ABOUT THE RESURRECTION

Belief in resurrection is imperative; without the understanding that you can live forever, Christianity is meaningless.

Trusting Jesus is part-one in a two-part event. To be born again there are two things in which a sinner must believe: (1) That Jesus is God in the flesh and has the Power of God, and (2) belief in the Resurrection.

The philosophers of Athens thought Paul and unusual fellow because “he preached unto them Jesus, and the resurrection” (Acts 17:18) That was indeed a strange teaching because they obviously believed in the man, Jesus, but not His Resurrection.

While many of the Greek gods were believed to be resurrected figures, the Greek philosophers did not believe in the Resurrection. They were the strange people of Athens. (MrMacSon 2018).

Paul was an odd fellow to them because he seemed to believe in the Greek gods, unlike the philosophers who trusted the philosophers. Even if Paul had believed in a god that was usual, but he believed in the resurrection.

Now examine the implications of that strange belief that even the Sadducees did not believe, to wit: testing Jesus, “the Sadducees, (which) say that there is no resurrection….” (Mat 22:23). The Sadducees believed in God but that’s it: 

  The Sadducees believed that God determined what was good and bad, and communicated this through the Torah. They believed that God was inactive in history and didn't care about people. (Cataliotti 2024)

 

What is a “god”? 

The being perfect in power, wisdom, and goodness who is worshipped (as in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism) as creator and ruler of the universe

Throughout the patristic and medieval periods, Christian theologians taught that God created the universe … (Merriam-Webster 2024) 

Note that through the Dark Ages, God was believed to have created the universe. Implied therein is that many in those religions deny that God created anything. Thus, by definition, the God of contemporary religions had no power, wisdom, nor goodness.

Many liberal Christians believe in God but do not believe that the cosmos was created. They believe in the fellow Jesus and even that He was good, but do not believe that He still lives. The popular notion in liberal Christianity is that there was no creator God and that even Jesus is dead. “Progressive” church denominations of this era trust philosophers and not God.

The Sadducees were not so unusual to the Greek philosophers; they could live with their belief. However, Paul was called a “babbler” whose religion was strange because he taught Jesus and the Resurrection.

Christians are still shunned by so many in society because we too are considered babblers of a strange religion.

To many, the idea of a creation is now strange. Are you aware that even the world’s leading scientists now refer to ontology of the universe as “creation”?  The word creation implies intelligence and power.

The cosmos does exist; does it not? It was erected by some Thing that we call “God” and who has power, wisdom, and goodness if we define goodness as the glorious, intrinsic design of the universe for the habitation of mankind!

Any fool can look out the window and see that there must be a god. That is the premise of about all religions. Paul spoke about that observation: “The invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead” (Rom 1:20).

The “Godhead” is the Person, Spirit, and Power of God. God is indeed a Supreme Being beyond our understanding, but some THING created that was omniscient. We call that Divine Being “God.” The ultimate ignorance is that some naïve people still believe, not in science, but alchemy wherein things come from nothing.

To be a theist, requires that things came from something. That is scientific as well; there must be a cause for every effect. To believe what you can clearly detect with your own senses came about without a cause is pure idiocy. The atheist may not be stupid, but naïve enough, to accept repetition as the truth. It has been said trillions of times that the universe is without a cause, and that for many, has become the truth.

That God is Truth implies that He is the science, and now the smartest scientists in the world believe in the creation.

That God is Light is evidence of that because light is truly a cloud that when divided into its parts, and when stopped, can be seen as either photon particles or waves of light that each reveal order by light’s frequency and wavelength. Light is evidence of intelligent design because when it is divided into its components, the cloud of light reveals order.

That is evidence of a God, and it does coincide with the science. I know very naïve people that still do not accept that as science because they have been taught that order happened by random chance.

Every wise person should believe in creation. That is now the science, and it was from the beginning. Even I, while in high school and college, was taught that was foolishness, but now it is the accepted science. Repetition did not make the deception the truth. Only really brainwashed people now think that all things just happened without a cause!

Creation is building things. From the Power of God came all things (John 1:1-3). God erected the universe. However, Paul taught Jesus and the Resurrection.

Jesus, laid in the tomb, and was re-erected. That He lay dead-still on a stone would not be proof that He is God. God did the erection, as I have shown. Jesus experienced the Power of God when He was re-erected, having once walked erect. The word, “resurrection” in the Greek is “anastasis.”

The root words for that, Ana means “up again” and histanai “to cause to be upright, or firm” (Harper 2001-2023).  It was not just a mechanical thing wherein Jesus was raised up but that He was made firm again. He was re-erected because He was indeed God. His death and resurrection proved that Jesus is God!

Many miss an important point about the Resurrection of Jesus. He was raised from the dead (Acts 3:15). That was what Paul was talking about as well. The Greek word for “raised” is literally “assembled.” He was assembled from a non-firm spirit and a firm person.

