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The End of Evil?

03/23/2008 - The Death of Evil, Selected Scripture

He is risen! He is risen indeed! Good morning and welcome to the Easter celebration of Valley View Community Church! Today we join Christ followers all over the world to celebrate and rejoice that the tomb is empty, Jesus is alive, and the death of evil has begun! This is a great day!

Easter is about the resurrection of Jesus Christ who was miraculously raised to life from the dead. But it's more than that. Unlike Christmas, Easter is not just an historical event that we celebrate.

Easter is about the resurrection to life someday of all those who believe that Jesus is the rescuer, the savior of this world, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. What happened to Jesus 2,000 years ago will one day happen to us. That's the hope we cherish as Christ followers. But it's more than that. It's not just about a personal event that we look forward to in the future, as great and as glorious as that will be.

Easter is about the resurrection of this entire universe that one day will be delivered from the bondage of sin and suffering and sickness and death and poverty and pollution and hatred and war and global warming and AIDS and racism and injustice and tornados and tsunamis and terrorism and random acts of violence and all the other headlines that are the result of evil in this world. But it's even more than that.

Easter is about the fact that this new creation, this new world that God has promised to reclaim, to redeem, to restore ever since evil entered into the garden has already begun. It's not a hope we have way out there somewhere. It is happening right now. And Easter is the proof of that.

The beginning of that new creation exploded onto a stunned and unsuspecting world when Jesus emerged from the tomb in a body every bit as physical as yours and mine and yet so much more than yours and mine. The resurrected Jesus is the prototype, the first fruits of a whole new creation, alive with life that can no longer be assaulted by evil and disease and death. And that's the best news this old world has ever heard.

Easter is about something that happened in history that has forever changed God's creation. The dawn of a new day that announces the end of evil, the death of evil, began when life burst out of a cave on that first resurrection Sunday. The kingdom of God appeared on earth as it is in heaven when Jesus rose from the dead in a body that was off limits to evil. And now we're all invited to be part of that kingdom and to experience that new creation for ourselves.

If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old is gone, the new is here! 2 Corinthians 5:17

I want to talk this morning about the implications of Easter for our bodies, for our world, and for our everyday life. The body that Jesus received at his resurrection is the same body that we'll receive when we're resurrected some day. A new body equipped to live in a new world. A physical body, outfitted to live in a physical world. A body of flesh and bones that can be touched and handled, that can walk and talk, and enjoy a good meal with friends. That's the new body Jesus had.

After his resurrection Jesus said to his disciples in Luke 24:39-43, Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have... ⁴¹Do you have anything here to eat?" ⁴²They gave him a piece of broiled fish, ⁴³and he took it and ate it in their presence.

Jesus had a physical body after his resurrection. He was not a ghost. In fact, his body even bore the wounds of the cross in his hands and in his feet and in his side.

But his resurrected body was also a glorified body, an immortal body that could pass through locked doors, appear and disappear, and even float up into the sky.

Acts 1:9-11 describes that event called the ascension of Jesus which took place forty days after his resurrection, After Jesus said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight. ¹⁰They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. ¹¹"Men of Galilee," they said, "why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who was taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven."

The physical, resurrected body of Jesus was able was to float above the earth and enter into that other dimension called "heaven", which by the way is not high up in the sky, but is right here all around us.

You may never have thought about Jesus this way. It's easy for us to think that when Jesus was in heaven he was God and when he came to earth he became a man and stopped being God, but when he went back to heaven he became God again. But when Jesus was on earth he didn't stop being God. And now that he's in heaven he hasn't stopped being human. Only now he lives in a resurrected body.

And what does all this have to do with us? Everything. Because that's the kind of body we all will need to live in the kingdom of God when heaven finally appears on this earth. If we're going to enter that place where evil is not permitted to go we will need a body that cannot die just like Jesus body.

That's Paul's point in 1 Corinthians 15. Listen as I read what he writes in verses 50-57, I declare to you, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God (that's the body we have now), nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. ⁵¹Listen, I tell you a mystery. We will not all sleep (which is Paul's way of saying 'we will not all die'), but we will all be changed - ⁵²in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. ⁵³For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. ⁵⁴When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory." ⁵⁵"Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death is your sting?" ⁵⁶The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. ⁵⁷But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

When Jesus returns and the kingdom of God appears on this earth there will be no more death. Death, the corruption and decay of God's good creation, the ultimate blasphemy, the great intruder, the final satanic weapon, will be defeated once and for all.

The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

1 Corinthians 15:26

So we can't enter God's kingdom in a body like this because our bodies die. We will all need a new body that cannot die, a non-perishable, immortal, glorified, physical, resurrected body just like Jesus had. And if you're a believer in him, that body will be yours one day.

Easter has implications for our bodies. Easter has implications for our world. Not only will our bodies be made new one day, but this whole world will be made new, released finally and forever from its own death and decay.

