The Resurrection and Its Aftermath

So, the last days of Jesus' ministry and life on earth is closing time in which after the resurrection there's two different directions taken. I want to start reading at verse 11 and sort of set the scene for what we find in verse 16. The resurrection has occurred. Every effort that the Jewish leaders made to make sure that this resurrection was not going to happen had been in place, and yet it occurred. So, as a result of it, there are two different groups of people involved. While the women were on their way, they were now going back to the disciples to tell them exactly what had happened to Jesus and fill them in on what took place. So, here's one strand of this story. Some of the guards went to the city and reported to the chief priest everything that had happened. When the chief priest had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, You are to say, His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep. If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble. So, the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day. Now, Matthew is explaining to the Jewish people who are going to be reading his gospel why this story that this was a fake took place. He's filling us in on what happened to the enemies of Jesus after this resurrection event took place. Now, beginning with verse 16, the result of the ladies going on their way under the instructions by Jesus Himself to go tell the disciples to meet Him in Galilee. Now, we see what's the rest of this story from all the accounts that took place. And if you read the gospels and even the book of Acts, and if you read even the things that Paul wrote, you find that this time after the resurrection of Jesus was a time of pretty great chaos. Everyone was going everywhere. Everyone was afraid of what would take place because the enemies of Jesus were determined to snuff out this movement that Jesus was starting. So, there's confusion and uncertainty and conflict and insecurity everywhere around. So, the stories are not always the same. And when you read even the gospels, they don't always end the same. And when you read even the book of Acts, it doesn't reflect exactly as if there was a day-to-day event of what a series of events that took place. Paul does write in 1 Corinthians about all the different appearances of Jesus. So, He's the only place in which we find all of them sort of collected together. And we can see in one place the different appearances that Jesus had. He didn't even appear to be with anyone in any certain place for a particular length of time. We don't know exactly all that was taking place. But then the eleven went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. We don't know all the stories that takes place, but the eleven minus Judas, the twelve disciples, were now sent to Galilee. We're not told exactly why they were to go to Galilee. Jesus Himself said they were to go. The message was given to the ladies who came to say, go to Galilee and to the mountain. We don't know what the mountain was that they were talking about either. We're not clear about that exactly. What was the mountain that they were talking about? Speculation is it was a mountain on the Sermon on the Mount was given to them. There they were gathering again. Galilee was a long way from the city of Jerusalem. The people who were wanting to make sure that Jesus was dead, gone, and out of the whole picture were looking for His followers. Now, when they were looking for His followers, Galilee was a great distance away and so they felt a little bit safe. We don't know, but in chapter 15 of the book of Corinthians, Paul is listing all the different people that saw Jesus. And in this section, he mentions that they went to Galilee. And there he says that there were 500 people who saw Jesus. Chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians, he says, Now, we don't find in the Gospels any record of 500 people seeing Jesus at any particular place. But there are many people who look at this and assume or deduce from it that the 500 were the crowd that gathered on the mountain. They would be a long way from Jerusalem. It would be hard for the authorities to find out that they were there. And in the short time that they were there by the time the news got back to Jerusalem, it would be too late to send someone up to try to kill them because they still wouldn't be there. Maybe that's what the crowd was that Jesus came to see. The 11 came, we know, and there may have been others. It'd be hard to imagine that the women who took the message from the empty tomb back to the disciples, telling them that they were to go to Galilee, that they didn't also plan to go themselves. They'd been following Jesus and His disciples around. They were the ones who stayed at the cross to watch the crucifixion when His disciples ran away. It would be hard to imagine the commitment they had to Christ if they didn't want to go and see what took place in the very last moments of His days here on earth or what He was going to do. They didn't know if He was going to stay or go. So the crowd that comes on this mountain may have been pretty large. It only mentions here the 11 who went to Galilee to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. They were instructed with that. But I think it would be difficult for all the people who were followers of Christ not to have heard the story of the resurrection, not to have heard that Jesus was no longer in a tomb, not to have heard that He was going to meet with His disciples again in Galilee. And so it makes sense that what Paul says, that there were 500 people or so who came to hear Jesus and see Him in this last appearance of His at Galilee. Then verse 17 says, when they saw Him, they worshipped Him. Now, what he's talking about here is they recognized His authority of who He was. The Bible, when it talks about worship, does not talk about it in the same way we do. If people says we're going to go worship, they think, well, you went to church, you sang songs and you had preaching and took up the offering or whatever that involves for what we call a worship service. But in the Bible, worship is primarily the relationship that a person has with God. It's exalting God to a position of ultimate authority