Re-creation

The Resurrection Changes Everything

Tony Reinke Easter, G.K. Chesterton, Re-creation, Resurrection

I’m of the opinion that great quotes on the resurrection are never out of season. This one comes from G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, as taken from The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton (Ignatius; 1986), 2:344–5:

They took the body down from the cross and one of the few rich men among the first Christians obtained permission to bury it in a rock tomb in his garden; the Romans setting a military guard lest there should be some riot and attempt to recover the body. There was once more a natural symbolism in these natural proceedings; it was well that the tomb should be sealed with all the secrecy of ancient eastern sepulture [burial] and guarded by the authority of the Caesars.

For in that second cavern the whole of that great and glorious humanity which we call antiquity was gathered up and covered over; and in that place it was buried. It was the end of a very great thing called human history; the history that was merely human. The mythologies and the philosophies were buried there, the gods and the heroes and the sages. In the great Roman phrase, they had lived. But as they could only live, so they could only die; and they were dead.

On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realised that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.

The Multidirectional Cross

Tony Reinke BR > Crossway, Cross of Christ, Re-creation

Robert Peterson in his new book Salvation Accomplished by the Son: The Work of Christ (Crossway, 2011), page 301:

What is the place of the cross of Christ in this cosmic restoration? As was the case in the previous passages that we explored, the cross is front and center in reconciliation in Colossians 1 too. God was pleased “to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (v. 20). The cross, therefore, is multidirectional. Taking into account all of Scripture’s teaching, the cross is directed toward God himself (in propitiation); toward our enemies, including demons, to defeat them; toward men and women to redeem them; and toward the whole creation to deliver it from “its bondage to decay” and to bring it into “the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21). Why will all of these things occur? Why will we be finally saved? Why will the Devil and evil angels not ruin the shalom of the new creation but instead be cast into the lake of fire? Why will there be a new heaven and a new earth? All of these questions have the same answer: because the Son of God died and rose again on the third day.

The Re-Creation

Tony Reinke Re-creation

From Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4:720

“Just as the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, as carbon is converted into diamond, as the grain of wheat upon dying in the ground produces other grains of wheat, as all of nature revives in the spring and dresses up in celebrative clothing, as the believing community is formed out of Adam’s fallen race, as the resurrection body is raised from the body that is dead and buried in the earth, so too, by the re-creating power of Christ, the new heaven and the new earth will one day emerge from the fire-purged elements of this world, radiant in enduring glory and forever set free from the ‘bondage to decay.’”