Jeff Durbin | Death, Resurrection and Glory

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Matthew 27, we're gonna start,

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I'm tempted to read just so much of 27 into 28, but we'll start in 62.

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62. Matthew chapter 27 verse 62.

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Remember how that imposter said, while he was still alive, after three days I will rise.

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Therefore order the tomb to be made secure until the third day, lest his disciples go and steal him away and tell the people, he is risen from the dead, and the last fraud will be worse than the first.

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Pilate said to them, you have a guard of soldiers, go make it as secure as you can. So they went and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone and setting a guard.

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Now after the Sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other

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Mary went to see the tomb. And behold, there was a great earthquake, for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone and sat on it.

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His appearance was like lightning and his clothing white as snow. And for fear of him, the guards trembled and became like dead men.

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But the angel said to the women, do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who is crucified.

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He is not here, for he is risen as he said. Come see the place where he lay.

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Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he is risen from the dead. And behold, he is going before you to Galilee.

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There you will see him. See, I have told you. So they departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy and ran to tell his disciples.

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And behold, Jesus met them and said, greetings. And they came up and took hold of his feet and worshipped him.

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Then Jesus said to them, do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.

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While they were going, behold, some of the guard went into the city and told the chief priests all that had taken place.

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And when they had assembled with the elders and taken counsel, they gave a sufficient sum of money to the soldiers and said, tell the people.

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His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep. And if this comes to the governor's ears, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.

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So they took the money and did as they were directed. And this story has been spread among the

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Jews to this day. Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which

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Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him, they worshipped him. But some doubted.

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And Jesus came and said to them, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

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Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the

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Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold,

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I am with you always to the end of the age. Thus far is the reading of God's holy and inspired word.

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Let's pray together. Father, thank you for your truth, your word, this gift of your revelation to us,

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Lord, towards undeserving people. Thank you for your love. Thank you for your sovereign rule.

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Thank you, God, for your grace and mercy. Thank you for Jesus, Father. Thank you for the gospel.

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Lord Jesus, thank you for your resurrection. Thank you for your life and your ascension. We pray

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God today, bless as we open your word and hear from you. Bless, Lord. Remove, Lord, the teacher, the unworthy servant up here.

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And Lord, speak by your spirit to your people. Lord, open the eyes of the blind. Give hearing to the deaf.

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Lord, equip your church. We praise you in Jesus' name. Amen. So this is a, it's an epic moment because, well, we really have to understand the power and the meaning of this moment.

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You could read this story and it's interesting because, yes, it's a climax, but it's a climax to a story that was told much longer before this.

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And it's not really the climax climax, because there's sort of at the end of Matthew's gospel with the ascension of Jesus and the all authority and go make disciples, there's sort of a to be continued at the end of Matthew's gospel.

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There, of course, is a climax to this. This is God defeating death in an unexpected way, a way that they actually were totally confused by God defeating death, not simply at the end of history as they anticipated, as they were talking about, but it's

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God defeating death in the middle of history. It's something that they weren't really ready for.

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They couldn't quite understand. And there's a reason for that. And that's that dead people don't generally rise.

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Now they had seen in Jesus' life, they'd seen the miracles. They see Jesus, of course, walking on water.

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They see Jesus forgiving sins. They see Jesus causing the lame to leap. They see Jesus raising a little girl from the dead.

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They see Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. They know he has the power, but he's incessantly telling them, apparently, that he's going to go to Jerusalem.

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They're going to kill him. And after three days, he'll rise again. And they still are kind of in the dark about it.

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They have the scriptures to the degree that Jesus tells them on the road to Emmaus, when they're all confused and sad about the fact that their

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Messiah has been crucified and he's dead, that they should have known. He calls them slow of heart to believe, although the prophets have spoken.

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In other words, it wasn't just Jesus telling them. I mean, he's giving them reason to believe that he has the ability to raise himself from the dead.

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They're seeing dead people come to life in the ministry of Jesus. It's not like he wasn't vindicated.

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He showed them he has the power. He showed them that he's God himself in the flesh. That's why they're worshiping him here.

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But it wasn't just Jesus. It was the scriptures of the Old Testament that had foretold this story. This is truly, and this isn't just a pithy slogan, the greatest story ever told, because it involves everything that matters the most to you and to me, to everyone in the world.

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Our greatest enemy is death. We're all going to meet it. It's going to hit us all.

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We will face it, maybe today, in your life today. It's the greatest enemy for all humanity, and that's why this is the greatest story ever told.

