Click here to suppport the gospel advance in Calgary!

The Strength of the God-Man vs. Human Weakness

A few months ago, while doing a plumbing job for a very wealthy client, I noticed a large stack of “Life Extension” magazines beside the toilet. The picture on the magazine at top of the stack was one of a person climbing a ladder that was leaning up against a piece of DNA. Each strand going across represented another ten years. The person making their way up the ladder was approaching 150 years on the piece of DNA. This served as a reminder to me that, contrary to the thinking of some, the modernist dream of utopia is still alive and well in some quarters.

Or consider the growing business of the cryonics industry. Cryonics is defined as “the low temperature preservation (around -196 degrees C) of people who cannot be sustained by contemporary medicine, with the hope that resuscitation and restoration to full health may be possible in the future.”

As one client of the cryonics industry put it, “I have peace of mind knowing that no matter what happens in the future....I am signed up for cryonics and there is that possibility that I could wake up in the future.”

What a desperately sad statement for someone to make. In behind all this is the unspoken and taboo reality that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). Death is the universal destination for 100% of humanity. We are all reaping what we have sown as we have all rebelled against a holy and perfect God.

While this frenzied, frantic, and fearful world continues to claw away at the pangs of death in abject futility, there was a man who actually did emerge from the grave. In the ancient near East some 2000 years ago, just outside of the walls of Jerusalem, there was a man who emerged from the grave, because as the apostle Peter said: “God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.” (Acts 2:24)

Jesus Christ, the God-man, could not be held by the grave. At least one of the reasons for this is that he was sinless. It was impossible for him to be held by it (death) because he perfectly pleased the Father - both in his perfect, sinless life and in his substitutionary death on behalf of hopeless sinners. Now, for all of those who have been united to this Christ, through repentance of our sins and through faith in him, it can be said of us as well that it will be impossible for the grave to hold us.

Out of joy and gratitude to our Saviour, let us hold this Christ out to this lost, hopeless, and dying world.