SERMON: The Tomb, The Womb Of New Creation

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherd's Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day Sermon, and we pray that as we declare the word of God, that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and you would catch a greater vision of who

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

Mary Magdalene came in the dark. That's how John opens up the resurrection narrative.

Mary Magdalene came in the dark. She didn't come with angels, she didn't come with thunder, she didn't come with the

Mormon Tabernacle Choir playing the Hallelujah Chorus in the background. John opens up the resurrection narrative with a woman coming to him in darkness before dawn.

A single lady walking to the tomb that she believed would hold a corpse, but this

Easter, or this day that she walked there is where the Easter Sunday begins.

And if you think about it, the beginning that John paints is one of the most scandalous stories that you could paint in the entire ancient world.

A woman in that day, as many of you already know, would not be considered competent to stand trial.

So to write the story of the resurrection of the Son of God and your first witness be a woman in that society, would not have been a made up detail, but it certainly would not have been a favorable detail.

Many would have laughed at such a tale. And then also to have your tale begin while it's still dark outside and at night, when everyone in the ancient world knew that great epics and resounding victories all happened during the day.

Remember, Joshua is pleading with the Lord, don't let the sun go down so that I can finish the battle. So to have your story at a minimum, begin with a woman in the dark, a woman who's already untrustworthy, but now it's so dark, she can't see.

To have that be the beginning of your story is already a reversal of some powerful social norms that were going on at the time in the first century.

So as we begin, I want you to hold that image in your mind because everything pivots on that.

A woman, a garden in the darkness and a tomb. And if you don't understand those things, you won't understand the full depth of what resurrection means.

So over the last two weeks, we've been spending our time together looking at this most extraordinary week that has happened in the scriptures from Palm Sunday, when the new

Adam walks back through the days of creation. If you were here for Palm Sunday, you won't know what I'm talking about.

If not, you should listen to that message because it is fabulous, not because I did it, but because the truth that's involved in that message is unbelievable.

Jesus walks back through the days of creation, undoing the curse, inspecting every corner of the broken world, taking inventory of all of its fallenness and pronouncing the terminal curse on everything that remained fruitless.

And you'll remember that we ended with the new Adam, Jesus, in a garden, being captured by the ones that he created.

Gethsemane, we remember, is the place on the Mount of Olives where the olives would be pressed. Gethsemane itself even means pressing, which is the place where our

Lord Jesus was pressed. And in his crushing, the oil of his salvation would flow to all the nations.

On the cross, we remember, which is the sixth day, if you're counting from Palm Sunday, Friday is the sixth day.

On the sixth day, God made man and breathed life into man's lungs. Well, on Jesus' sixth day, the air leaves his lungs.

Jesus says it is finished on the cross where in the beginning, God says, in the beginning, it's clear what

Jesus is doing. He's reversing old creation and he's bringing about a new creation with us, his people, no longer being in the image of Adam, but being in the image of Christ.

And then the seventh day, the Lord of the Sabbath kept the Sabbath. He rested from his labors in a garden tomb with the world holding its breath.

Roman guards stationed to make sure that no one could come up with any cockamamie ideas.

But today, brothers and sisters, is not the seventh day. Today's the eighth day.

Yesterday was the seventh day. Yesterday was the Sabbath, according to the Jewish practice. Saturday, the seventh day, which means that the way that the

Jews thought about creation was creation began on Sunday and ended on Saturday.

And that's the day that God rested. That was yesterday. So what do we do with today?

Every other day, it went back to day one. And you repeated that seven day cycle in perpetuity from the

Garden of Eden onward. But what do we do with this eighth day? What does it actually mean for you?

What does it mean for the cosmos that Jesus rose on the eighth day? What does it mean for humanity?

What does it mean for every molecule that's in motion? Today, I wanna share with you some of the most extraordinary truths that I've been able to preach because of the depth and the beauty of what

Christ has done. So to that end, would you join me in John chapter 20 and verses one through 22 as we will read and as we will explore and as we will not be able to cover all of it, but we will, like a rock skipping across a tranquil pond, we will tap it and we will see what

Christ has done. Amen. So John chapter 20 verses one through 22.

