Dead and Gone
What a waste of time our faith is as Christians. And what a bunch of liars we are to say that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead. At least that’s what the apostle Paul tells us in the fifteenth chapter of his first letter to the church at Corinth.
If Easter never was, if there was no resurrection, the foundation of the Christian faith is no better than that house of which Jesus spoke that was built upon the sand. Like the sandcastles I often see children making on our nearby beaches, the rising tides of history will wash it all away.
But that’s not all. As we have noted in our last two devotionals, there are at least five consequences for us as followers and believers in Jesus if Christ neither died for our sins nor was raised from the dead.
Today, we consider the third consequence, which in many ways is the most devastating and disheartening of all because if Christ was not raised from the dead, then . . .
The dead are dead and gone forever.
Gone. Dust to dust. Ashes to ashes.
That godly grandparent whose funeral you attended and of whom the preacher said such nice things, best of all, that someday you would see her again. Not going to happen.
Your mother and father, who faithfully carried you to church and encouraged you to trust Christ, well, you can forget seeing them too. They’re gone. They’re not coming back. Stop wasting your time believing in something that is never going to happen.
I remember when my mother passed. She and my younger sister, and I might add the youngest and only girl among three boys, were very close. Mom was struggling against the inevitable. She had a cancerous tumor on her sternum and a heart condition as well. To treat one problem only served to undermine what was being done to help the other. On top of this, my father’s dementia, for which my mother had been covering, was becoming more obvious to all of us. The last thing mom wanted to do was leave my dad.
That’s why when my sister leaned over and gently placed her hand on mom’s shoulder while whispering to her, “It’s okay, you can let go.” my mother responded with a ferocity we had never witnessed before. But we quickly came to understand why after she passed. Dad went over the deep end both mentally and physically and followed mom eight months later.
I tell this story and the struggles I faced during and immediately after my parents passed in my book Masterpiece in the Making. It was a time when I struggled with my faith in ways I’d never done before. But when everything was said and done, I came out the other side with a living hope and an assurance that because of my faith in Christ, I would one day see both my parents again, and in that day, we would all be whole and complete. Faith would become sight, and all eternity would lie before us.
In Christ, you and I have a living hope. That’s what the apostle Peter calls it. He tells us that that hope comes to us “through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”
I’m betting my life and future on that hope. I trust you are as well.
In Christ,
Dan
P.S. I just realized this post was unintentionally scheduled on my mother’s birthday.