John 20:1-16 - The Resurrection Of Christ And The Putting Away Of The Old World

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Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day Sermon. We pray that as we declare the

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Word of God that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and that you would catch a greater vision of who

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Christ is. May you be blessed in the hearing of God's Word, and may the Lord be with you.

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The word world is a funny word in the, not ha -ha sense, but in the, can mean a lot of different things.

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It can mean the planet, Earth, the one that we live on. It could also mean a, a sort of behavior when we talk about the world and how the world behaves during this season of time.

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We're talking about people, we're talking about a categorization, a collective, a group of people.

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It can also represent a system or a structure. We can talk about the world of the twenties or the world of the two thousand and twenties.

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And we're talking about a society or a way of doing life that was operative at a certain period of time.

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The word world can mean a lot of different things. Today we're going to sort of talk about that latter example, how there's a particular system and a way of doing things that's called a world, almost like a little snow globe.

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You look at it and it's like a little contained environment within itself. And what we're going to see today is that at the time of Jesus, when

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Jesus rose from the dead, you have two worlds that were simultaneously coexisting.

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Now I don't mean that planet Earth physically split in half, but what

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I mean is that Jesus's resurrection so fundamentally and foundationally changed the face of the earth that he unleashed a new kind of world upon the world.

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What we're going to see is that for a time when Jesus rises from the dead, that there is a crashing of the old world, a fading away of the old world, and there is a rising up of the new world.

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And this is all ushered in by, of course, the greatest event that ever happened in human history, which is the resurrection.

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Now, these passages are very familiar, and I'm going to be talking about them today from a slightly different angle, because if you're a

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Christian for any length of time, you know that Jesus died on the cross. And we preach that and we've covered that in John 19. You also know that he was entombed, that Joseph of Arimathea put him in a borrowed tomb and he sat there for three days.

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You also know that he rose from the dead and he rose from the dead to make you free, to save you, to bring you into his kingdom.

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We know that the tomb was empty. That is the foundational point of our faith, that the death that stung all of us has been unstung by Christ, which is a powerful apologetic, by the way.

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You want to talk about a faith that's reasonable, look no further than the empty tomb in the town that hated

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Jesus, in the town that had every reason to produce a body, in a town where all they had to do was open up the tomb and drag the body out in the street and say, no, no, no, he's still dead.

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They could not produce a body. They had every reason to. And because they couldn't, it's one of the greatest apologetics for our faith.

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They even paid the Romans to tell a lie to say that the body was stolen. Over 500 people saw the risen

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Lord. Thomas even stuck his finger into the side of the Lord. We have a reasonable faith that is rooted in the resurrection.

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Paul even says that if he was not raised, our faith is in vain. So Paul even says that the centrality of the

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Christian faith is built upon the efficacy of the empty tomb.

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Now, I want to look a little deeper and see what the resurrection actually did. It unleashed something.

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It was one domino that caused an entire mountain of dominoes to begin to fall. You ever seen those YouTube videos where the person who is more patient than I will ever be has constructed this million domino thing, and then all of a sudden, in a moment, it's gone.

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It's a cascading sort of effect. This is what the resurrection did. It was the death blow to the old world, and it was the birth of a new world that we now live in.

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And there's profound implications because you and I are living in the new world. We're living in a world that is fundamentally different than the old covenant world of types and shadows.

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It's almost like a solar eclipse. We just had one. Maybe you had the little glasses so that you could look at it.

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I hope you didn't try to look at it without it. Maybe you didn't have the glasses and you had a welder's mask.

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Whatever you did. You'll notice that the moon totally covered the sun for a moment, and then all of a sudden, the moon fades away little by little until you can't see it anymore, and all that's left is the sun.

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This is exactly what happened in the first century. The old covenant, which is the covenant of types and shadows, faded out of existence.

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The priesthood faded out of existence. The temple faded out of existence. The feast, the ceremonial mall, all of that was fading out of existence, giving way to the rise of Jesus's kingdom that will never end.