I find John to be one of the most deliberate and theologically rich writers in all of the

Bible. If you read Revelation, remember the fact that when

John wrote the book of Revelation, he didn't have a Bible with him. And yet the book of Revelation is the book in the

Bible that quotes the Old Testament more than any other book. So he had it memorized. He knew

Ezekiel better than we know anything that we've ever memorized in our life and Ezekiel's hard.

So John is deep and he's got some things to say to us here. Now on the first day of the week,

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

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

Lord out of the tomb and we do not know where they have laid him. So Peter and the other disciple went forth and they were going to the tomb and the two were running together and the other disciple ran ahead faster than Peter and came to the tomb first.

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 but he entered the tomb 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 in a place by itself.

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

So the disciples went away again to their own homes but Mary was standing outside the tomb weeping and so as she wept, she stooped 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? And she said to them, because they have taken away my

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

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

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

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

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,

I ascend to my father and your father and my God and your God.

And Mary Magdalene came announcing to the disciples, I have seen the Lord and that he had said these things to her.

So when it was evening on the day, the first day of the week, when the doors were shut, where the disciples were for fear of the

Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, peace be with you. And when he had said these things, he showed them both his hands and his side and the disciples then rejoiced and they saw the

Lord. So Jesus said to them again, peace be with you as the father has sent me, I also send you.

And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, receive the Holy Spirit. Let us pray.

Lord Jesus, there is so much depth and beauty in your word. And Lord, we thank you for our brother

John, who probably was just a teenager when he was your disciple, when he outran

Peter on that morning to get to the tomb first. Lord, thank you that you gave him a mind to record these things in such ways.

Lord, thank you that you gave him the Holy Spirit to assist him and to produce this masterpiece that we call

John's Gospel. And Lord, we thank you that we can study it and have the privilege of reading it, that you preserved it throughout 200, or throughout 20 centuries so far, you've preserved it.

Lord, help us to see what the truth is here and help it to change us and shape us into the people that you want us to be in your image.

In Jesus' name we pray, amen. The eighth day is when new creation begins.

When John opens up the resurrection narrative, he gives you a detail that sounds like a calendar detail, but it's actually a theological earthquake.

He says, on the first day of the week. So before we go any further, I need you to count with me.

Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Sunday, which was the first day of the week. And then on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, he was dealing with the

Pharisees in Jerusalem, going back and forth from the city, inspecting it, declaring it unclean.

And then Friday, which is the sixth day, he was arrested, tried, and murdered on the cross. Saturday, the seventh day, he laid in the tomb.

So the next day that he rose was the eighth day. When you see this stone rolling away, it's on the eighth day.

And I need you to feel how strange this is because in the original creation, God made everything in six days, rested on the seventh, and then he rested and he stopped numbering.

In the Old Testament, you do not see a new day. You have seven days. God rested, and the entire

Old Testament occurs within the seventh day rest of God. There is no eighth day in the book of Genesis.

God made a seven -day world, and that seven -day world is the only kind of world that ever existed.

And in that way, every day that you and I have ever lived in our body, we've been living in the seventh day of God.

Every sunrise in Genesis 3 occurred in the seventh day of God. Everything that flows out of creation is on the seventh day of God.

How do I say that? Because God spent six days creating material, and on the seventh day, he rested.

And that doesn't mean siesta. That means that he rested from making new material so that he could now sit in authority and rule over that material so that there is no new material that has been created on earth since day seven, or at least until the resurrection.

From Genesis 1 all the way to Easter Sunday, there had never been an eighth day until Jesus rose from the grave because for the first time in thousands of years, something new was created.

God ended his rest to create a new thing. And that new thing will make everything new again.

Now, I want you to see this eighth day even not just beyond the Holy Week narrative because the number eight is always having to do with new creation in the

Bible. And there's several different areas where you see this and it is typified and it points forward to Jesus.

