As He Said

The moments Jesus taught on his own death and resurrection build our confidence and show us why Jesus had to go to the cross and walk out of the tomb.

Well, good morning, Calvary. And to our visitors. Thank you for joining us for this celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Every Sunday here at Calvary, we celebrate the resurrected Christ. As unique as Easter is in our culture, what we do here today is really not different than what we do every week. What we are made by God to do with every day of our lives, with every breath that He’s given us. We were made to glorify God. And we are able to do that because of Jesus, who made a way for us to have a restored relationship with God by His death and resurrection.

Jesus came into the world to do three things. He came into the world to live a perfect human life that you and I cannot live on our own. Certainly, we’ve not lived perfect human lives. He came to die on the cross in the place of our sins as a substitute penalty for our sins. And he came to raise to new life so that those of us who trust in him can have new life eternally, too. When we talk about the resurrection of Jesus, we’re not talking about a kind of spiritual resurrection in our hearts. We’re talking about a dead man’s physical body rolling off the slab and walking out of the tomb the same way you rolled off bed and got up this morning. Okay?  He came out of the tomb the same way you came out of the garage this morning. The stone rolled away like the door came up. Adjust that if you do not have a garage. And the reason I mention this is that we have a lot of visitors here today and I want you to know what kind of church you’re in. I want you to know and understand who we are. You’re in the kind of church that believes firmly that our hope for eternal life is that Jesus conquered the actual physical grave. He destroyed death. He conquered death as the last enemy. There is now nothing to fear for those who trust in Jesus. That’s what we’re here to celebrate today. New eternal life in Christ that started with Jesus walking out of that grave.

Now, what I thought I was going to do with this morning was walk us through the moments there in Matthew 28 when Jesus rose from the dead. And so I went to Matthew 28 and I started working on the story, as I do when I when I preach the sermons. But as I was reading through the account of the resurrection with the ladies going to the tomb and the earthquake rolling the stone away and the angel telling the women that Jesus is not here because he’s risen. Go see the place where he lay. Something jumped out at me in that story in a way that I’ve never seen before. I’ve certainly read the words, but I hadn’t seen these words really the way I did this week.

And that was three words “As He said”. He is not here, for he has risen, ‘as He said’. Now, I’ve known for a long time that Jesus told his disciples beforehand, before he died and rose again that he was going to die and rise again. But I never noticed that this is also mentioned by the angel after the fact. It never really occurred to me. This is kind of a sort of a big divine I told you so, isn’t it? And that got me thinking. Well, how often did Jesus talk about his death and resurrection? How often? How often did he actually do that? I knew of one very famous place in scripture off the top of my head, which we’ll look at here in just a minute. But I wondered how many times Jesus actually brought it up. And it turns out that Matthew tells us that four different times Jesus taught his disciples about his death and resurrection. And by the way, that’s just the four that we have recorded in Matthew. When you write history, it’s by definition, selective. You have to select what you’re going to put into the historical account that you’re telling. And the fact that that Matthew mentions four times between chapters 16 and 28 that Jesus taught on his own death and resurrection means that it was a very important point to Jesus.

It was an important focus of his teaching about his mission. So I went to each one of these passages to see what we could learn from Jesus about his own death and resurrection. What can we learn from Jesus own mouth about His resurrection? And my goodness, it is informative, but it is not flattering at all. There is a reason that Jesus died alone with his disciples cowering at a distance. They clearly did not understand the reason for Jesus’ crucifixion or have any confidence in His resurrection. All four of these moments when Jesus taught on this are embedded in discipleship failure. They’re all failures. They just don’t get it. And many of you here this morning may find yourselves in a similar place. You don’t really understand why Jesus had to die and what that would even mean for you. And so therefore, you have no compelling reason to trust that Jesus conquered the grave. Others of you were once there. You once felt that way or thought that way or believed that way. But you’ve come to know Christ. And now His death, burial and resurrection haves transformed everything for you. You have a whole new purpose for your life. And so I thought I would take the time this morning to give you a tour of these four moments when Jesus predicts his own death and resurrection. These moments Jesus taught on this will build our confidence and will show us why Jesus had to go to the cross and why he had to walk out of that tomb.

