Tim Keller: Easter in a Year of Death
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Editor’s Note: This text has been edited for grammar and clarity.
This is the week leading up to Easter, and it's not like any holy week any of us alive today can remember. I'm in the middle of New York City, and every day this week I've talked to somebody who knew someone who has died. Yesterday I talked to the pastor of a seventh grader who had just died. Today I talked to somebody who knows of a third grader in Brooklyn who had just died, and of a young mother who was working at a hospital who also caught it and died, leaving behind three- and five-year-old children. I'm not trying to horrify you. I’m just telling you what I’ve seen in this Holy Week. Is Easter a match for this kind of darkness? Yes. Yes, and more.
I want to read to you the first time Easter was ever preached. It was on Pentecost, the very first day that the church received the Holy Spirit. Peter spoke, and it's the first sermon we have. It's the very beginning of the church, so of course the resurrection was preached. Here's what Peter said in Acts 2:22-24.
He said, “Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders, and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know. This man was handed over to you by God's deliberate plan and foreknowledge, and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him up from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.”
Notice three things in these verses. There’s a hidden plan, a broken power, and a champion.
Think of the sort of questions that get asked at a time like this. One of the questions is, “Where was God when all this happened? Why is God allowing this?” Another question is, “Why did God do this?” I get these questions from all sides. Notice that each of them assumes a model of a relationship of God to the world. If you say, “Where was God?” that assumes that God runs all the machinery and that he was asleep at the switch. He's off somewhere, meanwhile things are going wrong down here; He should have been more aware. Another question is “Why has God done this?” That assumes the puppet master idea of God. God is up there, and everything that happens is something that he is doing. He's moving us around like a puppet master moves puppets around.
But that's not what you see in this verse. Look at this. It says, “This man, Jesus Christ, was handed over to you by God's deliberate plan and foreknowledge.” Okay, that sounds like, “Oh, there's a plan.” It sounds like the puppet master. But then it says, “And you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.” Now, that's a fascinating paradox. We have a tendency to say, “Well, if God's in charge, if he's doing this, then we're not responsible. It's 100% God and 0% us.” Or we may say, “If we are responsible and our choices really are the thing that drives history, then God is away sort of watching us. He might intervene here or there, do a miracle, but basically it's 100% us and 0% God.” Or it's 100% God, or it's 0% us, or maybe it's 50-50. Maybe it's 80-20.
But that's not what it says here. It says on the one hand, it was absolutely certain that Jesus Christ was going to die on that cross. He's the center of the plan. It was the plan that he had to die on the cross. It had to happen, and yet everybody who did it was wicked. They're absolutely responsible, and yet God was completely in control. Which means that evil is the result of human actions, yet God is right in the midst of the action.
If you look at the cross, you can imagine people standing around the cross, looking up and saying, “I can't see how God could bring anything out of this that's good. God, either he's asleep at the switch or he's evil. This man was healing people, he was raising people from the dead, he could've saved us, he could've changed the world, and now this happened. Why would God allow such a thing?” But we know that God was in the midst. He was working out his plan, and he was actually bringing life out of death.
Let me give you another example of this. Habakkuk. Recently I've had a chance to look at Habakkuk. The prophet Habakkuk starts his prophecy by saying, “Lord,” he says, “look at Israel. It's falling apart. The people are worshiping idols. The rich are oppressing the poor. Everything's wrong in Israel. And now there's this Babylonian empire rising up, and it's a threat, and so ... do something.” What God says to Habakkuk is, “I am going to do something, but it's going to get way worse before it gets better. Those Babylonians are actually going to come, and they are going to wipe out Israel. Then they're going to take anyone who is left into exile.”
That is not what Habakkuk wanted to hear. When the Babylonians came, they killed and maimed people, and they took the rest of the Jews into exile in order to do cultural assimilation. They took them there in order to wipe out their cultural identity, so that in a couple of generations, they'd all think of themselves as just Babylonians. They were trying to destroy the Jewish nation.
The Jews must have thought “This is the end of the world. This is awful. This is terrible. There's no way God could bring any good out of this. He's abandoned us. What's happened here?” And yet we know from history that when they went to Babylon, they did not lose their cultural identity. They actually learned how to be a minority and keep their cultural identity, they invented the synagogue, and they reckoned with their sin in a way they wouldn't have otherwise.
