April 8, 2023 - 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.
Mercy there was great and race was real.
Ladies and gentlemen, the last hour of our program before Resurrection Day, Easter Sunday, belongs to Pastor Brett McAtee, the husband of a wife without peer, father of three children who walk as heroes in the land.
He is the author of Iron Inc., which is committed to thinking God's thoughts after him.
He has pastored Christ the King Reformed Church in Charlotte, Michigan for over 20 years.
He is our official TPC clergyman, and he is with us again here on this holy weekend.
Pastor Brett, it is so great to have you.
Thank you, James.
It's good of you to ask me to be here.
Christ is risen.
He is risen indeed, brother, and share us the good news of what happened at Calvary so many years ago.
Very good.
So here we are on the cusp now of resurrection morning.
And I thought that we would look at the text in 1 Corinthians 15, which is a classic text about the resurrection, and then look at the resurrection and the proper way to understand it and maybe improper ways that we shouldn't be thinking about it.
We go to there in 1 Corinthians 15.
The Holy Spirit says through the Apostle Paul, he says, now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand.
And by this gospel, you are saved if you hold firmly to the word I preach to you.
Otherwise, you have believed in vain.
For what I received, I passed on to you as of primary importance, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, and he appeared to Cephas and the 12.
And after that, he appeared to more than 500 of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.
Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.
And last of all, he appeared to me also as to one born out of time.
So as we look at the resurrection, let's tee it up by looking at some of the great premises of the Bible.
The great premises of the Bible that have to be in place to understand the resurrection is that God is real, God is holy, man is a sinner, man as a sinner is accountable to God.
Man has sought to displace God for himself as God in his sin.
And because of that, God intends to judge men for this high-hand rebellion.
And the only place that man can find safety from that judgment is in the judgment of God that fell on Christ there at Calvary.
That God is satisfied with us because he is satisfied with his judgment that fell on Christ for our sins is attested to and is proven by the resurrection.
In other words, the resurrection is the proof positive that God receives Christ's death as payment for the penalty of our sins.
The scriptures say, for example, that Christ was delivered up for our trespasses or our sins and raised for our justification.
The scripture teaches that because of Christ's death and resurrection, there is, therefore, now no condemnation, no judgment of guilt for those who are in Christ Jesus.
So what we see here is no bodily resurrection of Christ, and so no possible sense of relief from the inescapable sense of God's just wrath and opposition to us as sinners.
The resurrection then is instrumental to the Christian faith.
And without the real live resurrection of Jesus Christ from the doldrums of the grave, there is no such thing as Christianity.
And anything that goes by the name Christianity that doesn't believe in a physical resurrection of Christ arising from the tomb is not Christianity at all, but is something that's just cobbed the name.
Of the import of the bodily resurrection to Bible-believing Christians, there is little doubt.
In the passage in Corinthians 15, Paul elsewhere can turn to the importance of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ over and over again.
In verse 17 of that same chapter of 1 Corinthians 15, Paul can write under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and if Christ hath not risen, then void is our preaching and void also is your face.
Again in 17, and if Christ has not risen, vain is your faith, and you are yet in your sins.
Then also those who have fallen asleep in Christ did perish.
If in this life, Paul says, we have hope in Christ only, of all men we are to be pitied.
The early church fathers understand this.
They contained the same kind of reasoning and what they had to say.
There was a chap named Chrysostom, an early church father.
He was called the golden-tongued.
He was known as one of the greatest preachers in church history.
He had this to say about the resurrection.
He said, for in what were the disciples confident?
In the shrewdness of their reasonings?
Nay, of all men, they were the most unlearned.
But in the abundance of their possessions?
Nay, they had neither staff nor shoes.
But in the distinction of their race, nay, they were mean and of mean ancestors.
In the greatness of their country, nay, they were obscure places.
In their own numbers, nay, they were not more than 11 and they were scattered abroad.
But in their master's promises, what kind of promises?
For if he were not risen again, neither would those be likely to be trusted by them.
