April 16, 2022 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
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You're listening to the Liberty News Radio Network, and this is the Political Cesspool.
The Political Cesspool, known across the South and worldwide as the South's foremost populist conservative radio program.
And here to guide you through the murky waters of the political cesspool is your host, James Edwards.
It is Easter weekend, ladies and gentlemen.
Yesterday was Good Friday, the day that Christ gave his life on the cross.
Tomorrow is Resurrection Day, and here to tell us all about it is Pastor Brett Maggotty of Christ the King Reformed Church in Charlotte, Michigan.
He's back this Easter weekend to present the biblical accounting of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Pastor Brett, tell us the good news.
The good news, of course, is that Christ is risen.
In the time that we have together this evening, we want to look at the scriptures that speak of the resurrection.
We want to look at also the conspiracy that went down in trying to keep the resurrection in the category of denied or of not happening.
So as we continue to consider the resurrection, we look at Matthew's gospel where Christ speaks in Matthew 16, 21.
From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.
We have these kinds of pronouncements of Jesus sprinkled all the way through the gospel accounts.
Another place is in John chapter 10, verse 18.
Jesus speaking of his own life, he says, no one takes it, that is my life from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.
I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again.
This charge I have received from my Father.
So here's another instance in the Gospels where Jesus speaks of this coming resurrection, which his own disciples didn't seem to comprehend very well.
Indeed, we're going to see that his enemies seem to have understood this prediction better than his own disciples.
In Matthew 26, 61, we likewise have somebody giving testimony against Jesus saying, this man, referring to Jesus, said, I'm able to destroy the temple of God and rebuild it in three days.
And of course, we know from that account, what Christ was speaking of was his own body that he was going to rebuild it in three days.
So here we see these promises that, as I said earlier, Christ's enemies seem more conversant with than Christ's disciples.
Christ had repeatedly promised to rise from the dead and his enemies knew it and were determined to stop it at all costs.
We see this determination by all that they did in order to make sure that there was no misunderstanding about resurrection.
One of the first things that we see that was done in order to stop the resurrection, as it were, was a big stone is rolled in front of the entrance to the tomb.
We see that in Matthew chapter 27, verse 59 and 60.
And we have to understand that it wasn't just like this was just some kind of large rock that you could push with your shoulder.
These stones were huge, and they typically would run down one side of the tomb and then up another small hill and they would eventually find themselves settled into the hole or several men then would use leverage in order to push the stone in.
And that was all to secure the tomb.
But also there was other dynamics to secure that Jesus would not arise from that grave.
There was a Roman seal that was put on that boulder, stone, whatever word you want to use.
And not only a Roman seal, which was the second, you have the stone itself and you had the Roman seal on the stone, but you also have a Roman guard that was set to ensure the stone was not going to be removed and the body stolen by some earnest, well-intended disciples.
We see this in Matthew 27, 66, and they went and made the grave secure.
And along with a guard, they set a seal on the stone.
Now, this idea of making the grave secure means they worked to the end that no one was going to easily get inside or outside that tomb.
It was secure as it could be possibly made.
So the enemies of Christ were doing all that they could to make sure Jesus Christ stayed in that grave.
Now understand, let's talk about the Roman seal a second that's spoken about there in scripture.
It says there in Matthew 27, they set a seal on the stone.
This was a Roman seal.
And when the Romans sealed something, the casual person just didn't go about stripping that seal away.
It was a Roman seal.
And if that seal was broken by anybody besides somebody who had the authority to do that, it would typically bear the penalty of death to the one who broke the seal illegally.
So now you have this huge stone.
You have them doing all they can to make sure that nobody gets in or out of it.
Then you have the Roman seal.
Next, you have the fact that there is a guard assigned.
And the guard assigned, scholars differ.
It's either the Roman guard or temple police.
We find this in Matthew 27.
Pilate said to them, you have a guard, go, make it as secure as you know how.
And they went, made the grave secure, and along with the guard, they set a seal on the stone.
And so which guards were it?
