Blue Letter Bible

The biggest mystery of the resurrection (I bet you've never heard this preached on Easter Sunday)


Ever wonder why the Bible refers to Jesus as the firstborn from the dead (1 Corinthians 15:20)? 

Was He the first to return from the dead? What about Lazarus (John 11)? The son of the widow of Nain (Luke 7:11-15)? Jairus' daughter (Luke 8:49-55)? The man who was raised by contact from the bones of Elisha (2 Kings 13:21)?

When Lazarus is raised from the dead, he is bound in grave clothes, his face covered with a napkin. Jesus asks those around him to "Loose him, and let him go" (John 11:44). But when Jesus returns from the dead, ever wondered who was around to unwrap His grave clothes off His body? When the disciples got to the tomb, they found the grave linens lying by themselves (Luke 24:12, John 20:6)

The difference - is the resurrection.

Lazarus, the son of the Nain widow, and the others, were resuscitated. Breath was returned to their mortal, corruptible bodies. They were raised, to die at a later time.

But Jesus Christ was resurrected, as the prototype - the first version - of the perfect creation God is preparing, the kind that lives for all eternity. His return from the dead was not just a reviving of His physical body, like the others. He came back with a body that is unable to perish, an eternal body, the type promised to those that believe in Him in John 3 vs 16. 

What happened in the tomb on the original Resurrection Sunday, is the kind of change described in the verses below:

"Listen, I will tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed in a moment, in the blinking of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.

For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.

Now when this perishable puts on the imperishable, and this mortal puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will happen, “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”

1 Corinthians 15:50-54
Hallelujah! Christ is risen indeed!

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