And how should they endure a frantic people?
For if the chief of them endured not the speech of a woman keeping the door, referring to Peter, and if all the rest too, on seeing Christ bound, were scattered abroad, how should they have thought to run to the ends of the earth and plant a faint tale of a resurrection?
For if he stood not at a woman's threat, and they not so much the sight of bonds, how were they able to stand against kings and rulers and nations where were swords and guerdians and furnaces and 10,000 deaths by day unless they had the benefit of the power and grace of him who rose again.
Such miracles and so many were done and none of these things did the Jews regard but crucified him who had done them.
And were they likely to believe these men as their mere word about a resurrection?
These things are not.
They are not so, but the might of him who rose again brought them to pass.
And so Chrysostom understood the importance and the necessity of the resurrection.
It is the lynchpin for the biblical Christian.
It is the foundation upon which he builds his whole faith.
Many years later, another minister after Chrysostom, a chap named John Owen, he likewise talked about the importance of this resurrection.
This truth of the resurrection, Owen said, is so important that nothing in the religion can exist without it.
The apostles diligently confirmed it in the first churches, and for the same reason it was attacked by Satan and denied and opposed by many.
This was done in two ways.
First, by an open denial of any such thing.
How can some of you say that there is no resurrection from the dead?
And second, those who did not dare attack it directly expounded in an allegorical way, saying the resurrection has already taken place.
Well, Paul's right there, ladies and gentlemen, and Pastor Brent McE will continue his Resurrection Weekend message right after this.
The Honorable Cause, a Free South, is a collection of 12 essays written by Southern Nationalist authors.
The book explores topics such as what is the Southern nation?
What is Southern nationalism?
And how can we achieve a free and independent diction?
The Honorable Cause answers questions on our own terms.
The book invites readers to understand for themselves why a free and independent diction is both preferable and possible.
The book pulls in some of the biggest producers of pro-South content, including James Edwards, the host and creator of the political cesspool, and Wilson Smith, author of Charlottesville Untoad, Arkansas congressional candidate and activist Neil Kumar,
host and creator of the dissident mama podcast, Rebecca Dillingham, author of A Walk in the Park, My Charlottesville Story, Identity Dictionary, Patrick Martin, and yours truly, Michael Hill, founder and president of the League of the South, as well as several other authors.
The Honorable Cause is available now at Amazon.com.
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 they reproduce the lie, the more spiritual power they get.
Now look, the media is a lie multiplier.
And this multiplication gives more evil spiritual power to the beast.
That power protects the cells of the beast from prosecution.
Why isn't Hillary in prison?
She is protected.
We must restore our national relationship with God.
Truth is sacred in the kingdom.
And the government shall be upon his shoulder.
Isaiah 9, A message from Christ Kingdom Ministries.
lives this Easter weekend, ladies and gentlemen.
Rare is the guest who can make the creator and host step aside, quieten, and listen.
But Pastor Brett McCatey does that every time he appears on this program.
You listen to this show.
Anything that any of our guests have been attacked for, Brett McAtee has sustained and endured and withered those attacks.
He is a man of faith and a man of God and a man who, when he appears on this program, I am all too happy to be just a member of the listening audience.
I am thankful to hear his message and the blessings it always brings.
Pastor, continue to tell us the Easter story.
So we see where we left off that the resurrection is affirmed throughout scripture.
It's affirmed by Chrysostom.
It's affirmed by John Owen.
Indeed, Owen, as we quoted earlier, says the truth of the resurrection is so important that nothing in religion can exist without it.
And then he goes on, as I quoted at the tail end of the last segment, to talk about ways in which the resurrection was being denied in the early church.
He talks about that in 2 Timothy 2:18.
And he says that in both cases, not only does the apostle condemn these errors in denying the resurrection, but declares positively that their admission, that is the admission of these errors, overthrows the faith and makes the preaching of the gospel vain and useless.
So if we do not have a resurrection, again, we do not have Christianity.
