Epitaph written on the wind

On a beautiful spring day some years ago, Beverly and I made a bike trip from Fort Valley to Marshallville. We traveled along the back roads to avoid highway traffic. As we rode along, we soaked up the blooming flowers and beautiful farmland. Traveling down Sleepy Hollow Road, we noticed a small roadside graveyard inside a wooded tract. We parked our bicycles to investigate. There, we found graves reflecting birth dates in the 1800s; some with epitaphs etched thereon.

Since all deceased persons are entombed in some fashion, I thought how radically different were the burial facts of Jesus relative to the major prophets of world religions such as Islam’s Mohammed, Buddhism’s Gautama Buddha, and Taoism’s Lao-tzu. Their remains can be found decaying in a grave somewhere in the world today, but not Jesus’. His epitaph was written on the wind by an angel who proclaimed from the empty tomb: “He is not here, He is risen!”

To scoff at the possibility of the resurrection is to limit the power of God. Man’s Creator made humans differently from animals. Whereas an animal has neither thought of death nor of an after-life, it was God’s pleasure to create man with free will and to hard-wire into his psyche, a desire to live beyond this earthly domain.

Would a loving God create man with the quest for immortality and then abandon him at the grave? The whole fabric of Christianity rises or falls based upon the resurrection. Can God raise the dead? If God created the heavens and earth with a command and breathed into man the breath of life, it would pose no obstacle for Him to resurrect His own creation. The Apostle Paul, in his defense before King Agrippa, asked the despot, “O King, do you find it incredible to believe that God can raise the dead?” The resurrection of Jesus emboldened Paul to pen these conquering words in Romans: “O death where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory? Thanks be to God, who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

A momentous expression of faith came from the lips of Job. In abject misery, Job was sitting atop an ash heap. He had lost his possessions, his family, and was beset with agonizing physical maladies. Instinctively knowing that his next rendezvous might be with death itself, he reached out to a Power beyond himself. He declared, “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” Job intuitively knew that his Redeemer was an Intermediary capable of vindicating him either in this world or the next. Job’s Redeemer is Christ, the Savoir, who built a bridge of redemption between sinful man and Holy God. With His atoning work complete, Jesus promised, “Because I live you shall live also.” This is the message of Easter—the hope that we shall live again and be reunited with our precious loved ones.

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