in your life. You worship Him. You express to Him the authority that He has over you. You express to Him your commitment and your devotion to Him. And you do that not necessarily by words, but sometimes in the Bible, worship simply means that you do it by your actions. You do what you know God wants you to do. Living under His authority, that's saying you're in control of my life. You're my boss, and so as my boss, I'm going to do the things you tell me to do. So when they went there and they saw Jesus, the resurrected person, they worshipped Him. They were astonished at His presence. They acknowledged His superiority. And they acknowledged probably His divinity in a way that they never had been able to do before when He was walking on earth as a human being like they were. Here He was, dead one time and now alive, standing before them. They're awe at who He was. They're awe at what happened to Him. It had to be a powerful thing for them. And so when they came, they expressed it in their acceptance of Him and His worship with Him. And then the scripture says something very strange. When they saw Him, they worshipped Him, but some doubted. Now, the way this is phrased, it seems as if the 11, some of the 11 doubted, and that may have been true. Well, I mean, we know about the resurrection, okay? But if this had never happened before in the history of the world, and we were gathered here in this group, and someone that we know and loved came walking in the door, and we'd just gone to their funeral three days ago and buried them in the ground, wouldn't you be taken a little aback by that? Wouldn't you be uncertain as to whether or not this was really what it appeared to be? Now, we know, we've already heard of somebody being resurrected, so we're accustomed to that. But try to imagine you'd never heard of such a thing in all of your life. And they were unsure as to exactly what happened. The way this is phrased in our translation, it says some of them, some were, and some, how to say, some doubted. Matthew only uses the word doubted two times in all of his book. And both of these times, it's a little different than the way we might think. In this way, it could mean some of those who were there who worshipped him doubted, but it could mean also some of the other people of the 500 doubted. The way it reads in the Scripture, it almost seems like some of the 11 doubted. But if we know there were 500 who were gathered there, it's hard to imagine that there are not some of them who had heard the story, but had not seen him alive, who said, I can't believe this is true, but I'm going up there to be with the brothers and see what's going on here. I've heard this story, but people don't come from the dead and come back to life. It doesn't happen that way. Now, the resurrection of Jesus was different than the resuscitations of other people. We have stories of people who died and were resuscitated, and they just assumed the life that they'd had before, wherever it left off. Those resuscitations are far different than this resurrection of Jesus, because his resurrection was after the three days of death, and he was no longer in a human body like we have here. So, they heard the story of all this, and I'm sure that there were some in the crowd who came, but they were unsure as to exactly what they were going to find. The story in the scripture is not magic stuff. It's stories of real people who encountered these incredible and unbelievable experiences. We ought to understand that in the life of these people, there were some who heard the story, but they found it difficult and hard to believe. But you know what? There's not any of us at all who we haven't read the scriptures, even though we've placed our faith and trust in Christ, that sometimes the great promises of the Bible seem a little too big to believe. When you get in certain circumstances and things really look bad or difficult or hard, you can quote in your mind the promise that God is going to provide for you or protect you or care for you. But in those moments, it's just hard to expect that you have no fear or uncertainty. There are times, you know, whenever you get in situations that are frightening. I remember as a boy growing up in southwest Missouri on a farm, way away from anybody else that lived around, you know. And I'd be out in the field and we'd have some problem go wrong, and Dad would go back to get the tractor to come back and get me to pull the truck out of the creek that we got it stuck in, you know. And he'd be down there and it'd be black. You couldn't see a light anywhere in the world. You could hear noises everywhere around you. I really believed that God would take care of me. But I'll tell you, I was scared to death. I doubted. I thought, well, I know he's going to take care of me, but it may be that he wants me to die so that my parents will know that I went to heaven. You know, he may have some other plan here. And you can still believe the truth of things, but in certain, certain, certain circumstances, it can be terrifying to you. So it may have been even the some of the eleven were struggling with this. What does all this mean? The Bible is filled with stories of ordinary people like us who are trying to come to grips with what it meant to live under the authority of Christ and see the overwhelming things that he did and said. So here you have Jesus gathering now with, we don't know, the eleven at least. And maybe Paul is telling the same story about this five hundred people. He has them around him. He's talking to them about what he what he wants to say to them. Then verse 18 says, then Jesus came to them. You know, most of the stories of Jesus' ministry, it's the other way around. People come to Jesus. There's not very many times in Matthew's gospel that he talks about Jesus coming to people. The other ways people are always coming to Jesus, they want to touch him, they want to talk to him. They want to ask him questions. But here Jesus reverses the circumstances. All of the people are gathered looking for him, waiting for him. And then suddenly he comes to them. Jesus approaches us. He approaches them. He does, he takes the initiative in coming to them to begin to describe in his last days exactly what was going to take place. Jesus came to them