If we do not have a very particular resurrection, we do not have Christianity.
This evening, following the scriptures then and following 2,000 years of godly men who have gone before, we're going to spend just a little bit of time considering the different ways that the modern church today thinks about the resurrection and gets it wrong.
The premise is as Christians, we not only have to affirm the resurrection, but we also have to affirm a very particular resurrection, the resurrection that we find in scripture.
Here is one of the ways that the modern churches is appealing to the scripture in a boneheaded way.
Recently, Andy Stanley at Dallas Theological Seminary said, quote, the foundation of our faith is not the scripture.
The foundation of our faith is not the infallibility of the Bible.
The foundation of our faith is something that happened in history.
And that's something that happened in history, of course, as Stanley's referring to is the resurrection.
But of course, what Stanley's doing here is he's trying to rip apart redemption from Revelation, the redemption that's provided in the resurrection in Christ.
Sure, the foundation of our faith is something that happened in history, that is redemption, but I could not know about redemption apart from Revelation.
So Stanley introduces a false dichotomy between redemption and revelation.
God not only acts, that is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but he also speaks, that is, he interprets this act, and the interpretation of that act is found in the scriptures.
So when Stanley says that we needed to be done with the foundation of scripture, at that very minute, we've also done away with the resurrection, because you can't have the embrace of the resurrection without the embrace of the scriptures.
And so without trying to be too over the top here, it's just this statement by Angie Stanley is an attack on the resurrection of Jesus Christ, even though he thinks he's affirming it.
Another way that the church gets it wrong throughout history, and there are going to be lots of people in these kinds of churches tomorrow, is that you find the church treats the resurrection like an Aesop fable.
It's something that we're just supposed to get a lesson out of.
And this is often pursued, this mindset, by irrational liberal fundamentalists.
This is the way, as I said, the large percentage of the church today thinks about the resurrection.
They affirm that the resurrection is existentially true.
That is, it's subjectively true.
Though they also go on to say that it's likely false in terms of historical reality.
But that's completely contrary to what Paul says in that passage we read at the beginning.
He talks about the historical reliability.
He brings forth the witnesses.
If there was a court setting, he would have called forth the 500 witnesses and say, what did you see?
But this way of looking at the resurrection says, well, it's true for me, but it may not be true for you.
It's not a historical reality.
In this way of thinking, the resurrection, as well as all of Christianity, becomes, as I said, like an Aesop fable.
We can learn truth from Aesop fables, but nobody really thinks the fables themselves are historically true.
We may say that there's much to be learned from the fox who fooled the crow out of her cheese by falsely flattering her on her singing abilities, but no one really believes that a fox and a crow had a conversation regarding cheese.
Many people want to treat the resurrection in just that manner.
Yes, yes, the lessons that we've learned from letting the truth of the resurrection impact us are all very, they're very well and good, but let us not get too cheeky in actually believing that all this really happened in history.
You know, for these types of folks, the resurrection and Christianity in a whole, as a whole, is one giant Aesop fable.
There's a chap in history named Emil Bruner.
He was one of those chaps.
He said things like God and the medium of conceptuality are mutually exclusive.
He said God can speak his word to a man even through false doctrine.
Bruner could say all words have only an instrumental value.
Neither the spoken words nor their conceptual content are the word itself, but only its framework.
Now, those are involved quotes, but what Bruner is telling us with these quotes is there's no getting at, no getting to objective truth.
And if there's no getting to objective truth, then what we believe is no longer the issue, but only the how we believe, the passion with which we believe, whatever it is that we believe.
That this mindset has entered into modern culture is seen everywhere.
One example of that in a film I like, and some of you no doubt have seen it as well, is the film Serenity.
In the scene where the Christian pastor of the crew, whose name's Shepherd Book, where he's dying, he grabs Mal and he says, I don't care what you believe, just believe in it.
Well, as you're a shepherd book, I want you to know I don't care if you just believe in something.
