My Easter Celebration
My Testimony to the Healing Power of the Resurrection of Jesus
Today is the day when we remember and celebrate the bodily resurrection of Jesus. But did you know that there are SEVERAL ways to believe that the Father raised Jesus from being dead? And it is quite possible to believe that He was raised from the dead and yet not really receive the same transforming value, power and EFFECT of that truth that it clearly had upon His first followers. My own life is an example of that possibility.
From childhood, I grew up being taught that He was raised from the dead three days after being executed on the cross. It was one of those “givens.” Being taught that he was God’s Son was another one of those “givens.” There were many such “givens.” I never wrestled with any of those givens any more than I wrestled with the fact that two plus two equals four.
But when God led me to surrender to Jesus at age nineteen while out at sea on the way to Africa my life was truly changed. I wound up being drawn to the ministry, finished undergraduate, seminary and graduate studies, and initially continued to believe in those “givens.” I knew that the resurrection of Jesus was the source of our victory and our hope, but it clearly did not have the same personal effect upon me that it obviously did upon those first followers. For them, it was new, unexpected, and even shocking. For me, it was the product of a lifetime of regular, unexamined, and untested teaching and preaching: “Of COURSE, He was raised from the dead!”
But when the Satanic assaults began in seminary, I discovered that my confidence in those “givens” could not survive the debilitating effects of the doctrine of demons that were posing as the [supposedly] advanced scholarship of “higher criticism” being taught by my professors. The “theology” I was taught and had internalized turned out to be a “house of cards” that could not survive the cunning of that invisible enemy who had penetrated my seminary staff, congregational leadership, entire denomination and – finally – ME.
In the course of the years following that downward spiral, our marriage fell apart, my enthusiastic Christianity got replaced by the religions of India, China and Japan, and my heretofore strict moral standards got merged by the “enlightened” social and sexual values of the sixties and seventies. And once I had bitten into the PLEASURES of the cunning satanic hook, I began to experience the TORMENTS that necessarily accompany that supposed pleasure: the loneliness, the anxiety, the loss of all moral absolutes, the loss of any clear direction and purpose for my life, the stress of trying to explain away the guilt of sin, and the actual gnawing personal inner PRESENCE of a Satan that I had never believed in. Getting into therapy provided shallow levels of insight that were quite ineffectual in delivering me from those cunning demonic assaults that finally destroyed virtually all of the self-confidence that had grown within me because of my superior academic accomplishments. “For some strange reason” (tongue-in-cheek), no matter HOW smart you become, Satan can assign you to a demon who is far, FAR smarter than you are!
By the end of that downward spiral, I was in fear that I might actually disintegrate into some kind of emotional, intellectual vegetable. The coursework for the degree was finished, but the thought of accomplishing the Ph.D. exams and dissertation were paralyzing me with anxiety. I actually developed a vivid fear of attending some gathering where I would just shut down as a person, go into a corner and become trapped into some kind of permanent vegetative state, and cease to be human.
That was the condition I was in on that early Sunday morning in February of 1971. I had decided to go for a ride, and drove over to the Cloisters in upper Manhattan, where there was an inspiring view of the Palisades cliffs on the other side of the Hudson River in New Jersey. At that point in time, I had no consciousness of any such thing as those intelligent and evil satanic “critters” that Jesus talked about and dealt with. I was only aware of that nagging feeling of fear I mentioned above. I remember thinking that it was bigger than I was, and that I knew of no way that I could prevent disintegrating into that vegetable. And then, unbeknownst to me, God began to guide my thinking process, although I had not the slightest idea of His presence. For some very strange reason, my thoughts just “drifted” to the question of Jesus and His supposed “resurrection.” As far as I can remember, I hadn’t thought about that resurrection event for quite a long time. I had been too busy being consumed by the cheerful possibility that we humans were just a bunch of atoms that had accidentally “bumped into” one another, to spend time thinking about such “abstract” issues of whether Jesus actually was supernaturally restored to bodily life.
And yet His suffering and rising were what my thoughts “drifted” to (praise His holy name!). “What is the significance of Jesus’s dying and rising?”, I remember thinking. Well, I remember thinking, His acceptance of that torturous death meant that He had surrendered to the Father His ability to even keep on breathing: “Into your hands I commit my spirit,” He had said. So, He handed over His right to keep breathing into the hands of His God, and His God accepted that surrender – but then let Him die anyway. God did not reply to that voluntary surrender until after Jesus was FULLY, three-days dead. But, His eventual reply created a new version of Jesus, a Jesus who could never die or be hurt again! Then, my thoughts “drifted” to a comparison between what Jesus went through and what I was going through. My possible disintegration was an obvious parallel to Jesus’s actual dying. And if God could actually and historically handle the normally irreversible condition of physical death, then His ability to handle my possible descent into some form of vegetative insanity would, of course, be a “piece of cake” when compared to the miraculous biological reversal of physical death and decay.
And then my thoughts turned to, “But do I REALLY believe that God raised Jesus from being physically dead? Is His resurrection physically and historically true” And, to my amazement, I discovered that I really DID believe that God did reverse Jesus’s death! I had been cleverly seduced into quit thinking about Jesus, while getting so enthralled about that supposedly experientially rich way of those eastern religions that I had been studying and practicing. But, when “push came to shove,” I saw that none of those religious “giants” came up to Jesus’s KNEECAPS as a man: His courage, His purity, His use of power as an act of compassion, His commitment to speaking what is true… I intuitively “knew” (or it was revealed) that neither He nor any of those who fell under His “spell” would ever lie or invent resurrection fables. It surprised me to be so confident that I did believe He had conquered death. It was so unlike what that “Reed” had become – but then, it is GOD who does the calling and convincing, as our “alpha” and “omega,” no?
So, it now seemed like a “no-brainer,” that if I took the path that Jesus took while on His cross, I would “of COURSE” wind up in the same place that He eventually did: restored in glory. If I handed my possible disintegration into the Father’s hands, He might well let me disintegrate, just as He had let Jesus physically “disintegrate.” But if I trusted the words and deeds of Jesus and His Father, I could indeed quit carrying that burden of possible disintegration any longer. And I DID quit!
I embraced the idea of my possible disintegration. I quit trying to prevent it from happening or worrying about whether it MIGHT still happen. It was now in the hands of the same faithful, powerful, kind-hearted Giant who handled the suffering of His own Son so MAGNIFICENTLY! The peace was instant and overwhelming! The anxiety that was haunting me with its reality just disappeared.
And it NEVER returned!
That is what the impact of the resurrection of Jesus from physical death has had upon ME! The beginning of confidence in his bodily, physical, historical reversal of death was the beginning of the first experience of joy and glory I ever knew. The confidence that I am in the hands of a such a kind-hearted Giant is the New Testament GOSPEL’s version of such terms as “faith,” “trust,” or “confidence.” Such experienced confidence truly is “mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:4).
Has the mighty God’s mighty resurrection of Jesus penetrated down to where your deepest fears, your deepest corruptions, your deepest needs exist? There is no reason why it should not.
Christ, God’s manifestation in human flesh, has utterly conquered death. He who came to destroy the works of Satan HAS succeeded!
COME, LORD JESUS AND SET YOUR PEOPLE TRULY FREE!!!
