There are, as you know, many marks that we are God’s elect, one of which is you prefer a Sunday evening service over the Eagles playoff. Pastor Greg said—I mentioned the faithful remnant. Actually, he made the first remark. He said, “You guys are the super saints.”
We want to return to the doctrine of the resurrection this evening, but before we do that, I think it’d be appropriate if we take some time for prayer, specifically for Alethea this evening. This is a serious matter that she’s facing with her hearing. And I wonder if someone would volunteer to pray for her. And then, Pastor Boyd, would you close after that? All right, Paul, thank you.
The Roots Of The Resurrection
Not long ago, someone asked me—they were, after reading John chapter 11, Mary and Martha, the incident there with Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, and there’s the encounter between Jesus and Martha, and Martha makes the exclamation that “I know that he will be raised again in the resurrection.” And the person asking me said, “How did she know that?”
Well, the doctrine of the resurrection was alive and well at the time of Jesus among the Jews. They all believed it. This was common property among them. Not, of course, with the Sadducees, but among mainstream Judaism it was. But the question then is: where’d they get that?
And so what I’ve been trying to do last time, and then again this evening, and perhaps again next time, is to look back to the Old Testament—what we’ve called the roots of the resurrection. And we tried to see some foreshadowings of it, and then finally in the Old Testament we’ll get to some prophecies of it as well.
It, of course, has to begin in some way in Genesis chapter 3 where God makes the promise of this champion who will come to defeat the tempter. The implicit point is this whole mess then will be fixed. Now, looking back on it at least—I don’t think we could have known it fully at that point—but looking back on it at least, we can say that that promise entailed resurrection.
But when did that become more explicit in the understanding of God’s people? We saw in Genesis chapter 5 that, with the illustration of Enoch, that he walked with God and he was not, for God took him. Well, that’s not resurrection, but if God can take someone before death, it at least opens the possibility that he could take someone after death and raise him from the dead.
We also saw in Genesis chapter 5 that Lamech named his son Noah, which means rest, and he says explicitly that he named him “rest,” saying, “Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed, this one shall bring relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands.” And there he is quoting from the curse, the judgment of God in Genesis chapter 3. And he seems to have the hope then that somehow through his son Noah there will be an end to this mess, specifically this work of our hands and toil that ends in death. It doesn’t quite say resurrection, but at least the idea could be implicit there.
We then saw in Genesis chapters 7 and 8 that we have with the flood and then the recreation after the flood, something of a decreation and then a recreation, sort of signaling ahead to a resurrection; and that actually is what is picked up later in the prophets. We saw that in Genesis chapter 1, God giving birth to Isaac and Sarah—the womb spoken of as though it is dead, a dead womb giving birth—becomes somehow anticipative of the resurrection.
More explicitly, finally, we saw in Genesis chapter 22, we have Abraham’s trust that God will preserve his seed through Isaac in resurrection. If you think that’s saying too much, remember we saw in Hebrews 11 that is exactly what the New Testament affirms of Abraham. God had promised that God would continue Abraham’s seed through Isaac, and then God commands Abraham to offer up Isaac in sacrifice.
And Hebrews comments on that and says that Abraham trusted then that God would fulfill his promise in resurrection. “God asks me to sacrifice this one through whom he promised he would bring the seed, then God will have to raise him up from the dead in order to do that.” So the idea of resurrection is there explicitly in Abraham.
And then, in fact, we saw it a little bit more with the patriarchs. Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and then with Joseph as well, all asking and determined to be buried there in the land. God had promised the land to them, and not only was Abraham buried there, not having fulfilled or received the promise, bought the land, important for him to be buried there, and then the same we saw with Isaac, and then Jacob, down in Egypt, giving orders that his body be taken back to the land to be buried there as well. And then Joseph the same, giving orders concerning his bones to be taken back up there.
And again, it is Hebrews that comments on that and says, “By faith, Joseph, at the end of his life, gave direction concerning his bones.” So he believed that God would fulfill the promise in resurrection. And so his direction to have his bones taken back there was indicative of that. So we can see then that the resurrection hope is alive and well with the patriarchs.