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And for a time period, for 40 years, there was a unique period of time where both of these systems existed simultaneously.

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For 40 years, from AD 30 when Jesus rose from the dead to AD 70 when Jerusalem was destroyed, both the old covenant world and the new covenant world were existing simultaneously, overlapping like the eclipse.

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And yet what we see is that one is going down and one is rising.

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And in that period of time, the people who were involved in the old covenant world were clenching to a last -ditch effort for power.

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They killed Christ. They killed Christians. They fought to maintain their status and their power.

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And what we see is that God, in His grace, put away all of it so that there would be no rival for the kingdom that Jesus was building.

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The reason that God destroyed Jerusalem is because He loves His church. The reason God destroyed the temple is because He loves

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His people. The reason is because God would not allow the city of Jerusalem to compete with His church, who is called the new

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Jerusalem of God. He would not allow the temple to compete with Him because He's the temple, the true temple where we know

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God. He would not allow the priesthood to compete with His perfect priesthood, the sacrificial system to compete with His perfect sacrifice.

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He put away the old and He brought the new. So what we're going to see today is in the resurrection of Christ, how

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Jesus is deliberately putting away the old world. And we're going to see this in very surprising ways in the text, maybe ways you've never thought about before.

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So with that, let us dive in to John chapter 20, verses 1 through 18, as we see, or verses 1 through 16, excuse me, as we see how

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Christ put away the old world and brought us into the world of His Son. John chapter 20, we'll begin in verse 1, we will go to verse 16.

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This is the word of the Lord. Now on the first day of the week,

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Mary Magdalene came early to the tomb while it was still dark and saw the stone already taken away from the tomb.

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So she ran and came to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved. And she said to them, they have taken away the

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Lord out of the tomb and we do not know where they have laid

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Him. So Peter and the other disciple went forth and they were going to the tomb. The two were running together and the other disciple ran ahead faster than Peter and came to the tomb first.

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And stooping and looking in, he saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in.

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And so Simon Peter also came following him and entered the tomb and he saw the linen wrappings lying there.

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And the face cloth which had been put on his head, not lying with the linen wrappings, but rolled up in a place by itself.

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So the other disciple who had come to the tomb then also entered and he saw and believed.

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For as yet they did not understand the scripture that he must rise again from the dead. So the disciples went away to their own homes.

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But Mary was standing outside the tomb weeping. And so as she wept, she stood and looked into the tomb and she saw two angels in white sitting, one at the head and one at the feet, where the body of Jesus had been lying.

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And they said to her, woman, why are you weeping? And she said to them, because they have taken away my

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Lord and I do not know where they have lain him. And when she had said this, she turned around and saw

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Jesus standing there and did not know that it was Jesus. And Jesus said to her, woman, why are you weeping?

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Whom are you seeking? Supposing him to be the gardener, she said, sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him and I will take him away.

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And Jesus said to her, Mary. And she turned and said to him in Hebrew, which means teacher, the word of the

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Lord. Let's pray. Lord, I pray today that as we look at this text, that we would see the beautiful treasures that are existing in here.

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Lord, I pray that we would see a continuity with the Old Testament. Lord, I pray that we would see a richness and a depth to the gospel and how it is not accidental, but it's certainly purposeful and that everything that happens here is connected to a much larger and grander story.

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Lord, I pray that as we see that we would find our place in that story. Lord, I pray that we would rejoice in that story.

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Lord, I pray that we would understand more clearly the kind of world that we live in that now has

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Christ as its king. Lord, it's in Jesus name we pray. Amen. Now, the first evidence that a new world had dawned is that Jesus was found.

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The empty tomb was found not by Peter and not by Nicodemus or John or Joseph of Arimathea or Jesus's brothers or any of the

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Pharisees. His body was found by a woman. That's the first evidence that a new world has dawned because you have a woman finding

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Jesus's empty tomb in a male -saturated, male -centric and dominated world.

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Men were the leaders. They were the heads. They were the fathers and the brothers of the nation. And Jesus deliberately allowed a woman to find his tomb first, which is beautiful and glorious.