So for instance, let me give you a couple of examples of eight being new creation just so that I can prove this point to you. When God instituted the circumcision, the sign of covenant membership, the sign that you were exiting out of your old way, the old flesh was being cut away from you so that you could have new flesh, new creation.

He called all the children to be circumcised, all the male children to be circumcised on the eighth day.

On the eighth day, your old is cut away and the new has come because circumcision was a sign of new creation.

It's about new identity. It's about your old flesh being cut away so that the new man could come out of the blade that God was cutting to make you into his distinct new creation people.

That happened on the eighth day. And it happened on the eighth day to symbolize something as Paul says in Galatians that we were circumcised with Christ while our old flesh was cut away and in his resurrection, we were given new flesh, eighth day, new creation.

Here's another example. When Noah and his family stepped off the ark and onto a renewed world, remember the world had become so bad, so evil that God was gonna put it away.

He's gonna destroy that old world and make a new world out of it. How many people came off the ark?

Eight. That's just a coincidence. It's not.

Eight people walking into a new world to repopulate it and make a new creation. God consecrated

Aaron as the first high priest, the one who would stand before his presence and the

Holy of Holies on behalf of the people. Leviticus 9 tells us that that happened on the eighth day.

He had seven days of preparation, seven days of cleansing, seven days of washing, seven days of anointing.

And then the final day, when he put on all of his armor, and if you read the text, it looks like he's putting on armor to go into a hostile environment because the holiness of God is heavy and dangerous to sinners like you and I.

So he armors up and he walks into the Holy of Holies on the eighth day, symbolizing this is where history is heading,

Aaron. You live in a seven -day world, but I'm taking you one day to where, instead of it only being one day a year where you get to enter into new creation,

I'm gonna make new creation every day of the year. You think about Jesse.

Samuel came to anoint one of Jesse's sons to be king over Israel. And he goes through the first seven of them.

And seven of them were brought before him. And Samuel says, don't you have any others? God hasn't said anything to me about any of these seven.

And Jesse says, yeah, we've got the one that's out in the field, the eighth.

And he comes, Samuel anoints him as king, and he puts away the old monarchy and brings about a new monarchy who he will be the king who sits upon the throne forever.

He's a new creation kind of king. He's a type of Jesus who will reign forever from his throne.

So this number eight in scripture keeps reaching for us to look at it as the putting away of something old, the seventh day, into bringing about something new on the eighth day.

That's what this number is sort of telling us. So when John tells you that Mary came to the tomb on the first day of the week, which is the eighth day as we're counting, you know that Jesus is doing something so fantastically new that it's gonna put away old creation.

When you see that Jesus not only laid dead on the seventh day, but he rose on the eighth day, you see that his plans are not just to save individuals.

His plans are not just so that we can have Christian camps where with every eye closed and every head bowed, you can raise your hand and experience an individual salvation experience.

It's more than that. When Jesus rose on the eighth day, he was declaring to all of creation,

I am going to make you new. From the people, to the plants, to the cosmos itself, he's going to re -heal all that was broken.

So when Jesus rises from the dead, he doesn't rise on another seven -day morning. He rises on a day that's never existed before, a day without precedent, a day that old creation and the

Old Testament had no category for, and in that way, this is not a new morning on the calendar, but this is a brand new calendar.

This is not a new order of time, but it's a new order of existence, a kind of human who can never die. That's what's new.

Every human after that died. We said a couple of days ago or last week, maybe

I can't remember, that there were people who were raised from the dead, but they died again. This is the first man who was ever raised who death could not ever harm again.

So you have something utterly new. And John tells us that it happens while it was still dark.

Why does he say that? Because he's appealing to the first creation. The first creation sprung out of darkness.

When darkness hovered over the face of the deep, God spoke and said, let there be light. And here in the tomb, when darkness hovered over the face of the ground, when

Mary comes, God says, let there be light, and light broke forth out of the tomb. This is new creation.

