Luke 24:1-12
Luke chapter 24, verses 1 through
12, the account of the resurrection. Before we read, let’s ask for
God’s help. Lord, we remember the parable
that you spoke to your disciples, that the word of God is like
a seed. It is cast by the sower and it
falls on different sorts of ground. Lord, let this seed not fall
among the rock. Let it not fall among the path
or even among the weeds, lest it be snatched by Satan or choked
by the cares of the world, or lest it take a quick growth,
but be scorched by the sun. No, but let it fall on good soil. Prepare now by your spirit, the
soil of each and every heart in this room. Let it be tilled
and mixed until it is rich and ready to receive the wonderful
seed of your word. And may it be watered. May it
bring forth a hundredfold fruit in our lives and in our witness
before the watching world. This is a mighty prayer, a mighty
ask, but you are a mighty God and you promise to do mighty
things by your written word. So attend to us this hour and
give us your blessing. We pray in the name of Christ.
Amen. Here now, the word of the living God. This is Luke 24,
beginning at verse one. But on the first day of the week
at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices they
had prepared, and they found the stone rolled away from the
tomb. But when they went in, They did
not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were perplexed
about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel. And as they were frightened,
they bowed their faces to the ground. The men said to them,
why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but
has risen. Remember how he told you while
he was still in Galilee. that the son of man must be delivered
into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third
day rise. And they remembered his words
and returning from the tomb, they told all these things to
the 11 and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene and
Joanna and Mary, the mother of James and the other women with
them who told these things to the apostles. But these words
seemed to them an idle tale and they did not believe them. But
Peter rose and ran to the tomb, stooping and looking in. He saw
the linen cloths by themselves, and he went home marveling at
what had happened. Amen. Word of living God, you
may be seated. You can imagine the thoughts
that go on through your head as you read this biblical account. Why didn’t it happen this way?
Why didn’t it happen that way? And maybe one of the thoughts
you have as you read this passage is Jesus at least could have
told the 11. He at least could have told the
11. Now, the 12 would be with Judas.
There’s only 11 now. He could have at least told the
11, look, Look, guys, this this is how it’s going to go down.
I don’t want you to tell anybody this is a super secret plan of
redemption, but this is how it’s going to go. We’re going to go
to Jerusalem. The Pharisees, the scribes, the
teachers of the law, the religious officials, their their hatred
against me and my kingdom is going to rise to such a level
that they will finally trap me. And Judas, our dearly departed,
soon departed brother, he’s the one that’s going to do this.
He’s going to get 30 pieces of silver. You get the idea of the
details. This is how it’s going to go
down. And he’s even going to say, I’m going to go to the cross. I’m going to be crucified by
a Roman executioner. I am going to be put into the
grave, a stone rolled over. The tomb will be sealed. The
religious officials will ask Herod and Pilate and he’ll comply
to set a guard over the tomb until the third day because they
don’t want the body to be stolen and a fake resurrection story
to get around and put egg all over their faces. This is how
it’s going to go down. Just sit tight. and come Sunday
morning, everything will be A-O-K. He did tell them. In fact, if
you go back through the gospel of Luke, you read Jesus making
this very statement to his disciples in the ninth chapter. He says
to his disciples, the son of man must suffer many things and
be rejected by the elders. and be rejected by the chief
priest and be rejected by the scribes and be killed. And get
this, he tells them in plain words, read it in Luke nine and
on the third day be raised. That’s the first time he told
them this. There’s a second time in just a few verses. He says,
let these words sink into your ears. The son of man is about
to be delivered into the hands of men. And then by chapter 18,
when Jesus is now nearing Jerusalem, he says to his disciples, he
says to the women who were no doubt at the tomb in our passage
today, see, we are going up to Jerusalem and everything that
is written about the son of man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will be delivered over
to the Gentiles. He will be mocked and shamefully
treated. He’ll be spit upon and after
flogging him, they will kill him. And on the third day, he
will rise. See the disciples in all of these
accounts where Jesus says these words explicitly, clearly, plainly
to them, they’re marveling at his outward ministry. But the
Bible says they do not understand or grasp these prophetic sayings. Now, put this into today’s terms
with church. In today’s 21st century American
church. We want to see the fireworks. We want to see all the big stuff. We want to see numbers. We want
to see dollars. We want to see buildings. We
want to see campuses. We marvel at outward ministry
just as the disciples did, just as the women who followed Jesus
did so. But very often we don’t understand
or grasp the prophetic sayings. And so today, and even next week,
as we consider some of these studies in Luke chapter 24, one
of the things that’s going to land squarely on our shoulders,
it’s gonna knock us plainly between our eyes, is this. You need to
know your Bibles. For if you knew what your Bibles
said, you would have plainly understood the events of the
passion and life and ministry and death and burial and resurrection
of our Lord Jesus. You know this. Our studies in
Genesis on Wednesday night, Genesis chapter three, verse 15. What
does Jesus say when he has Adam and Eve and Satan lined up after
this fall of Adam and Eve into sin? He announces the hardship
and curses on Eve. He announces the hardship and
curses on Adam. And then when he gets to Satan,
he says, guess what? This woman whom you have seduced
into sinning, she’s gonna bear an offspring, that’s Jesus, and
the two of you are gonna duke it out. And you’re gonna nip
it as heel, but he’s gonna crush your head. His or her offspring
will have the ultimate victory over you. You think you’ve won
the war. Now the war is not over. This
is just a battle. And so on and on through the
Bible, what do we see? We see a line of history of God’s
people where God oversees with his hand of providence, evil
people trying to destroy the seed of the woman. And then we
come to the cross. We come to the grave and lest
we think everything is over, we come to a passage like today
and we see a couple of things. We see these women, these apostles,
they’ve seen unforgettable things. You can’t, how do we say it in
today’s terms? You can’t unsee that. You know,
we tell a friend, you know, oh, what you’ve just told me, I can’t
get to quote the great theologian Fraser Crane. I’m going to have
to poke out my mind’s eye. They have seen things that cannot
be unseen. They have seen a Roman flogging.
