He is risen
The fact that changes everything
Everything in this devotional is footnote to this.
Not metaphor. Not symbol. Not the disciples' subjective experience of continuing inspiration from a dead teacher. The claim of the New Testament, the claim of the creeds, the claim for which the martyrs died and the hidden Christians whispered and the North Korean believer memorizes scripture in the dark — is that on the third day he rose from the dead.
Actually. Bodily. In history. Verifiable in principle.
Paul puts it plainly in 1 Corinthians 15: if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. There is no softened version of this claim. Either it happened or it did not. If it did not, the last two thousand years are the most elaborate and costly mistake in human history.
If it did, everything changes.
Every martyr who died singing knew something the people watching them could not account for. Every person in this devotional who went back into the fire and the prison and the jungle and the slum — they went because of this. Because the one who called them had been where they were going and come back.
He had been in the tomb. He had come out.
Death is not the last word.
This is either the most important fact in history or it is nothing. There is no comfortable middle.
He is risen.
“If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead.”
— Paul, 1 Corinthians 15:17, 20
“But now Christ has been raised from the dead. He became the first fruits of those who are asleep.”
He is risen.
Say it.
Not as liturgy — as the claim it is. The specific claim that on a specific morning in a specific city a specific dead man walked out of a specific tomb and appeared to over five hundred people.
If it is true, every sacrifice in this devotional makes sense. Every martyr was right. Every hidden Christian is holding something real. Every grain of wheat that fell into the earth will bear fruit.
If it is true, death is not the end of your story either.
He is risen.
He is risen indeed.