Hope for the Dead

What is the connection between personal freedom and rising from the dead?

When America was in its infancy and struggling to find a culture and frustrated at governance from Great Britain, the word most frequently uttered in speeches and pamphlets and editorials was not “safety” or “taxes” or “peace”; it was “freedom.” Two acts of Parliament broke the bonds with the mother country irreparably.

The first was the Stamp Act, which was enforced by British soldiers who used general search warrants issued by a secret court in London to rummage through the personal possessions of any colonists they chose, ostensibly looking to see whether they had purchased the government’s stamps.Jesus had the freedom to reject this horrific event, but He exercised His free will so that we might know the truth. The truth is that He would rise from the dead.

On Easter, three days after He died, that manifestation was completed when He did rise from the dead. By doing that, He demonstrated to us that while living, we can liberate our souls from the slavery of sin and our free will from the oppression of the government; and after death, we can rise to be with Him.

Easter — which manifests our own immortality — is the linchpin of human existence. With it, life is worth living, no matter its costs or pains. Without it, life is meaningless, no matter its fleeting joys or triumphs. Easter has a meaning that is both incomprehensible and simple. It is incomprehensible that a human being had the freedom to rise from the dead. It is simple because that human being was and is God.

Jesus is the hypostatic union — not half God and half man and not just a godly good man but truly and fully God and, at the same time, truly and fully man. When the Roman government killed the man Jesus, it killed God. When the man Jesus rose from His tomb, God rose from the dead.

What does Easter mean? Easter means that there’s hope for the dead. If there’s hope for the dead, there’s hope for the living. But like the colonists who fought the oppression of the king, we the living can only achieve our hopes if we have freedom. And that requires a government that protects freedom, not one that assaults it.

Happy Easter.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

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