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And this moment is something that should pique the curiosity of every image bearer of God.

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This is God defeating death in an unexpected way from our perspective in the middle of history.

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It is the greatest story ever told. You will not surpass it. You won't get over it.

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You won't outdo it, because this is God, the only God, the true and living

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God, in the person of Jesus Christ, condescending to love sinners and to do away with our greatest enemy, death.

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So this is the surprising middle. Of course, at the end of Matthew's Gospel, we read stories like a front, middle, end, and this is the climax.

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What a great story. But this is actually a story that ends with a to be continued, to be continued.

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It's interesting, because as you read the New Testament documents, through the inspiration of the

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Holy Spirit, God's inspired word, you see more explanation in the

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New Testament of the resurrection and the centrality of the resurrection. In other words, after the

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Gospels, you see this development by inspiration of resurrection, the theme of the resurrection, the doctrine of the resurrection, after the

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Gospels. In the Gospels, you kind of see confusion, right? I mean, it's embarrassing for the apostles, isn't it?

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I mean, if you think about it, like, they're on record permanently, like, throughout eternity, they're on record as the people who just couldn't understand.

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And they're, like, resisting Jesus. Jesus is like, I'm going to go to Jerusalem, they're going to kill me, or I rise again. And Peter's like, no, no, that'll never happen.

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Get behind me, Satan. Yeah, that's on record. Your name's down. Put it on a plaque, right? Peter did that, right?

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In heaven, you think, well, like, look at him every once in a while and go, hey, but remember? Like, do you think there'll be moments like that where, like, hey, do you remember when you, uh, remember that?

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That was weird, right? Like, I wonder what kind of conversations are going to happen in heaven. Or, like, with Thomas.

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Like, you first meet Thomas in heaven. Thomas! Bro! Like, like,

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I mean, you didn't, like, really? Like, you had to see? I mean, this story in the

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Gospels is interesting because it contains the stories of their doubts.

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It contains the stories of their confusion. The Gospels are written as eyewitness accounts through inspiration just to tell you like it is.

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And that's one of the things I love about Scripture, is the lack of whitewashing of the heroes, right?

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It just puts all their sins on the page and their doubt on the page and all their failings and faceplanting on the page.

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But in the Gospels you have the story of the resurrection and it is a climax, but it's filled with a ton of confusion.

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Like, how? Really? Actually? And, okay, there's, uh, redemption after Peter blows it and there's, you know, forgiveness and he's now on a new path and he's courageous now and he gives his life up at the end of his life for Jesus Christ from going from a coward to, like, a giant of the faith.

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It's, it's an amazing thing because the Gospels tell you the truth about the disciples' experience and the resurrection and just how surprising it was to them.

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And then the New Testament following that fills out details that show us that that to be continued is better than you can imagine.

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The to be continued part is that ultimate climax that the story is getting to.

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I would actually say that what takes place in the life of Jesus, the ministry of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus and the ascension of Jesus is that middle part of the story.

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It is grand. It is spectacular. But, brothers and sisters, the climax has not yet been here.

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The climax is the resurrection of the dead at the end of history, the final defeat of death.

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Jesus, the Son of God, God incarnate, the second person of the Trinity, the Son of Man, defeated the greatest enemy of humanity in his life and ministry at the middle of history.

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But that's not all. That's not the end. There's more to come. And that's why this is the greatest story ever told.

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It's the greatest story ever told because there's more to come. It's not finished yet. And it involves you and I in Jesus Christ.

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It's something, listen, that you and I have that is actually spectacular, astonishing, powerful, and it makes atheism look undeniably stupid.

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It does. If you saw the debate, for those of you that love us, when we were in Utah, one of the constant challenges we were making to the atheist perspective, to the agnostics, is that their worldview doesn't comport with what they're saying.

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We pointed them to the fact that honest atheists like Dr. Will Provine, the professor of biological sciences at Cornell University, says actually with the

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Darwinian model, when you have bacteria that goes to fish that goes ultimately to philosophers, there's no imminent morality.

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Nothing is good. Nothing is lovely. Nothing is true. He says that there is no ultimate morality.

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No ultimate meaning to life. He says, when I die, I'm absolutely certain I'm going to be gone.

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When you die, you're absolutely gone when you die. And we pointed out to our atheist opponents and our agnostic opponents, the humanist opponents, because you put humans at the center.