Was it the Jewish guards, the Roman guards?
I think the context seems to favor the idea of a Roman guard.
It was likely the guard that was comprised of 16 men working together in order to make sure something stayed secure.
And those men, that guard as a whole, is governed by what really quite strict rules, as you can well imagine a military unit would.
There were 16 soldiers that are Roman soldiers watching a grave that had been made secure as closed by a big stone, having upon it a Roman seal that promised death for all who would break that seal.
So obviously there was redundancy going on here in order to preclude any possibility that there would be rumors of a resurrection.
They were going to do their best to make sure that this Christ, this Messiah, this Jesus who they killed, was not going to have some kind of legacy or following left by some kind of strange happenings.
They went out of their way in order to make sure that there would no longer be any hopes that would arise again from Jesus the Messiah.
When we talk about the Roman Guard, the guard worked in such a way that it found each member responsible for six square feet of space.
Hold on right there, Pastor.
Amen, brother.
Yes, we will.
He has been on the show enough to know when the music begins, we have to take a break.
We don't want to.
We have to.
When we come back, Pastor Brett McAtee will continue to share the good news of Jesus' resurrection.
And I'll play with you an eclipse version of a Southern gospel song that I sang throughout my childhood at church.
It's a beautiful song this East Weekend.
Stay tuned.
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Why does the left lie constantly?
Because they get spiritual power from lying.
The lies come from Satan, the father of lies.
John 8, 44.
Here's how the political lying process works.
Satan provides the beast with a lie.
Then the more they use the lie, the more spiritual power they get.
Look, the media is a lie multiplier, and this multiplication gives more evil spiritual power to the beast.
And that can overwhelm and even deceive the body of Christ, especially when the body is being disobedient to the head.
The churches today are incorporated, so they're subordinate to human government.
They obey the beast and do nothing to restore our national relationship with God.
And the government shall be on his shoulders, Isaiah 9, 6.
That verse is not for the present-day church.
Rather, it is for the end-time church, the body of the line of Judah.
A message from Christ Kingdom Ministries.
That's a song I could sing blindfolded.
I'm 41 years old.
I'm a 41-year-old man now.
From the time I was old enough to talk, I was singing that hymn in church.
And I had parents and grandparents who loved me enough to take me to church every Sunday.
It has made me the man that I am today.
He lives.
He lives, does he not, Pastor Brett?
Amen.
Christ lives.
And if you ask me how I know he lives, my testimony is: I know he lives because the scripture tells me so.
We need to anchor our convictions about the resurrection of Jesus Christ on the certain word of God, which is what we get when we look at what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15.
He says it was according to the scriptures, and then only then does he then call forth the various witnesses.
So it is true that Jesus lives within my heart.
I rejoiced over that.
I exalt in that.
But that's not how I know he lives.
I know he lives because it's the testimony of scripture.
Anyway, getting back to where we were at, we're talking about the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
And we're talking about the absurdities to which his enemies went to in order to make sure Christ's body wasn't stolen.
That's what they thought would happen.
They did not believe, at least some of them, in the supernatural.
And so they put a seal on the tomb.
They had this huge stone.
They leveraged it around and worked it to make sure nothing could get in or out.
They set a guard.
We were talking about the Roman Guard.
And we said the Roman Guard was comprised of 16 men, each responsible for six square feet of space.
During their duty, the guard members could not sit down or lean against anything.
And if a guard member fell asleep, which is, of course, as we know, the excuse they were finally told to give, the general rule was he was beaten and burned with his own clothes.
However, we need to keep in mind he was not the only one executed.
They believed in corporal punishment, as military often does.
The entire 16-man guard unit was executed if only one of the members fell asleep while on duty.
And so by citing this, we can see how ridiculous it is for them to come back and say they had fallen asleep.
They would have known in normal circumstances what the penalty would have been.
But of course, there was all kinds of money being paid off.
We'll get to that in a bit.
