"I am the resurrection and the life"

Jesus paid a great price for us to have a great hope, He paid the price by His blood, and so we should want to eagerly believe in this hope and live as people who have it. Because he was resurrected, we also will be. However, we can have a part in the new life which He received after resurrection, right now. People have many vague hopes for their future, but our hope is one only the resurrection. Peter says that through the resurrection of Jesus, we are born again to a living hope (1 Pet. 1:3).

Through the resurrection of Christ, God showed all of humanity that there is hope of new life, there is a better way to live. But Christ was resurrected because of the life that He had lived; it was not possible for the grave to hold Him. So Jesus showed us the path, the process, that through death we should come to life. But the process is not exactly the same, because we didn't live the life He lived, and so we ourselves aren't worthy of such resurrection. We only can have it through faith in God's grace, through baptism into Jesus' death and resurrection, through realizing that we need Him to be our Saviour. But all the same, 1 Cor. 15:23 says that Christ is the firstfruits, and just as surely as He was resurrected, so we too will be. So, if we believe in His resurrection, we should just as surely believe that we too will be raised. But we can only justifiably have this certainty if we have repented, if we have realized that we ourselves are not worthy of it, and that we so need identification with His resurrection in order to share in it ourselves.

If we do this, then we can take comfort from John 11:25, which says that whoever believes in Jesus even if he dies, he will live again, and never die. So we surely do believe in Jesus, that He was perfect whereas we are not, that He is open to our having a part in Him, and we have shown this by being baptized. Therefore we can look forward positively to being in the Kingdom of God, the eternal life which will follow our resurrection, seeing that we believe that we will stand justified before God - just as Jesus Christ stood justified before Him - because we are in Christ.  

Bro. Gennady (Poltava, Ukraine)