For her part, Mary came expecting a corpse. She had no idea she was gonna see a brand new light of the world. That's the first thing

I wanna show you, is that new creation happens on the eighth day. The second thing I wanna show you from this passage is that a new

Adam has come back to the garden again. I want you to notice that he didn't just go to the

Garden of Gethsemane. There's garden language everywhere. If you look, it says that the tomb was a garden.

It says that the cross was in a garden. Look at what it says, John 19 .41. Now in the place where he was crucified, there was a garden.

He's crucified in a garden. We tend to think about it, and when we imagine it, it's dusty, because why?

Jim Caviezel told us so. It's dusty. There's nothing growing.

It looks barren. And it's a great story because of death and all of the different emotions that go with death.

But at this time and in this century, whatever it looks like today, I have not been to Israel, but the cross was actually in this region where there was a garden.

There was life. There was all kinds of fruit and vegetation. So Adam, the true

Adam, has come back into the garden to die on the tree that the former Adam should have died on.

He's back in the garden. He says that Christ was crucified in a garden space.

Now this new Adam, this perfect Adam, was killed on a garden tree. The cross was in a garden. The tomb was in a garden.

It's called a garden tomb, which means that the new Adam is both killed and buried in a garden.

And Jesus actually tells us and gives us the key for how to interpret this. Just a few chapters earlier in John, instead of Adam dying in the garden,

Adam was covered so that he could leave and wander. Jesus comes back into the garden and dies.

Why? Well, he told us. John 12, 24, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone.

But if it dies, it bears much fruit. He's not speaking abstractly. He's describing with intentional garden language what the cross is.

The cross is Christ the seed going down into the earth, which is the ground, and then rising in life to bear fruit unto the ends of the earth.

It's the crucifixion and resurrection. It's the planting story of a new creation. It's also interesting to me that Jesus rose on the third day from his death, right?

On the third day of old creation is when the plants broke out of the ground. And Jesus' third day is when he broke out of the ground.

He also rose on the eighth day from Palm Sunday. New creation, the seed that fell into the earth that rises and makes a new creation that will bear much fruit.

All of what we've been looking at, the destruction language, the curse language from Jerusalem, Matthew 21, 22, and 23, all of that is because they bore him no fruit.

Palm Sunday, they gave him leaves with no fruit. Now Jesus, the seed, will rise and bear much fruit in Judea, Samaria, and to the uttermost parts of the earth.

And he's been doing it for 2 ,000 years, and he will continue to do it. The first Adam was placed in a garden and he abandoned it.

The last Adam was placed into a garden, and instead of fleeing, instead of hiding, he allowed himself to be planted so that he could bring new creation.

And amid all of this garden language, seeds, planting, fruit, garden here, garden there,

Mary mistakes him for a gardener. Of course she does. When the stone is rolled away, she's weeping outside of the tomb and she sees a man standing there.

And I've heard this passage preached as she had tears in her eyes and she just couldn't see very well, and she mistook him for the gardener.

John 20, 15 says, "'She supposing him to be the gardener said to him, "'Sir, if you have carried him away, "'tell me where you have laid him.'"

Again, almost every sermon I've heard on this says Mary was confused, Mary was wrong. Jesus reveals himself and she realizes her error and she repents.

But I'm gonna argue this morning that she was not wrong, that she was actually more right than she could have ever known.

Because in Genesis 2, 15, when God placed the first man in the garden to tend and to keep it, the

Hebrew word there is abad and shamar, which means to work and to watch over it. To be a gardener was

Adam's original job, to steward and be the keeper of the garden and to be the multiplier of the garden, the extender of the garden, the one who took out his backhoe and bobcat and extended the borders of the garden until the garden eventually filled the world.

That was the fruitful multiply mandate that was given to Adam, be fruitful, multiplied, spread out to the ends of the earth, make the whole world a garden.

But Adam abandoned his post before he ever gave it a third citizen.

He abandoned his post. He stood passive while the serpent came. He ate the fruit, he hid in the leaves and the garden was lost.

And for thousands of years, the post of Adam, the gardener, stood empty. And now on the other side of this garden cross, at the garden tomb,

Mary turns around and sees that the post has now been filled. The new gardener is back. Her instinct was right.

