Victor over death and the grave, O that
our hearts and voices could be worthily blended
in the praise of thy love and omnipotence,
which on this Easter day burst the bonds
of death who brought life and immortality to
light.
Accept, we humbly, and treat thee our human,
halting thanks, that thou, our God and Savior,
who was in the repose of the sealed
and rocky sepulchre, didst on the third day
crush sin, hell, and death into everlasting defeat.
Teach us to face life and death alike
with a courageous assurance that we are thine,
so that not even the last enemy death
and the gruesomeness of the grave can rob
us of the calm hope of the resurrection.
Bless this message, especially in hearts and homes
that have been chilled by cold death, and
as the Spirit illuminates doubting minds, may we,
all doubts and questioning banished, our sins forever
removed, be given the grace and the wisdom
to kneel before thee, our Savior of the
riven side and the wounded hand, and to
confess thee our Lord, our God, our life,
our salvation.
On this glorious Easter day, as we stand
in spirit before the Savior's open grave, let
us ask ourselves frankly, what is it that
magnetizes the faith of Christian hearts all over
the world today and draws them to this
broken sepulchre?
History knows far more pretentious burial places than
Joseph's grave, where the lifeless body of the
Savior was laid to its repose.
Recent excavations have uncovered the extended tombs of
the Sumerian kings in Ur of the Chaldees.
In Egypt, the tomb of Tutankhamen, with its
lavish wealth and its artistic adornment, has impressed
even our age.
In the Red Square at Moscow, the remains
of the red dictator Lenin, preserved by a
mysterious process, are regarded with an admiration that
approaches worship.
But even the site of our Savior's grave
is not definitely known.
Mohammedans heckle Christian missionaries with the challenge, we
have the tomb of our great prophet Mohammed
here in Medina.
Why, you Christians have nothing.
But at Easter we have everything.
While all of the tombs are evidences of
death and decay, Christ's tomb alone is the
evidence of life.
We hear the angel challenge, why seek he
the living among the dead?
And we recall the burial places enshrined in
the grateful memory of the nation's Flanders fields,
where poppies grow between the crosses, row on
row.
We think of the sepulchres of other distinguished
leaders and statesmen, all of which commemorate brilliant
or generous lives that run their course only
to end in inevitable death.
But our Savior's grave offers life, hope, and
blessing, even though we may never be able
to mark the garden grave of our Lord.
The reality of his resurrection must be a
strong and vital power in our faith and
lives.
Even though the ranks of 20th century scoffers
are daily swollen by those who demand, where
is the proof of the next life, the
evidence of the resurrection?
We must cling to the Easter pledge of
heaven, and as we approach our risen Savior,
the blood and agony and the death of
Calvary forever overcome, acclaim him the living Christ.
To strengthen our faith and remove all distrust
of the resurrection message, let us concentrate our
thoughts of in this festival broadcast on our
Easter assurance and taking the words of Saint
Paul, 1 Corinthians chapter 6 verse 14, God
hath both raised up the Lord and will
also raise up us by his own power.
Find faith and hope in the Savior's resurrection
and in our eternal Easter with him.
First of all, let us impress this conviction
deeply in our minds.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ rests on fact
as well as on faith.
Repeatedly do Old Testament passages foretell his resurrection.
Emphatically did Jesus himself, before he went the
way of the cross, tell his friends and
his enemies that on the third day after
his crucifixion he would rise from the dead.
Six different and independent accounts, one in each
of the four gospels, one in the book
of Acts, and one from the pen of
Saint Paul, recount his triumph over death.
Scores of passages in the remainder of the
New Testament speak of the Savior's resurrection with
a clarity that tolerates no uncertainty.
Do you know any other fact in the
history of the first century that has as
much support as the resurrection of Christ?
If the Easter record is not in every
claim the account of history, if the statements
of those who testified to the Easter truth
are not accepted as conclusive evidence, then no
testimony and no evidence whatever can establish any
truth in any age of history.
The proof that God hath raised up the
Lord comes to us from other convincing sources.
What was it that took the first company
of the disciples, cowering as they did behind
the locked doors, and transformed them into a
band of confident champions of their crucified Lord,
not a dead Savior, but a living, conquering
Christ?
What power and influence changed the cross from
an instrument of bloody torture to the most
beloved of all symbols?
Uncounted thousands had been crucified before the day
of our Savior, and you know that if
he had not risen from the dead, no
right-minded person would have glorified anything as
hideous and repulsive as that timber and cross
being stained with the Savior's blood.
What gave the great army of Christian martyrs
and missionaries the love, the power to face
death, to penetrate poisonous jungles, to cross barren
deserts, to hasten to the ends of the
earth in their zeal for winning disciples for
their Savior?
Only blind fanaticism could lead them to serve
a dead Lord whose resurrection promises had failed
and whose body had molded in the grave.
There is no fanaticism in our faith.
We have the eternal facts, the everlasting truth
of the Savior's conquest of death, in every
hope that we breathe, with every conviction that
we utter, in every article of the faith
that we confess.