Romans 8 connects the resurrection of Jesus with the resurrection of the whole created universe better than any other passage in the Bible. Listen to what Paul says in Romans 8.

Romans 8:11, 18-25, And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you... ¹⁸I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. ¹⁹The creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. ²⁰For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope ²¹that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. ²²We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. ²³Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption, the redemption of our bodies. ²⁴For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? ²⁵But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

All of creation, Paul says, is on tip toe waiting patiently for the same thing we're waiting for, to be delivered from the suffering and frustration of evil. Like the groaning of a pregnant woman ready to deliver her baby, creation is longing to deliver her new baby, a new world liberated from bondage to decay. And that baby will come when the children of God are revealed at our

resurrection when Christ returns. And when that happens, the sufferings of this life and of this world will be forgotten because they can't compare with the glory that will be revealed in us.

Tornados and tsunamis, hurricanes and earthquakes, famines and floods are all the groanings of creation. We see it every fall. Trees alive with fruit and color lose their leaves and look barren and dead. Summer reaches its peak and then the days start to shorten again. Lives full of promise and beauty, laughter and love, are cut short by illness and death. And we groan. When will it end? Creation as beautiful as it is, reminds us every single day that it's in bondage to evil and longs to be set free.

About all this theologian N. T. Wright says, "The renewal of creation, the birth of the new world from the laboring womb of the old, will demonstrate that God is in the right. Romans 8, is the deepest New Testament answer to the 'problem of evil,' to the question of God's justice. And it is all accomplished according to the pattern of the exodus, of the freeing of the slaves, of the cross and the resurrection, of the powerful new life of the Spirit.

"The New Testament invites us to imagine this new world as a beautiful, healing community; to envision it as a world vibrant with life and energy, incorruptible, beyond the reach of death and decay; to hold in our mind's eye as a world reborn, set free from the slavery of corruption, free to be truly what it was made to be.

"The truly remarkable thing Paul is talking about here is an incorruptible, unkillable physical world. New creation is what matters, a new kind of world with a new kind of physicality, which will not need to decay and die, which will not be subject to the seasons and the endless sequence of deaths and births within the natural order.

"It will be a world which will be more physical, more solid, more utterly real, a world in which the physical reality will wear its deepest meanings on its face, a world filled with the knowledge of God's glory as the waters cover the sea."

That's what the great prophet Isaiah envisioned when he wrote this in Isaiah 11:9, They will never harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

We're all waiting for the day when we can finally turn on the news at night and it's all good. We're all waiting for the day when the problems that stress us out during the day and rob us of sleep at night are finally gone. We're all waiting for the day when the death of evil will come. That's the groaning we feel and all creation feels it too. And that day will come when God does for the whole cosmos what he did for Jesus at Easter.

Easter has implications for our bodies. Easter has implications for our world. And Easter has implications for how we live every single day. Easter is what gives us a mission in life. Easter is why we can all live for something greater than ourselves.

This new creation, this dream of God, has already begun and we're invited to belong to it, to play a part in it, to make it happen in this world. Belonging to it begins when we believe, believe that God is God, that Jesus is Lord, that the powers of evil and death and decay have been defeated, and that God's new creation has already begun. Faith is Jesus is the first step. If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old is gone, the new is here!

Easter is not the end of the story. Easter is the beginning of the story. None of the gospels end with the resurrection. The resurrection is the launching pad for the job we have to do. You will be my witnesses, Jesus said, in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. That's us today, witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus Christ and what he's done and is doing in our lives and what he's doing and will do in this world.

We are Easter people invited to live resurrected lives right now, called to implement the victory of Jesus while we patiently wait with anticipation for the coming of God's new world. And we implement it everyday by being light in this world and by pushing back the darkness of evil any and everyway we can.

I think it is interesting that at the end of Paul's great chapter on the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 he doesn't close by saying, "Now that you know what's coming and how the story ends, sit back and relax and wait until Jesus returns."

No, instead he says get busy we've got work to do. He puts it like this in 1 Corinthians 15:58, Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.

What we do right now, right in this present time - painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, raising children, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, donating clothes and books and computers, making build-a-bears for cancer patients at Children's Hospital, loving our neighbors as ourselves, making the world a better place, all of it, will follow us into God's future. Nothing is wasted. And it's all because Jesus is risen from the dead and the death of evil has begun.

For a long time I thought that the resurrection was God's reward to Jesus for a job well done, and it was that, or proof that Jesus was more than a carpenter and it was that. But Easter is more than that, much more than that. The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead was absolutely necessary for the death of evil to be accomplished. It changes everything, our bodies, our world, and our every day lives.

1 Corinthians 15:17-20, 57, If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. ¹⁸Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. ¹⁹If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all others. ²⁰But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep ... ⁵⁷Thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

FOR MORE INFORMATION about Valley View Community Church, feel free to contact us at info@valleyviewseek.org or call 610.631.2707.