The scripture I’m going to teach is going to be on the screen behind me this morning. But I can’t give you the full context of all of the things we’re going to look at. So I want to encourage you at some point, either this afternoon or maybe some time later this week, go to our website where we have our sermons kept, our sermon archive, and look there on the page for this sermon, you’ll find a link to a sermon study, a study of these four passages. And there you can read them and go into greater depth on them. You’ll actually learn a lot that way. And each one of these four moments this morning, briefly, I want to show you what it is that Jesus taught and then what it is his disciples thought was more important. Okay? What did Jesus teach and what did these disciples think was more important? We can learn from their failure. I know I learned from failure. I learned from my own failure. You learn from your own failure. We’re going to learn from the disciple’s failure this morning. The first time Jesus taught on this, on his death and resurrection, is recorded for us in Matthew 16. From that time, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed. And on the third day be raised. This is the famous passage that I was telling you about before because this is the first time Jesus teaches on this. In fact, he says from this time forward, meaning there were going to be lots more times that Jesus would teach on this. He didn’t start teaching on his death and resurrection from the beginning of his ministry. He waited a bit. He waited until his disciples had walked with him for a while and had watched him at work and had listened to his teaching. And then one day Jesus has his disciples around him. He says, tell me, what is it people are saying about me? Who do people say that I am? And they go, wow, you’re going to really love this, Jesus. People have a very high view of you. They think you’re a prophet. They think you’re like one of those Old Testament prophets that’s coming. And Jesus says, okay, all right, well, that’s pretty good. But let me ask you guys, who do you say that I am? Who do you think that I am? And Peter is one of his closest friends, speaks up and says, You are the Christ, the son of the living God. Basically, saying you are so much more than a prophet. Yeah, those prophets in the Old Testament, they were important. But actually they all talked about you. They were all pointing to you. We’ve been waiting for our Messiah, the anointed one, the one that would come and serve and fulfill all of that the Old Testament talks about. And Jesus, we see it in you. That’s what Peter is saying here.

It was then when his disciples understood that Jesus was more than just a good man, more than just a good teacher, more than even a prophet that he knew. Okay, I can start teaching these guys about what it is that I’ve come to do. I can start letting them in on some of the harder things. Specifically, he knew he could start talking about how he was going to endure a terrible death on the cross, and then he was going to raise to new life. And that’s what the Old Testament prophets, by the way, said that the Christ, the Messiah would do when he comes. If you want to check that out, you can check out Isaiah 53 later today. Check it out. You can see there that even the Old Testament prophets knew that when God sent his servant, he was going to come, and he was going to actually take a beating. He was going to die in the place. He was going to be pierced for the sins of the people. They knew he was going to suffer. So hey, Peter and the disciples, they now know that Jesus is this Christ. They should be ready to hear about Jesus’ death and resurrection, right? Well, not so fast. Peter takes Jesus aside and rebukes him. Come here, Jesus. Let me tell you how it’s actually supposed to be. And he takes Jesus aside and says he rebukes him, explaining that the cross will never happen to him. The cross will never happen to him. Now, I know that from our 2000 years of perspective, taking Jesus aside to tell him he’s wrong is about the dumbest thing you can do. Right? We know that now. We know that now. In this conversation, Peter has all the gravitas of a four year old taking his parents aside to explain why vegetables don’t matter. You know, it’s just not, it’s just dumb. It’s ridiculous to us because we live this side of the resurrection, right? We can look back and see how it all went down. But remember, for Peter, this is all still future. He doesn’t want his friend and his teacher and his Lord to die, certainly not at the hands of his enemies. What Peter doesn’t know is that this is necessary. In fact, it’s more than necessary. It’s what Jesus came to do. This is the whole reason for him being here. The cross and the resurrection are the catalyst of salvation. Without this historic moment, every single person in the world, both past and present, including every one of us here this morning, would have no substitute for our sins and we would be forever separated from God. There would be no salvation without what Jesus came to do. So Jesus says very forcefully to Peter, get behind me, Satan. For you are a hindrance to me, for you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man. How many of you know if Jesus calls you Satan, you done messed up somewhere. That’s bad. Jesus doesn’t just throw the Satan word around all the time, right? So if you get called it, you should retrace your thinking. How did I get here? See to Peter, Jesus’ death at the hands of his enemies. That would be failure. That would be failure. It would be a defeat. Peter wants Jesus to win. He doesn’t want, he doesn’t want him to be defeated. He doesn’t want him to have failure. He wants him to triumph over his enemies. He doesn’t understand that the cross and the resurrection is God’s plan to triumph over sin and death. But it’s not the plan that we would have come up with. We wouldn’t have thought of this. A man-made plan of salvation would have our hero killing his enemies, vanquishing his enemies, not being killed by his enemies. The empty tomb is the perfect plan of a completely sovereign God, a plan that you and I would never have imagined on our own.

