Resurrection From the Dead, Part 3
Reprinted March 17, 2023
Let’s pick up right where we left off last week. We were talking about the revelation of
Resurrection that comes in water baptism.
The truth contained in this revelation is nothing short of
stunning! In order to get a hold of it,
however, we have to be able to shut down all of the pre-conditioning we’ve had
throughout many generations.
The
objective here is that — as Paul puts it — we have know and have the revelation
of Him, His onoma, His
character and makeup. But there’s much,
much more! It isn’t simply that we have
a revelation of Jesus in water baptism: we also receive a revelation of the
miraculous power and might released in His resurrection.
And
still there is more!
We
get to be a partaker of the sufferings He endured — the beatings, the stripes,
the disfigurement that occurred when His beard was ripped out of his face, the
unutterable pain that occurred when the crown of thorns was shoved into His
skull.
How
are we a partaker of those sufferings, you ask?
By receiving what He paid for on our behalf when all that took place.
Every
single stripe of the cat-o-nine tails that ripped the flesh on His body
represents a disease or an infirmity that He took for us.
The
disfigurement that took place when His beard was ripped out, leaving loose
flesh hanging from His face, His chin and His neck paid for the disfiguring
injuries that men and women suffer in today’s so-called “advanced” society as a
result of diseases or accidents of one kind or another.
The
pain and suffering that occurred with the planting of the crown of thorns into
His skull paid for all of the mental anguish, the torment of our minds, the
agonies we suffer with the thoughts of the past, the concerns of the present
and the future.
Are
you now beginning to grasp the significance of getting to “know
the fellowship (Greek: koinonia: partnership and participation with) of
His sufferings?” We partner with
Him; we partake of those sufferings by being IN Him when we are immersed in the
waters of baptism.
Let
me pause here for a minute to take you to Isaiah’s prophecy concerning Jesus:
Isaiah 53:3-5:
“He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted
with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we
esteemed him not.
Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we
did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded
for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of
our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.”
Isaiah
was able to see some 700 years or so into the future, and what he sees is
exactly what took place with Jesus’ suffering, the betrayal, all that He took
upon Himself, and all that He accomplished on our behalf.
But
Isaiah also saw far into the future to our present day.
Here’s
how the Hebrew text describes the picture:
He is disdained and scorned, and considered as having ceased to
exist by men: a man of anguish and pain, and has known grief by seeing and
experiencing it; and we hid as it were our faces from Him; He was disdained and
scorned, and we maliciously fabricated, invented and treated His suffering and
death as void.
Surely He has suffered and accepted as His own our maladies, our
anxieties, our calamities, our disease and sicknesses, and carried our anguish,
pain and grief: yet we fabricated and maliciously invented His being stricken
violently, beaten, punished, wounded and slaughtered as if by God -- choosing
to believe that God browbeat, demeaned and looked down upon Him.
But He was broken and profaned for our rebellion, our revolt,
our apostasy and our [religious] quarrel against God; He was crushed, oppressed
and smitten, and (emotionally) broken into pieces for our perversity, our evil,
our mischief, sins and faults; the breaking and ridiculing of our peace, our
welfare, our prosperity, our health and our safety was upon Him; and with His
bloodied and blue wounds we are cured, mended, repaired and made thoroughly
whole. (Isaiah 53:3-5, RAC Translation
& Amplification)
You
see the difference in the picture, don’t you?
Isaiah is actually seeing how the world today treats Jesus, despite all
that He did on our behalf! The world —
and a whole fistful of folks who call themselves Christians — still consider
that God demeaned and looked down on Him.
So many folks today treat His death as null and void when and where it
applies to every aspect of their lives.
Jesus left NOTHING undone!
Listen
to how Paul finishes with his explanation of what takes place. He wraps all of this up with this phrase: “being
made conformable to His death.”
There’s
a 64-dollar word for you!
Conformable. It comes from the
Greek word: summorphos. It translates
literally to:
being jointly formed; fashioned with and like.
Understand? We are jointly formed with Jesus Christ INTO
His death. He dies. We die with Him. The old us is dead. What used to exist of us is now nothing more
than a corpse. Jesus has died and is
buried in a tomb. We have been formed
INTO Him so that as He died, so did we.
In
the same way that Jesus’ death finished the past, the sin, the sufferings, the
diseases and everything that went with the curse that came upon the human race,
our having been jointly formed and fashioned like Him, means that our past —
and all the consequences of the sins, the iniquities of our fathers, the
diseases that have plagued us, the infirmities of our flesh, the poverty that came
with the curse — and death itself! — has been finished IN US!
But
that’s only the first part of baptism.
That’s the dying and burial part.
But we don’t remain in the grave!
The power of the Resurrection has been made available to us. Here’s what Jesus said about it when He was
talking to Martha (and you’ll remember that we quoted this last week:
John 11:25-26:
“I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me,
though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth
and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?”
Paul
deals with this when he writes his letter to the Ekklesia in Ephesus:
Ephesians 2:4-7:
“But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he
loved us, Even
when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye
are saved;) And
hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in
Christ Jesus: That
in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of his grace in his
kindness toward us through Christ Jesus.”