We keep in mind that all this opposition to Christ and to any chance that his body might be stolen was because they were scared of a bunch of disciples, the chief of whom couldn't stand up to a servant girl making inquiries whether or not he was the chief of the disciples.
So again, I'm trying to communicate the overkill around that tomb.
It reminds us of almost a Houdini handcuffing himself, putting himself in a safe and then wrapping the safe in chains before dumping in the harbor.
That's the kind of redundancy they were talking about here.
But the best laid plans of mice and men, as we know, we see in scripture there was a violent earthquake.
Yes, violent.
And we're going to explain why it had to be violent.
For an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and going to the tomb rolled back the big stone and sat on it.
His appearance was like lightning and his clothes were white as snow.
And the guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.
Now we have to understand something here when it talks about this stone being rolled back.
The language in the Greek there is not, does not communicate the idea that it was just pushed back a little bit so somebody could squirm their way through.
This idea of the stone being rolled back is almost the idea of a child picking up a stone to skip it across the water.
It is completely removed overwhelmingly, thus the violent earthquake, thus the angel doing what the angel did.
And just like that, the big stone, the Roman seal, the 16-man Roman guard, it's gone.
Poof, it's gone.
And then we're told, behold, some of the guard came into the city and reported to the chief priest all the things that had happened.
And when they had assembled with the elders and consulted together, they gave a large sum of money to the soldiers, saying, Tell them his disciples came at night and stole him away while we slept.
And if this comes to the governor's ears, we will appease him and make you secure.
So they took the money and did as they were instructed.
And this saying is commonly reported among the Jews until this day.
And so what we have here is, first of all, the 11th commandment, which I teach my children, I give them the 10 commandments, and then I say the 11th commandment is follow the money.
So we have the 11th commandment here, follow the money.
If we follow the money, we know what happened.
But we also have something going on here that's relevant to our times.
And that's clearly what's going down here at this point is, don't say it too loudly because people will get mad at you, is they'll think you're wearing a tinfoil hat if you say it too loudly.
What's going on here is conspiracy.
There is a conspiracy among the elites in order to deny or redirect the truth.
So we know here that the response of the deep state elite of their day was to create, as I said, this conspiracy.
And this would dismiss the facts of what really happened.
Well, at the same time, reconstructing a false narrative to what really happened.
This was not the beginning of spin, but this is one of the largest examples of spin we read in world history.
It's not the first occurrence of what we now call fake news, but it is a classic example of what we see today with CNN or the New York Slimes or the Washington Compost and the reporting that they do.
It reminds us that we can't take things on the surface, that we have to be wise and we have to dig.
We cannot just let the elite tell us what the news is because they have an axe to grind.
Just as the elites at that time didn't want anybody to think that Jesus was resurrected, so the elites in our day have their narratives that they want to spend so that we don't believe the truth.
So what do we learn from God's word here?
We learn that God's enemies will consistently do all they can to invert and entwist the truth.
And the closer you get to the truth, the more they're going to work to twist and invert it, the more that they're going to do all they can to blow smoke to set out false narratives.
God's enemies live by conspiracy.
And we see that not only here in this account of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but we see it as early as Psalm 2, where the psalmist says, why do the nations conspire?
And so conspiracy, when it comes to history, is a norm.
And we see it here in the Resurrection Account.
God's enemies live by conspiracies in.
And as God's enemies own the organs of information now as they did on that resurrection Sunday, as Christians, one thing that we can learn from the resurrection is that we must not be so naive as to believe the news, quote unquote, as reported by God's enemies, who always have an axe to grind against God's narrative.
It doesn't matter what the narrative here.
This is the central narrative that is the resurrection.
But whenever we're talking about the truth, God's enemies are going to do all they can to blow smoke.
The scripture repeatedly teaches us that the wicked conspire, and we're fools if we don't seek to see through the conspiracy of dunces put forth on a daily basis.
Folks, stay tuned there.
Amen.
Pastor Brett Magate, what a powerful message we're presenting to you tonight on TPC.
It is the eve of Jesus Christ's resurrection.