Let’s move to the next mention. It’s one chapter later in Matthew 17. As they were gathering in Galilee, Jesus said to them, The son of man is about to be delivered into the hands of men and they will kill him and he will be raised on the third day. And they were greatly distressed. So the disciples are out and they are working with Jesus in the crowds. Jesus has got many people coming around him and he’s doing a lot of healing. And so the disciples are out there and they’re helping Jesus, and a man comes up to Jesus pretty distraught over his son. If you’ve ever gone through a difficult time with a sick child, you’ll understand this man’s grief. His son is having seizures due to a demonic presence in his life. He’s having these seizures and the seizures are causing him to fall down. And it says he often falls down into the water or the fire. You can imagine the danger there. This demon is trying to kill this boy. And so this father is incredibly upset. Where do you turn? Where do you turn? He comes to Jesus and he says, I took my boy to your disciples. But they were unable to help him. So Jesus has the boy brought to him and he casts out the demon. He heals the boy, just like he’s been doing all over the region. The disciples see Jesus do this, and they get real quiet. They think, Let’s just ask him later. Let’s ask him later. And it says they take him aside later and they ask him privately why they were not able to heal the boy like Jesus. Now, if you’re like me, you hear that and you think, well, the reason you couldn’t do it is because this is God Incarnate, right? Of course he’s able to do what you’re not able to do. But what’s interesting is Jesus doesn’t answer that way. Jesus says, you should have been able to do it. But the reason you weren’t able to do it is that you lacked faith. From another gospel account, we know that it was because they didn’t pray. They lacked faith and then they didn’t pray. In other words, they tried to heal the boy, but with their own power, as if they had some. What they should have done was trusted in God’s power to heal and then called out to the Lord to heal this boy. This, by the way, is not to suggest that all prayers made to God with the proper amount of faith brings healing. That’s how we end up with charlatan faith healers today. But in this case, at that time and under these circumstances, the disciples failed because they didn’t trust God to get it done. They didn’t they didn’t trust that God’s power would take care of this situation. And wouldn’t you know it, right after this failure, right after this moment of not having enough faith, this embarrassing display of faith failure, Jesus tells them again that he’s going to be delivered into his enemy’s hands and he’s going to be killed and then he’s going to rise on the third day.

It’s going to take a lot of faith to trust God through that, isn’t it? It’s going to take a lot of faith in God to trust that when things start to fall apart, when Jesus gets arrested and beaten and nailed to a cross, God’s still in control. God has this. This is all part of God’s plan. It’s going to be fine. I’m going to stick with Jesus. It’s going to be okay. It’s going to take a lot of faith to get through that. When all of life seems out of control, it takes a lot of faith in a sovereign God at that moment to say I stick with the Lord. So the question is, do they have the faith that it’s going to take now?

No. It says that they were greatly distressed. Now, again, it’s hard to blame them. You know, if my friend came to me and told me that he was about to die, but don’t worry, he’s going to come back to life. I think I’d still worry for my friend. Right? But by now, these disciples should have begun to understand that the power of God to cast out demons and heal the sick and to open the eyes of the blind and to cause the lame to walk again, things that they’ve been watching Jesus do, that that all means that God is in control of His creation. God is in perfect control of everything that seems broken. God can bring back to healing. And not even death itself is an obstacle to the God who’s in control of his creation.