I want to know if what you believe corresponds to what God says you must believe and what God says is true.
As for these types of people, for them, it's not what is believed about the resurrection that matters in terms of content, but rather what matters is the passion with which one believes whatever content one assigns to the resurrection.
Or similarly, what matters is not believing set truths about the resurrection, but rather what matters is having a powerful encounter with an individually defined resurrected Christ so that's coming away with a meaningful experience.
And so again, the thrust of this is it's not really that is the resurrection.
It's not really objectively true, according to these people, but it's only true for me.
We sing it.
We sing this mindset in the evangelical churches.
Many will sing it tomorrow.
You ask me how I know he lives.
He lives within my heart.
Well, if you talk to somebody with half a brain in their head, they're just going to scorn you if that's how you say you know he lives.
He doesn't, our knowledge of him knowing that he lives is not the fact that he lives within our heart, true as that may be.
Our knowledge that we know he lives is in the record of scripture.
It's what God says.
God says that Christ was resurrected.
That's what we're told in scripture, and that's what we have to base our confidence in the resurrection on.
Now, again, it should be true that Christ lives in our hearts, metaphorically speaking, but that is not the foundation of how we know and how we have confidence in the resurrection.
Our confidence in the resurrection is based upon thus saith the Lord.
Down this line of what I'm talking about, a chap named Curtis White in a literature named Hot Air God can say, what we require of belief is not that it makes sense, but that it be sincere.
Clearly, this is not the spirituality of a centralized orthodoxy.
It is a sort of workshop spirituality that you can get with a cereal box top in $5.
And so again, what we're pressing here is that it's not only the resurrection that we have to believe in, but it's a very particular resurrection that's grounded and anchored in the revelation of Jesus Christ as articulated in scripture.
This way of thinking about the resurrection insists that personal experience and individual encounter can do for us what the divine record of redemptive history cannot do for us.
Why try to surmount 2,000 years of history in order to find out with precision what God says happened when you can have your own meaningful experience?
And so here we see that the objective content of God's revelation in scripture gives way to a Jesus encounter, an encounter that is each and every person variable.
And so we have to anchor our faith in the resurrection and the God's revelation and not just talk about having a personal relationship with Jesus.
Unless that Jesus.
Quick break, Pastor McAtee.
Ladies and gentlemen, an important message from Brett McAtee, perhaps the most important we could ever give you this weekend.
And we'll be exposing corruption.
Informing citizens, pursuing liberty.
You're listening to Liberty News Radio.
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I'm Jerry Barmash.
A number of congressional Democrats want trips taken by Justice Clarence Thomas to be investigated.
The 16 lawmakers are asking Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to investigate the luxury trips that were given to Justice Clarence Thomas by a major Republican donor.
They want Roberts to look into any unethical or potentially unlawful conduct on the part of Thomas.
The group said if Roberts doesn't act, Congress will.
Thomas, for his part, has said he was told he didn't have to disclose the trips around the world on yachts and private jets owned by billionaire businessman Harlan Crowe.
I'm John Schaefer.
A federal judge in eastern Washington is prohibiting the FDA from pulling a well-known abortion drug off the market.
The Seattle Times reports a U.S. district judge issued his ruling on Friday in response to a multi-state lawsuit involving 16 other states.
The ruling will keep mephopristone available in those states, too, while the case proceeds.
Conservatives have taken to social media criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris for a fiery speech she made condemning Tennessee Republicans who voted to expel two Democrats following gun violence protests on the House floor, Fox News reported.
Harris, in one portion of the speech, said loudly, quote, it wasn't about the three of these leaders.
It was about who they were representing.
It was about whose voices they were channeling.
Understand that, unquote.
Her boss, President Biden, will visit Northern Ireland and Ireland later this week.
Biden will mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.
The peace deal brokered by the U.S. helped end decades of sectarian violence between pro-Ireland Catholics and pro-Britain Protestants.
The president will head to Belfast Tuesday to mark the tremendous progress since the signing of the agreement.