and said, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. We now see what's going to happen. Whenever you look at what took place with the Roman, with the authorities that Jesus was faced with, they had their own plans. We're going to deny this ever took place. We're going to pay off the guards so that they'll tell the story we want them to tell. And everyone in our nation will hear the story that Jesus was stolen away. He did not come alive. Now, the people who are following Christ, the 11 or the 500, whichever one of these it is, or both of them, they come and they find Jesus coming to them. And he says to them, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Now, in Jesus' ministry, the disciples gave him authority. When he came to call them, he said, come and I'll teach you to be fishers of men. They accepted the authority of Jesus to leave behind everything that they were doing and come and follow him. But it was the authority of a prophet, a man of God and the Messiah even. It was a human kind of authority. They watched Jesus as he did his ministry and they saw that he had power to be able to understand things of God and communicate the things of God. But they also saw him on the cross, hanging there, bloody, beaten, defeated. And they saw him die. And they saw his body wrapped in the cloth and placed in the tomb. And they had severe shocks because they thought that he had all power and authority, but they saw him die. It was a disorienting thing for them, remember. They thought, what are we going to do? We'll just go back to our old way of life. They believed in his earthly authority, but there was this time in which they had every reason in the world to question what was taking place. Now Jesus comes to them in a different way. We don't know the kind of body Jesus had. We don't know if it looked exactly like us or if there was some kind of difference that they could see, this resurrected body. There's evidences that his resurrection body was quite different than the human body. And yet there's evidences that this resurrection body appeared to be like his human body. Nobody knows exactly what it was. All kind of speculation is given that Jesus, and I even read one fellow that said he thought Jesus' body was sort of slowly being transformed from the human kind of body to a body that was more like a spiritual body that he would have in heaven forever. And they point to the fact that he ate after he was resurrected as if he had a human body with a system that could ingest food and deal with food. And yet he came to places where he would get in a room with the doors all closed as if there was no physical part to his body. So we don't know exactly what was taking place with him. But Jesus comes, they're able to see him, and he tells them in this new body that they know is different. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Now Jesus had given authority before. You'll recall when he was talking to Peter, he asked Peter who he was. He said, you're the Christ, the Son of living God. He said, Peter, on this rock I will build my church and you will have authority. You'll be a leader in the church. They accepted that, but it was different now. Jesus is now saying that his authority is expanded to all of the universe, not just to this earth. He said to the church in meeting that the gates of hell would not prevail against the church. And that what the church bound on earth would be bound in heaven. What the church loosed on earth, it would be loosed in heaven. But now he comes to say, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Now we have earthly authorities, governments. We have church authorities. But what Jesus was saying to them is, everything in the universe is now under me, under my control. What a comfort this is to us. I mean, you can look and see at the persecution going on in the Middle East where people are told to convert to Islam or die. And I marvel at them, the courage that they have to say, I will never deny the cross and my savior. They've learned what it's like to believe that all authority in heaven and on earth belongs to him. And he ultimately has authority over them. The whole story of the scriptures is the story of the fact that people refuse to acknowledge and accept the authority of God over their lives. There are a lot of people who want to become followers of Christ, but they want to compartmentalize their lives and say, OK, God, I will give you this part of me. But this part of me is under my authority and control. It's hard for us to see the authority of God in the international community where so many evil and wicked things go on, or even in our own community where evil and wicked things are going on. But God says to his followers here, I want you to believe all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. So when you sit down to pray and you say, Lord, you're addressing the one who has all authority over the universe, the earth and every human being in the world. With that one word, it's hard to get in touch with someone when you're calling your phone service who has any authority to help you. You can stay on the phone for a long time trying to go from one person to another before you can finally get someone done. And whenever you try to get someone in a big company to pay attention to you, it's hard to do. When you try to get someone in the government to pay attention to you, it's hard to do. But what Jesus told his followers, now these 500 people gathered around them, I'm going to send you out. But I want you to understand this, all the authority and power in the world has been given to me. So whenever you go, I want you to remember that I have the power and authority to give you whatever you need and to help you wherever you are with whatever it is that you come face to face with. And in our everyday life, we have a tendency to forget that. But when we see the people who are faced with persecution, who have commitments to God forever in their lives, and we see the courage with which they face the persecution and death that is certain to come to them, we understand that they have grasped this concept. All authority in heaven and on earth belongs to God. And I have yielded myself to Jesus Christ, and he will take care of me. If you really believe that