They’ve seen literally a man’s body beaten within an inch of
death. They’ve seen a crucifixion. They’ve
seen the birds of prey, the flies, the blood, the gore and all the
rest. They have heard the cries of
agony from the cross and they have seen unforgettable things. But the hope of this passage
is that unforgettable things are revealed to them. And those
unforgettable things are the resurrection of the Lord Jesus
Christ. It is with profound sadness,
but a sense of duty that these women in our passage go to the
tomb of Jesus. Remember, Jesus was taken down
from the cross on Friday evening. Now, in Jewish tradition, about
6 p.m., the The day of preparation has ended,
it’s Sabbath now. And they’re pretty strict about
their Sabbath keeping. So from sundown on Friday to
sundown on Saturday, they would have strictly observed the Sabbath. And so Joseph of Arimathea in
great haste goes to Pilate, requests that he be able to take down
the body of Jesus, that his body not be dumped in the trash pile
of the city and to be burned and to be wasted away in that
sense. But he cares for the body of
Jesus as quickly as possible before sundown, wrapping the
body in linens and placing Jesus’ body in his own grave. Jesus’
humiliation now ended, his exaltation now beginning as he is buried
in the tomb of a rich man. But one of the things skipped
in the process of Jesus’ burial were the spices, the oils, the
ointments to prepare the body so that it would be given a loving
and kind and proper burial. So it is with profound sadness,
but a sense of duty that these women who stood afar at the life
or the death of Jesus, they watched where Joseph of Arimathea took
his body And as soon as Sabbath was ended, they tortured themselves
for these 24, 36 hours. And they went to the grave. Our passage tells us. And you
can fill in the gaps by reading Matthew’s account, Mark’s account,
as well as John’s account. You can fill in the details.
Mary Magdalene goes first. She’s up. Maybe she never slept. And she goes to the grave and
realize it is empty. So she runs back to tell Peter
and John, those two come running to the grave. John chapter 20
tells us, uh, John looks in there, doesn’t see a body. Peter as
he would goes in there and does not see a body. Uh, the two of
them, uh, make their way back to the disciples. Now we’re at
this group of women. Luke speaks of they go. And as
they go there, how are we going to get the stone rolled away?
Maybe some of you have been to the Holy Land or at least seen
pictures. There’s this garden tomb they
take you to. It’s a tourist trap. But they
take you there and there’s this grand cave. It’s a burial chamber. And it would have been in the
prominent place of the city where a rich man like Joseph of Arimathea
would have owned and purchased for his someday burial needs. And you can go in, you can look,
you can see where the place where they pretty sure Jesus was laid. It’s probably not. It’s neat
thing. You can buy postcards. It’s a
tourist trap, right? You can take communion there
in the garden tomb. You can do all these wonderful
things, but guess what? That tomb is still empty. But
in front of the tomb, there’s this, uh, rut and it’s a rut. I would guess maybe a foot. foot
deep and it’s as long as the doorway but it has room for the
stone to be rolled back and there would be this giant millstone
as tall as a tall man and as wide as his hands can reach and
that stone would be rolled through that that rut in the ground and
it would be rolled away so that the tomb which had been sealed
by a Roman guard for at least a couple days to ensure against
theft from the disciples and to keep the religious officials
happy that they killed the man and he stayed in the grave and
that he was good and dead and rotting, maybe was probably their
attitude. Well, these women, this early
Sunday morning, the first day of the week at early dawn, they
go. They’re duty bound and the stone
is rolled away. It’s been taken care of. Now,
how does that take place? Well, other gospels tell us.
Uh, there was a great earthquake and as an angel came down from
heaven and rolled away the stone, uh, the guards that pilot had
sent fell over as though dead because of the shaking of the
earth and this seismic event of the appearance of a heavenly
servant of almighty God, Jesus was not in there. Jesus had been
raised by the power of almighty God. And so they come with their.