I'm Dave Collins.
Rain suspended play at the Masters.
The third round will resume at 8:30 a.m. Eastern.
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With the mighty director's horse, he arose a maker from the dark domain.
And he is for enemy.
Says the grave.
He arose.
He arose.
Hallelujah.
I hope Pastor Brett McEtee won't mind me relaying this information to him and to all of you as well.
When Pastor McEtee comes on, people take notice, not just the members of our listening audience, but our guests as well.
Earlier this evening in the first hour, Dr. Michael Hill was our guest.
When he heard Pastor McAtee was going to be on, he said, it is an honor to be on the same show as Brett McAtee.
And please let Pastor McAtee know that I will be tuned in tomorrow morning as I am every morning for his online sermon.
Now, Pastor McCarty pastors the brick and mortar Christ the King Reformed Church in Charlotte, Michigan.
But if you are not a member of a local congregation, if you're looking for a fellowship to which you can belong, nothing substitutes for that in-person fellowship.
But you could do much worse than tuning in online at charlottereformed.org.
That's C-H-A-R-L-O-T-T-E, Charlotte Reformed.org.
And of course, our good friends Brett, the Hamblins, Rich and Janice, are tuned in tonight and wanted to pass along from me to you a hello and many others.
When you come on, I get more requests to say, tell Brett I said hello than just about any guest I can recall.
And for good reason, it's a powerful message.
A lot of times when you're on, it's more conversational over the course of the hour.
But when you're on for Christmas and Easter, I actually call Brett and I say, you got four segments, 10 minutes each.
I'm going to introduce you, and you take the segments and do whatever you want with them.
And that's what we do.
And so that's what we're doing now.
But I did want to relay those messages, Brett.
Your message is well received here on this program.
Godspeed to all my friends.
I'm not worthy of people's confidence, but thank you.
We're talking about the resurrection here.
And what we're trying to make a point is that it's not just any resurrection, but it's a very particular resurrection.
It's a resurrection that's anchored in objective reality.
It's not a resurrection that is just a subjective encounter with what we call a resurrected Jesus, and therefore I can kind of give Jesus a wax nose and make him whatever I want him to be.
When we have these kind of subjective encounters, meaningful experience sometimes they're called, it has the advantage so-called of canceling out the time chasm between us and the historical Christ who rose from the grave so many years ago.
And when we have this encounter, we're basing everything on our personal encounter, it makes us to be contemporaries with Jesus.
And those who have this Aesop fable resurrection generally believe the scriptures are all paradox and contradiction.
And given such a paradoxical revelation that can mean anything, it usually does mean anything to any number of different people.
What we need now is clarity in the pulpit more than ever.
And clarity has to begin with the fundamentals of biblical Christianity.
And the fundamentals are the cross and the empty grave, the ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ in Pentecost, empowering the church to do and proclaim this crucified and resurrected reigning king, the Lord Jesus Christ.
And if we keep embracing these kind of subjective Christianities that talk about our personal encounter or a personal relationship absent of being anchored in scripture, we're going to keep having a church that's that's not anchored.
And that's what I'm arguing for today as I'm arguing for the resurrection is that we be an anchored people that can stand the zeitgeist blowing all around us.
And we certainly know what we need today more than anything is to be able to have a foundation where we don't blow with every strange wind of doctrine.
As a result of subjectivism in the church, the subjective resurrection, the church today does not confess altogether the same resurrected Christ, but rather all confess different Christs together at the same time.
We may be part of the same denomination and perhaps even attend the same churches, yet the resurrected Christ that we're all confessing is potentially at least as different as each and every individual doing the confessing.
And all this is important because it is not that we believe in some kind of resurrection that matters, but rather that we believe in a very particular, God-defined resurrection that matters.
The resurrection that's spoken of throughout the scriptures.
Now, what is behind what we have briefly discussed here happens in two different opposite ways.
People can assume the supernatural can't be true.
This is called, in history, has been called neo-orthodoxy, Bardianism.
