Resurrection Faith
1 Corinthians 15:19
If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.
A friend from many years ago quipped,
“There’s nothing that would enter the new creation apart from the resurrection.”
Little did I appreciate the saying then, though it grew on me. For a long time of my Christian life, the resurrection has been a little more than an article of faith, a subscribed proposition, and yet impacting little on my personal life and ministry. By God’s grace, it is a truth that I have grown to appreciate over the years.
A world-view without the resurrection, would approximate what Charles Taylor termed as the “immanent frame”.
The digital media we imbibe and inhabit, would constantly preach that what truly matters occurs only between birth and death. Nothing transcends this life, and hence death. Hence, extreme angst and hopelessness are reasonable in face of the current injustice.
To be sure, cover-ups of abuses ought to ignite our ire, but the immanent frame has no category for a final justice and vindication on the day of general resurrection. Our technological age preaches that no problem, whether that of infertility, or gender dysphoria, or mental health, cannot be fixed now or near future via technique.
And even for professing Christians who recite the Creed that we believe “in the resurrection of the body, and life-everlasting”, it is far too commonplace for us to find our vindication and justification now, whether in visible ministry success or our career advancements. When everything that truly matters is only in the here and now, it is inevitable then that suffering becomes insufferable.
There is no better antidote for us inflicted by the immanent frame, than a meditation upon the doctrine of the resurrection, of Christ’s and ours.
Resurrection faith is a necessity in our present age.
Indeed, with a resurrection faith, where our vindication lies in hope beyond death, we can practice mercy and kindness to others without expectations of a present reward. The giving up of selfish pleasures to serve others would make sense. There is a future reward and joy that we anticipate. We can afford to forgive our enemies now, because we believe in a day when justice would be finally done. There is an escape from envy, like Asaph in Psalm 73, who was trapped in the sin of envy within a version of the immanent frame. His only escape, to which his pious cry of Psalm 73:25-26 points to, would be that of a resurrection hope. A hope secured by our Saviour one Sunday morning two thousand years ago.
I confess as a church planter that my regular proneness to sin happens most on Sunday mornings, when I tend to find justification and vindication in my ministry—whether in numbers or the praise of the people. This means that depending on the visible circumstances, I can be prone to either pride or discouragement. I need a resurrection faith, ironically most, when I preach it.
A resurrection faith tells me that I’m not measured ultimately by what happened between my birth and my death.
Rather, my true comfort in life and death is that Christ has made me his own through his life, death, and resurrection.
My resurrection hope lies only in Him, and all other saviours are literal dead ends. May the hope of seeing Christ face to face, in bodily resurrection from the dead, enables our current ministry, relativizes our present sufferings, and by some measure, escape the oppression of the immanent frame.