God is always working out his plan. Elisabeth Elliot tells a story of visiting a British sheep farm one day when the shepherd was treating his flock for parasites. The way you did that was you herded them into a small enclosure, and then one by one, you picked up the sheep and you threw them into a vat filled with chemical disinfectant, and you held them under. The sheep must have felt they were drowning. Finally they were released, treated but very upset. What she wrote was, “What must the sheep have been thinking when all this was happening?” She said, “Probably the sheep, if they could think, they would've said, ‘I thought the shepherd cared. He's trying to kill me. What is he trying to do?’” On the other hand, of course, if the shepherd had not been doing that, and the sheep couldn't understand why, they would be dead, or they would certainly be miserable. Elisabeth Elliot said, “There's a plan, and the sheep can't see it. But we have a shepherd, and there's a plan.”
So there's a plan, even though it's hidden. I don't know what it is, and you don't either. And yet, the cross and the resurrection tell us that all things are working together for good, which means all things that God is working in the midst of is, in a sense, being taken up into that master narrative, that through death comes resurrection, and God has got a plan. So there's a plan, number one.
Number two, there's a broken power. What I love about the particular way that Peter talks about the resurrection is it says, “God raised him up from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.” The word “hold” is a word that actually means “grip.” Basically it means strength. Jesus Christ broke the strong grip of death. He broke its power.
There's a hymn that Kathy and I sang every Easter in our little church in Hopewell, Virginia for many years. We haven't really sung it much since. But Robert Lowry wrote a hymn called “Christ Arose.” The words of the hymn are exuberant. One of the lines goes like this. “Death cannot keep his prey, Jesus my Savior. He tore the bars away, Jesus my Lord.” What does that mean? It means, of course, that Jesus Christ broke the confinement of death. He broke the power of death. In what way? Well, the Bible tells us at least two ways, and it's good for us to think about them right now.
First, he broke the hold of death objectively. The reason he rose from the dead was because death no longer had any right over him, because he paid the penalty for sin. One of the ways you could think about this is if you commit a crime and the penalty for that crime is two years in prison, okay, because you committed that crime and that crime has not been paid for, prison has a hold on you. It has power over you. It will take you in, and you will stay in there, and you will not be able to get out because it's got power over you.
But on the last day, or on the first day of the third year, the prison cannot hold you, because the debt's been paid. Therefore it has no power over you. It cannot keep you one more minute. You are free. When Jesus Christ rose from the dead, that was God's way of saying not only has he paid the debt, but everyone who believes in him has had their debt wiped away, and therefore death cannot keep hold of you.
Death can take you physically, but it can take you spiritually as well. In Matthew 10:28 Jesus says, “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” There are two deaths. There's physical death and there's spiritual death, being separated from God forever, and that's the result of sin. The penalty sin is not just physical death. It's eternal death. But Jesus Christ has paid the penalty. So now that means not only has he broken the power of death objectively over you if you believe in him, but the resurrection means he's also broken the power of death subjectively, that is, the fear of death.
Ernest Becker, an atheist wrote a book back in the ‘70s. It's not very well remembered anymore. I refer to it all the time hoping to get people to read it. It's called The Denial of Death. He was a secular man, but he believed, rightly, that every religion, every culture based on a religion has always had some way of helping people deal with the fear of death. Death tells you, “If there's nothing after death, then nothing I do here will matter, because in the end, everything I do will be forgotten. After I die, other people will remember me for a while, and remember things I did, but eventually they will die and nobody will remember, and eventually the sun will die and everything will be wiped out, and nothing you have done, whether good or bad, will make any final difference.”
Ernest Becker says that the secular person who's got no way of dealing with that fear of nothingness, that death means that nothing we do matters and that nothing about us is significant. He says that is the biggest problem in our culture. He explains that our need for accruing wealth, our need for apocalyptic sex, all those things come from the fact that the secular culture has no way of dealing with the fear of death, and no way to break its power over you. So we distract ourselves with toys while death draws nearer.