It
couldn’t be any clearer! We were dead
with our lives measured by the Law of Sin and Death. But Jesus incorporated us with Him when He
died. We were woven into His being so
that when He died, carrying our sins, we died at the same time.
We
didn’t exit Him, and He didn’t eject us when He was raised from the dead. Paul uses an interesting word in the Greek
text when he says that God “hath quickened us together with Christ.” The Greek word in this instance is: suzoopoieo, and it means: to reanimate, or
to make one alive together (at the same time).
But
our resurrection doesn’t stop with our being raised from the dead (what which
occurs when we are raised out of the water).
Father God continued the “raising up” together IN Christ, and has made
us to sit together — WITH Him, and IN Him — in Heavenly places,
in the anointing of the Anointed One, the Lord Jesus Christ!
THAT, my friends is what takes place when we are
baptized in water! We’ll explore this a
bit further next week, but I’d like to take a detour and talk about a different
kind of transition.
Consider
what Paul writes to the Corinthians. We
will explore the entire 15th chapter of I Corinthians later, but here’s
something that has been the source of much discussion in the body of Christ for
many years. Many folks relate this
passage of Scripture to an event that will transpire at some time way off in
the future. That’s wrong! This is an event for the here and now!
I Corinthians 15:51-57, KJV: Behold, I show you a
mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the
twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the
dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible
must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.
So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and
this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the
saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is
thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is
sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God,
which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Now,
let me amplify this passage from the Greek text for the sake of some
clarification.
Let me give you something that you can see with your spiritual
eyes — a thing which has been hidden from natural discernment which I now
reveal to you; we are not all headed for death and the grave, but we will — all
of us — transform.
In an “atom” of time, in that same split second that the eye
blinks, at the sound and reverberation of the final sound of the trumpet: for
the trumpet shall sound a blast (both literally and figuratively), and those
who are dead — both literally as corpses, and as flesh and blood with the
sentence of death hanging over them —will be roused and awakened with all decay
in their existence eradicated for all eternity.
What has been decaying and subject to decay must, of necessity,
cease for all time; where we have once been mortals and subject to death,
disease, sickness and weakness now changes so that we become immortals
(restored to that image and likeness we were first created for).
Therefore, when this perishable existence now transforms into an
unending, immortal existence, then we will see brought to pass the old saying
that was written, “Death (and dying) have been engulfed and consumed by
conquest and victory — totally vanquished.”
“Oh, death, where is your poison; where is the power of your pin
prick?”
The poison and pin prick of death is sin — offenses against God:
and the dynamic force of sin is embodied in the Law. But, thanks and grace be to Father God who
totally vanquishes sin through our Lord Jesus Christ!
Therefore, my dear and beloved brothers and sisters, be
absolutely steadfast, settled and immovable, always excelling and
super-abounding in the labors and direction of the Lord, knowing without
question that your toil, your pains, your trouble and
your weariness is not wasted, empty and in vain in the Lord. (I Corinthians 15:51-57, RAC Translation
and Amplification)
Are
you seeing the revelation of this? This
is not a “when we all get to Heaven” event.
If we don’t have this victory
now, then why did John write the following statement in his general epistle to
the body of Christ?
I John 3:2-3: Beloved,
now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be:
but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see
him as he is. And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even
as he is pure. (emphasis,
mine)
Get
it? John isn’t saying, “When we all get
to Heaven, we will be like him.” He is
making it clear that we are NOW the sons of God, and that when the Lord Jesus
Christ appears (HERE!) we will already be like Him! That means that the transforming process will
have taken place. We will have made the
transition from mortality to immortality.
That
means that changes are going on in us now.
There is a transformative process taking place on a daily basis — with a
caveat, of course. The caveat is that we
are responding to every quickening of Holy Spirit. Whatever He speaks, whatever He whispers,
whatever He nudges us with, we respond — IMMEDIATELY!!
There
is no room — and no time — to “adjust” His Word to us to fit our thinking or
our paradigm.
No
matter how long we live, and no matter what our upbringing, we have all
developed mindsets and mental protocols that cause us to either respond or
react or “adjust” the Word spoken to us to fit our understanding. It is mandatory that we overcome those
mindsets and mental protocols.
More
to come!
In case you are
missing out on real fellowship in an environment of Ekklesia, our Sunday
worship gatherings are available by conference call – usually at about 10:45AM
Pacific. That conference number is (712) 770-4160, and the access code is 308640#. We are now making these
gatherings available by Skype. If you
wish to participate by video on Skype, my Skype ID is regner.capener. If you miss the live voice call, you can dial
(712) 770-4169, enter the same access code and listen in
later. The video call, of course, is not
recorded – not yet, anyway.
Blessings
on you!
Regner A. Capener
CAPENER MINISTRIES
RIVER WORSHIP CENTER
Temple, Texas 76504
Email Contact: CapenerMinistries@protonmail.com
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