Or, The Great Reality of Resurrection
Scripture: 1 Petetr 1:3
Date: April 20, 2025
Speaker: Sean Higgins
What’s better than Easter? It’s got history and theology. It’s not just not darkness and death, it’s power that defeats death and wins like the dawn. It’s lost souls found and broken hearts healed. The world couldn’t stay, and hasn’t been, the same since that Sunday morning. Easter vindicated all that Jesus said. It demonstrated God’s justice and mercy and purpose. We believe in our hearts that God raised the Lord Jesus from the dead and we are saved.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! Blessed be God who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing. Blessed be the Father of mercies and God of all comfort. Blessed be Jesus Christ, our great God and Savior, whose appearance in glory we wait for.
For those with eyes to see, we live in a world dominated by resurrection. It is not merely an idea, but what idea has been enfleshed and then had more consequences? We say that nothing is certain except for death and taxes, but resurrection is more powerful. Our God is the living God, He gives us living hope, and whoever believes in Jesus, “as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water’” (John 7:38).
It is true and good news that Jesus was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. And we celebrate God who can and did do this, and we consider how, in doing this, God will finish saving us. We who believe are saved, but we are not done being saved. You are not now what the resurrection guarantees you will be. You might be weak in faith, but the Author has determined the end of the story. The saints will persevere in faith, yes, and the saints will be presented to Christ in splendor. That’s why Christ died and rose again (Ephesians 5:25-27).
How do I know? Because of Easter. It is the image of the empty tomb that sticks. Easter is the victory of resurrection.
Let us consider one apostle’s trifecta of faith-and-joy-building-praise that depends on the resurrection of Jesus.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead (1 Peter 1:3 NASB)
This will be our text, but not to ignore the context. Including that this is Peter’s letter to Jewish believers that were scattered to places that were driven from their homes due to believing in Jesus. There is a lot about suffering in 1 Peter because God makes faith pure and genuine through trials. Context also requires us to notice that verse 3 is not the complete sentence, which arguably includes verses 3-12 (though all English translations break it up). Add the observation that verse 9 ends with a similar thought to verse 5, namely, about the coming salvation, and we know that verse 3 isn’t all there is. We’ll have reason to reference some of the surrounding support as we go.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is found twice elsewhere in the New Testament, and both other uses are by the apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 1:3; Ephesians 1:3). Interesting that all three times it helps open a letter. Start with praise.
This is a way of talking that Jesus introduced when He talked to Mary Magdalene on the morning of His resurrection. “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” (John 20:17)
This God is the subject of verse 3. The Person of interest in verses 6-9 is the Jesus Christ, and in verses 10-12 it is the Spirit of Christ working in Old Testament prophets. But the God and Father of Jesus is at work, regenerating and readying for a final revelation.
The main work is this: second life. God…has caused us to be born again. We call it regeneration. The construction of the sentences emphasizes this as a characteristic of God; He is “the-one-causing again-births” God. You’d pronounce the original word anagenésas (ἀναγεννήσας), and connecting it with genesis would be appropriate. Genesis is a beginning, a birth. The ana is again or second, so this means to be re-begotton, re-born, born again, re-generated.
In the Bible this particular word is only used here and in verse 23, “born again…through the living and abiding word of God.” Otherwise, it’s rarely used in Classical Greek because being born again wasn’t a ubiquitous idea for them. God put the “imperishable seed” inside us and it continues to grow and change us and make us fruitful.
There are three parts of this God of re-birthing in the rest of verse 3.
What moved God to do it? God caused us to be born again according to His great mercy. Mercy is kindness expressed to those in need. All men have sinned, alienated from the life of God, callous and greedy and impure (see Ephesians 4:18-19), foolish, disobedient, full of envy and malice, hated by others and hating one another (see Titus 3:3).
God’s mercy is concern in clothes. Our new life grows from the soil of God’s characteristic kindness. It is His, divine not human. It is great, as in much, large in measure, extensive. His mercy is not dispensed from shot glasses.
“All the wickedness in this world that man might work or think is no more to the mercy of God than a live coal in the sea.” —William Langland
He is “the Father of mercies.” His mercies are new every morning, His mercies causing new life to live. “Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (1 Peter 2:10).
What was God aiming for in re-birthing us? God caused us to be born again to a living hope.
The same preposition, expressing another aim, is also found two more times in the sentence. Verse 4: “to an inheritance” and verse 5: “to/for salvation ready to be revealed.”
Our hope breaths, it pulses. Our hope is transcendent, as in, more than biological or limited to the physical realm.
This hope is given by God, but not like a spiritual gift that only some believers get. Some may appreciate it better, but all who are born again are born for this kind of hope.
Hope drives us, not doubt, despair, skepticism, pessimism, fear, anxiety, panic. We are no longer those “having no hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12). Hope has pull, an expectancy, an energy.
What means did God use to re-birth us? God caused us to be born again through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. This was written by a guy who was there. Peter witnessed Christ’s sufferings and ate fish Jesus roasted. It is an eye-witness testimony.
The same power is at work in us that was at work raising Jesus.
what is the immeasurable greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead… (Ephesians 1:19-20)
This is right after Paul referenced “the hope to which He has called you.” Peter is about to talk of our inheritance in verse 4, and Paul refers to the “riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints” (verse 18). Such understanding of such power requires God Himself to open our eyes to know it.
You know what many prophets tried to figure out from their own writings (1 Peter 1:10-11), you know things that the angels are trying to figure out (1 Peter 1:12).
Hope is not a mood, hope is a Man. 1 Timothy 1:1 - “Jesus our hope,” and Hope is alive. We have living hope. There are real problems, but hope is a greater reality.
The great reality is not death, and it’s also more than life. It is resurrection from death to life. The great reality is not a tomb but an empty tomb.
So, YES, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Blessed be His mercy. Blessed be His purpose. Blessed be His power. Blessed be the one from whom and through whom and to whom we have life.
Live in the hope of the empty tomb. It is the great reality.
The greatest worth is knowing Christ Jesus our Lord. May you know Him and the power of His resurrection, not only sharing His sufferings, but pressing on to live and abide in Him. He chose you for resurrection and life, that His joy would be in you, and that your joy may be full.
[M]ay the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 1:17–20 ESV)