Explicit Statements Of Resurrection
But it is not until Deuteronomy chapter 32, if you’d like to turn there—this is where we ended up last time—it is not until Deuteronomy 32 verse 39 that we have what is probably the first unambiguous anticipation of the resurrection. Deuteronomy 32:39. This, you remember, is in the section where Moses is warning Israel concerning now as they go into the land that they must keep the covenant that God has given them—be faithful to it. If they are faithful, God will bless. If they are not faithful, God will judge them.
But here in the midst of that, God says, “See now that I, even I am he, and there is no God beside me. I kill, and I make alive. I wound and I heal. There is none that can deliver out of my hand.” There’s an explicit statement that God raises the dead. “I kill and I make alive.” Life and death, life and resurrection are in my hands, God says.
Now there’s a significant advance if you look forward at 1 Samuel chapter 2. You remember in 1 Samuel chapter 1, Hannah is desperate to have a child. God gives her a child, Samuel. And then in chapter 2, we have Hannah’s prayer of praise to God for having answered the prayer. And we won’t take time to look at it all, but look at verse 6, 1 Samuel 2:6, where Hannah says, “The Lord kills and brings to life. He brings down to Sheol and raises up.” Again, we have an explicit mention of the resurrection. It is God who takes us out of Sheol, takes us out of the realm of the dead and raises us.
Resuscitations In The Historical Books
Alright, when we come then to the historical books of the Old Testament—Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, and so on—we have three what we call resuscitations. That is, it’s not a resurrection of the dead into the life of the eternal state, but it is a raising from the dead to life again. And do you remember what they are? We have three of them in the historical books. We have them in the books of Kings. Anyone want to take a guess, or shall I just tell you?
All right, nobody’s jumping. Okay, the widow’s son, yes. All right, here we go. 1 Kings 17—we won’t take time to look these up. You’ll say, “Oh yeah,” after I tell you. 1 Kings 17, Elijah raises the widow’s son. 2 Kings 4, we have Elisha raises the Shunammite woman’s son. And then also in 2 Kings 13, Elisha’s bones, you remember, in the tomb and when another man is buried there, his body touches the prophet’s bones and he comes to life. Strange event.
Now there’s nothing like that in the Pentateuch, Genesis to Deuteronomy, but here we have it three times in the books of Kings. Now, again, these are only resuscitations, so it’s not exactly relevant to our study—not exactly, except in this: that it establishes the precedent that physical death is not undoable. God raises the dead. We’ve seen the declarations of that. Well, here’s an example of where he does. Death, evidently, is not necessarily final.
Now in light of Deuteronomy 32 verse 39 that we just read, what we have then in these three events is a small picture of the big picture, that God raises the dead. Now, keep these in mind. Again, Elijah raised the widow’s son, Elisha raised the son of the Shunammite woman, and then this other man whose body touched the bones of Elisha, and he was raised.
Keep all that in mind, and now look forward to Hebrews chapter 11, where we see a comment on this. You remember this is the Hall of Faith, as it’s often called, where the writer to the Hebrews lists all these people from the Old Testament who were faithful and trusted God and served him faithfully. And notice here what he says in Hebrews 11 verse 35: “Women received back their dead by resurrection. Some were tortured…” Well, there he’s referring back to these two that we mentioned in 1 Kings 17 and 2 Kings 4. “Women received back their dead by resurrection. Some were tortured, refusing to accept release so that they might rise again to a better life,” or “they might rise again to accept a better resurrection.”
Now, in both halves of this verse, we have the word “resurrection” used. It’s translated differently in my version, but we have the same word, “resurrection,” in both halves. “Others were tortured… so that they might obtain a better resurrection.” And I think putting those together we can say then that the former—that is, those resurrections of these women’s sons—is a picture or a foreshadowing of the latter waiting for a better resurrection. All right, so we have these three in the historical books—resuscitations, not the final eschatological resurrection, but still resuscitations, which themselves seem to be taken in Hebrews as a picture of that final resurrection.