It must be the gardener, the gardener of the new creation. The true and better Adam, who's back to tend and keep and to produce and to be fruitful and multiply to the ends of the earth.

Which brings a lot of meaning to go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the

Father, Son and Holy Spirit. For I will be with you always. What Jesus is telling his disciples is,

I'm the gardener, go be fruitful and multiply and spread to the ends of the earth. The great commission is a recapitulation of the cultural mandate in Eden.

That's the second thing. Third thing I wanna show you is that the way to the garden is open. There's a problem in the

Old Testament. Adam sins, the garden is locked up. The two greatest cherubim with the sharpest flaming swords are guarding it and no one can go back.

So there's a problem. How does Jesus get back? I want you to look at one little detail in John 20, 12 that almost no one mentions.

And it's one of the most stunning pieces of symbolism in the entire Easter narrative and it's hidden in plain sight.

When Peter and the beloved disciple entered the tomb, they saw the grave clothes lying there.

And when Mary looks in the tomb, John is extraordinarily precise about what she sees.

He tells us, she saw two angels in white, one at the head and one at the feet where the body of Jesus had been lying.

This is an astounding point for two reasons. First, one of the angels is at the head and one is at the feet.

Why does that matter? Well, because there was not enough room for both of them to sit at the head, right? It's a narrow tomb.

Jesus was in good shape. He didn't need the extra largo tomb.

No. One is at the head and one is at the feet because this goes all the way back to Exodus 25, 17 -22.

If you remember, God gave Moses specific instructions on how to make the

Ark of the Covenant, the most sacred object in all of Israel's worship, the physical representation of God on earth, where God dwells.

The priest would go into the Holy of Holies and he would stand in front of the Ark of the Covenant and there were two cherubim with their wings out like this, one at the head, one at the foot facing each other and that over top of the mercy seat is where God's holy presence dwelt in the white hottest fury of his holiness on earth and there is where the minister sprinkled the blood.

So you have Mary, not a male, Mary, not a high priest, Mary walking into a

Holy of Holies with two cherubim sitting on a new Ark of the Covenant, a new mercy seat and he's not there, which means that the

Holy of Holies is no longer in the temple, the Holy of Holies is birthed out of the tomb because Jesus is the mercy seat of God.

It's from Jesus that the world will come to be known by God, not just the high priest, not just once a year, you and I will know

God by coming to the tomb first, dying with Christ and rising with him in new creation.

He's the mercy seat, Hebrews tells us, the cherubim are there sitting head and foot because they're the fulfillment of the

Ark of the Covenant. Knowing our Old Testament shows us such deep, beautiful truths.

The Ark of the Covenant's no longer locked away in a secret room, Christ in his tomb, in his death, in his burial, in his resurrection is the mercy seat by which you know

God forevermore. That's the first thing. The second thing that we see here is that the old man, or we see that we go back to Genesis 3 .23.

So you see the cherubim sitting on the Ark of the Covenant, but they were actually pointing back to something before because the idea of two cherubim facing one another comes all the way back to Genesis 3.

Because after the fall, after the exile of Adam and Eve from Eden, they were driven out of the garden and God, it says, stationed the cherubim on the east side of the garden with a flaming, whirling sword to guard the way to the tree of life.

You have cherubim who are stationed side by side, face to face, guarding the way to the entrance of the garden.

And for thousands of years, these cherubim held their post physically at Eden, symbolically at the temple.

As you walk into the temple, the high priest would have walked past this glorious curtain, four feet thick curtain, and painted on that curtain was two cherubim with flaming swords.

So every time the priest walked through those curtains, he was participating and practicing walking back into the garden of Eden.

Now, what I find so utterly astounding is that it was under great duress and pressure, seven days of purification, that they got to enter once.

Adam never got to enter again because God's holy presence is dangerous.

But I want you to look at what's going on here at the tomb because it's very different. In Eden, they have swords, flaming swords.

