What I would have given to have been there and experienced that moment. That precise moment where Mary realized the tomb was empty and her Lord removed.
We all know the story and we know it well. Mary, weeping, hears a voice behind her, and she turns to ask where the body of Christ was taken. Not recognizing that it was Jesus Christ, in fact, who was speaking to her. She mistook Him for the gardener in her grief.
Reading the text, we become aware of some things. One of the most profound and revealing things we see is that it was a woman who was at the tomb that morning. Women, in that day and time, were thought to be unreliable as witnesses and their testimonies were often not accepted in the courts of their day. Knowing this, why would it be a woman who would be the first witness to the resurrection? Wouldn’t it have been easier to have a couple of men there, since their testimony would have been regarded as more reliable?
It might have been easier, but that would have represented a failure of the King of the Kingdom to confront the cultural nonsense that had diminished the role of women in the ancient world and rendered them to second-class citizens. And what an awful thing that would have been had it happened that way. The Lord was not going to bend to a patriarchal system that diminshed women when He created us all as equals.
For Mary to see her risen Lord and Savior was profound! The Lord fired a deadly shot at the systems of the world and essentially uprooted them with the light of the Kingdom of God at His death, burial and resurrection. For Mary to be the first eyewitness to the risen King shows us that the Lord was acting as if His Kingdom was the one that would advance and that the systems of the world were being put on notice that He had instituted the mechanisms in place that would lead to the freedom of the entire human race. And we know this freedom best as we experience Him in our daily lives.
When Christ Jesus came to us as God and the Son of Man, He came in direct opposition to the way that we have been doing things for thousands of years. And while He came to free us from the bondage of our sins, He came to show us something even more profound.
He came to show us to Whom we actually belong. In the original languages of the text of scripture we find some powerful realities being communicated to us. The New Testament tells us that in Him “ we live, and move and have our being…”. That deep truth is powerful and requires further explanation.
You see, in the original text it is communicated to us that we started out as an idea, so to speak, in the heart of God Almighty. Everyone single one of us started this way and the reality of being born to earthly parents wasn’t meant to obscure our Source and His parentage in our lives.
When we say that God the Father is our Father, that is the truth of it. And from a contextual standpoint, when we talk about being lost, we aren’t talking about whether or not someone has prayed a sinners prayer and landed on the right side of belief. We come to understand that the idea of “being lost” in the text meant that we had moved away from our beginning in our Maker, from our true parentage in Him, and we have lived as though we had another father, a lesser being whose language is that evil language of lies. This lesser being accuses and deceives us, and we ultimately embrace that deception, then he accuses us before God of what he desired that we would do in the first place. He throws us under the bus before all of heaven.
When Christ Jesus came to the earth, knowing full well that He would render the sacrificial system moot forever and destroy the mechanisms that have inhibited our freedom, He knew that He came to a blinded world. A world stuck in believing lies about God and ourselves, a people not knowing the Source and Origin of their true identity.
The beautiful thing that Christ has done is that He has mirrored us in Him, and fully mirrored the Father to us. It is in Christ and Christ alone that both worlds meet in redemption and salvation. It is in Christ Jesus that we start to see the resurrection of who He intended for us to be in Him and it is there that our identities finally find completion and fulfillment in such a way that nothing can remove it from us, even if we aren’t aware of who we are in Him. If I continue in my blindness, that in no way impacts His faithfulness and His ability to prove that we are His. It is in Christ Jesus that we find the Trinity endorsing us as members of good standing in God the Fathers family, and it is there that we find out that we can call Him “Dad, Daddy, Papa, Father” and that we are welcomed by Him directly to do just that!
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is THE home run of all of the ages, of those ages past and those ages to come. And even though the world is blinded by the liar and accuser even to this day, the truth of the Kingdom of God advances though we may not perceive it and we have a rock solid assurance that His Kingdom has…no…end.
So today let it be said that the systems of the world were put on notice thousands of years ago and that God Almighty loves humanity with an open and powerful love, freely given and never taken away. Humanity has a Father Who loves with an everlasting purity and joyful power and that there is nothing that any of us can do to diminish the fire and Presence of that love. It continues to operate even if and when we do not perceive it or believe it.
You are mirrored in Christ. Christ mirrors the Father to us. All is met and fulfilled in Christ Jesus! And that, my friends, is a cause for celebration!!
God bless you as you find your way through the only gate in which we find our identities, and that is in Jesus Christ.
This is the Way. May you find your path here in Him.
You are meant for this.
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REVIVALin2020 | Road 2 Revival©
Wes Ruff