The Hope Of Job And The Psalms
All right, back to the Old Testament. Look at Job chapter 19. This is a big one. Job chapter 19. You’ll remember the story of Job: his suffering, his miserable comforters come and they give their two cents on the thing, and there’s these debates, arguments going back and forth. “You must deserve this, you must have sinned greatly or you wouldn’t be suffering so greatly.” Job protests his innocence, even to the point sometimes of falsely accusing God or bordering on that, not in a contemptuous unbelief but in a struggle of faith, trying to figure out why this happened.
Evidently, he had adopted the same kind of theology that his friends had, but he was frustrated with the fact that it didn’t fit his situation, and so how do you make sense of it, given all of that? In Job 19, we have an interesting illustration of that kind of struggle in Job’s own mind. In verses 1 to 4, he’s criticizing his friends, his miserable comforters. He protests his innocence. He denies their allegations.
And then verses 5 and 6, here’s where he begins to doubt God: “If indeed you magnify yourselves against me and make my disgrace an argument against me, know then that God has put me in the wrong and closed his net about me.” If you have another version here, it probably translated, I think, in a little bit clearer way, “God has wronged me.” God has wronged me. So he’s struggling with this.
Then in the following verses, a good many verses through verse 17 and following, we have some graphic description of his sufferings. He’s suffering with no pity from others; even the children in the area despise him and evidently mock him. Former friends don’t pay any attention to him. Everybody’s turned against him. So he’s suffering on many levels.
But in the midst of all of this, when Job is struggling with his own faith, even bordering on falsely accusing God, he comes out with this burst of faith in verses 25 and 26: “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last He will stand on the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God.”
A couple of things of interest here. In verse 25, he speaks of God as his Redeemer. I don’t know how much we can read into that—how much did Job understand in terms of blood redemption through Christ and the substitutional atonement and all of that? I don’t know. The word that he uses here, translated “redeemer,” is the word kinsman-redeemer. You remember in the Mosaic economy, God gave instruction for the next of kin to defend his brother who has died, or next of kin who has died, and to buy back the property and to raise up children after him and take up his cause. He could be the one who could be the avenger of death and so on. It’s the kinsman-redeemer. We have an illustration of the kinsman-redeemer with Boaz in the book of Ruth. That’s the word used here. God is going to be my next of kin to come to my defense.
Well, what kind of defense is God going to give? Verse 26: he’s going to raise me from the dead. “In my flesh, I will see God.” He’ll defend me in resurrection. A lot of ink has been spilled on these two verses, but I think it really is what it appears to be, and that is a burst of faith on Job’s part, expressing his hope in the resurrection.
All right, after that, then, we come to the Psalms. In the Psalms, we find the doctrine of the resurrection is a doctrine that’s to be sung. It shows up in the songbook, the Psalms. And we’ll take a few samples of that. Look at Psalm 16. Psalm 16. You’ll recognize this as a psalm that Peter quotes with reference to Christ in Acts after the resurrection of Christ at the day of Pentecost. But look at verses nine through 11: “Therefore my heart is glad and my whole being rejoices. My flesh also dwells secure, for you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, nor let your holy ones see corruption. You made known to me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy. At your right hand there are pleasures forevermore.”
Now on one level, this psalm is fulfilled only in the resurrection of Jesus. Notice the detail: “You’ll not allow my flesh to see corruption.” Well, Peter makes the argument at Pentecost: David’s bones are still there in the grave. This doesn’t refer to him. It must refer to Jesus. He rose from the dead. His flesh did not see corruption. So on one level, this is a direct prophecy of Jesus.
On another level, the psalmist here is expressing his own hope. And it’s not a deathbed scene. There’s no sickness, no impending danger. He’s not just hoping that death will be postponed. He’s just affirming his hope that death will not be the end, and that death does not negate future blessing. Death won’t have the last say; for the godly, Sheol is not the end of it. But God will raise him up.
All right, just across the page, Psalm 17, verses 13 and following: “Arise, O Lord, confront him, subdue him, deliver my soul from the wicked by your sword, from men by your hand, O Lord, from men of the world whose portion is in this life. You fill their womb with treasure. They are satisfied with children. They leave their abundance to their infants. As for me, I will behold your face in righteousness. When I awake, I shall be satisfied with your likeness.”