Let’s look at the third mention. I’d like to tell you that the disciples get better at this, but somehow, actually they get worse at this. This is from Matthew 20, and as Jesus was going up to Jerusalem, he took the 12 disciples aside and on the way he said to them, see, we are going up to Jerusalem and the son of man will be delivered over to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified, and he will be raised on the third day. At the beginning of Matthew chapter 20, we have Jesus ‘Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard’. The story goes like this. There’s a worker, a man who owns a vineyard, and he goes out to find some workers who can work that day, picking the grapes in his vineyard or working on the ground in his vineyard. And so he goes and he finds these laborers and he promises them a denarius. He’s going to give them one denarius for the day. Let’s call it $200. All right. Let’s say 200 bucks. You come work for me. End of the day, I’ll give you $200. And so some of these guys get hired in the morning. Some in the afternoon and some of them get hired at 5:00 pm, 5:00 in the afternoon, almost quitting time, right? 5 p.m. they come in and then at the end of the day, they all line up. And the owner comes out and everybody gets $200, and the guys in the morning – whoa. what is going on here? How is that possible? How is the 5:00 guy getting the same thing that I do? Shouldn’t I get more? It says some of them even said, Look, we were here through the hot part of the day. Remember when the sun was blazing? We were here for that. These guys came at 5:00. It was cool by then. What’s going on? And the owner of the vineyard says, Why are you upset? Why are you upset? Didn’t we agree to $200 for the day? What’s it to you how I decide to use my money with other people? Or is it the generosity you don’t like? And oh, no, we like generosity. It’s okay.

You know, it’s a really fascinating parable. It’s a very fascinating parable teaching the heart of service that we are to have when we serve God. And the summary of the whole teaching, very famously, as Jesus put it, is that the last will be first and the first will be last, Meaning the highest position in God’s economy is the one who serves others sacrificially. That’s the way God looks at things. You want the highest position. The highest position goes to the servant of all the people. And right after this, after he tells this story that teaches this lesson, Jesus shares with his disciples once again about his death and his resurrection, this time with the most detail that we have here in Matthew. They’re on their way up to Jerusalem. They are walking to the place where this will happen, this death and resurrection. They’re on their way, it says. And Jesus takes his 12 disciples aside and he tells them what’s about to happen. The religious leaders are going to condemn him to death, and then they’re going to turn him over to the non-Jewish Romans, the Gentiles in this passage. And what they’re going to do is they’re going to mock him and they’re going to beat him with whips and they’re going to nail him to a cross to die. And then on the third day, he’s going to rise from the dead. And this time the disciples, they don’t object, and they don’t get distressed, which may sound like improvement, but it’s actually much worse. Two of the disciples are brothers. Their names are James and John. Their mother comes up to Jesus and requests that her sons get to sit at Jesus’s right hand and his left hand when he comes into his kingdom. And you thought helicopter parenting was something new. Here in the Bible, we have it from very, very early on. Some of you are teachers and you’re like, I think I know this mom, right? I know her.

Can you imagine it? Remember, Jesus has just taugh.t He has just explained what he’s about to go through, what he’s going to do to serve his people. And this mom and her boys are thinking, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, but when you get past that, you know, once that’s done, Jesus, could my sons have a place of honor? Could they be glorified with you? So Jesus brings it back to service. He’s about to bear the burden of the sins of his people. He’s about to suffer for his friends. To serve them, he’s going to suffer and he’s going to do more than even for his friends. He’s going to suffer in such a way that even his enemies are going to be changed in heart, and they’re going to become his friends. That’s how much he loves people. He’ll die even for his enemies. He says, can you do that? All right, James and John, can you do that? In other words, instead of focusing on being kings, can you focus on being servants who are willing to suffer and sacrifice for the sake of other people? And James and John say, well, they can. And Jesus says you will. He makes no promises to them about the position in the kingdom. Frankly, they just don’t understand. Jesus ends by telling them, if you want to be first, you need to be the servant. If that’s what you really want, if that’s what you desire to have, a great place in the Kingdom of God, then you need to become a servant. Even the son of man came not to be served, but to serve, and give his life as a ransom for many.

We have one more moment when Jesus teaches on his death and resurrection. But if you’re thinking, well, maybe they’ll turn this thing around, don’t get your hopes up. It’s also not good. From Matthew 26: “When Jesus had finished all these sayings, he said to his disciples, ‘You know that after two days the Passover is coming, and the son of man will be delivered up to be crucified’.” Now it’s just two days before the crucifixion at this point,         where in what we call Holy week.,            Jesus finishes another round of teaching on the Kingdom of God and how to have salvation and new life in his kingdom. And he gives one final reminder about what’s about to happen. And this time he only mentions the crucifixion, probably because he’s focusing only on the Passover events, so he doesn’t mention the resurrection. But at this point, the disciples should know that when Jesus speaks of His crucifixion, it comes with his resurrection. That’s sort of a package deal.