this is true, there's not anything in the world that you can't face with confidence. God has all authority and power. When the church has decisions to make about what it's going to do, when we find the will of God, and we know what he wants us to do, there is not anything in the world that can stop us except our failure to believe that he has all power and authority, and that he will respond to the need that we have. Churches don't die because God is sick or weak. They die because they fail to believe he has all authority, and they fail because they are not prepared to do the things he tells them he wants done. Whenever we believe that God wants us to do his will and his work, and we do it with faithfulness, there is not anything that can stand in the way of us. Jesus said to his church, I'll promise you that the gates of hell will not stand against you. It can't stop you. Now, he uses the word Hades in the Bible. It's a different word than hell. It's really the place where dead people go. You know what stops everything in this world? When it dies. You can have a wonderful horse. When your horse is dead, it's over. You can have a wonderful dog, but when your dog is dead, it's over. You can be a wonderful person, but when you die, it's over. That's our ultimate enemy. Even death cannot stop my church. We face the terrible circumstances in our world in many places, but what Jesus promised was, I will protect you even from death. The worst thing that can ever happen to a person in this world is for them to die, but what Jesus promised was, this will not be an enemy to you. For when it comes your time to die, you will win. So, we can't lose because all authority and power are given to us because Jesus has promised that to us. He brought his disciples to this mountain, and he's going to tell them what he wants them to do. This is where he may have started his ministry with the Sermon on the Mount. And now he's brought them back to this place where he started on his ministry, and he's saying to them, there is a new agenda. It's not like the first time I stood here and told you I was going to keep the law and all the things I wanted you to do. You've watched me live these things. You've seen me put into practice the things I've told you. You've been living with me, and you've seen the power that God has when you do that. And now I come to you saying, this is what it's to be about. In the book of Acts, we find that the story of Jesus' resurrection appearances are phrased a little differently. It says, Jesus spent 40 days on earth teaching about the kingdom of God. Now, the kingdom of God means, any kingdom means that there is a king who is in charge of his citizens. What Jesus was teaching them was that the king, him, is now in charge of them, and this is the way they're to live their lives. Jesus was reestablishing with them the principles of the kingdom of God. Did he take them back to the mountain where he first gave that Sermon on the Mount to say to them again, remember what I told you that you should do, how you should live, how you should treat people, the way your life should be. I'm telling you that I lived this while I was on earth, and now I'm stepping off this stage, and you are to live it. I will give you all the wisdom you need to be able to live it so you'll make the right choices. I will provide everything that you need to be able to live in this world. I will protect you from being destroyed, and I will make you, my people, a force that changes the entire world. You just do what I told you. We could not have ever had the church and all of its authority and power today had Jesus stayed as a human being. But right now, today, all over the world, there are groups of people gathered on this day. They're listening to the Word of God. The Holy Spirit is carrying the message of Jesus to the heart and mind of every single one of these millions of people who are out there. They're hearing his message. They're talking to him, and they're hearing the authoritative voice of Jesus saying this is what I want you to do. This is what I want you to say to that person you work with or the people in your family or the friend that you have. Do it. All authority is given to me. All power is given to me. Do what I tell you. The rest of the story in Matthew couldn't take place without this part. I have all power and all authority. Now, he gets ready to tell them what they're supposed to do. Living your life for God can't be done unless you really believe that he has all authority and power. Let's pray. Let me ask you if there's something in your life that you know God has wanted you to do. That you have put it off. Maybe you thought you couldn't do it, but he keeps telling you. Maybe you've looked at your skills, and you say it's not there. Maybe you've looked at your own life and said that's not something I could do. I want you this week when you pray, when you pray, and when you make choices to stop and think if God has all power and authority, would it make a difference in the choices that I make and the things that I do? We do believe the story of the scriptures. But we doubt. This is not new to you, Lord. Because when you were on earth and you had these people gathered around you, there were many who were looking at you but still had their doubts. We ask that you would help us to have confidence that your power and authority lives within us so that whatever you ask of us we will be courageous to do without thought that it might fail. For we would have confidence that whatever you ask of us will be done if we try. I'm asking you this week in the minds of all of us that we might experience your authority and your power personally in our lives. And I want to ask that when you do that that you would remind each of us in whose life you have demonstrated this to take a few minutes to tell us in the future how we've experienced the living Lord with authority speaking to us guiding us, providing for us, protecting us and giving us influence in the lives of other people so that we make a difference in their lives. Help us to proclaim the message to the world that you have a powerful, that you have the power to heal, to change, and to save. In the name of Jesus we pray. Amen. Amen. See you tomorrow. See you tomorrow. See you tomorrow.