It presupposes the supernatural can't be true, and then it reads the Bible and says, well, I believe the Bible.
I believe in Christianity.
I believe in the resurrection.
But if you presuppose the Bible, the supernatural isn't true, then whatever you mean by those words, I believe in the Bible, I believe in the resurrection, they obviously are going to have a different content than the person who believes that scripture is true.
Also, these views can presuppose that God is so transcendent that we can't reach him.
So we want to ask, what is the answer to this wrong way of thinking about the resurrection?
We have to be, first of all, as we've been saying over and over again in different ways, we have to be confident in God's recorded revelation.
Scripture teaches to the law and through the testimony.
If they do not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn.
And that's what the scriptures do.
They point to the reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Going back as far as perhaps the oldest book in the Bible, in the book of Job, all the way through the scriptures, and then brought with vivid reality in the New Testament, this proclamation of the resurrection.
2 Timothy 3.16 teaches all scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be adequately equipped for every good work.
And so the scriptures are reliable.
And when the Holy Spirit tells us to the Apostle Paul that Christ is resurrected and there were all these witnesses, this is a reliability that we have to build our whole lives on.
The objective truth of God's revealed word in proclaiming to us the resurrection of Jesus Christ, a resurrection that gives us confidence that we've been received by God, that we are owned by God and have favor with God because of the finished work of Jesus Christ, confirmed by and received by the confirmation of his resurrection.
In these truths we stand.
In these truths we find our whole meaning and definition.
In these truths we find our identity.
Paul is right when he says, if in this life Christ is not raised, we of all men are to be pitied.
And so the resurrection is central to who we are.
If I didn't have the resurrection, I can't even begin to think how my life would unravel.
But the resurrection is true and we have the confidence of it being true.
He says, because God has said it's true.
So we have to do all we can to support churches which understand this kind of idea of the resurrection.
And for those of you that are younger, that are listening, you have to look for a church as your life unfolds that anchors you in these truths.
Don't just go to a church unless, don't go to a church if it's just playing at Christianity.
Make sure they're anchored in these truths like the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
For those that are younger, make sure as you grow older that the confidence in the resurrection is a non-negotiable.
This historical real resurrection that we're speaking of is what the Holy Spirit speaks of in 1 Corinthians 15.
Paul there doesn't speak that it's true to me.
He calls forth the historical evidence.
He cites the witnesses that can be called forth.
He's not speaking of a resurrection that was based on the truth that Christ has arisen in his heart.
The scriptures everywhere testify to the historicity of the resurrection.
Christ has flesh and bones that one can examine by touching.
He eats breakfast with his disciples.
Christ's resurrection is as historical, dear listener, as your own birth.
For your parents out there, you must train your children to think this way.
Get them a good catechism, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Westminster larger or shorter catechism.
Teach them about the historicity and the reliability of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Because if you don't, they're going to imbibe the zeitgeist that's around them too often in the church even, and they will very likely abandon the faith.
And so you have to teach them.
You have to model before them the reliability of the resurrection.
You have to tell them why these things are true and why it's instrumental in their lives.
You have to give them a confidence of the resurrection.
You have to grow them up so that they understand that without the resurrection, they lose their identity.
And the fact that we haven't done this is testified by the reality that too often when our children hit 18, they graduate not only from high school, but they graduate from the church.
We must be careful of this idea of a spiritual only resurrection.
In other words, there are those who believe that the resurrection is real, but they make it so spiritual that it loses touch with reality.
And that's what we want to talk about a little bit now.
There's a tendency for the reform to make spiritual other than what it really is.
And with that, we'll go to the next pause.
The next and final pause this Easter weekend, this holy weekend between Good Friday and Resurrection Day, we are here now with Pastor Brett McIntyre, Charlotte Reform.org.
One more segment with the good man right after this.
Hey there, TPC family.
This is James Edwards, your host of the Political Cesspool.
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All the minds are going.