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And by the way, this is not a detail that you would invent. If you were sitting down in circa

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A .D. 30 and you were running to write a story of a new world religion, at that time, you would not write it with a woman being the first eyewitness.

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At that time, women were not credible witnesses. They weren't allowed to even give their testimony in court.

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I'm not arguing for that. I'm saying that's the world that they lived in. It would be like today having a white male

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Christian give advice on abortion. Our society doesn't take that seriously. Their society didn't take a woman being an eyewitness seriously.

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It's not a detail you would begin a world religion with, which means it must have happened. It must be true. There is no way that the disciples would have invented that fact if it didn't happen.

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They're risking their own credibility. They're saying, I care about the truth more than I care about my reputation. So I'm going to record exactly what happened, even if people question it, even if people make fun of it, even if people malign it.

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The fact that they gave this detail means that we have a trustworthy account of the resurrection of Christ, which is really fascinating and good.

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It would only be written if it were true. Now, there's a reformational nature to the fact that a woman found the tomb, and I think it goes all the way back to the

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Garden of Eden. Of course it does. You've heard me preach long enough to know that almost every sermon goes back to the

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Garden of Eden. And it's because every rock that you throw in a pond has multiple ripples. This one certainly does as well.

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If you remember the old world, how did it begin? God crafted the man, and he put him into a death -like state, and then he resurrected that man,

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Adam, and then immediately the man woke up and saw that he had a bride that God had brought to him.

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What happens in this passage? Christ is put into death, Christ is resurrected by the will of God, and when

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Christ is raised, God brings a bride to him, the church.

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And what I think is so beautiful about it is that he brings first a woman who is a type, who is representative of a daughter of Eve, because he's telling the story of a new wedding.

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The old wedding is not good enough anymore. Where God married Adam and Eve together, no, no, no. Now there's a new wedding, there's a new bride, there's a new reality that's happening where the old covenant people are married into and joined with the new covenant people, and there's a marriage of the

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Lamb where he is married to his bride, the church, past, present, and future. There's only three marriages that God ever presided over personally in the

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Bible. There's the marriage of Adam and Eve in Eden, there's the marriage of Israel and God at Mount Sinai, and there's the marriage of Christ and his church right here in the garden tomb.

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When Christ is resurrected by the will of God, God brings to him a bride, which is fascinating, which means that this new bride is going to be the new world reality that you and I experience and cherish.

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We are the bride of Christ, married to our bridegroom in his love and his grace, a loved, beloved bride, because of what he did on the cross in his resurrection.

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So that's the first thing we see in this passage, is God uses a woman in a new marriage ceremony that typifies what happened in the

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Garden of Eden, but better. So the old world's passing away, the new world is rising.

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That's the first way. The second way we see this new world dawning is in the timing of the events, which are not accidental at all.

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Verse 20 says, Now on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene came early to the tomb while it was still dark and saw the stone was already taken away.

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Did you know that the first day of the week here is Sunday? That's why we call it Resurrection Sunday. Did you know that the

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Jews believe that the world was created on Sunday? Day one, day two, day three, day four, day five, day six, day seven, they rested.

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What was the Sabbath in Judaism? Saturday. What's the first day of the week? Sunday. So in the old world,

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God created the world starting on Sunday. And that's what? When darkness turned into light, when

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God said on the first day of the week, let night come out of darkness. What's happening here? Out of the darkness of the tomb, the light of the world has come on a new

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Sunday, on a new week. The first week is days one through seven. Now we're in a new week because we're in a new world, a new creation world where we will know the light of the world.

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Mary came at night, which was symbolic. Mary came while it was still dark. Why? Because she's living in an old covenant world, an old covenant world of types and shadows where the temple could not allow her in to the court of men, where the temple could not fully show her the light of Christ, where the sacrificial system only hinted at shadows and faint glimmerings of what was coming.

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She came at dark time because she was ordained to meet the light of the world.

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Our darkness symbolizes sin and misery that was so true in the old covenant order.