That really happened.
We'll hear more of the good news right after this from Pat Brett.
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Oleksandr Vilko, head of the Ukrainian military administration, telling CBS News that they can't win the war without more weapons.
We need fighter jets, tanks, missiles, the whole spectrum of weapons.
The White House says another $800 million in weapons should arrive in Ukraine soon.
The Kremlin warned the U.S. in a diplomatic note that doing that could bring unpredictable consequences.
The $50,000 reward leading to the arrest of the suspect in the Brooklyn subway shooting will be split among five people.
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10 people were shot.
19 others were injured in the attack.
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I have found a friend in Jesus.
He's everything to me.
He's the fairest of 10,000 to my soul.
The lily of the valley in him alone I see.
All I need to cleanse and make me fully whole.
In sorrow, he's my comfort.
In trouble, he's my stay.
He tells me every care on him to roll.
He's the lily of the valley, the bright and morning star.
He's the fairest of 10,000 to my soul.
He will never, never leave me, nor yet forsake me here.
While I live by faith and do his blessed will.
Oh, all of fire about me.
I've nothing now to fear.
With this man, he my hungry soul shall fill.
Then sweeping up to glory, I'll see his blessed face, where rivers of your life shall ever roll.
He's the lily of the valley, the bright and morning star.
He's the fairest of 10,000 to my soul.
What a special night here on this radio program.
What a privilege it is to be your host this evening and present it to you.
It's a convergence of so many things that are special to me, our earthly heritage, our spiritual heritage.
We've been talking about it all night, but I shared with you in the first hour that just yesterday, I took my wife and my three children to Shiloh, where I was able to traverse the very battlefield where my great-great-great-grandfather fought 160 years ago this month.
And I hope I make him proud.
My father, who is still living, is tuned in tonight.
I hope I'm making him proud tonight.
He was the one who took me to church every week as I was growing up and instilled this spiritual heritage in me.
And with that being said, before we toss it back to Pastor Brett McAtee, I'd like to read just a couple of verses from scripture.
Luke 23, verses 20 and 21.
Pilate argued with them because he wanted to release Jesus, but they kept shouting, crucify him, crucify him.
Matthew 27, verses 24 and 25 reads, When Pilate saw he could prevail nothing, he took water and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person.
Then answered all the people and said, His blood be us, his blood be on us and on our children.
Pastor Brett, many years ago, I believe it was 2008, because it was right after Barack Obama was elected, and a reporter, New York Times, flew down to Memphis to interview me and my then co-host, Bill Rowland, who has since received his eternal reward.
And we met in the Peabody Hotel.
And in the course of this interview, he was asking us what we believe in.
And we talked about what we believed in.
And we cannot talk about what we believe in without mentioning our faith.
And he laughed.
He was a Jewish reporter by the name of Jim Rutenberg.
And he laughed and he said, do people in the South really believe that?
And my co-host at the time, he responded with such sincerity and resolution in his voice that the question was, do people in the South really believe in God?
And my co-host responded, we believe that we are saved by grace in Jesus Christ.
And he responded with such resolution and sincerity that the reporter was stunned.
For five or ten seconds, it was.
He was stunned.
And he looked down and he shuffled into his next question.
There is power in the name of Jesus, Pastor Brett, on this Easter weekend.
Amen.
And Paul says, if these things are not true, we are of all men to be pitied.
And we do believe in all of these truths.
And the central truth, perhaps, certainly the central truth of the gospel is the resurrection, ascension, and ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ.
And there is no Christianity without the resurrection, the literal objective resurrection of Jesus Christ.
And to be sure, life, I'm not going to be able to have time to get all into this, but life does not make sense apart from a resurrection.
Apart from a resurrection, life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
So we look at this resurrection and we continue to note the fact that there was a whole lot of work going on in order to stop any resurrection.
We've seen the supernatural already.
We've seen this incredible earthquake that moved the stone.
We see the angel dressed in white, incredible white.
We've seen the guards in a catatonic state as seeing the angels.
