court of Israel unless He Himself performed the hand leaning ceremony on the head of an animal brought as a chagigah (festival offering). But He is the one and only High Priest in the Greater Temple shown to Moses atop the mountain—everything else is a shadow.

And this picture of the presentation of the body of Yeshua as the firstfruits is meant to fill us with the same sort of hunger that the poor and vulnerable experienced when the new barley crop was being presented. Just a little while and we can taste that new harvest, just a little while longer and we will be satisfied with something even greater. And not only us but all of Creation with us—you know, there is nothing wrong with the planet that we haven’t done to it. Creation is longing for our renewal for its own sake—it is greatly desiring that we and our wasteful, destructive, selfish ways are changed forever. Not only will glory be revealed to us but also in us—and Creation has been waiting, as it were, on pins and needles because we have subjected it to futility. We were supposed to expand Eden but instead, we expanded our egos, waistlines, and demands. Or is that just me? And yet, once saved, we feel that seed within us that grows and overtakes the flesh. We begin to change and we keep changing because, like all those barley presentations at the Temple pointing to something greater, that seed of resurrection inside us is just the beginning. Paul says that we “eagerly wait for it with patience.” Boy is that a non-sequitur—which is something that doesn’t make sense in the natural world.

James echoes the same sentiments in his epistle James 1 “¹⁸ By his own choice, he gave us birth by the word of truth so that we would be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.” We have this same idea—Creation is waiting for our redemption. Our rebirth leads to the conditions through which the world can also experience and enjoy rebirth. But it has to start with us because we are the problem here. Imagine Creation groaning hopelessly before the resurrection of Yeshua! Remember I talked about how people were averse to the idea of a physical resurrection among the “Greeks”? By this time, within Judaism, only the Sadducees were holdouts for believing in a general resurrection of the faithful from the dead. And with how wicked the Sadducees were, you can see why they couldn’t want to believe they would ever face God. But the Essenes, the Pharisees, and your average faithful Jew were anticipating the resurrection—so this wasn’t any big shock. The shock was the idea that the Gentiles would be included. That was incredibly offensive after being trodden underfoot by the Babylonians, Persians, Medes, Greeks, and Romans for the last six hundred years. Gentiles were there to be conquered and a select few sought to be proselytes. For the Gentiles, however, who felt that the best blessing of all would be to shed their bodies and become one with God spiritually, some were ardently denying the resurrection. They didn’t want it and they were causing problems in Corinth, a Roman colony in Greece.

I Cor 15: ¹² Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say, “There is no resurrection of the dead”? ¹³ If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised; ¹⁴ and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain, and so is your faith. ¹⁵ Moreover, we are found to be false witnesses about God, because we have testified wrongly about God that he raised up Christ—whom he did not raise up, if in fact the dead are not raised. ¹⁶ For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. ¹⁷ And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins. ¹⁸ Those, then, who have fallen asleep in Christ have also perished. ¹⁹ If we have put our hope in Christ for this life only, we should be pitied more than anyone.²⁰ But as it is, Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. ²¹ For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead also comes through a man. ²² For just as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive. ²³ But each in his own order: Christ, the firstfruits; afterward, at his coming, those who belong to Christ.

I suppose some folks wanted it both ways. Either they were buying into the phantasm theory of a fake body and therefore no death and no resurrection—meaning that how everyone saw Yeshua after the empty tomb was just Him finally showing His true form, OR He never really died at all OR He died but the resurrection was a colossal hoax. If Christ is raised from the dead but we aren’t, it means that we will never be vindicated as being on the right side of history. Everyone who has ever died will stay dead. And when Yeshua said that Yahweh was the God of the living and not the dead (Mark 12), then He would have been lying. And if the resurrection is a lie, then Yeshua wasn’t raised either. I mean, what would be the point? Yeshua is either the first of many or He died for absolutely no reason—we’re still dead in our sins. And we’d be so, so pathetic and deluded. But I know what I have been through over the last twenty-three years and none of it has been my own doing. I have not liked the changes as I am going through them. I wouldn’t have chosen them. But that seed of New Creation, that spark of eternal life has this way of growing like that darned mustard seed and it pushes everything out little by little. Just as the Kingdom spreads through the world, eternal life, resurrection, spreads through us. The earth still suffers and so do we, but we are both changing.

But, as Paul tells the Corinthians, Yeshua is that fulfillment of the Bikkurim, of First Fruits—the first of a great harvest and not the only sheaf ever produced. Just imagine if the priests waved the only sheaf of barley at the Temple and there was no more! Why would people even care? What would it mean? It is only the abundance of the harvest that glorifies God’s provision and it is the same with us. If only Yeshua is raised, then it is to Yahweh’s shame. And that day on the Biblical calendar, only that one day, becomes meaningless when we find so much richness and depth in all the others. Nah, I don’t think so.