God not only created all things; He assembled them to working order. He gave life even to the planetary objects and even black holes where objects are turned into energy and then re-erected as masses. The cosmos reveals the resurrection in black holes and the James Watt Space Telescope saw them in 2021.

Jesus was re-assembled in the tomb. He was not strictly made erect, but firm again as well. The Godhead includes God in different stasis (states): Spirit, Mass, and Power (Dynamics), all together as one God in homeostasis.

The point to the crucifixion of Jesus was to reveal the truth; that Jesus is God in the flesh. In a very Platonian manner, God made the “Shadow” (Image; Selem in the Hebrew) move independently of the object. The death of Jesus overcame the science that the shadow is a fragment of the object, not the object itself! Jesus cried out and “he gave up the ghost” (Luke 23:46). That was God’s proof that Jesus was who He said He was — God in the flesh.

The crucifixion dis-assembled God. The tomb re-assembled Him. How so? 

Behold, there was a great earthquake: for the Angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it. His countenance was like lightning, and His raiment white as snow. (Mat 28:2-3) 

The “angelos” of the Lord was an “heavenly spirit.” However, that specific Spirit was of it’s “kyrios” — its Owner.  That heavenly Spirit was the Holy Ghost that was gone from Jesus, returning to be re-assembled.

In science, there is a thermodynamic characteristic that is true for all things in the world — entropy. It is the science that any thermodynamic process once completed, cannot be reversed without the loss of energy.

The Holy Ghost had lost great Power (Virtue) to save mankind. The Godhead was re-assembled, and the Godhead afterward was identical to the Godhead before. There was no loss of entropy, again proving that Jesus overcame the world. He even said so, “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

God, in the beginning, created the world. He, in a sense, “cut the atom” (‘bara in the Hebrew means to cut) into sub-atomic particles that He re-assembled to make all things. Ironically, His project was named “Adam.”

God assembled the universe in the beginning after cutting the particles with great energy, or as the Bible says it, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters” (Gen 1:6). Then He did just that; He divided the “seminal fluids” containing “seminal particles”! Then God re-assembled them again, and said it was “good” (Gen 1:31).

The point with that background is that God did with Jesus what He had done with the Creation. He made all things from Himself in a sense, from His Power, and the death and Resurrection of Jesus is the repeat of that.

First God separated the waters from the waters, the blood of Jesus from the waters of Jesus, then God, at the Resurrection, returned the “Waters” (Living Water) to the belly of Jesus (the firm things).

Is it merely a coincidence that God proved that Jesus was God by a re-creation?

The Bible is a book of miracles. You may see them as coincidences but unlike repetitions, many “coincidences” is evidence of truth — that Jesus is who He said He was, and that He is God!

Paul taught on Jesus and the Resurrection because the Person of Jesus already re-erected was the evidence that Jesus was the “Unknown God” (Acts 17:23) to which they attributed all things.

Paul was preaching to them that Jesus is their unknown god, “and Him I declare to you.” His declaration was that mysterious Power that created all things were The Word, Jesus (John 1:1-14).

Even the demons believe in God. (Jas 2:19). Since atheists are even worse than demons, they should expect as bad an outcome — the total destruction of their souls.

Jesus went to Athens to make a point to the most intelligent of the time; that Jesus is the god who they were unwittingly teaching. That was of first importance. Of equal importance was the Resurrection wherein Jesus’s re-assembly without any losses did overcome the world; and that was enough evidence that He was their unknown god.

Jesus died, not only to save mankind, but to convince them that God is greater than the science. Paul was able to persuade the Greeks to accept Jesus as God because the evidence of the creation and re-creation overwhelmed any other idea. The Greeks understood that Jesus is God because although once dead, even taken apart, He was put back together again and was still the God of Creation.

People followed Moses, but always refused to follow God. The blood of Moses never changed anybody, but God changed Abram to Abraham, Sarai to Sarah, and Jacob to Israel.

Jesus changed the murderer Saul into the apostle Paul. God changed their countenances just as Yahweh had changed the countenances of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and even King David.

Paul taught two points to change philosophers into Christians; that Jesus was the unknown Creator God that they professed and not once dead; always dead.  

Jesus is the material Image of God, and the Resurrection proved that His “Shadow” was Yahweh Himself. That coincided with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in pursuit of the truth. They should have accepted Jesus and the Resurrection as adequate proof that the Object and its Shadow were one Divine Being.

So, you believe in God? Most do not! You must believe that Jesus is God; and that His Body was evidence of the Ghost within Him, as Paul said to the Romans.

Jesus was not just a man; He is the Immortal God and He proved that by re-assembling Himself in the same manner that Yahweh assembled the universe.  

Don’t call yourselves “Christians” unless you believe that God created all things, that Jesus was Him who created (John 1), and that it is God who can re-erect you in the end by re-assembling your body with your soul (1 Thes 4:16).