In the temple, God's presence would strike you down. I've told you this before. They would wrap a rope around their body so that if they had not prepared well, they could, and they died, you could pull them out because no one else wanted to go in after you.

Can you imagine? But here in the tomb, something different has happened.

There's no swords. There's no swords. They're no longer standing with swords and armor.

They're seated, which is different, isn't it? They're no longer wearing full body armor.

They're wearing a white robe, which is like your undergarment, kind of like they're off duty.

I remember when I was in the military and I would wear full uniform. We would go out on our field missions and we would practice and I was wearing all of this heavy stuff and then

I would come in. Soon as I got in my room after a field exercise, I'm throwing all of it off and I'm down to my pajamas.

I take a shower, then I'm down to my pajamas and it was glorious. These guys are off duty is what

I'm saying. For thousands of years, they've been guarding the way to the presence of God and now the armor's off, the swords are gone, they're sitting there and there is no threat of violence.

Listen, the high priest barely got to go in. Adam never got to go back in and here

John, Peter and Mary all bumble in and nothing happens to them.

And the reason nothing happens to them, the reason that they are committedly pacifistic is because what they're saying is

Christ has taken away the sword. He's taken the sword on himself. Now every weapon formed against us shall not prosper.

Welcome home. That's what those angels are saying. We're no longer on guard duty anymore.

We're no longer trying to stop you from coming in. Now come in, welcome. Same two cherubim, completely different disposition because of what

Christ did. He took the wrath of God. He took the sword of their fury so that we could experience the welcome of Almighty God.

For the first time since Genesis three, the way to the tree of life has been unguarded. Not because the guard abandoned their post and not because these cherubim were like private snuffy who always falls asleep on guard duty because there's no longer any need for swords.

Now only thing that's left is greeting. Welcome, welcome to him. That's the third thing

I want you to see. The next thing I want you to see is that Adam, the new Adam is working to make for himself a new bride.

We see the first word that he speaks after his resurrection. Do you know what it is?

The very first word that is recorded that Jesus says after his resurrection, woman.

The first word. Because the first word of redemption spoken in Genesis three was given to the woman.

The first promise of hope given to the woman. The first promise that your seed is gonna save the rest of humanity given to the woman.

So it's fitting here that he would speak first and the first word he says be woman.

Now it's not like Jesus was confused. He spent time with Mary. He was friends with Mary. He knew Mary. He could have said, what's up Mary.

He didn't. He didn't because he was saying woman to point all the way back to Genesis three to say, dear

Eve, your seed has come. Your son has come.

The deliverer that you were promised has come. The one who would crush the serpent and in so doing would be crushed has come.

Woman, the one who would from her womb break new creation onto the earth through the birth of Christ.

Woman, your redemption has come. All daughters of Eve, your redemption has come.

I find it astounding. No one would have ever written a story like this but he says woman.

Why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking? This is the same thing he said to his mother.

This is Mary Magdalene at the tomb. Same thing he said to his mother on Friday. Woman, because Jesus is pointing out the fact that he is going to heal and he is going to fulfill the oldest promise in the

Bible, I will put enmity between you and the woman between your seed and her seed and he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.

Jesus is saying to Mary, that has been fulfilled right in your very viewing. The seed of the woman is here.

I've crushed the serpent's head. New creation has come. That's the fourth thing that I wanted us to see.

The next, well, maybe even let's go a little further. It doesn't just, it's not just about the woman because remember

God also promises to Adam that there's going to be blessings and God promises that there's going to be a family that comes out of this woman.

I love what he says here. He says this to Mary after he says woman, after he points back to the promise of Eve, he says go to my brothers and tell them that I am ascending to my

Father and your Father, to my God and your God. He's never talked like this to his disciples in the gospels.

This is the first time he talks like this. He's never called them brothers yet until this moment.

He's called them slaves, yes. He's called them servants, yes. John 15, he upgrades it and they're all shocked.

He says, you are my servants, but I also tell you are my friends. And they're like, wow.

Here for the first time, he says, go tell my brothers.