And so we're reminded that the world that we live in is a world that's charged with the reality of God.
It's not just a matter that everything happens according to materialistic naturalism.
There is a supernatural, and the whole Bible is based upon the reality of the supernatural because in the Bible, we believe that God speaks.
And what we see in the Bible, what we see in the New Testament accounts is an account of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
If Christ isn't resurrected, I can't imagine the difference in the life of Western civilization.
Never mind my own particular life.
And so we have the resurrection.
We have Christ coming out of the grave.
We have people trying to deny it by way of conspiracy.
We also understand that there's a desire of the enemies of Christ to make sure a Christian community doesn't rise to follow the Messiah.
They want him to remain dead and buried because they know that Christ is recognized as arisen, as resurrected, that a community of faith is going to surround him.
And that's the last thing. that they want.
And so they create this false narrative that we've been talking about.
And we still have this kind of mindset today.
We've just been through it in the last couple years.
The deep state elite during Christ's time wanted to make sure a community of faith didn't rise up to follow the Messiah.
Haven't we seen this in 2020 forward?
We've seen the deep state elite telling the faith community that they can't corporally gather to worship.
They've said, you can go to your liquor, you can go get your marijuana, you can go get food, but don't you dare gather physically to worship.
And in some areas, pastors have been thrown in jail.
I'm thinking of especially what's going on in Canada.
And it's all because supposedly they have our best interest at heart.
And so we see the fact that big government is, and the government, corporatist, and religious complex is going on in the first century with Jesus trying to deny the gathering and the rise of the faith community.
And it goes on even yet today.
We know also the Pharisees know beyond any shadow of doubt that Christ had indeed resurrected.
Maybe they didn't want to admit to themselves, but that was what the account was from the guards.
These guards had experienced some form of catatonia.
We see in Matthew 28, the guards were so afraid of him, that is the angel, that they shook and became like dead men.
Now, keep in mind, these guards were hardened Roman soldiers.
It's not like they were going to run away at nothing.
And yet these hardened Roman soldiers are in a state of catatonia over what's happened and what they're seeing with the resurrection of Christ with the coming of the angels.
You would think that this would have been enough for them, that is the elite, to repent.
You think they would have covered their mouths in shock, admitting they'd been wrong about their Messiah.
The truth that they had murdered the long promised Messiah, did it cause them to second guess themselves?
No, they instead doubled down and continued to concoct a false narrative that would be spread around.
This reminds us that in our endeavors to convince people of the truths of the resurrection and the divinity of Jesus Christ, the truth of biblical Christianity, that the people that we're dealing with don't give up their lie that they're invested in simply because they're brought face to face with the indubitable and indisputable truth.
The Pharisees have been brought face to face.
The enemies of God have been brought face to face with the reality of a trustworthy testimony from these guards that something had happened.
But instead, what they're prone to do is to find some way to deny that which they can't escape from knowing, which is the truth.
This just proves what Jesus said himself by way of the parable of Lazarus and Dibes, the rich man of Lazarus.
If you remember that parable, Jesus says if they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.
And in that parable, there's almost a prophetic aspect of it.
Jesus is almost saying in that parable, I'm coming back from the dead.
And guess what?
They're still not going to believe it.
And that's what we face today in our apologetics.
Unless God opens eyes and ears to see about the resurrected Christ, we're going to get Jewish New York Times or Washington Post reporters, whatever they were in your account that you told earlier.
We're going to get them looking at us and grinning sarcastically and scoffingly saying, Do you people really believe that?
Well, damn, yes, I believe it.
I believe every word of it.
And what's more, if you don't believe it, you're going to spend eternity in hell.
This is what the scriptures teach.
And all of this is contingent upon the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
And all of civilization, in fact, the dividing line of civilization and the dividing line of time itself is based upon Christ's birth and his death.
And that's the CNBC.
Hey, Pastor Brett, we'll be back with you one more segment, one more powerful segment.
This Easter weekend, Resurrection Day is tomorrow.
