I was at Easter services this weekend and I like listening to the pastor of my wife's church.  He's intriguing and he answers questions.  I didn't get the chance to ask about this one because it was crowded (with folks who show up twice a year).

My question: The big deal with Easter was Jesus rising from the dead.  We talking about the victory over Death and how Jesus's coming back is a great and wonderful thing.

God invented Death with everything else.  Why is it so special that He decided his son should return after paying for our sins?  It's like me putting out a fire I created and had complete control over the whole time.  God controls death, decides who dies and when, and He invented it.

Why is it such a fuss to "defeat death'?

warmaker : Death happens because everyone sins. (Wages of sin is death. -Romans 6:23) God is a good and righteous God that anything bad and evil (which is all of us) cannot be in His spiritual presence. There's a separation and a punishment to sin, which is why everybody dies. Not only that, there is nothing we can do to stop that, not by being nice to people, not by donating to charity, not by trying to be morally good, because no matter what, we are still guilty of sin. There's no hope.



Jesus, who is God Himself, came not only to reveal to us what the Kingdom of God is like, to reveal what God is like, but to take our place of the punishment of sin. God became a man to substitute Himself to be the punishment that the world deserves. Those who put their faith in Jesus are made clean, sinners are made to saints, no guilt stained on the person, sins are cleansed. Just as Jesus defeated death, the same goes to those who put their faith in Jesus and come back to God. They defeat death as well, since God's goodness is over them and affect them on the inside. Death is nothing when they have eternal life in Christ and to be in God's presence (O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting? -1 Corinthians 15:55) 


One song that I can think of expresses just that





Here's one line of the lyric: No guilt in life, no fear in death,
This is the power of Christ in me;




It is only through Jesus that there is hope and life. As Christians, that's a lot to celebrate about.

warmaker :

I'm going to answer this question differently. Instead of using the bible, lets instead talk about the question "what is death?". First, lets just assume the existence of the human soul because otherwise we get completely off topic. This would mean that "death" is not "non-existence", but instead it would be much closer to "ceasing function". The body stops working and decomposes, the soul doesn't have a body any more, and so we are existing in this awkward, twisted shape that is definitely not supposed to be how we are.

Now we can bring in God. Why would God allow such a corruption in us? Well, we suck at being people. We kill, steal, lie, and are generally self-centered. Even the best of us in the world still make multiple mistakes, occasionally big mistakes. It's just. We want things our way, but we cannot sustain ourselves for very long. God knows that death sucks, but he will not be unjust and grant us all these blessings without fair rectification. Well, it ends up we have nothing to pay with. Kinda leaves us in our current system eternally, but that is technically perfectly just. There is no injustice done because this is our state.

So, with the whole confusing Trinity thing, God pays the debt for us. The First Person (the Father) rips the debt from the Second Person (the Son, Jesus, who agrees). This means that Jesus has to be the perfect human being (not sucking in any way what so ever) and also submitting himself to the justice meant for us - namely suffering and death. This happens. He stays in the twisted state of death for three days (although the time probably feels eternal regardless of how long it actually was). Justice was done, rectification has happened, and so Jesus came back to life.

What this means is that we too will come back to life. We don't need to stay in some twisted form where we don't have bodies (because who can imagine life without eyes, ears, a brain, a sense of time, etc?), but instead we're promised "glorified bodies" that wont have the flaws that we have in this one, mainly the ability to die.

So that's why the resurrection is a big deal. It's not like God was like "I have full power to do what I want so witness this odd display of power", but instead its much closer to "Hey guys, death isn't permanent".