And notice what he doesn't say. He doesn't say, go tell my brothers that I'm ascending to my

Father and to my God. He says, I'm ascending to my Father and your

Father, to my God and your God. And there's a very specific reason for why he does it this way.

And he does it for two different reasons. Number one, he does it because at both in the same time, he's affirming the new status of believers that now you are children of the living

God, adopted into the family of God through the finished work of Christ. He's not only my Father, he's your

Father too. But he's also not saying our

Father, because he refuses to collapse the distinction between the one and only son of man and us who are adopted children.

I ascend to my Father and your Father, to my God and your

God. He is maintaining at the same time, our new status as new creation family of God and also the special homoousius status that he has between him and the

Father, my God and your God. And it's your God because you're now in me, in union with me.

He's careful to honor that distinction. The fifth thing that I wanna show you is this idea of a new creation body.

In Jesus's body, we see something that has never existed before. When Jesus appears to his disciples in the locked room in John 20, 19 through 20, he does something that defines categories and only shows up in sci -fi movies.

He walks through walls. He appears in a locked room without using the door and without having a key.

He's simply there standing among them. And I want you to notice something about this because the basest instinct that we all have is to revert to, oh, well, he's a spirit.

God is spirit and he did some spirit thing and he's in the room.

But that's not what John is describing. In the same breath, in the same breath that Jesus walked through walls,

John tells us that he looks at Thomas and says, touch my hand and touch my side and let me eat in front of you too so that I can prove to you that I'm not a ghost, that I'm physical.

John is making a point to say, this is entirely physical. He doesn't vaporize and go through walls and then rematerialize into physicality.

The whole time he's physical. How does he do it? How does he pass through walls and also not, and be touched by his disciples?

How can both of those things be true? Well, they are both true and they're not a contradiction, but they are something that we don't yet fully understand.

Paul unpacks this a little bit in 1 Corinthians 15, where he says that the old creation body is sown in perishability, but it's raised in perishable.

It's sown in dishonor, but it's raised in glory. It's sown in weakness, but it's raised in power. It's sown a natural body and it's raised a spiritual body and spiritual body does not mean immaterial body.

In this way, Jesus is not a ghost. He's not a disembodied spirit. He's not less physical than he was before.

In fact, he is more physical than he was before. He was fully human, but now he's more human than he was before.

More human than we are. He is the first specimen of a new kind of humanity that never existed before.

A human who is fully embodied, tangible, touchable, physical, but no longer subject to the constraints of old creation.

He can walk through walls, not because he's less real than the wall, but because he's more real than the wall.

Because old creation's physical laws apply to old creation material. Now the new

Adam in his new creation flesh can walk through walls. The resurrection is not a resuscitation of a corpse and the resurrection is not

Jesus abandoning body in some kind of gnostic fancy.

It is Jesus more real than real, more human than human, more physical than physical, now no longer constrained by old creation logic where he can do things that we cannot do.

You try to walk through a wall, you'll get a headache. Jesus tries to walk through a wall, he says, hello, there is a difference.

Everybody before that died and operated under the old rules of creation.

Jesus rose as one who would never die again with new flesh that could never be corrupted.

Jesus came out of the tomb and he folded the grave clothes and he left death behind forever because he did not need the grave clothes anymore because he's not going back.

He's the prototype of a new humanity. Do you remember when Adam sinned in the garden? He was naked and ashamed.

The first thing that God did was clothed him to cover him and here

Jesus takes off his grave clothes and leaves them. Do we not think that there's something special significant about this?

That now the one, the Adam who was formerly clothed in his fall now no longer needs the clothes because he's clothed in glory.

He's clothed in imperishable glory. But before we move on, there's one more detail that I want us to see about his body.

He still has wounds, which I think is fascinating. In John 20, 20, he shows his hands in his side.

In John 20, 27, he invites Thomas to put his finger in the nail marks and in the hand and his hand in the wound in his side and to put your hand into a wound.

It's a big wound. And in this way, the new creation body of Christ also carries the marks of the curse of the old creation.