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Now night has dawned salvation, joy, and grace in Christ.

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There's nothing accidental about this narrative. John's drawing intentional parallels from the original creation story, and he's showing us that this passage is not only about individual salvation, it is.

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Jesus' resurrection is the reason why you can have any confidence whatsoever that you are saved, but it's more than that.

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It's about Jesus bringing a new creation. It's about Jesus bringing a brand new world.

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That's the second thing. The third is that he's bringing that old covenant world.

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To a close. And we see that deliberately here in this passage.

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Verses two, and we're going to go all the way to verse 10, says this. So she ran.

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She found out that the tomb was empty. There's despair that settled down in her heart. There's sorrow. She's like, where is

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Jesus? So she runs. She came to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom

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Jesus loved, and she said to them, they have taken away the Lord out of the tomb. And we do not know where they have laid him.

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She doesn't even know who they are at this point. She just knows that they did something. So Peter and the other disciple went forth and they were going to the tomb.

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The two were running together. And the other disciple ran ahead faster than Peter and came to the tomb first.

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And stooping and looking in, he saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. And so Simon Peter also came following him and entered the tomb.

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And he saw the linen wrappings lying there and the face cloth, which had been on his head, not lying with the linen wrappings, but rolled up into a place all by itself.

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So the other disciple who had come first entered and saw and believed, for they did not yet understand the scripture that he must rise again from the dead.

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So the disciples went away. There's a lot going on underneath this. This is not just a story about how

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Peter is a little slower than John. This is not

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Randy Moss lining up against Tom Brady for a jog. This is something so much deeper.

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There's two of them. Why is that important? How many disciples were there? There were 12.

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Jesus, when he first came upon the scene, he chose 12 disciples. Why did he do that?

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That's an important question. The old covenant people of Israel were 12 tribes, the 12 tribes of the

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Jews. In the history of the Jewish people, 10 of those tribes were completely lost.

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The Assyrians came in and they wiped out the 10 northern tribes so that they were no more.

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And then you're left with two, Judah and Benjamin. Judah and Benjamin are the

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Jews. So today, if the biological legacy of the Jewish people have continued down, it is the tribes of Judah and Benjamin and Levi that are left.

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Levi was not a tribe that was considered in the normal allotment. So 10 and two, you had a nation split into two parts, 10 on one, two on the other.

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Mary goes to the 12 disciples. It says she goes to John and Peter, but John and Peter were hanging out in the upper room with their other 10.

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And then what happens? She goes to the 12 and 10 of them have no voice.

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10 of them don't respond. 10 of them don't come. 10 of them stay put. And only two of them come.

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That is the story of Israel who had 12 tribes, but 10 of them didn't come because they were put away in history.

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And only two of them ended up coming, the Jews, Judah and Benjamin. It's even more fascinating than that because John and Peter, it says the unnamed disciple, but most believe that it was

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John. They act like the tribe of Judah and the tribe of Benjamin. John gets there first.

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Why? Because the tribe of Judah is the leading tribe. And he gets to the tomb first because he's the one who's representing

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Judah. What does he do? He looks in and he says, I'm not going to go in the tomb. Why? Because he's a good

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Jew. He realizes that if he goes into the tomb of a dead man, then he will be ceremonially unclean.

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And this is still the season of Passover. So he doesn't go in. He simply looks from the outside in.

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But what does Peter do? Peter acts like a son of Benjamin. I don't know if Peter was a son of Benjamin or not, but he acts like one.

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Do you remember Saul? How impetuous and impatient Saul was? He was supposed to wait for Samuel to come at one point and offer a sacrifice.

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And Saul says, nah, it's okay. I'll offer it myself. Peter's always acting like a son of Benjamin in that way.

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So he burst into the tomb. He's like, I don't care. Ceremonial law, you know, whatever.

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He burst in. He looks around. He acts like a son of Benjamin. These two are both coming like the

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Jewish people who showed up to the first century and yet were confused and blinded and had no idea what to do with Jesus.