Jesus had to rise again, and by this
miracle of all miracles, place the seal of
assurance upon the forgiveness of our sins.
For a dead Christ could be no Savior.
An unopened grave would mean an unopened heaven.
By bursting the bonds of the tomb, Jesus
proved himself for all men and for all
ages the conqueror of sin and showed the
everlasting validity of his atonement.
The sacrifice on Calvary had fulfilled its purpose.
The ransom price paid for your sins and
mine had been accepted.
No wonder that great men of God have
found their highest comfort in this Easter assurance.
God hath raised up the Lord.
Luther would dispel all despondency with the one
word, vivid, the Latin for he lives.
Many times he seized a piece of chalk
and wrote this vivid on his study table
or voiced it in triumph.
When asked for an explanation, he answered, Jesus
lives, and if he were not among the
living, I would not wish to live a
single hour.
Let us all try with the Spirit's help
to engrave this Easter truth, he lives, into
our hearts.
For if we remove the resurrection reality from
our Christian faith, we have less hope than
the heathens.
While with the blessing of Easter faith, we
have the living Christ, his sustaining companionship, his
guiding help, his burden-sharing presence, his never
-failing leadership, his divine counsel, and above all
this, his eternal salvation, his everlasting atonement, his
never-ending redemption.
With faith in Christ's resurrection, our text offers
us this pledge, God will also raise up
us by his own power.
The open grave becomes the pledge of our
immortality, the Savior's resurrected body, the promise of
our glorified bodies, the Easter cry, O death,
where is thy sting?
The echo of our own triumph, O grave,
where is thy victory?
With faith in the Easter morning greeting, he
is not here, he is risen, the great
problem of the human soul and its destiny,
that ageless perplexity which has baffled the choicest
mind, brings a blessed and personal solution for
every one of us.
At the empty tomb we learn that the
one short, perplexing life which is ours does
not complete our destiny, that the grave is
not a last and futile chapter in our
life's history, that we are not human bundles
of cellular matter consigned to decay.
With the great stone rolled from the entrance
of the Savior's rock-hewn grave, every doubt
and obstacle concerning our own eternity is removed,
and as the promises of God in Christ
push aside the draperies concealing the hereafter, we
must catch a foregleam of a new and
blessed existence that starts when this life stops.
We must discover a pre-vision of a
heavenly glorified body.
Only in the power of Christ's resurrection can
we gain strength and assurance for our eternal
Easter.
Men may dream dreams of a hereafter and
draw pretty pictures of life to come, but
our resurrection reality must be woven of firmer
textures.
Ask the botanist and he will point you
to the lily which in its white beauty
has become the flower of the Easter festival.
Its bulb lies buried and unseen in the
black ground until by the mysterious force of
life a shaft of green breaks through the
earth and as the sun smiles in its
warming rays the tender stalk grows in height
and strength.
A cluster of buds appears and then a
lily in all its fairness and fragrance.
So we are told the grave becomes the
garden of God's new creation.
The lifeless body reposes in its dark embrace.
It decays, yet by the power of God
a new body, pure and sinless, arises.
Ask the naturalist and he will offer a
picture of the resurrection in the spring and
autumnal migration of the bird.
He will show you winged creatures that fly
7,000 miles from the Yukon Valley to
southern Argentina guided by their instinct and he
will conclude that an inborn sense of immortality
must irresistibly summon man to seek and find
his everlasting home in a better and happier
land.
He will tell you that we are all
like the homing pigeon and that when we
are released we shall fly back to the
God whose love created us.
The philosopher has a dozen different arguments for
life after death.
He believes that death cannot end all because
our lives are so incomplete and unfinished that
there must be a continuation just as he
insists.
There must be a reward or retribution in
the next world by which all the injustice
and unfairness of life can be adjusted.
Its wrongs righted, its losses compensated, its sins
atoned.
We need not argue the reality of our
resurrection on these grounds, nor rest our hope
for a reunion with those who have gone
before us in the faith, on the reawakening
of nature, or on the claims that the
higher forces which created man could not brutally
destroy him forever.
Others may question the resurrection, argue its probability,
and debate its verity.
But in the words of Jesus, we have
surety, conviction, truth.
When our perfect and unfailing Lord promises, he
that believeth in me, though he were dead,
yet shall he live.
When he adds certainty to certainty by repeating,
because I live, ye shall live also.
Where I am, there shall also my servant
be.
If a man keep my saying, he shall
never see death.
The issue is closed.
The immortality of the soul is not a
matter of speculation and guess and conjecture.
It is the unchangeable truth of God himself
bestowed through the only sure antidote to death,
the blood of Jesus Christ, which forever removes
the cause of death, the sin that would
separate us from the Father.
Oh, we must cling to this doctrine of
our resurrection, even though its promises seem far
too merciful for our sin-bound lives.
When Dr. Morrison was translating the Bible into
Chinese, and he came upon the passage, we
shall be like him, for we shall see
him as he is.