And the Lord Hill, because Luke,
chapter 24, tells us that he is not here, he has risen.
The Christian response to that is, he has risen indeed.
This yesterday was Good Friday, which marks the beginning of the weekend where most of the Christian world, our Eastern friends, celebrated a little bit later, commemorates what is the most pivotal point in history, the day by which history is divided, the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Imagine what it must have felt like for his mother, his disciples, the small family, small band of family and friends to watch as he agonizingly gasped for air on the cross.
What was going through their minds as they witnessed the most unspeakable act of injustice the world has ever seen unfold right before their very eyes.
We find ourselves lamenting the slow and grinding death of our own nation, our own culture, our own very flesh and blood kinsmen during this degenerate age.
But at the very darkest of hours, we must remember the words spoken so long ago at that empty tomb.
He is not here.
He is risen.
And to the degree that those words resonate in our hearts this Easter weekend, this Resurrection Day weekend, they strike fear in the hearts of our enemies who are overplaying their hand even as we speak this evening with Pastor Brett McAtee.
The more we take those words to heart, he is not here, he is risen, the more those who oppose us lose heart because they instinctively know what we too easily forget.
It only takes one.
We don't have to outnumber them.
And it can happen because it did happen.
And he promised that we would do even greater things than he because he would be working through us.
And I want you to remember that this Easter weekend and have a blessed Resurrection Day tomorrow.
Pastor Brett McAtee, the last 10 minutes of this program, this last 10 minutes before Easter is yours, brother.
James, we got to find a pulpit for you, brother.
Amen.
I could have gone that route, I think, in a different world.
I could have gone that route.
And I would have been happy doing it.
As we press on, we're reminded that the resurrection does remind us of God's victory, God's victory in space and time.
And piggybacking just a wee bit on what James said here, we need to have confidence in light of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Confidence not only in his resurrection, but confidence in the reality of what scripture teaches that we've been resurrected with him.
And that we're now living resurrected lives.
I'm going to talk about that in just a wee bit.
But as dark as the night now seems around us, culturally speaking, as wacky and as insane as it is, and it is insane, we can look to the resurrection and we can be reminded that God wins, that God gets the victory.
And so it may be the case that we're overwhelmed with numbers against us, but the resurrected Christ has ascended the right hand of the Father and he reigns and he rules and he's bringing everything and conducting all of history that Ephesians teaches to the good of the church.
And so we can be confident that even though the numbers are overwhelming against us, we can take the attitude of, hey, it's a target-rich environment.
I can't miss.
And so the resurrection reminds us that we follow a victorious Christ, and we likewise will go from victory unto victory.
Even if there are temporary setbacks in God's hard providence, overall, we can know that we know that we know because of the resurrection that we are going to win out.
Christ reigns.
As we're talking about the resurrection, we were segueing and pivoting just a bit to talk about the nature of the resurrection that we have.
Christ is risen, and scripture teaches that we've been risen with Christ.
And so there's a connection between Christ as our head and we as the body.
Because he's resurrected, we live the resurrected life.
And it's not just a spiritual resurrection.
We need to be careful of that.
There's a tendency for evangelicals to make spiritual to mean to speak Plato as if it means non-intrusive in our everyday lives.
We have been resurrected so that our relationship to the old Adam is superseded by our relationship to the new Adam.
We've been taken out of the old Adam, the old covenant head, and been put in the resurrected Christ.
And this explains why the expectation is that we would walk as the scripture says in newness of life.
You see, our resurrection means that we've been resurrected from our old life.
Paul can say in Colossians that you've been translated from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of God's dear son.
And that translation is a kind of a resurrection that's true because of the resurrected work of Jesus Christ.
And so we walk in newness of life because we are now in a new kingdom.
We are resurrected beings right now.
Do you understand that, listeners?
It's not that we're waiting to be resurrected.
That's true.
We are waiting for our not yet resurrected bodies, but there's a sense in which we're resurrected even now.