Before we go further into I Cor 15, I want to share something very personal about the Resurrection. And no, you don’t have to believe me because it was my dream and I can’t prove anything. Really be scared of folks who want to tell you what to do or believe based on dreams. I won’t do that. Anyway, I guess it was about twelve years ago. In my dream, I saw a woman walking up to me. It was the Jewish comedienne Gilda Radner—she had died tragically from breast cancer in her early 40s. And she looked exactly like she always had in real life. She wasn’t a woman who most would call beautiful because her looks were very quirky and she played on them well. But she walked up to me and as I saw her, I was struck by how beautiful she was. She looked exactly as she did in real life but even thinking about it now makes me tear up. I remember the first time I saw the Grand Canyon and I was in awe. I live near Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons and I have spent time in at least fourteen national parks so I know natural beauty. None of it—nothing I have ever seen before or after and not even my newborn sons, rivaled the sheer beauty of Gilda. She bent toward me and whispered to me wonderful secrets about God’s love and for the life of me, I can’t remember to this day what they were. When I woke up, I was inconsolable. I would have given just about anything to look at her for another five minutes. And I believe that what God was showing me was a perfected resurrection body. I can’t prove it. But when I think back, I long to see her again.

And Paul must have been challenged to give some sort of detailed account of what we will be like—people always want to know stuff that really doesn’t have any importance in the here and now, right?

I Cor 15 ³⁵ But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? What kind of body will they have when they come?” ³⁶ You fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. (I love this because I imagine Paul saying, “How should I know, do I look like I have died and come back??) ³⁷ And as for what you sow—you are not sowing the body that will be, but only a seed, perhaps of wheat or another grain. ³⁸ But God gives it a body as he wants, and to each of the seeds its own body. ³⁹ Not all flesh is the same flesh; there is one flesh for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. ⁴⁰ There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the splendor of the heavenly bodies is different from that of the earthly ones. ⁴¹ There is a splendor of the sun, another of the moon, and another of the stars; in fact, one star differs from another star in splendor. ⁴² So it is with the resurrection of the dead: Sown in corruption, raised in incorruption; ⁴³ sown in dishonor, raised in glory; sown in weakness, raised in power; ⁴⁴ sown a natural body, raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. ⁴⁵ So it is written, The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. ⁴⁶ However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural, then the spiritual.”

In other words, Paul could have just said, “It’s not going to be exactly like we have now, that’s for sure. It will be better, it will be different, but it will be a body!” We’ve had this issue repeat in history where people will become really obsessed with what they can see and what can be proven through facts and figures, and then times when we relax that sort of thinking. We have been coming out of that sort of mindset for a while now, and so we don’t see the sort of higher criticism problems that are responsible for things like Lunar Sabbath and the search to find naturalistic causes behind the plagues and all that stuff. These folks were Greco-Romans and so they absolutely believed in the divine and that gods and goddesses could do stuff, but like us, they had their boxes where they would say, “But they can’t do that,” based on their own comfort level and paradigms. Resurrection was a hard pill for Greco-Roman Gentiles to swallow. Some sort of afterlife, they could deal with that—resurrected bodies? That was just crazy talk! But what about Paul talking about a spiritual body? Doesn’t that mean a disembodied existence in Heaven, more like what the Gentiles were looking for?

⁴⁷ The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. ⁴⁸ Like the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; like the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. ⁴⁹ And just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.⁵⁰ What I am saying, brothers and sisters, is this: Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor can corruption inherit incorruption. ⁵¹ Listen, I am telling you a mystery: We will not all fall asleep, but we will all be changed, ⁵² in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we will be changed. ⁵³ For this corruptible body must be clothed with incorruptibility, and this mortal body must be clothed with immortality. ⁵⁴ When this corruptible body is clothed with incorruptibility, and this mortal body is clothed with immortality, then the saying that is written will take place: Death has been swallowed up in victory.⁵⁵ Where, death, is your victory? Where, death, is your sting?

This is a really important follow-up to the “spiritual bodies” statement because it qualifies it. We can’t make the spiritual bodies statement mean whatever we want because this follows directly afterward. Adam was mortal—that’s what it means for him to be made of dust, but the second man, Yeshua, is from God, and those who are joined with Him in covenant become like Him as well, being impervious to the second death (He was obviously not impervious to the first death Himself but by suffering death wrongly when it had no power over Him, He emptied it of its power). And this word translated as Heaven can be a euphemism for Yahweh Himself, as when it was used in Psalm 67:15 in the Septuagint. Otherwise, it is sort of a catch-all for those things pertaining to God’s Kingdom. We become members of God’s Kingdom by becoming joined to Him through the “second man” Yeshua. Paul goes on to say that we have all borne the image of mortal, fallen Adam but we will ALSO (Also, and not instead) bear the image of the Son of Man, who is Himself the perfect image of Yahweh. So, we will have that body but somehow it will be different, it will be more. We aren’t doing a complete trade-in for something else. Flesh and blood won’t cut it for the final realization of Heaven on Earth—our corruptible, decaying bodies and minds aren’t suited for the Kingdom of Heaven as they are now.