One of his assistants, a native scholar, exclaimed,
oh, my people can never believe that they
shall see their Savior and their God face
to face.
Let me rather translate, for we may hope
to kiss his feet.
But Dr. Morrison replied, give the word of
God as it is, and when we take
God at his promises and penitently trust in
our Savior's love, all the sin and selfishness
that would tear us away from God vanishes,
and unworthy, unholy, unhappy as we may be,
we are blessed by the promise that we
shall see him as he is.
Many of you sang at your Easter services,
in one of the last stanzas of the
hymn, I know that my Redeemer lives, these
reassuring lines, he lives and grants me daily
breath, he lives and I shall conquer death,
he lives my mansions to prepare, he lives
to bring me safely there.
Do you know that Samuel Medley, who wrote
these lines, was converted to the faith from
a wild and dissolute life, and that overcoming
sin, he could die in the hope of
his Easter hymn, and on his deathbed declare,
I am a poor shattered bark, just about
to gain the blissful harbor, and oh how
sweet will be the port after the storm,
dying is sweet, sweet work, my Heavenly Father,
I am looking to my dear Jesus, my
God, my portion, my all in all, so
in the radiance of the Easter mercy, and
in the power of the resurrection glory, may
the Spirit of God bring into your penitent
believing hearts, the assurance that since Jesus was
delivered for our offenses, and raised again for
our justification, the gift of God is eternal
life.
We must build our hopes on the reality
of the resurrection, even though the human mind
staggers, when it is asked to believe that
the body returned to the dust whence it
sprang, can be revived and rebuilt, that our
human frame with all its blemishes and imperfections,
can be molded in a new and perfect
form.
One day in the laboratory of Michael Faraday,
the great chemist, a workman accidentally knocked a
silver cup into a jar of acid.
The cup was consumed by the powerful solution.
When Faraday, that stalwart confessor of Christ, heard
of the disappearance of the cup, he threw
some chemicals into the acid, and soon the
dissolved particles of silver were precipitated.
The metal was reclaimed, sent to a silversmith,
and recast into a graceful cup.
Does not the inference suggest itself, that if
a chemist can perform this reconstruction, surely the
Almighty God can gather the particles of our
body, though they be scattered to the four
winds, and change that which is shown a
natural body into a spiritual body?
And if you tell me that this is
only an analogy, then I point you to
those resurrection miracles, which prove the power of
God, not only the reawakening of Jairus' daughter,
not only the restored life of the widow's
son at Nahum, not only the resurrection of
Lazarus after decomposition had started, but on Easter
particularly to the triumph of our Savior and
his victorious promise, because I live, ye shall
live also.
Unless we believe unquestioningly and unhesitatingly that through
the Savior's resurrection, life and eternity are ours,
we have no guidepost to lead us through
the maze of life.
In the catacombs at Rome, the burial places
of the pagan dead and of the early
Christians are marked by a notable contrast.
The heathen graves are inscribed with dedication to
the gods of the lower world, and sometimes
they abound in sarcasm and resentment.
Death is often pictured as an eternal sleep
or an unhappy existence of gloom and hopelessness,
but the favorite expression on the Christian graves
are he rests in peace or he lives
forever, or weep not, my child, death is
not eternal.
On the epitaphs of those who were ready
to lay down their lives for the faith,
we find the sustaining power for the sorrow
of death in our own family and in
our own life.
Easter gives comfort particularly for those whose heart
aches under recent bereavement.
Self-confident men and women who accept the
doctrine of resurrection sometimes question it when death
touches their own home, but may God give
to you all through the risen Christ the
faith that is fitted for these crucial tests.
May he lead every one of you, and
especially those who are ready to charge God
with heartlessness, to stand at the open grave
and hear the promise, God will also raise
up us by his power.
When the armies of Napoleon swept over Europe,
one of his generals made a surprise attack
on the little town of Selkirk on the
Austrian border.
It was Easter, and as the formidable French
army maneuvered on the heights above Selkirk, the
council of its citizens was hastily summoned to
deliberate upon the alternative of surrender or defense.
It was in this assembly that the venerable
dean of the church arose to declare, this
is Easter day.
We have been counting on our own strength
and it will fail.
This is the day of the Lord's resurrection.
Let us ring the bells and have services
as usual and leave the matter in God's
hands.
We know only our weakness and not the
power of God.
His counsel was accepted, and in a moment
or two the church belfry chimed with the
joyous bells announcing the Savior's resurrection.
The enemy, hearing the sudden peal, concluded that
the Austrian army had arrived during the night.
The enemy broke up camp, and before the
Easter bells had ceased, the danger had been
lifted.
Oh, let the joy of Easter ring in
your heart and all the doubt and gloom
that surrounds you, ready to despoil your life
and crush your hopes forever, will similarly vanish.
God grant every one of us in this
wide Easter congregation of the air the faith
and the victory that will unite us through
the blessing of these resurrection realities in the
eternal mansions prepared for us by him who
lived for us, who died for us, but
on that first Easter day arose again for
us.
Amen.