He Died, He Rose, He Reigns

The cross was not an accident, nor a defeat that God had to fix afterward. Before dying, Jesus made clear that his death would be a conscious choice: “No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again” (John 10:18). He died in our place: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21). On the cross, he paid a debt that no human effort could ever repay.

It was real suffering, slow and brutal. Crucifixion was the most despised method of execution in the Roman world and carried an extreme degree of humiliation. Even so, Jesus's final words reveal control, not collapse. First he declares: “it is finished” (John 19:30). Then he bows his head, and only then gives up his spirit. The Romans themselves, responsible for that torment, considered it too degrading to apply to their own citizens and reserved it for slaves and rebels. It was precisely that path, the most shameful that existed, that the King of kings chose in order to bear upon himself the curse that was ours.

But the story did not end at the tomb. Paul does not treat the resurrection as a secondary or agreeable detail of the faith. He weighs everything else against it: “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Cor 15:14). The resurrection is the point on which everything else stands.

The evidence surrounding this event is solid enough to have convinced skeptics who began their investigation with the express purpose of dismantling it. The tomb was new, sealed with an official Roman seal, and guarded by armed soldiers trained to prevent exactly this kind of violation, on pain of death. Even so, on Sunday morning the tomb was empty, and the burial cloths had been left there, not scattered about, as though someone had hastily stolen the body. Over a period of forty days, Jesus also appeared alive to many people: to Peter, to the eleven, to two disciples on the road, and, on one occasion, “to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive” (1 Cor 15:6). It was an explicit invitation for these witnesses to be investigated.

Over the centuries, four theories have tried to explain the empty tomb without admitting a miracle: that the disciples stole the body; that Jesus never actually died, but merely fainted; that the appearances were hallucinations; or that the women went to the wrong tomb. None of them holds up under serious scrutiny. Men who had fled in terror on the night of the arrest could not suddenly have outwitted an armed Roman guard. A man who had merely survived the most brutal torture of the ancient world would hardly have walked for miles afterward, appearing like a conqueror. And hallucinations do not explain simultaneous appearances before five hundred people, much less encounters in which Jesus eats and talks with those who see him.

There is a particularly strong piece of evidence besides this: no one lays down his own life, gaining nothing from it, to knowingly uphold a lie he invented. And almost all the disciples died still affirming, to the very end, what they claimed to have seen. To this can be added other evidence that is hard to explain otherwise: the explosive growth of the church in the very territory where Jesus had been condemned, and the shift of the primary day of worship, from the Sabbath, kept for centuries, to Sunday, in memory of the resurrection. An entire people does not abandon so ancient a custom without an extraordinary reason.

After rising, Jesus did not return to an ordinary earthly life. Before the disciples, he was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of the Father, fulfilling what David had announced centuries earlier: “the Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool” (Ps 110:1). To sit at God's right hand is not a matter of heavenly geography, but of full participation in supreme authority. Jesus is not passively waiting for the end of the age. He reigns now over all creation and, at this very moment, intercedes for all who come to God through him.

Watching him ascend, the disciples did not go home sorrowful, like people who had just lost a friend. They went back worshiping, full of expectation because of the promise he had left them: the coming of the Holy Spirit. And the Spirit would soon transform that small group of frightened men into a church that would reach the entire world.

He died, he rose, he reigns. That sequence is not merely a doctrinal summary. It is the foundation of all Christian hope. If your faith today rests only on a good story or a pleasant feeling, it needs a firmer foundation. Rest it where Scripture rests it: on a tomb that was left empty, on witnesses willing to die for what they claimed to have seen, and on a Christ who, right now, rules the universe and intercedes for you.

Death did not have the last word over Jesus. And if you are united to him by faith, it will not have the last word over you either.