We are resurrected beings, and though we are not yet all that we one day will be, we are creatures who live in this present age as walking and living in the resurrected age to come.
Some of you are familiar with Tolkien.
I'm a big Tolkien fan.
One of his characters, Legolas, in one of his works, Legolas lived in two worlds at the same time.
And we're the same way.
We live in this present wicked age, but also because we're grounded and anchored in Christ's resurrection, we live and walk in the age to come.
And because of the resurrection, we walk in newness of life.
And so we are his ambassadors, his resurrected people, being the aroma of the resurrected of Christ everywhere.
And scripture teaches that that resurrection life is the smell of death to those who are perishing, but it's the smell of life to those that are being saved.
And so this tells us that this walking in newness of life that is reality because of our resurrection with Christ, that this walking in newness of life should make us a pucker-upper duck kind of people.
That is to say that people should either want to kiss us or they should want to punch us.
They should want to punch us because they're enemies of Christ.
They should want to kiss us because we with them are friends of Christ.
This is the nature of the resurrected life.
We've been resurrected to walk in this newness of life, and that's impinging an influencing on everything around us that's not yet been resurrected.
So in some sense, then we as the resurrected are the bearers of resurrection life to all that we come in contact with.
Now, fellow believer, have you thought about yourself that way?
That you in your very existence are the bearer of the resurrection life to all that we come in contact with, to all that you put your hand to.
So Christians, as being those who have been resurrected, regenerated, given newness of life, translated from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of God to your son, whom he loves.
Christians who live the resurrected life, that resurrection should get in everything that they do in their relationships, in their thinking, and their speaking.
Praise God for the resurrection that's given not only to our Lord Christ, but also to us as fellow believers.
This reality of having now been resurrected to Christ is why Paul can write about our now being seated in the heavenlies with Jesus Christ there in Ephesians.
It is why he could write that we have been now translated to the kingdom of God's dear son whom he loves.
It's why we can write that our citizenship is in heaven, keeping in mind that heaven is invading this present wicked age via his resurrected citizenry.
The now of our resurrected status cannot be hidden under the bushel of the not yet of our resurrection.
The kingdom has come, and we are citizens of that future creational age kingdom, bringing the aroma of Christ and the kingdom into all that we come in contact with.
And I don't know if I'll be able to have the time to get through this poem, but I want to end with a poem by John Updike.
You can look it up if I don't get through it.
You can punch into search engine John Updike resurrection.
Here's the poem, make no mistake.
If he rose at all, it was as his body.
If the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules renit, the amino acids rekindle, the church will fall.
It was not as the flowers, each soft spring recurrent.
It was not as this is spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the 11 apostles.
It was as his flesh, ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes, the same valved heart that 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 faded credulity of earlier ages.
Let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back.
Not paper-mâché, not a stone in the 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, make it a real angel, weighty with max planks, quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the dawn light, 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.
Beautiful, beautiful poem by Updike talking about the real reality of Jesus Christ, that he resurrected not as some kind of a spirit, that he resurrected not just in the imagination of his disciples, that it was not just the fact that they somehow believed he was resurrected.
Therefore, that was the faith that caused the church to go forward, but that he really corporeal, physically resurrected from the grave.
Jesus Christ is risen.
He is risen indeed.
He is risen indeed, ladies and gentlemen.
Pastor Brett McAtee, thank you so much for bringing your message to this audience tonight.
You can join Pastor Brett and his congregation up in Michigan for worship every Sunday morning at 10 a.m. at charlotte reformed.org.
I know several of you listening tonight do that already.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you're looking for a fellowship, that's one right there that you should go to while you're waiting to find one in the flesh.
But he had the flesh, an in-the-flesh fellowship and a brick-and-mortar fellowship at charlottereform.org.
Pastor Brett, he has risen.
He has risen indeed.
Happy Resurrection Day to you, my friend, and my brother.
And we look forward to the next time we talk to you already for Dr. Michael Hill and Keith Alexander, the entire production crew and staff here at TBC.