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Do you see the point? Both Peter and John go home confused, just like the

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Jews of the first century who saw Jesus. They showed up to the first century, unlike the 10 tribes.

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And yet they didn't believe. They walked away confused and clouded with blindness, which

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I think is a very fascinating thing. Mary goes to the 12 looking for answers. She goes to the 12.

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She goes to the ones who, like Israel, should have known the oracles of God, should have known the prophecies of God.

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The Israelites were stewards of the word of God. They had Isaiah 53, Psalm 22, Psalm 2,

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Psalm 110. They knew that Jesus was coming. And yet they had no answer for it when he came.

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Mary goes to the 12 and gets no answer. The two come and inspect it thoroughly.

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They have no answer. And the only one who is left is Mary, who's like a really beautiful picture of the church, has no idea who the savior is, but knows that she needs him and know that she has to find him more than anything.

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She doesn't go home. She stays outside the tomb. Her eyes still veiled.

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Looking for the one her soul loves. Now, I think there's something interesting here. The church in the first little first stages, first days of the church, many get saved.

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But there's a period of time where the Jewish people are resistant until many of the

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Jewish people come. I think Peter and John are sort of typifying the way that this kingdom is going to be built.

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There's gonna be some early people who come in like Mary. And there's gonna be some people, some

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Jewish people, who don't come in until later in the first century. And Acts chapter five tells us that they eventually did come.

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Pharisees came. Priests came. There was Jewish leadership that came. Not all of them.

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There's many who did not come. But there's a timing here that's being played out because I think

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Mary is supposed to tell us what it looks like to be the people of God. She's a type and a picture of the people of God.

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Who is searching for her savior in sorrow and yet not yet finding him.

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And that leads us to our fourth point. We know that the new world is coming and the old world is passing away because Mary is waiting for Jesus with sorrow.

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Which is exactly what happens in the new covenant world when someone is coming to Christ. When we see

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Mary at every step of the way, we're looking at our life story with Jesus. We're looking at the time period in our life where we went looking for him.

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Where we realized that there was something wrong. That he was missing. That someone other than ourselves, something bigger than us, something greater than us was missing from our life.

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And we went looking and we had no answer. So we went to the religious experts. So we went to the ones who were supposed to have an answer and they didn't have an answer.

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So we wept. One of the clearest evidences of salvation is swollen cheeks and glistened eyes.

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Remembering the turmoil of your life apart from Christ. Mary certainly remembered it. She remembered

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Jesus being brutalized. She remembered him being taken down from the cross. She remembered his body being thrown into the tomb.

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And yet, for a moment, her salvation story doesn't begin with joy. All of us, when we think about the empty tomb, we're like, the empty tomb, it's amazing.

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Not for Mary. Mary's story began with sorrow in the same way that our salvation ought to begin with sorrow because she realized that something that she desperately needed was taken from her and she didn't know where to find it.

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The angels asked her a question, woman, why are you weeping? As if she needed to explain what had caused her consternation.

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And she answered, because they have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have laid him.

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She sobbed. She was broken. And in that, she's a microcosm of us.

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She sobbed like Israel did in Egypt when they were crying out to God to rescue them from their slavery.

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She sobbed like a Christian who cried out to God and said, God, rescue me from my slavery.

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The Bible says that godly sorrow leads to repentance. The Bible says that when we come to faith in Christ, it begins with a hatred of the things that we once loved.

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That's what salvation is. Salvation is a learning to hate the things that you once loved and a learning to love the thing, namely

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God, that you once hated. She had no idea that freedom was coming around the corner.

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All she had was a visceral sadness and abiding pain that what she needed more than anything was beyond her grasp.

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And she symbolizes us who at some point in our life said, where are you,

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Lord? Where are you, God? And as we searched, and as we searched, and as we searched, we woke up one day and realized that while we were searching for him, he was actually finding us.

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Isn't that interesting? While we were out looking for him, he was seeking us.

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He's the one who seeks. He's the one who saves. He's the one who finds the lost. Mary typifies our journey to Christ.

