Chaplain's Corner

All the Christian Traditions (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant and Anabaptist) of our region have just finished remembering the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  We call that remembrance Easter.  Easter, as anyone who has even the most rudimentary understanding of the Christian Faith knows, is unique to Christianity.  It is unparalleled in Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Taoism, Shintoism and all the primal-indigenous religions of Africa, Asia, South America and even the First Nations spiritualities of Canada and the United States.  The belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the promised physical, bodily resurrection of both the wicked and the redeemed, at the end of this earth’s time is a uniquely Christian belief.

Of course like all of the primary Christian holy days, Easter has been co-opted by secularism as a means of material profit, mixing with it symbols of pagan fertility religions which most of us have simply embraced  as cultural or secular expressions that have become attached to these sacred days.  But that’s a topic for another article.

I am moved this morning to write about the wonder of the Christian concept of resurrection.  There are numerous misconceptions about this belief.  One of the most prevalent is that when a believing person dies he or she becomes an angel.  This misbelieve is fueled by the visual media, TV programming and movies, which almost without exception treat the subject of life after death as humans becoming angels.  The Bible teaches that angels are unique creations of God, that they do not reproduce, that there are several distinct kinds of angelic beings, that some have fallen in a rebellion that took place before the earth was created; and that the majority have remained faithful to God and are his servants, doing His bidding.  The Bible goes on to teach that angels are not to be venerated or worshipped.  The holy angels will participate in gathering the saints in the day of resurrection but because they do not die they will never experience the resurrection.

The second misconception that may be even more common is that the judgment that follows the resurrection will be a time when God weighs our good deeds and our sinful deeds and that our eternal destiny will be determined by this process.  Sadly, this misconception has slipped into the theologies of many individuals and groups that consider themselves Christian.  If there is anything the Christian Scriptures teach with clarity, it is that our eternal destiny, the potential of eternal life in heaven, can not be connected to our good deeds; that no amount of good deeds are sufficient to insure us entry into heaven.  The Christian teaching about grace is that God offers the free gift of forgiveness and the eternal destiny of life everlasting in heaven to those who will trust that Jesus was God come in the flesh and that his death satisfied completely God’s just demands in relation to our sins.

A third misconception is that somehow resurrection and reincarnation are compatible beliefs. In The Harris Poll® #11, February 26, 2003 demonstrated that 21 percent of Christians said they “believe in reincarnation, that they were once another person”.  This is a fascinating and tragic reality.  One in five persons who call themselves Christian believe in a doctrine that is absolutely incompatible with the teachings of the Christian Scriptures.  The Bible states that “it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.” (Hebrews 9:27)  A belief in reincarnation insists that we die not just once, but over and over again.  In classic reincarnation, this series of births, lives and deaths are intended to purge us of our sins and purify us to be absorbed into the universal spirit and that it does not end until we have paid for all our sins in full.  Such a belief rejects the Bibles insistence that Jesus died for our sins once and for all for it insists that we ourselves must die over and over and over again until we ourselves have paid for our sins.

So if these common misconceptions about the resurrection exist, and they do even among those who identify themselves as Christians, what does the Bible teach about the resurrection?  First and foremost the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is affirmed by the Scriptures.  It is His resurrection that establishes the fact that people will experience resurrection.

The Bible teaches that all people, the wicked and the redeemed will be resurrected.  In the book of Revelation it speaks of the resurrection of the wicked unto judgment and eternal punishment in the Lake of Fire. (Revelation 20:5, 11-15).  In 1 Corinthians 15 and 1 Thessalonians 4 the resurrection of the redeemed is most clearly revealed.  In other words, the Bible teaches that we will all live, physically again, that our bodies will be resurrected and that depending on our willingness to place our trust in Jesus in this life, we will either live eternally in the Lake of Fire or in the presence of the Lord, Heaven.

The Bible teaches that participation in the resurrection unto life everlasting is dependent entirely on our willingness to believe that our good works can not gain us entrance into heaven so we must trust entirely on the redeeming work of Jesus who died on the cross in our place and for our sins so that we might have peace and fellowship with God. (Romans 3, Ephesians 2, Titus 2 and many others).

The concept of the resurrection both of Jesus Christ, the central belief celebrated at Easter and the belief that the redeemed will be raised, bodily to live in the joy and peace and love of God forever is the truth that gives the Christian peace in the face of death.  It is the belief that enabled the Apostle Paul to say, “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain.”  We don’t have in the Scriptures all the details.  There are some things about the time frame between death and the resurrection that we can not say with absolute certainty that we know about.  We don’t know for instance exactly what Paul meant when he said, “To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.”   But the fact is we don’t need those details, it is enough for the Christian to know that there is nothing to fear on the other side of death, for God has promised the redeemed resurrection and life everlasting.

Whether you are followers of the Ukrainian or Greek Orthodox Faith, the Roman Catholic Faith, one of the Protestant denominations, one of the Anabaptist groups in our region or from an Evangelical Christian tradition:  May the blessing of knowing that Christ arose, generate the greatest of hopes in your heart and may you know that as we trust in Him, Jesus Christ our Lord, we too will one day be raised to live in the glory of His presence for all eternity.