Biblegems #263
Question: Why do some New Testament passages say Jesus was the first to
rise from the dead when the Bible contains several accounts of others who were
raised from the dead?
The
apostle Paul explains in Acts how Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection fulfilled
Old Testament prophecies:
Acts
26:23 “…that the Messiah would suffer and, as the first to rise from the
dead, would bring the message of light to his own people and to the
Gentiles.”
Paul was
not ignorant of such miracles as Elijah and his protégé Elisha raising a child
from death back to life (1 Kings 17:22; 2 Kings 4:32-35). And he would have known
how Jesus raised people from death to life, such as the raising of Lazarus, who
had been entombed for three days (Jn. 11:38-45).
Why then
does the New Testament refer to Jesus as “the
firstborn from the dead” (Rev. 1:5)?
The
answer lies in the uniqueness of
Jesus’ resurrection.
Those raised
from the dead in the Bible eventually died again. In that respect the Bible revealed
ages ago what medical science would later confirm—reviving a person who has
died is indeed possible. Beyond that, these miracles also foreshadowed Jesus’
resurrection, which would open the door for humanity to pass from death to
eternal life, from mortality to immortality.
This
seeming impossibility is made possible by one significant fact: death was not
part of God’s original design in creation, but exists as the direct result of
Adam and Eve intentionally breaking away from God’s design. That rebellious act
fractured a universe once free of death and decay and launched the entire
created order into an inescapable whirlpool of destruction. Imagine the entire
universe existing in a state of perfect peace, like water in a bathtub—and
someone opens the drain! At that moment, all the known “laws” of the physical
universe would seem to be dramatically altered as the universe heads inexorably
down the drain.
The Bible
calls Adam and Eve’s destructive act “sin.”
Rom. 5:12 Therefore,
just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned…
To rectify this, God entered His creation as a human
(Jesus), to ‘plug the hole’ with the sacrifice His own life and ‘refill the
tub’ back to a place of order and peace. Because Jesus was sinless, death had
no lasting power over Him:
Rom. 6:9-10 For
we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again;
death no longer has mastery over
him. The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the
life he lives, he lives to God.
Jesus’
entrance into the world was like the plug in God’s hand, plunging down through
the swirling water of sin, destruction and death to stop up the drain.
Believers in Jesus latch onto Him to escape being flushed into the septic tank
the Bible calls hell. By latching onto Jesus we also latch onto the eternal life
He has come to restore:
1Cor.
15:21
For since death came through a
man, the resurrection of the
dead comes also through a man.