They’re pounds, they’re 75 pounds of oils and spices and there
is no body in there, no body that needs. their attendance. They entered the tomb, our passage
says, and they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. Now to
us, to us who read this story, we read these words with great
excitement because we know Jesus rose from the dead. We know that
to be the story of the Bible, but they’re living these events
moment by moment and on entering the tomb, they did not find the
body of Jesus, Jesus, the sadness, The shock. Our passage says they
were perplexed. And to add to that, when they
saw the appearance of the two heavenly beings, they were frightened. The brightness of the clothing
of these two angels of God. But their words as they spoke
to these women, why are you seeking the living among the dead? You’re
in a cemetery. Living saviors don’t dwell here. Living saviors are off in Galilee
waiting for the disciples to gather. Our passage says they
bowed their heads and they remembered. They remembered the words of
Almighty God. Jesus said, remember. or the
angel said, remember how he told you while he was still in Galilee,
that the son of man must be delivered into the hands of wicked men. He must be crucified. And on
the third day rise again. And so they make haste, they
run, they return to the, to the others and they tell them this
good news, but they believed it to be an idle tale. They said
nonsense. They said this cannot be. But
here’s Peter, the impetuous one. He runs to the tomb to see if
it is so. He marvels. And it’s amazing,
isn’t it, how quickly we forget the words of Jesus, how quickly
we forget the breadth and the width of the story of the scriptures. One of the wonderful habits I
think it’s good for every Christian to do, at least once in a while,
maybe not every year, it’s a difficult task, but it’s a worthy one,
is to read the whole Bible through in a year. And if you have a
good Bible with good study notes, you will see the thread of Jesus
all the way, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy,
all the way through, even through the boring books, right? Jesus
is there. Jesus is in Genesis. Jesus is
in Exodus. Jesus is in Leviticus. He’s in
Numbers and Deuteronomy and Joshua and Judges and Samuels and Kings
and Chronicles. He’s in Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther,
Job, Ruth, and on through the 39 books. And of course, he’s
in the 26 New Testament, 27 New Testament books that we have. We’ve got to read our Bibles
and understand these things. But notice in our scripture today,
Notice the emotions, the responses. The women were perplexed when
they saw the empty tomb. Where is he? They go to the disciples
and tell them the good news. It’s as though an idle tale. Go back to our original question. Wouldn’t it have been cool if
Jesus had told his disciples what was going to take place?
Well, he did. We read three explicit quotes
from just Luke’s gospel. And you can read all kinds of
other places in the gospels where Jesus is dropping hints, dropping
the phrases. I am going to suffer and die
for the sins of my people. He alludes to it. He says it
clearly over and over again. What’s what’s the reason for
not understanding? What’s the reason for their being
perplexed? What’s the reason for the disciples back at the
headquarters saying this is an idle tale? It takes the Holy
Spirit to understand these things. You can evangelize all you want
in the workplace and in the marketplace. And unless the spirit works,
people won’t come to faith in Jesus. I can preach my heart
out in my life and ministry, and I could conceivably preach
an entire lifetime of ministry and never see a soul saved. Because
why? The Holy Spirit must do his work.
That’s why we have a prayer of illumination before every Sunday
sermon. God, give us ears to hear, eyes
to see, hearts to perceive, and lives willing to take up your
call and come to faith in Jesus and live out of the faith that
you have given us. And so, dear brothers and sisters,
we can paint a picture of the resurrection. We can tell all
the details from Matthew and Mark and Luke and John. We can
Say the words of the gospel till we are blue in the face. But
unless the Holy Spirit gives us the ability to understand,
we will never know the glories of salvation. Jesus said it very
plainly. This is how it’s going to go
down. The son of man must fall into the hands of Gentiles. He
must go to the cross by the hands of the religious leaders. He
must suffer and he must die and he must rise again. You would
have thought, because you know this in your head from reading
the scripture, you would have thought they would have just
said, all right, let’s all meet up for sandwiches. Let’s keep
the Sabbath day together. And as awful as this event has
been, let’s just remember on Sunday, it’s all going to be
better. And we’ll go to Jerusalem or we’ll go to Galilee and we’ll
fry fish with Jesus on the shore. They came unglued. And friends,
that’s a challenge to us, isn’t it? To feed our faith, to pray
for the Holy Spirit, to show us the way of salvation through
faith in Jesus. Lest we become dense in heart
and perplexed in mind and say to ourselves, it’s all over. He’s dead three years down the
tubes. Now we need to run to the empty
tomb. We need to run with faith to the cross and see that Jesus’
work has been accomplished. Let’s pray together. Lord, we
ask that your spirit would show us over and over and over and
over and over again that your word is true, that the events
of scripture as wild and supernatural as they seem are the faithful
testimony of eyewitnesses carried along by the Holy Spirit to write
these things down and to bring salvation to sinners and to strengthen
the faith of the saints. And so we pray now that our eyes,
our minds and our hearts would not say this is an idle tale,
but we would revere this as the truth of the gospel upon which
Everything in our lives hang. So give us faith. Now we pray
in Jesus name. Amen. We want to respond to God’s
goodness by singing number 404. The church’s one foundation is
Jesus Christ, our Lord.