When you die! (5)

The Bible says, “Inasmuch…as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death…the devil, and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage” (vv. 14-15 NKJV). Theologian Adolf von Harnack said this: “Christ’s grave was the birthplace of an indestructible belief that death is vanquished and there is life eternal. It is useless to cite Plato…useless to point to the Persian religion and the ideas and literature of later Judaism. All that would have perished; but the certainty of the resurrection and of a life eternal which is bound up with the grave in Joseph’s garden has not perished; and on the conviction that Jesus lives we still base those hopes of citizenship in an Eternal City, which make our earthly life worth living and tolerable. He delivered them ‘who, through fear of death, were all their lifetime subject to bondage.’” Good news: you don’t have to be in bondage to the fear of death! Dr. Simon Greenleaf, the Royal Professor of Law at Harvard, one of the world’s greatest authorities on legal evidence, shone the searchlight of his immense knowledge on the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ and revealed every thread of that evidence to the most probing critique. And when he did, he concluded that the evidence was so tremendous that in any unbiased courtroom on earth, it would be proclaimed a historical fact. So what does all this mean for us as believers? Simply this: Christ’s resurrection guarantees ours!