Now, it is clear by reading Paul’s letters to various churches that His ideas change over time about the imminence of the return of Yeshua. Paul, in a lot of places, really seems to think it will be very soon, and in that he has a lot in common with a whole lot of wrong people over the ages—including throughout my lifetime and now as well. Paul was inspired but it doesn’t mean that he had a good bead on everything. And that’s okay—he was writing letters stating his beliefs to these congregations who were facing issues we are largely ignorant about. When he says, “We will not all fall asleep” he isn’t talking about people 2000 years later, he really thinks it will be soon although he will modify that as the years go by. But that is a side issue because we’re talking about resurrection. He states that we will be changed—not replaced. That our corruptible body will not be replaced but will be clothed with a new nature that is incorruptible. And our mortal body will be altered in order to be immortal. After all, if there was no body, then death isn’t defeated. Death still won. Death took out our bodies and we are just left being spirit beings. And if we are just spirit beings then death can just laugh and point at our corpses. “Yeah, you exist but you aren’t actually alive!”

And that right there is why the resurrection of Yeshua is so important. Death didn’t win. Death had a minor victory when the champ took a dive. Death believed it had won; the Romans believed they had won; the chief priests believed they had won. They had poured all their authority and hatred and power into killing Yeshua. They did their worst, they inflicted the most feared death in the ancient world on Yeshua and instead of Him staying dead the way everyone else had, He rose again, imperishable, changed, different, perfected, impervious to the second death. It was as though He came out of the grave, shook His fist at Satan, and said, “Is that all you’ve got? It wasn’t enough! You’re done, defeated. From now on, everyone who knows me will know that you weren’t strong enough—the strong man was too weak to conquer the Son of Man. You used up all of yourself and I came out stronger. I won. And because you are defeated, the New Creation existence of humanity begins now.”

The resurrection had to happen in order for people to know that death has been reduced to a sideshow. Resurrection had to happen for God to be able to prove that He is the righteous and just God who delivers real justice to those who love Him. And real justice requires that the enemy doesn’t get to keep the bodies that he has used for his purposes. It means that we get back what was misused and abused and harmed. It means that our minds don’t get replaced but that they are renewed. No wheelchairs, no leg braces, no fake knees or shunts or crutches. No brain damage, nothing that we experience in this world. God is going to free us from everything that has oppressed us and return to us what should have been a blessing. People who are hurting on the outside won’t hurt anymore, and people who hurt on the inside won’t hurt either. All the tragic things that have happened, they won’t bother us ever again. If we were simply raised from the dead, like Lazarus, it would be totally different. He still had the exact same body and memories. Not us. If we were just disembodied spirits, that wouldn’t be justice either. God gave our bodies so that we would be His hands and feet and mouths and ears—so we could enjoy hugs, laugh, listen to music, and taste the fruit of the Garden. Justice means that people who spent their life paralyzed will get to run and swim and dance. Justice means that a deaf mom will finally hear her child say the words, “I love you, mamma!” Justice means that the people who were wrongly taken from us will be in our lives again. Justice means that the earth will be renewed and that there will be no more hunger or violence or oppression. Justice means so many things—the things God meant for us to love and enjoy with Him in the beginning but were stolen from us by rebellion and sin.

Without the resurrection, our lives that are full of injustice now will remain unjust. Wrongs will not be righted. Everything good that God wanted for us will never happen. Evil people might live to be a hundred years old and babies will die and nothing will ever happen to make things right. In fact, without the resurrection, things will remain wrong for all of time. Evil wins, death wins—and when people believe that they will do absolutely anything to save their own lives—rendering them all but useless for the Kingdom in a crisis.

Now, a problem that a lot of people have is that we talk about the resurrection but we don’t live like we really believe it and that was me until a number of years ago when I read NT Wright’s Evil and the Justice of God and that book really changed my life. I was so obsessed with getting justice in this life, with getting even, with being vindicated in the here and now—because I had no real conception of the fact that this wasn’t all to my life. You see, if this is all there is then we need to be afraid to die. We need to get revenge. We need to play it safe. But when we know that Yeshua is the firstfruits of many, then we can let this life go. We can forgive. We can turn the other cheek and be meek. We can bless our enemies. We can do good for those who do evil. We can even die so that others can live. But we can’t do any of that while we are obsessed with survival because we just don’t really believe what the Bible says about God’s love and justice. He’s got this and so we can trust Him.

On that Sunday morning, Yeshua presented Himself as that Bikkurim offering and when He did, He changed everything! He is risen! He is risen indeed!