Yesterday, I talked about Good Friday and I demonstrated how it was not A SHAME UPON US but a SHAME UPON JESUS, and here comes the GRAVE SATURDAY. Jesus died and was buried. There are many stories of people who have resurrected and many miracle workers have claimed to have resurrected people. But in my experience, I have not had someone being resurrected after an extensive postmortem report like that of Jesus Christ.
Both Mathew 27:58 and John 19: 38 tell us that: Going to Pilate, he asked for Jesus’ body, and Pilate ordered that it be given to him. Joseph took the body, wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and placed it in his own new tomb that he had cut out of the rock. He rolled a big stone in front of the entrance to the tomb and went away. (Mathew 27:58-60).
Jesus died and was buried. He did not die like modern man dies. His death was not one whereby the body goes to the dust and the soul goes back to who gave it as Ecclesiastes puts it. Jesus died an eternal death. The Bible says: For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:23 NIV). Jesus did not die because of any sin he committed, he died because of our sin. In fact, the Bible says that: God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2Corinthians 5:21 NIV). And because the wages of sin is death, once Jesus took on imputed sin, he could not survive death.
It is also important to point out that Saturday, which is the seventh day of the week and a day which was a Sabbath for the Jews, teaches us this important truth that God died in the place of the guilty sinner. In Genesis 2:16, God himself had warned man about eternal death and when man failed to understand, he had to die but still, God, in his grace, sacrificed a lamb in their stead and dressed man’s nakedness with the skin of this lamb. Ladies and Gentlemen God out of his love and grace could not let us die and die an eternal death but rather died in our place.
It is important at this point that we emphasize the significance of Saturday in the Passover (Easter) weekend. Saturday in the Easter weekend teaches us that Death passed our doors because God himself was in the grave on our behalf. Death is the ultimate enemy of all people in the world. Whatever we do and all the success and achievement does not make any sense if we do not solve the problem of death. We all know that we will surely die. Whenever am at a funeral I imagine that unknown day when I will be no more. I think of my family, and contemplate the thought that one day, I will never see them again and them not see me again.
Easter Saturday draws our attention to this fact that whether we want or not, we will die. Whether we test ourselves well and do regular health checkups, whether keep the law to the letter we will die just like the perfect Pharisee and the puritan Qumran died. Whether we go to church and get all miracles. Whether all the diseases, curable and incurable, are healed, we will surely die. It does not matter whether, like Lazarus, we are resuscitated and brought back to life, we will eventually die.
Death is an inevitable enemy. Jesus came to save us from this enemy known as death. But what is this death? What does it mean to die? Personally, I have never died, so the definition am about to share with you is not from experience but from Biblical interpretation. Just like the gift of believing Jesus Christ is eternal life, so the wages of sin is eternal death. This death is always misunderstood. Jesus did not die like we die today. When someone dies, his breath leaves his body and his body begins to rot and since it is dust, it goes back to its original state which is dust. And man is no more without his body and breath since he has separated from the essentials of his being. What we know as death today is mere separation of the material from the immaterial.
However, this is not the death that we are saved from. Jesus did not die to save us from this kind of death. For such is not death of everything about man but mere separation. For one to understand this concept we need to understand that before everything material and immaterial was, God was. Everything was created by God and this God is the very geography of everything that was created. So if death is mere separation of the material and the immaterial, we must understand that this separation still happens in God. And God being pure and perfect cannot allow this within his holiness.
The death from which we are saved from is eternal death. It is not a mere separation but a cessation and an annihilation. Just like God created everything out of nothing, eternal death calls everything back into nothingness. For God to be in the grave, he had become nothing in order to reclaim his people back into life and life eternal. The Bible says that: the lord will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of his power (2Thesolonians 1:8-9 NIV).
The seventh day, on which the Lord was in the grave, teaches us the truth about death and the death from which we are saved. Jesus did not save us from this ordinary death of separation or alteration from one form to another. Let me use an example of the death of a tree so that you understand the kind of death that Jesus saved us from. A tree is cut, and death begins from that moment. It dries up, then it is burnt and turns into charcoal, then the Charcoal is also burnt to ashes. The former tree is now ashes. This is exactly the kind of death that we all die. That is why the Bible says: And the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. “Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Everything is meaningless!” (Ecclesiastes 12:7-8 NIV)
Now watch that, the kind of death that Jesus saves us from is not the one discussed in my metaphor of the tree that becomes ashes or one that is discussed in the above scripture that says that the spirit and dust separate. The death from which Jesus saved us is eternal death. And eternal death means separation from God and that separation must end up in Nothingness. It is not death, when a tree turns into ashes or when the body turns into dust. The real death that Jesus saved us from is when the ashes and the dust itself are no more. Jesus saved us from this nothingness from which death had taken us.