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Here in the way that she's lost and she's upset and she's waiting on revelation's light to dawn upon her soul.

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So that's the fourth one. She weeps. She's disoriented. She's looking for Jesus and she finds him as he finds her, which is the story of all of us.

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We find him when he's found us. Number five, he's putting away the old temple sacrificial system and all of the trappings of the old covenant.

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Why? Because what Mary's looking for can't be solved in a temple. Can't be solved in a sacrifice of goats and bulls.

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What she's looking for is something bigger and better and more permanent than the old covenant could offer.

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We needed a new world with Christ as king in order for Mary's tears to be wiped away from her cheeks.

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And that is exactly what Jesus is doing in verse 11 through 13. It says, but Mary was standing outside of the tomb weeping and so as she wept, she stood and she looked into the tomb and she saw two angels in white sitting one at the head and one at the feet where the body of Jesus had been lying and they said to her, woman, why are you weeping?

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And she said to them, because they have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have laid him.

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This reminds us and we talked about this last week of what the old covenant was. The old covenant was

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God being at a distant from you. You remember the Garden of Eden?

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Where did the first time that two angels show up in the Bible? The Garden of Eden. What's the circumstance? Sin has separated us from God and the angels who wield the fiery swords will not let you in.

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And it's not because God doesn't love you. He's not letting you in because he loves you because his holiness is dangerous because your sin is so offensive to God that it will rip you apart being in the presence of God with your sin.

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So the cherubim guarded the way to the presence of God so that you could not get in because God loved the old covenant people and was protecting them from the ferocity of his holiness.

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He's so bright, so beautiful and so pure. We can't stand in his presence without a mediator.

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It would be like trying to land a spaceship on the surface of the sun.

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Before you even got there, you would be turned into nothing and undone.

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Not because the sun is bad, because it's so good and so pure and so holy. How much more so than is

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God? Second time two angels show up guarding the way to the presence of God is in the tabernacle.

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And not only two angels, we see three sets of two angels. As the priest walked into the tabernacle, there was a huge curtain, a massive curtain that had two angels with fiery swords basically saying, if you haven't done what

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I've told you to do, do not come in because you're going to die. And we've said this several times, there were priests who died inside the

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Holy of Holies because they were impure before God. They wore a rope around their waist so that people could pull them out because no one would want to go in to get them.

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Beyond the curtain, inside the Holy of Holies were two massive cherubim who stood hanging wings ready when a bird, in this sense, because the cherubim are described in avian language, when their wings are tucked in, they're resting.

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When their wings are perched, it's almost like they're ready to fly. The wings of the cherubim spreading out, touching tip to tip, showcasing that ready for the holiness of God to strike out against any unworthy person who came in.

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There was two cherubim also on top of the mercy seat on the Ark of the Covenant, showcasing that the furious, holy, glorious presence of God was most fully concentrated above that box.

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So what you have, the whole Old Testament is about God being at a distance from you.

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None of us would have gotten close to the presence of God because it was too holy and too glorious.

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Now, Mary comes and Mary finds a tomb that is being guarded by two angels.

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And what are they doing? The angels in Eden were standing up with swords drawn.

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The angels in the tabernacle standing up with wings spread. What are these angels doing? They're sitting down.

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They're off duty. They've done their deployment and now they're going home.

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They have one more job left. Hey, that era is over. That old world's over. Now the way to the presence of God is no longer being guarded under lock and key with flaming sword.

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Now he's come out. He's no longer hiding from you. He's out there.

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Like two men who've been on roving patrol for a thousand, thousand, thousand years.

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Now these angels are finally off duty. Their weapons are put up. They're just sitting there tenderly speaking to the woman.

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Can you imagine the difference between the cherubim who with angry faces were like, stop, don't come in.

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Now these are like, oh dear woman, the status has changed. The world has changed.

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A new world has dawned. God is no longer under lock and key anymore.

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Do you realize the significance of this? Do you remember in the gospel of Matthew when Jesus dies and the temple curtain is torn?