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Because for you, humanity is the reference point. And because you believe that we got here through purposeless forces, time and chance, acting on matter, there is no

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God above us, no justice above us, no purpose, no meaning. Our ancestors were bacteria.

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You have no ultimate foundation for ethics. You can make no meaningful claims.

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Nothing. And if you watch the debate, you'll see that they actually admit it. They say, yeah, there's no absolutes.

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Nothing is ultimate. And he says this, isn't that great? Right? Nothing is absolute.

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Nothing is ultimate. And he had the audacity to say, isn't that great? You'll forgive us for looking at you a little squinty eyed when you say that, right?

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No meaning. No purpose. Nothing. Nothing is ultimate. Nothing is absolute. Isn't that grand?

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No, it isn't. Atheism is hashtag stupid. It is because, listen, one of the things that this man said, who was the first humanist chaplain in military history, he said that he has spent time grieving over people's bodies when they die.

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And what I pointed out to him was that in your worldview, that kind of grief is meaningless.

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You can't justify it. There's no real meaning. If human beings exist on a continuum of purposeless time and chance acting on matter, if we are truly the descendants of bacteria, if there is no absolute standard above us and there's no meaning or purpose in life, then that means that human beings dying is the same as rocks tumbling off a cliff and shattering.

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No one cries or sheds tears when rocks tumble off cliffs and shatter.

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It's just what happens. It's just what is, which shows that even this humanist chaplain that rebels against God and hates

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God and resists God knows in those moments of death that there is something different.

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There is something wrong here. There is an enemy here. It's a powerful thing that the

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Christian worldview is the only worldview that can give you hope for the future, that ultimate victory over death, and it can give you any meaning at all at the bedside of a person who's dying.

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Now I'm going to try my best, and I can see your faces right now. Every one of you is waiting for me to lose it.

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I can see it. I'm going to try not to. Candy said, you know, if you talk about this today, you're going to cry. And I said, no,

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I think I'll be fine. And she says, you're not going to be fine. She knows me better than me, so I'm going to do my best.

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God's story gives us an explanation for the pain that we feel at the bedside of a person that we love that is dying.

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I spent the last couple of weeks in the hospital from one floor, just the standard hospital room.

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My mother was getting checked out because she had COVID that turned into COVID pneumonia, and she was struggling.

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And then she had a collapsed lungs, and they moved her to ICU. And one of the things that I was realizing and just aware of while I was there that last week in ICU was,

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I don't know what all these people believe. I don't know what the head nurse believes. I don't know what these doctors believe.

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But isn't it interesting that there is this somber, broken feeling in this

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ICU? The doctor came in the last day my mom was alive, and the doctor was shedding tears.

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The nurse was shedding tears, crying, actually, which surprised me. Doctors and nurses in the

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ICU who see this every day, shedding tears over my mother. This feeling of there's something wrong here.

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There's something broken here. That obvious thing to everybody in that ICU was that this is an enemy.

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Something is not right here. This ought not to be. And that was a powerful thing to see and to experience in the

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ICU is, I don't know what any of these people believe, but every single one of them right now is acting like a

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Christian. Every single one of them is acknowledging what Scripture says and that this is, in fact, a terrible enemy, and this ought not to be so.

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And only Jesus Christ has an answer for that ICU. Amen? Only Jesus Christ has an answer to the ultimate victory we're looking forward to in history.

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This is the greatest story ever told. These pages here at the end of Matthew, again, are the middle of history.

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They're not the ultimate end. There's more to come. What takes place here in the resurrection of Jesus is

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God's promise to His people that He will have ultimate victory also at the end of history.

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That's the glory of the gospel. Not just peace with God, but God is going to wrap up, summarize, and defeat all the works of the enemy.

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He is going to have ultimate victory in history, and it all starts at the beginning.

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I want to just start here to talk about why this story is so powerful when we talk about resurrection and death, is that this begins, interestingly, at the beginning of human experience.

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You know the story. You've probably read Genesis. If you had a yearly Bible reading plan, I'm sure you made it through Genesis and stopped at Leviticus.

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You at least got Genesis down, right? Or if you're, you know, at least you read the first three chapters, okay?

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In the first three chapters, you have this amazing start to God's creation. God, the only

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God, this magnificent and amazing, true and living God, He creates.

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He splashes the universe into existence. He creates amazing things. He's innovative.

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He's good. He's creative. And then He creates, as the pinnacle of His creation, His image in the garden.

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Now one of the things we have to grab hold of right now, and this is what I'm trying to fix right now in us, in the

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Christian community in the West, is we need to recognize something. At the beginning of God's story, it is physical and spiritual.