One of the things the psalmist is wrestling with here is this age-old problem of the seeming inequity of life: the wicked prosper, they’ve got it good, the bad guys who don’t love you and who oppose me, they seem to have it all, they don’t seem to have to go to the doctor and they seem well and healthy and live long and leave treasures for their kids, and that’s not the case with me. And then he says in verse 15, “Here’s my portion, here’s what I get. As for me, I will behold your face in righteousness. When I awake, I shall be satisfied with your likeness.” That is, there’ll be vindication. And the awaking here is pretty clearly awaking from the sleep of death. And that stands in contrast to the sufferings and the difficulties of this life in the previous verses. But in the next life, I’ll awake in resurrection and behold the face of God, and I will be satisfied with that.
All right, another in Psalms. Look at Psalm 49, verse 15: “But God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me.” How do you redeem or ransom a soul from Sheol? Sounds like resurrection is what he’s expecting. Sheol, the realm of the dead, will not have the last say; I will not be there forever, but God will bring me back.
Psalm 71, verse 20: “You who have made me see many troubles and calamities will revive me again. From the depths of the earth, you will bring me up again.” So here the doctrine of the resurrection is again a doctrine from which he derives comfort.
Resurrection In The Prophets
All right, enough for the Psalms. We have to look at some in the prophets. Now you remember last time I mentioned just briefly this “back to Eden” theme in the prophets, where again and again we find the allusions that this Edenic situation in Genesis of perfection has fallen and we’ve left and we’re outside of Eden now. There’ll be a return to that. And in fact, actually it’s not just a return to that, it’s a return to that and better.
But there’s a back to Eden theme that comes back and there are Genesis allusions in the prophets speaking of the redoing of the earth and the redoing of creation, and it affects the animal kingdom and it affects the hills and everything else. And part of that then is humanity itself will be caught up in that renewal and there’ll be resurrection.
Look at Isaiah chapter 25. Isaiah 25, verses six through eight: “On this mountain, the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well-refined, and he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations, he will swallow up death forever, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces.”
Now, this is an unusual kind of metaphor—swallowing up death, eating death, devouring death. God will swallow it up. Well, how do you devour or swallow up death? Well, obviously, it’s speaking of death’s ultimate defeat. Its hold on people will be broken, and the obvious intimation here is that God will raise the dead, and the death will not hold us forever. So he’s speaking of the eventual defeat of death in resurrection. Its hold on bodies will be broken. And you might recall this language, Paul picks it up in 1 Corinthians chapter 15 to speak explicitly then of the resurrection as well. He quotes it in 1 Corinthians 15 verse 54.
Isaiah 25 then is a big one. Look over across the page, Isaiah 26 and verse 19: “Your dead shall live, their bodies shall rise, you who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy, for your dew is a dew of light and the earth will give birth to the dead.” Well, the dust idea here is obviously an allusion back to Genesis 3. “Out of dust you are taken, to dust you shall return.” But he says we will awake out of the dust. And so we have a couple of metaphors here about resurrection. One, the sleeping and waking thing. And then a strange metaphor for resurrection: birth. “He will give birth to the dead.” So the tomb is viewed here as a womb from which, or which will give birth in resurrection.
A big passage, and we’ll see that Jesus makes reference to this in Matthew chapter 11. I don’t know that I can get to that this evening, but you can make a note of that if you’d like. I think maybe I can just mention quickly Ezekiel chapter 37. You can turn and glance there if you like. I’m not sure that I can take time this evening to read through it. You remember verses 1 to 10? I think we should. Let’s read Ezekiel 37 verses 1 to 10:
“The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out in the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley, and it was full of bones. And he led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry. And he said to me, ‘Son of man, can these bones live?’ And I answered, ‘O Lord God, you know.’ And then he said to me, ‘Prophesy over these bones and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones, behold, I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live and I will lay sinews upon you and will cause flesh to come upon you and cover you with skin and put breath in you and you shall live and you shall know that I am the Lord.’ So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I prophesied, there was a sound, and behold, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And I looked, and behold, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them, and there was no breath in them. And then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, thus says the Lord God, come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain that they may live.’ So I prophesied as he commanded me and the breath came into them and they lived and stood on their feet an exceedingly great army.”