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Do you know why the temple curtain was torn? Because the presence of God broke out. It's no longer guarded by angels who are going to kill you if you come near.

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Because now you can come near in Jesus. The curtain is torn. The guard has been laid down.

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Jesus is bringing heaven and earth back together so that you, if you know Christ, can be in the presence of God.

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Do you realize, do you realize how much we actually take for granted living 2 ,000 years after the cross?

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When we come into the church on Sunday, when we open up our scriptures, when the

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Holy Spirit simply dwells in our hearts Monday through Sunday, every week, weekend and week out, we take for granted that he's there.

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The high priest wouldn't have taken it for granted. They would have spent all day preparing themselves not to die in the furious holiness of God.

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And now we live in it. Let us not be a people who take it for granted. Let us be a people who revel in it, who celebrate because of it, who praise

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God because of it. We don't live in the old world anymore. We live in the new world.

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Things have changed. The sixth thing that happens in this passage is that God has made a new

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Adam. And because of that, he's made a new people, a new race. Verse 14 through 15.

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When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, and she did not know that it was Jesus. And Jesus said to her, woman, why are you weeping?

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Woman is the word that Adam originally called Eve, by the way. Whom are you seeking?

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It's the same question Jesus asked to Judas before. Supposing him to be the gardener.

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She said to him, sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.

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Mary sees Jesus. The first time that she sees Jesus, her eyes are not yet open fully to the reality of who he is, but she sees him in his

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Adamic role. She sees him as a gardener. That was Adam's job. He was the man who was put into the garden to till and keep the garden.

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And then God brought him his Eve. This is what is happening. Jesus goes into the garden of Gethsemane.

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He breaks past the cherubim. He goes to his grave, a garden tomb.

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And now he's resurrected as the true gardener. And now the woman is brought to him.

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We're reenacting the story of Genesis. And as a result of that, everything that was lost in Adam is going to be found in Christ.

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What was lost in Adam? Death came into the world. Jesus is going to overturn death. Thorns and thistles came into the world.

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Jesus is going to redeem work. Labor pains. Jesus is going to heal the womb of woman.

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You look at every part of the curse that happened in Adam because Jesus went into a garden, died in a garden like Adam should have done.

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Because Jesus died in the garden for Adam and his posterity sin. Now Jesus is the true gardener who will bring life to the world.

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That's what a gardener's job is, is to bring life. Every time the hoe and the rake hits the ground, it's meant to cultivate more life.

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Jesus is the true gardener will make the world flourish under his leadership. There is no crashing and burning in Jesus's kingdom.

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He's bringing life to the world. And he will continue to bring life to the world until the entire world looks like a garden, a paradise in his kingdom and in his rule.

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Number seven, I ended with seven. Not on purpose, but hey, I'll take it.

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Number seven, God's making not just a new Adam, but he's making a new people, a new creation people.

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Verse 16 says, Jesus said to her, Mary, and she turned to him and said in Hebrew, Rabboni, which means teacher.

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And Jesus said to her, stop clinging to me for I have not yet ascended to the father, but go to my brethren and say to them,

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I ascend to my father and to your father and my God and to your God. We'll talk a little bit more about these verses next week.

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But do you see what has happened? Mary's story is our story. Mary came to the empty tomb and she had no idea what to do about it.

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So she asked the religious experts and they didn't have an answer. And then she wept and she wept over her loss.

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And then she saw the entire old covenant world put away because it didn't offer an answer.

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And then she looked and she saw the true gardener was standing there in front of her. And what does he do? He calls her by name.

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Is not that your and my story in Christ that we went looking for answers and we couldn't find them out of sorrow.

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We said, dear God, where are you? And Jesus called us by name. The fact that he called

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Mary by name is indicative of the salvation that you and I have received because there is not a single one of us who knew what name to call out to.

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We didn't know who this God was. He had to call us first. And he called us by name.

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And when he called us by name, our eyes were opened. And with whatever title we had in our heart, we called out to him.

