“If Christ has not been raised, then all our preaching is useless, and your faith is useless.”
If you've grown up in the church, you've heard it a hundred times: Christ died on the cross and rose again; without Christ's death and resurrection, there would be no salvation. But what does it all really mean?
Jesus' death and resurrection are always spoken of together, but rarely is it broken down into what each part actually means. Why did Jesus have to rise from the dead after He died? Why was the resurrection significant to us as believers?
Sometimes, it seems like more emphasis is put on His death with the resurrection just tacked on as an afterthought. But without the resurrection, our faith is rendered foolish (1 Corinthians 15:14)!
The resurrection proves Jesus is God.
The truth of the matter is that if Christ ONLY died, but never came back to life, there would be no chance of salvation (1 Corinthians 15:14). If He didn't rise again, everything He said about being God, about being the Father's Son, would have been a lie, and His death would be nothing more than the death of a liar.
But because He IS God, because He DID rise again, we know for sure that everything He said is true, and He has the authority to pay the penalty for our sins before God and grant us salvation (John 3:16-17).
Romans 6:23 tells us that the punishment for sinning aginst God is death. Every person has sinned, and since God is a God of justice, for every crime there must be punishment. For every person that has sinned, a life must be given in payment for that crime.
The resurrection proves Jesus is worthy.
Jesus Christ was fully Man and fully God (John 10:30; John 1:14), and He never sinned (1 Peter 2:22). Yet, despite this, Jesus paid for a crime He never committed. He died a sinner's death—not His sin for He had none—but our sin because we can hardly help ourselves (1 John 2:2). Jesus is truly the Lamb of God.
Jesus did die, and He did suffer the wrath of God (Romans 5:6-11). But because He was innocent of sin, death could not hold Him down. Because He never sinned, He could not be condemned to eternal death for it.
The resurrection proves there's still hope.
“Look! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”
This is where the Christian faith hinges. Without the resurrection, our faith means nothing (1 Corinthians 15). If we believe Jesus was resurrected, then we accept that He is God and that He is able to take on our sin in our place so that we can be free from the punishment of sin.
Christ's resurrection shows us that He conquered sin and conquered death. It shows us that He is, indeed, the Son of God who "takes away the sin of world" (John 1:29). Christ's resurrection proves that when we ask to be saved through Jesus Christ, and His blood covers us, we are deemed sinless before God because the blood needed to pay for our crime has already been spilled.
For Bible references in this video, check the description on YouTube.
God accepted Jesus' sacrifice on YOUR behalf. If you believe in Christ, you will not stay dead at the end of your physical life, but you will be resurrected into an eternal life with God. Now, that's something to hope for!