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God is with His people in the garden. Don't miss it, because it's going to make the resurrection story even more glorious.

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This moment here where Jesus is in a garden tomb bursting forth alive from the dead is more glorious when you consider this, that the

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Christian faith is not like Gnosticism. It's not like the dualism or the paganism of the past.

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The Christian faith doesn't say that we're just trying to escape the physical reality and get to the spiritual gassy experience out there.

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That's so much better. No, what's the beginning of the Bible start with?

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It starts with something so different. It is heaven and earth together, harmoniously.

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God with His people, the spiritual with the physical. When God created humanity,

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He created male and female. In the image of God, He created them. They were to be

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His light in the world, His glory. They were supposed to be that reflection of the glory of God and His good creation.

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When He created us, what did He say? He said, it's good. It's good.

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Then God of course says this but not that. Our first parents disobey God. Sin, corruption, evil, and death enters into the human experience.

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What happens at the beginning of that story? God has Adam and Eve, our first parents, cast out of the garden, out of His presence.

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Then what's the rest of the story? You feel it every day. I feel it every day.

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I got it a full face full of the darkness of this world last Sunday at 5 .15

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a .m. I did. We sense it. We feel it. We experience it.

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But scripture also tells that story. It says what? It says there is fall and then heaven and earth in a sense split because now man is not in the presence of God.

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There is something wrong. There is a veil. There is sin. There is separation from God. And there is this great enemy, of course, our spiritual death and separation from God but also our physical death.

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And time goes on with what? It goes on with sin. It goes on with death.

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It goes on with human pain. It goes on with suffering. It goes on with injustice.

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It goes on with betrayal. It goes on with misery. And it goes on again with death.

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Death is an enemy. It's interesting. And I mean this sincerely.

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My opinion I don't think will ever change on this because of how much I've experienced it.

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Death has an unparalleled ability to focus your minds.

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Death has an unparalleled ability to focus your minds. We live in a time where there is so much access to distraction.

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We hide our graveyards. We keep them as far away from the population as possible. We want to make sure that people don't see them, that they're off the path, under the freeway.

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We want to keep our minds off the death. We don't want to see the funeral homes. We don't want to see the graveyards.

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Let's keep them away from us. Whereas not very long ago you're burying your loved ones in your yard, on your property.

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Not very long ago when you went to worship that the dead brothers and sisters were lying out in the yard next to you.

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You've seen this. If you've been out east it's still commonplace. You'll see them everywhere, especially in the

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UK and Northern Ireland and Scotland. Graveyards everywhere. Headstones everywhere.

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But we hide ourselves from death. And there's a part where I think we can all grant if we're transparent and humble.

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I get why. I don't want to constantly be reminded. I don't want to constantly see.

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I don't want to constantly feel that pain. But there is something so good about not hiding yourself from death because it has the unparalleled ability to focus your minds.

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Just reflect on it. Many of us in this church body, we've lost loved ones and members of our body, done their funerals here over the last couple of years.

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And just think about those moments that week or two after we've lost someone we love at this church body or you've lost someone that you love.

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Think about that week or two after where you just have this sense of the divine, this sense of the presence of God, this better grasp of reality that you've been avoiding.

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We spend all of our times on our phones. Distraction, distraction, distraction. We spend all of our time in conflict.

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We spend all of our time over petty things and petty fights. And we distract ourselves.

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But death has the ability to focus your mind in an unparalleled way.

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It reminds you of what you really are, an image bearer of God. It reminds you of what is really true.

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You're going to die. You're going to die. All of us.

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We're going to die. And it reminds you that you and I have an ultimate thing that we have to settle.

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And that is that do you have peace with God? Do you know Him? Jesus says that because He lives, you will live also.

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If you have one verse, if you have one verse to satisfy your soul, your heart, and your mind when you are dying on the bed, that's the verse.

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Because I live, you will live also. God's revelation says that death is an enemy.

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It has been defeated in Jesus Christ and it ultimately will be defeated.

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Now quickly, just kidding, not really. There's no such thing as that with me. 1 Corinthians 15.

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Go there. Pastor James preached on this last week. I can't really do better.

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There's so much that I wanted to say that he said and so thanks a lot. 1

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Corinthians 15. I want to just say this. We could and should spend months unpacking the power of this passage and what's here but I'm going to do my best today to point us and put a finger on some things that are very, very important.