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Jesus is more than a rabbi. She's showcasing here that she, that's the biggest title she had in the moment to call out to her

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Lord. But her eyes were opened and she saw for the first time who he was.

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That's our story. This whole thing has been a picture of the story that you and I walked through.

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Like her, we went looking for a savior, but we couldn't find him. Like her, we asked the experts and they didn't have an answer.

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Like her, we wept thinking that we would never be saved, that we would die apart from God. And like her, we saw the old covenant types and shadows give way.

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And that this Jesus, this good and gardening Jesus brought us into the life -giving presence of God.

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And what is the last thing that happens? I said there were seven, let's go eight. Eight is the number of new creations. So let's go.

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What does Jesus do? And the very final thing that he says to her in verse 18, he tells her to go and tell her brothers.

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Let me say it this way. Your salvation is not the finish line of your journey.

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Jesus tells her, don't cling to me. Don't even rejoice right now. You'll have time later, but you've got a job to do.

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If every part of this story has been about a picture of Christ and his church, then as soon as your eyes are opened, you have a job to do and you have a purpose.

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What was her purpose? She was the very first missionary that existed in the

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Christian church. She was the one who got to go and tell her brothers that Christ has risen and he has risen indeed.

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Brothers and sisters, your salvation is not the end of your story. It's the beginning of the work that God has called you to do.

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And he has people that he has called you to tell. There are people who, like the disciples, need to hear that Christ has risen and he's called you to tell them.

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Every aspect of this story is a story of the way that we're supposed to relate to Christ.

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We're supposed to worship him and cry out to him and praise him. And we're supposed to tie our shoes and get to work and tell the world about the goodness of the

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Savior who paid everything to save us. Brothers and sisters, do not allow your faith to become lax, complacent.

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Do not allow your faith to become stale. You have the good news that this debauched world needs.

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You have the good news that raises dead souls back to life. You have the good news that not only saved a wretch like me and you, but can save our family members, our bosses, our presidents, our governments, and our world.

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Declare it. Declare it with joy. Don't declare it like Jonah. Go into the city and tell them they're all gonna die and burn.

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God sometimes uses that. Declare the gospel with great joy. Do you know how much joy that that woman had the day that she ran away from Jesus to go tell her brothers?

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Can you imagine there's never been a moment in her life where her knees moved as quickly as they moved on that day?

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How she, her tears of sorrow were turned into tears of joy. Can you imagine her running with tears streaming down her face, barely able to share the news with her brothers that Christ had risen?

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May it be so for us. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for your resurrection.

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Lord, we thank you for this beautiful picture that Christ and Mary demonstrate as a picture of Christ in the church.

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Lord, if there's someone here today who does not know Jesus, let their sorrow be turned into joy. Let their blindness be turned into sight and let them run to the fountain of living waters and drink of who

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Christ is. Like you did for Mary, would you open their eyes so they can see the glory and the beauty of Christ and would they run and cling to you with all their might.

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And Lord, for us who've been Christians for some time, like Mary standing in front of Jesus, her only inclination was to stand there clinging to him and that is a good thing.

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There's time for clinging and yet there are also time for building.

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And Lord, you told her to go and tell her brothers. Lord, let us be a people who not just come but also go and tell.

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Lord, help us to be a people who declare it. Lord, help us to be fathers who bring it into our homes and are not afraid to talk about it.

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Lord, let our children see the joy on our faces as we sing and as we pray and as we lead family worship.

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Lord, let us as men, let our co -workers and as women, let our children see the joy and the passion that we have for Christ.

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Lord, let the world look at this little church as a stick of holy dynamite that's so overjoyed with the things of God and so overjoyed to tell them who our

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God is that Lord, even if they don't believe, they have to admit that something has happened to us.

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Lord, would you reinvigorate missionary movements? Would you reinvigorate evangelism? Would you reinvigorate discipleship?

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Lord, would you cause your church not to stand in lethargy and not to stand with our hands in our pockets waiting on you to return?

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Lord, would you let us get to work and declare the good news of Christ and just like it happened in the first century,