And then he gives the interpretation in verses 11 and following: this is the house of Israel. Now this is a visionary experience. It’s not something that happened. It’s a visionary experience that he saw in a vision. And he sees—this is the famous passage. Oh, I can’t get into that. You know the spiritual, right? The foot bone connected to the ankle bone and all of that. This is what it’s taken from. We can discuss another time whether this is speaking of a revival among Israel itself or how that works out, but even if it is a metaphorical expression, it rests on the assumption of God’s ability to raise the dead. You can’t read through this and not see that he is talking about physical resurrection. And so obviously this was part of the frame of reference for the prophets.
And then the most clear expression in all of the prophets: Daniel chapter 12. Daniel chapter 12, verses one and two: “At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince who has charge of your people. And there shall be a time of trouble such as never has been since there was a nation till that time. But at that time, your people shall be delivered. Everyone whose name shall be found written in the book. And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt.”
Here we have a statement of universal resurrection, the righteous and the unrighteous. The sleep and the wake-up metaphor are used again, but they’re taken out of the dust that’s explicit there. And it’s a universal resurrection. It’s all of the dead. And we have him then saying, they will be raised at that time. Clearly, this is a time of the end of the age.
Now let me take the time to do one more. Look at Matthew chapter 11. Matthew chapter 11. And you remember in verses two to five here, we have the incident where John the Baptist is questioning—he’s in prison, “Why is this happening to me? I introduced the Messiah, things are supposed to go better than this.” And so he sends some of his disciples to Jesus, and they ask Jesus, “Are you the one that we’re looking for, or is there someone else?”
And Jesus answers in verse four, “Go and tell John what you hear and see. The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the good news preached to them, and blessed is the one who is not offended by me.”
Now notice this: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead raised up, and the poor have the good news preached to them. All of that is a stringing together of citations from the prophet Isaiah. “The eyes of the blind being opened, the deaf hearing,” that’s from Isaiah 35. “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, anointing me to preach the gospel to the poor and all this,” Isaiah chapter 61. And then we have this: “the dead are raised.” And I think that is an explicit reference back to Isaiah 26 that we just saw: “Your dead shall live, their bodies shall rise, you who dwell in the earth will give birth to the dead.”
So here Jesus is saying the dead will be raised, and he points to his fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah as fulfilled in some sense at least in his ministry. Now what’s interesting here is that the point of reference for Jesus—you’ve seen the dead raised—the point of reference is two chapters earlier in Matthew chapter nine when Jesus raised that little girl who had died. But surely that’s not the extent of Isaiah’s prophecy. When Isaiah prophesied that the dead—that the earth would give birth to the dead and they would come to life—he didn’t have in mind just this one little girl that Jesus had raised from the dead two chapters earlier.
But what Jesus then is saying is that what you have seen in my raising this little girl from the dead is prospective of a greater resurrection. This resuscitation is a foreshadowing of a greater resurrection that will come. The kingdom of God obviously is present among you in my doing this, and it is prospective of the greater resurrection that will come.
Now, we don’t have time to chase it further this evening. Just to give you a glimpse ahead, what we will find, if not next time then the time after, is that all of this comes to climax in the resurrection of Jesus himself. In his death, he defeats death. In his resurrection, he defeats death entirely. And not only does he rise from the—not only is he raised from the dead into the resurrection of the eschaton, but he takes all of his people with him in his resurrection and we are raised with him. That is the huge theme that we’ll see unfolding then in the New Testament as well. But now you can see then that there have been some growing hope of that until it finally became explicit in the prophets that God would raise the dead in the kingdom of God, which comes about fully in the final return of Jesus Christ when we share in his resurrection.
All right, I think that’s all I have the time for this evening. We come now to observe the Lord’s Table. Pastor Greg, would you come?