Death is antagonistic to the creation power of God for it takes into nothingness everything God creates. God died and went into nothingness to save us from that. The Bible says in Colossians 2:13 that: When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, Death is not merely being in hell; in Hades. “Death and hell are cast into the lake of fire,” as Revelation 20 says. And it declares, “This is the second death.”
So Jesus must have suffered the second death. Furthermore, He must have suffered the second death for every human being. What is the second death? It is the death or the total disappearance of every remains, both material and immaterial. It is a death that takes everything God has created into nothingness. And it is this nothingness from which Jesus saved us from. Heavens and Earth are realms of death, and they all will be consumed in death, that is why the Lord promised in Isaiah 65:17 that: For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind. This will go into eternal nothingness, and that is what the death of Jesus Christ in the grave on Saturday means.
Death, and the fear of death holds many all their life in bondage. Yet the Lord Jesus Christ became a man specifically so that He could die, and “that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death”. Death has been conquered by Jesus Christ. Death was swallowed up in victory because the grave could not hold the Lord Jesus. “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death” (1 Cor. 15:26). “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life”. (John 3:16).
The Death and presence of God in the grave demonstrates how dead most of us are. I have already implied physical death above, but I find it important for us to also think of the spiritual death that the Lord should save us from. Just like our God was in the dark grave, so are our spiritual lives. Our mental faculties are dead. We are a walking dead generation. We have the elites of our time doing the most uncivilized things. What is wrong is esteemed by the spiritually dead as right and what is right is stereotyped as wrong by those in the grave.
Scriptures says in Isaiah 5:20-23: Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight. Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine and champions at mixing drinks, who acquit the guilty for a bribe, but deny justice to the innocent. This is why Scripture says: “There is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one” (Rom. 3:11-12).
Because we are spiritually and mentally dead, we do not seek God. We do not want to come to light, and this what the Bible categorically says in John 3:19-20 This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.
That is how spiritually dead we are, we even hate and oppose what we know is true and prefer to lock ourselves in the grave. Jesus went down these graves to save us even from this kind of death.
Paul wrote to the Ephesians and said: So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more. You, however, did not come to know Christ that way. (Ephesians 4:17-20 NIV).
The presence of God in the grave on Saturday is a hope to all the dead in there. Salvation is the work of God. Only God can give spiritual life in the place of spiritual death. Many individuals who have been born once never realize that they are dead toward God. But whether they feel it or not, they are—and God says they are. If you place a weight on a corpse, it does not feel it at all. Thus the unsaved man may not feel separated from God, but he is.
Jesus today has visited every grave and he wants to work back to life everything dead in your life. Do not lock Jesus outside your grave. Let him in and once he gets into your Grave his light will illuminate your darkness. Your spiritual and mental eyes will be opened to see. Your sight will receive insight. Your choices will have discernment. Many of us are in tormenting graves and we are burdened. Jesus was in the Grave on the Seventh day which was a Sabbath to the Jews to remind all of us that Jesus is our Sabbath.
The word Sabbath means REST, and because the Lord wants to give those in the graves REST, that is why he visited the graves on that symbolic day. The issue is not the day, but the Lord of that day (Revelation 2:10). Since he is the Lord that gives REST he has invited all of us in these words: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. (Mathew 11:28 NIV).
Whoever is in the grave, whatever the grave is, the Easter Saturday teaches us about a Jesus who comes to our graves. Am reminded of the time he asked of the whereabouts of the grave of Lazarus when he said: “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb; it was a cave, and a stone lay upon it. (John 11:34, 38 RSV).
You and I need this Jesus to ask about our grave and we need this very Jesus to come to our grave. Grave in which we have been for a while and graves covered by huge resistance. Christ should come to these grave in which we lay dead and stinking. And yes he is on his way; the question is: When he calls, like he is calling now, will you respond?
God bless you: I invoke TRUTH, REASON and FAITH
Am Pr. I.T. WHITE
The Gospel Hawker
iTiS Well of Worship Fellowship (John 4:24) 