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John 2:19
19
Jesus answered
and said to them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I
will raise it up.
21
But He spoke of
the temple of His body.
22
When therefore
He was raised from the dead, His disciples remembered that
He had said this...
Acts 2:32
This Jesus God
has raised up
Acts 3:15
And the Author
of life you killed, whom God has raised from the dead, of
which we are witnesses.
According to
the New Testament, the Lord's resurrection is mentioned in two
ways.
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First, we
are told that the Lord Jesus resurrected Himself, that is,
that He raised Himself up.
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On the
other hand, the New Testament tells us that He was raised up
by God.
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On the one
hand, the Lord raised up Himself;
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on the
other hand, He was raised from the dead by God.
The Lord's
raising up Himself shows His life power, the ability in His
resurrection life. But God's raising Him from among the dead was
a sign that He was justified and vindicated by God.
God raised Christ from the dead as a proof that He justified
what the Lord was and what He did on earth. The Man-Savior lived
in a way that others thought strange.
His way of
living was absolutely different from religion, culture, and
society. He lived and worked in a very unusual way. If God had
not come in to raise Him up from the dead, this would have meant
that God did not justify Him. But God's raising Christ up from
the dead was a sign of God's justification and
vindication.
Romans 4:25 says that Christ
"was delivered
because of our offenses and was raised because of our
justification."
The death of
Christ fulfilled and satisfied God's righteous requirements so
that we may be justified by God through His death
(Rom.3:24).
Christ's resurrection is a proof that God was satisfied with His
death for us.
If Christ had died on the cross, having been judged there by
God, but had not been raised from among the dead, there would
have been no justification or vindication rendered to Him by
God.
That would have affected our salvation because, in such a case,
His death would not have been followed by God's vindication. But
God judged Christ in death and then raised Him up from the dead.
God's raising up Christ from the dead was His justification and
vindication of what Christ was and did.
From this we
may have the assurance that God has accepted what Christ did for
us on the cross. We are justified by God because of Christ's
death, and in Christ, the resurrected One, we are accepted
before God.
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