Yes, we believe it, and we'll be right back.
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That is why I shout and sing.
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, He's me singing as I go.
Let's go.
I shall wait my life to worlds unknown.
I shall reign with him on high.
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.
Sweet His name I know is my every longer since I'm singing.
That's another one, ladies and gentlemen.
I grew up singing, He Keeps Me Singing, and thank God for that because we live in a world that would teach you and tell you that your ancestors were evil and there was no good in them.
They would teach you that God is dead.
He doesn't exist.
Neither of those things are true.
Our ancestors were good and they were holy and they were better than any of us.
And God does exist.
And his Son is Jesus Christ.
And he died for our sins and he rose on the third day.
And we really do believe it, not just here in the South, but Christians around the world believe it.
Let me tell you a little bit more about our guest tonight who's been presenting this wonderful Easter message.
He's Pastor Brett McAtee.
He is the husband of a wife without peer, father of three children who walk as heroes in the land.
He's a grandfather of nine, the author of Iron Inc, which is committed to thinking God's thoughts after him.
He is the pastor of Christ the King Reformed Church.
For over 20 years, he's been there.
You can find them.
If you don't have brick and mortar fellowship to go to tomorrow on Easter Sunday, ladies and gentlemen, let me suggest to you Pastor Brett's online sermons, which you can hear from his brick and mortar church up in Michigan.
It's charlottereformed.org.
The spelling, just think if you're in the south of Charlotte, North Carolina, charlotte reformed.org.
And Pastor, I want to thank you again for presenting this Easter message this year, as you've done for the past couple of years on Christmas as well, for appearing with us in between.
You were with us just as recently as January the 22nd.
If you go back in our broadcast archives, ladies and gentlemen, you can listen to Pastor Brett articulate the reconciliation of our faith and heritage, which is our faith and heritage, which is what we're doing here on this, here in the South, our Confederate History Month.
But charlotte reformed.org.
Pastor, it is Easter week and Resurrection Day is tomorrow.
And the final 10 minutes of tonight's broadcast are all to you, my friend.
And again, I say and wish to you and to everyone listening, happy Easter.
Remember the meaning for the season tomorrow, ladies and gentlemen.
Amen.
God be with you, James.
I'm the one who should be thanking you for the opportunity to set forth the glories of the good news of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
So here we have, we've been looking at this testimony that Christ was resurrected.
A testimony, by the way, that comes not from his friends, but from his enemies.
That is those Roman guards who come back and tell the truth.
But not only do we have the testimony of what we would call hostile witnesses, but Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, he speaks of a long list of witnesses that would take days in a courtroom to bring them all forth in order to give testimony of the resurrected Jesus Christ.
He mentions Peter.
He mentions 500 that have not yet fallen asleep.
He says some of them have fallen asleep, but he mentions 500 and he mentions James and he mentions the 12 and then he mentions himself.
He says, here is my line of witnesses.
Now that only comes after the fact that he says that scripture is our main authoritative point.
But then after he says it's in scripture, it was spoken of in scripture, then he says, and if you don't like that, here are all the witnesses.
And the witnesses, even though Paul doesn't list them there in 1 Corinthians 15, include these catatonic Roman guards who are scared out of their wits.
So we have a resurrection that finds Christ's body and soul coming out of the grave.
It's not a resurrection that's spiritual.
It's a physical resurrection.
He doesn't rise into history like the liberals like to say.
It's not a resurrection that's a result of mass hysteria.
It's not a resurrection that's somehow metaphorical or mythical.
It's a resurrection that is substantially true.
The same Christ that went into the grave is the Christ that came out of the grave, except for the fact now that he has a glorified body.
There is continuity between the body that goes in the grave and the body that comes out of the grave.
But we must also say there's discontinuity inasmuch as the body is glorified.
We see the fact that there's continuity between the Savior and the appearances to the disciples and the fact that he created and breakfast.
And the text suggests that he shared breakfast with the disciples there in the book of John.
And so we have a real resurrection.