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I know this isn't Resurrection Sunday but the Lord, we celebrate His Resurrection every

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Lord's Day, every Sunday. We should never stop talking about the Resurrection because it is the distinctive of the

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Christian faith. It is the distinctive of the Christian faith. So here's what Paul says in verse 1 of chapter 15, 1

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Corinthians. He says, Now I would remind you brothers of the gospel I preach to you which you received in which you stand and by which you are being saved if you hold fast to the word

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I preach to you unless you believed in vain. Here it is. For I delivered to you as of first importance what

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I also received, that Christ died for our sins, here it is, in accordance with the scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.

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For the Apostle Paul, this is a key thing to communicate more than you when transmitting the message of Jesus.

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He says, I received this. I'm giving to you what I received and here is this early

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Christian confession, this early Christian tradition passing along the gospel.

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This is what they were saying, Paul is saying, but notice what the early Christians were doing. They were attaching the belief in the resurrection of the

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Son of God on the Old Testament revelation of God in accordance with the scriptures, in accordance with the scriptures.

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This is the Apostle Paul somewhere mid -fifties of the first century giving to you and I this early common

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Christian confession of the gospel itself. Hand it down. This is what we want you to know about Jesus.

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And he says, according to the scriptures. So here's the key issue. Ready? If you want to talk about God's story of resurrection, we're not talking about Jesus showing up and shocking people with a novelty.

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That's not how the resurrection comes into history. In other words, this is what God said

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He was going to do all along. It surprised them because dead people don't rise from the dead.

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They don't come back. It shocks them and it would shock us. Miracles tend to do that.

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They were blown away by it. They couldn't understand what Jesus was saying. But the point I'm making here is that Paul is saying this whole story of the resurrection is not a novelty.

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It's not something invented now with us. Like, wouldn't it be great if we had a story of a Messiah that actually rose again from the dead?

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That's not what they were doing. That's not what they were doing. This hope we have in our future resurrection is that the resurrection of Jesus is in accordance with the scripture.

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Here's the point. It's God's story. It's not just God's story.

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It's history. It's history. Our faith is grounded in the historic events of the resurrection of Jesus.

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Pastor James was delivering kind of death blows to atheism at the debate. And one of the things that he pointed out was that because we worship somebody who left an empty grave, because there's an empty grave, the person who comes out of an empty grave from the dead, he gets to tell us all what to do.

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Right? The moment you rise again from the dead, we'll listen to you. This one conquered our greatest enemy.

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Muhammad is dead. Joseph Smith is dead. David Koresh is dead. They all died and they stayed that way.

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We worship a Savior who conquered death, rose again from the dead, who has all authority.

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But he did it, according to Paul, in accordance with the holy scriptures. We can't unpack all of it, but what were they referring to?

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They were texts that were there long before Jesus came. We're talking hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years before Jesus arrives on the scene.

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They're singing songs about the resurrection and they didn't know it. They couldn't understand it.

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They couldn't see the glory of it. There's texts right in front of them, hundreds of years before Jesus arrives, that tells you about the mission of the

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Messiah, his work of redemption and his resurrection, that he will not stay dead.

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It was there all along. Look, it's there. And that's what you see, listen, in the New Testament, after the gospels themselves, is that the apostles and early

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Christians are now coming to the Jewish believers who had the scriptures given to them, and they were saying, look guys, it was there all along.

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It's right there. This is not a new story. It's what Yahweh said all along, in accordance with the scriptures.

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You have, of course, Psalm 22. These are things for you to read later. Go and investigate this.

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Psalm 22 is that famous psalm that they're singing like a thousand years before Jesus' ministry, his life, death, and resurrection.

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And in that psalm you have, of course, the passion of the Messiah. They pierce his hands and his feet.

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His heart is like wax, melted within him. They ground him like dogs wagging their head.

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They cast lots for his clothing. He's laid in the dust of death, so the

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Messiah dies. And then, of course, at the end of that psalm, it turns from darkness, despair, and death, the passion of the

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Messiah, to it turns, and all the families of the earth will return to worship Yahweh.

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It's victory. He's laid in the dust of death, and of course, we know in scripture it clearly teaches that he's going to see his offspring.

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He's going to prolong his days. The families of the earth are going to return to worship Yahweh because of the death of this

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Messiah. Isaiah chapter 53, go there. When Paul's in accordance with the scriptures,

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I've always encouraged you to get to know Isaiah 53. It is such an anchor for the hope we have in Jesus and explains so much.