So after he says this in Matthew 26, we’re told the religious leaders start making their plans. They start to plan and plot against Jesus, to kill him. Jesus and his disciples are hanging out in a town called Bethany in a house of a man named Simon. And while they’re there, a woman comes into the group, comes into the house, comes into their midst and comes to Jesus. And she has a very expensive flask of oil, it says. And she opens this flask of oil and she anoints Jesus’ body, his head and his body with it. Now, I know that’s very strange in our culture because we don’t really anoint people with oil. Certainly, we don’t want anybody else to anoint us with oil. So imagine somebody invites you over to a meal. Right? They invite you over to a meal and you come into the meal. And once you get there, they get out a thousand dollar bottle of wine, and they open the $1,000 bottle of wine. And you’re thinking, I should not have worn crocs. Because you didn’t understand how big a deal this was, right? You didn’t understand the situation. That is how important and very special this occasion is. That’s what’s happening here. This is a very special and important occasion that the disciples didn’t realize. Jesus explains that not only is this woman’s extravagant gift a way of showing how much she loves Jesus, how much she loves what Jesus is, what He is taught, what He has done, and what He is about to do. Jesus says this woman is anointing my body for what’s about to come next. This beautiful act of sacrifice is her way of preparing him for his death and burial. That means somebody got it. This woman gets it. She heard this teaching on his burial, and some of the people who listen to Jesus teach on his death understood. And they loved him for that sacrifice. They loved him for what he was about to do. How about the disciples? Well, Matthew records their reaction, and their reaction is why this waste? Why this waste? We know from other records that Judas led the way on this, because their reaction was, you know, we could have sold this oil and got a bunch of money for it and put it in with the ministry funds when Judas was the one that suggested this because he liked to take money from the ministry funds and give it to himself. But Matthew tells us ‘why this waste’ kind of reaction was the general feeling of all the disciples in that moment. And you know how he would know that? Because he was there. Matthew was one of the 12 disciples. He was there for all four of these moments where Jesus taught about what was going to happen.

But even on this fourth occasion, they still could not wrap their heads around the incredible importance of Jesus’ death. And they sure didn’t trust that there was going to be a resurrection after. Which is why on that first Easter Sunday morning, that not one of the 12 that showed up at the tomb. It wasn’t them that came out to see Jesus’ body. It was Mary and the other Mary. And you know what they were there to do? They were there to do the same thing the woman before had done. They were going to anoint Jesus’ body, his dead body with spices. They were fully expecting to see a slain body of Jesus there. And that is why it is such a surprise and genuine, exhilarating moment when the stone is rolled away and the angel declares, Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen, as He said. Just like you heard Him teach you over and over and over again. He’s not here. He’s alive.

Friends, let’s celebrate Jesus who rose from the dead, according to the sovereign plan and foreknowledge of God. This was no surprise to God. This was no surprise to Jesus. This is exactly how the plan would work. A plan Jesus declared throughout his ministry, even as he walked to the place where it would happen. He was talking about what he was going to do. He went to the cross willingly, to die for our sins. He was raised from the dead to declare his triumph over death and to pave the way for our eternal life. Don’t miss the significance of this. Don’t miss the significance of the death and resurrection of Jesus like the disciples did. Don’t insist like Peter, that there must be another way. There isn’t. Salvation comes only through the cross. Don’t waver in your faith thinking God isn’t sufficient. He is. The power of God is sufficient. The empty tomb proves that nothing holds God back from His plan or his purpose. Your faith can rest confidently in Him. Don’t grasp for a place in the kingdom like James and John without understanding what it cost the King. Eternal life with God is a great gift, but it comes with giving your life over to Christ, pouring yourself out for Christ, whatever the cost. And don’t fail to worship and adore Jesus for his sacrifice for you. The new life we now have through Jesus’ death and resurrection is worthy of costly, extravagant worship, life size worship. Let me tell you, all the disciples get it now. They all get it now. In fact, they even got it then, after the fact. Every one of Jesus disciples lost his life in service to Jesus because although they didn’t get it beforehand, they sure got it when they saw Jesus in the flesh risen and renewed. 2000 years later, those of us who have experienced new life in Christ declare with those disciples he is risen indeed. Would you pray with me