The poet John Updike, in a poem that I like, put it this way.
Make no mistake.
If he rose at all, it was as his body.
If the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules renew, the amino acids rekindle, the church will fall.
It was not as the flowers, each soft spring recurrent.
It was not as his spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of his 11 apostles.
It was as his flesh, our flesh.
The same hinged thumbs and toes, the same valved heart that was pierced, died, withered, paused, and then regathered out of enduring might, new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping transcendence, making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the face credulity of earlier ages.
Let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back.
Not paper-mâché, not a stone and just a story, but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb, making a real angel, lady with max planks, quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the dawnlight, robed in real linen, spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle and crushed by remonstrance.
Here, Updike is, in poetic fashion, is arguing for the corporeality, the materiality of the risen Jesus Christ.
And this stands in distinction to many within the visible church, most within the mainline churches, but also other places as well that want to talk about Jesus resurrecting into history or Jesus, while it's true that he arose in one sense, in the real actual sense, he didn't arise.
We have to say that the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus Christ is just as true as the historicity of the landing of the Mayflower or of the Battle of Shiloh.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ was corporeal and material.
And any denial of that, no matter how well-intended, frankly, is the denial of biblical Christianity.
Such a faith that denies the corporeality and the materiality of Jesus Christ in continuity with the Christ that went into the tomb coming out is a denial of, yes, it's a denial of faith.
We have to believe in this kind of physical resurrection that we celebrate tomorrow.
And James alluded to it earlier, but all of Western Christendom and all of Western civilization is what it is and was what it was because they believed in this doctrine of the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ.
It's not to say that Western civilization has been perfect, but it's been a far sight better than any other civilization that's ever been built.
And we need to thank our fathers and more so thank God that he worked in their hearts to own Jesus Christ, to own a material and corporeal resurrection.
And so we own it with our fathers before us and we trust with our children that come after us so that one day all of us will be gathered.
The circle will be unbroken.
One day we are gathered to do homage to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who still remains corporeally and material, materially, physically, in the heavens.
That is, one of the hopes of the resurrection is because Christ remains corporeal and material at the right hand of the Father.
Our hope is that our corporeality, our materiality will likewise follow.
We remember that Christ, Paul says in 1 Corinthians, is the first fruit, and we are the later fruit.
In the scriptures, the first fruit was that fruit that came forth that first ripened, and it was anticipatory of all the other fruit that would ripen.
And that first fruit was offered often in sacrifice in the temple.
And it is, again, anticipatory of all the rest that will likewise be resurrected.
So our hope in Jesus Christ and his resurrection is a hope that communicates also to our own resurrection.
And I have to tell you, as a minister, this is something that has greatly encouraged me over the years because one of the things that I had to learn going to the ministry, I had no idea that I was going to be facing was the fact of what it meant to minister to the dying.
And this raped my heart over and over again over the years.
And I could only walk away from these deaths, reciting to myself the true and certain, true and sure certainty that Jesus Christ has resurrected and that we will likewise follow.
That is, those of us who have trusted in Christ.
And I suppose my word to be in closing should be to encourage those that are hearing and listening, if they have not trusted in Christ to do so, to own their sins and to understand that there is a way out of their sins because of the forgiveness that's offered in the resurrected Jesus Christ.
That was going to be my question in closing this Easter weekend.
If there are any listeners out there who have not yet received the gift of faith, how they could come to know it.
Well, folks, tomorrow, you've heard an Easter message tonight from Pastor Brett, but tomorrow, if you're not a member of a brick and mortar church, how about going to charlottereform.org?
There you can, as Rich Hamblin does, and our good friend Rich and his wife Janice wanted me to tell you hello tonight, Brett.
Go to charlottereformed.org and tune into the Easter message, the Easter sermon by Pastor Brett.
Pastor, on the eve of Easter, thank you for spending an hour with us.
I know tomorrow is a big day at your congregation.
We thank you for taking an hour of the night before to be with us.
And we'll talk to you again next week, ladies and gentlemen.