He has the wounds, but they're healed wounds. Not open ones, not bleeding ones, not ones that any longer hurt, not ones that kill, but as a permanent testimony, as a trophy of God conquering tragedy of the evidence of what he endured to preserve his people forever.

When you meet Jesus in eternity, he will have the wounds as an ongoing everlasting testimony of what he did for you.

And you will praise God and sing when you see them. New creation in that way doesn't erase history, it redeems it, all its scars and brokenness.

It doesn't delete the story of the old world, it takes the suffering and it takes the loss and it takes the grief and it carries it forward healed, but not forgotten, transformed, but not erased.

Your wounds, my brother and sister, do not disqualify you from new creation. They're actually the scar tissue that makes new creation sweet.

That shows that you have been healed. The gardener carries his wounds, you carry your wounds, but you also have them healed as a testimony of his grace.

So as we close, I wanna say what we've seen today, we're gonna cover a little bit more of this next week.

You can think about the tomb of Christ as the womb of new creation. The tomb is the womb of new creation.

Mary came to the tomb in the dark, expecting to find a corpse. What she found was the gardener who would remake the world.

The new Adam was standing in the garden at the dawn of a brand new world with an eighth day sunrise on his face, carrying the wounds that no longer bleed and a body that can no longer die, bringing new creation air into his own lungs, breathing new creation life into his own people, not just another day, but a new day where dead men come back to life and never die again.

And that is what I want you to remember and that is what Easter is all about because if you do not know

Christ, he is the author of life. He is the one who can breathe life into you and make the dead live again.

He's the one who, when he comes out of the tomb, leaves the burial clothes behind so that he never faces death again.

So if you do not know Christ, if you are worried that somehow you have been apart from Christ, turn to him because he's the only one who can give you life.

And also, for all of us who know Christ, do not become comfortable and complacent with this message.

This message is so utterly revolutionary that to ever yawn at it would be a greater tragedy than spitting on the

Mona Lisa. This truth that you were dead and now you're alive and not like Lazarus alive, you're alive like Christ is alive because you'll never die again.

That truth needs to work its way down into your toes. Why? Because it affects how we live.

If I've been made alive by Christ, I have more gratitude than I could ever dare imagine.

If I've been made alive by Christ, my bad day is nothing compared to the glory that's gonna be revealed.

If Christ has made me alive, then any threat of death, I can laugh at it.

We don't act like that. We don't live like that. But if someone came to you today and said, deny

Christ or die, and they held the gun to your head, you can say, I will not because death has no power over me.

Though you kill me, I will live. You have no reason to fear because you've been given everything.

Brother and sister, don't let that truth grow stale in you. Cultivate it, think about it, meditate on it, bring it into every second of your day.

You are new creations. And what we'll look at next week is you've been assigned by Jesus as his subcontractors to bring the garden to the world.

So let's pray. The tomb was empty and life came out.

The morning was dark and light burst forth. And not as a spectacle of what one man could do who was faithful.

We do not believe in a salvation of one, a rescue of one, a resurrection of one.

We believe that Jesus was the first fruit who will bring forth many brothers and sisters and sons and daughters, who will bear fruit, some 30, some 60, some a hundredfold.

For all of us who have been plunged into Jesus's tomb and thrown down upon that mercy seat where those cherubs said welcome and have risen with him in life.

Lord God, please let us not be complacent of what that means and let us live differently.

Help us to leave our old creation patterns, our old creation attitudes, our old creation talk, our old creation ways, and help us to live as who we are.

The greatest hypocrisy is a worldly Christian because we've been set free from the world and set free from death and given new life.

Lord, help us to live that way. Help us to mortify the things that displease you. Help us to live and bear fruit and be pruned by you so that we can bear even more fruit because that is what you came to do.

You did not come to merely save souls and zap them out of here.

You came to reclaim entire bodies and to make them fruitful and to multiply them.

And so the entire world is teeming with your life for your glory, for your honor, for your name.

And Lord, let us remember that you've called us to be a part of it. We're not sideline Christians. Help us to get into the game and to be grateful and to be faithful.