All human beings feel instinctively their significance. In Ernest Becker’s words we have “an awareness of [our] own splendid uniqueness in that [we] stick out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet [we] go back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. [This] idea of death, the fear of it, haunts [us] like nothing else, [and dealing with it] is a mainspring of human activity.” He goes on to say that everything in modern culture is explained, all the problems we have are explained, because secular culture has no way of helping us deal with death.
On the other hand, George Herbert, the great 17th century poet, has a wonderful poem in which this thought is prominent. He says that death used to be an executioner. But because of Jesus Christ, the gospel has made him just a gardener. Death used to be an executioner, which means that when I died, I knew I was just going to nothing. Or if I was a religious person and believed in life after death, I might be afraid of death because after death, maybe there is something like eternal death, some kind of hell. So we're desperately afraid. We're horribly afraid of all that.
But if you believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and you put your hope in that, then death is now a gardener, meaning it plants us. It puts us into the ground like a tulip bulb, which becomes a lovely flower, or an acorn, which becomes a beautiful oak tree. All it can do now is make us better.
Some of you may have seen the viral clip of an African-American young man, a preacher, named Jonathan Evans, Tony Evans' son, speaking at his mother Lois’s funeral. He says he was praying before his mother died that God would heal her. Of course, he got an answer, and this was the answer. He said, “There's always two answers to your prayers,” is what God said to him. "Either she's going to be healed, or she's going to be healed. Either she's going to live, or she's going to live. Either she's going to be with family, or she's going to be with family. Either she's going to be taken care of, or she was going to be taken care of. Victory belongs to me.” [You can find that on the internet.]
The cross and resurrection is the end of the fear of death. It's been destroyed. Remember I said that God raised him from the dead and freed him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him. The picture is of Jesus Christ going into death the way you might go into an animal, a fierce animal eating people. You go into him, and you blow up and destroy the animal, and destroy its ability to hurt anybody else. I love the fact that this is a reference to Jesus Christ being the champion.
When Kathy and I were at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, there was a professor there named Dr. Bill Lane, who taught New Testament. He looked at the passage in Hebrews that talked about how Jesus Christ freed us from the fear of death. He said there was a very interesting word there in which it talked about, “He was the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.” But the word “archegos” that means “champion,” not “pioneer”: This is the passage. It says in Hebrews 2, “In bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the archegos, the champion of their salvation perfect through what he suffered. He, too, shared in their humanity, so that by his death, he might break the power of him who holds the power of death, and free those who all their lives have been held in slavery by their fear of death.”
The word archegos is a word that meant champion. When David and Goliath fought, they fought as champions, which meant that they fought as substitutes for their armies, so that if David won, then the victory of the entire army was imputed. His victory was imputed to them. If Goliath had won, then all of Israel would've been enslaved. In other words, instead of the two armies hacking each other, the two individuals fought, and the defeat or the victory of the individual champion was imputed to their people. What's wonderful about this, of course, is Jesus is the true David. He's the true champion. He faced death, and he fought it, and he defeated it for us.
I'm a pastor. I've seen people die, and I've talked to people who did not understand the gospel at the end of their lives. I've talked to people who felt like death was coming, and they weren't ready. Why? Because they said, “I haven't lived a good enough life.” Well, they hadn't lived a good enough life. But the point is Jesus Christ, for Christians, already met death, and has already destroyed its power. Therefore, all it can do is make you more glorious and more wonderful than you are now. The worst thing that can happen is the best thing that can happen. The resurrection of Jesus Christ proves that death has been defeated, and death is a defeated enemy. I love how Paul says, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” He's taunting death. He's making fun of it. Christians have that kind of confidence.
Let's pray. Our Father, we don't feel very confident right now. We do feel frightened. But we pray, Lord, that this week as we consider Easter, and consider what your Son did, and how you raised him from the dead, and how he broke the power of death, we pray that you would help us to sense these truths that we've looked at here tonight so that we also might not be afraid, not be afraid of it. We thank you, Lord, that death is no longer going to be an agony. Death is no longer going to be something that we have to fear. And yet, we also ask that you would enable us to not in any way make light of our situation, either. We pray, Lord, you wouldn't make us cavalier, either, because we know many, many, many people are suffering. So I pray, Lord, that you would teach us how to comfort other people through the courage that you give us through the doctrine of Easter. It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen.