Have You Seen the Son Rise?

Thank you, Angela.

Did you see the sunrise this morning?

It came up, by my checking, it came up at 6:21 this morning, and many of you were probably still sleeping.

Some of you might've been up with kids or grandkids, you know, doing whatever you do on Easter morning, hunting for Easter eggs.

Some of you here are some young parents here this morning.

You might have been up much earlier than that with one who woke you up.

I remember a time, maybe some of you do as well, where Easter services were, in most churches, there was a sunrise service.

So imagine all the effort that you put into getting your family dressed and ready and here this morning at this time for an 11 o'clock service.

Back that up several hours.

Imagine getting your family all ready to get dressed and get to an outdoor location before sunrise for a sunrise service.

Many of us used to be part of that.

"Did you" or"have you seen the sunrise?" That is, that's a question that I was repeatedly asked about 32 years ago.

My wife and I, at that time my new wife, Cindy, and I, we were in Bar Harbor, Maine for our honeymoon.

It was in August.

And people, when we'd go into shops and restaurants, would repeatedly asked,"Have you seen the sunrise?" And of course we'd seen sunrises before, but they said,"No, no, no.

You have not seen a sunrise til you see the sunrise on Cadillac Mountain." Now, if you've been to Maine, you may or may not know this: on the Maine coast there are, maybe they wouldn't be mountains by Tennessee standards, but there are some at least high hills.

One of them, right on the coast near Bar Harbor, is called Cadillac Mountain.

And just where that is located, you can look this up on a map, where that is located.

If you're on the top of Cadillac Mountain, when the sun comes up, you are the first one in the United States, the continental United States, to see the sun come up.

So the last day of our trip there.

We got up early before the sun came up.

We drove up to the top of Cadillac Mountain.

You can see a picture on the screen of what we encountered.

A whole bunch of people were there with their cameras ready to see the sun come up, and it came up like any other sunrise that I've seen.

But I guess at least I can say on that particular day, I was one of the first people to see the sunrise come up over the United States.

There's a more relevant question this morning: have you seen the Son"S-o-n" rise?

What do I mean by that?

I mean, is the resurrection this Easter morning, is the resurrection of Jesus Christ real to you?

I mean, is your life different because Jesus rose from the dead?

I mean, in asking that question, is the very same power of God, the power of God that Ephesians tells us was at work raising Christ from the dead, is that power at work in you, transforming you?

Have you seen the son rise?

When we think about the solar sunrise, most people miss the solar sunrise.

Many of us are asleep at that time on any given day.

Many of us, even if we're awake, we're indoors, or even if we're outside, where we're not looking in that direction.

Most people miss the solar sunrise.

But many people, maybe even most people, miss the Son rise, the"S-o-n" rise.

In other words, most people, many people, miss the transforming power of Christ's resurrection at work in their lives.

And we see an example of that in the text today, that what Angela just read out of, Luke chapter 24 verses 13 through 32.

Luke 24:13–32

Two people on the road to Emmaus that missed the Son rise that first Easter morning, that missed the significance of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Who were these two people, and what were they doing when this happened?

Well, we read in verse 13,"Now the same day--" that Easter morning, that first resurrection morning--"the same day, two of them were going to a village called Emmaus." Who were they?

Well, we're told that they're part of the"them", that if you look back in verse 19 is being discussed.

The 11, the 12 apostles minus Judas, who died, plus those who were gathered around them.

These weren't, probably, part of the 11, what we think of as the apostles, but they were part of that immediate group right around them.

They were, they were followers of Jesus.

They were disciples of Jesus.

And we're not told much about their identity.

Verse 18 tells us that one of them was a man named Cleopas.

Cleopas is not named elsewhere in the New Testament.

There's a reference to a Clopas in John's Gospel, but different individual.

We're not even told who the other person was.

We're not even told whether the other person was a man or a woman, and many people think it was a woman.

Many people think this is Cleopas' wife who was walking along with him on the road to Emmaus.

I think that picture fits, because that's a picture we can all relate to.

We're here as men and women and, in many ways, as we're going to see, we are like this man and probably this woman, walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus on the morning of the resurrection.

Where were they going?

Again, Emmaus, we don't really know where that is other than it's seven miles from Jerusalem.

They think it was probably west of Jerusalem.

That's significant because the angels, the angels who were at the tomb, we're told in Matthew's Gospel and Mark's Gospel, the angels not only announced that Jesus had risen from the dead, but they said that Jesus is going to Galilee up in the north and that his disciples were to go to Galilee and meet him in Galilee.

So you can figure out the geography here.

These two followers of Jesus, rather than going north to Galilee, they were going west, southwest, to Emmaus.

They were going the wrong direction from where they've been directed by the angels.

Why would they be going to Emmaus instead of Galilee?

Well, we don't know for sure, but the fact that they were disregarding the angels' message seems to indicate to me they had some doubts about that message.

They may not have believed that Jesus really had risen from the dead and would meet them in Galilee.

And so what I think this man and probably this woman were doing is they'd given up.

They were giving up, and they were going home.

They were going back to Emmaus.

They were done with what had happened.

I think we can relate to that.

Many of us can.

Maybe you started out as a child going to church, and you heard about Jesus, and you heard about his resurrection, and you embraced that with some degree of faith, but as you aged and you went through life, the hurtful things of life, the setbacks, the disappointments, those kind of knocked you off-kilter.

And you got to a place where you were discouraged about following Jesus, and you began to doubt.

You haven't become necessarily an atheist, but maybe you are a practical agnostic.

You're not really sure what you believe about Jesus anymore.

And so in some sense, even though you might be here this morning, there might be some of you that, like this man and probably this woman, you, in terms of your faith, you've given up, and you're going home.

Then in verse 15, we encounter what I think is the strangest thing about this particular resurrection appearance.

Jesus himself came up and walked along with them, verse 16:"but they were kept from recognizing him." Why didn't they recognize him?

Well, we don't know.

Luke doesn't give us any details.

Mark fills in one detail.

Mark 16:12 tells us that he appeared in a different form, and so apparently, Jesus had a normal human form.

Mark 16:12

He wasn't glowing or anything like that, but he had a human form that they didn't recognize immediately as the Jesus that they knew, that they had been following.

They think he's just a fellow traveler on the way to Emmaus.

Jesus prevented them from recognizing him.

They were prevented, or kept from, recognizing who he really is.

Why would Jesus do that?

Why would he prevent them from recognizing him?

And I mean, just to bring that home, how is it that this happens to us?

Are there ways in which we miss seeing the Son rise because we somehow don't recognize him, even though he's right there, present in our lives?

Well, I think we get a hint of why this happened to these two in verse 25, when Jesus says to them,"How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets had spoken." Now,"foolish" in this context,"foolish" is not an insult.

He's not making a derogatory comment about their intelligence; it's a statement about their spiritual dullness.

You and I, we are spiritually dull.

We are spiritually foolish when we overlook or we ignore what God has made plain to us, what he's revealed to us in his Word, how that Word connects with the events of our lives.

So a foolish person is not an unintelligent person.

There's many intelligent people who are foolish people.

A foolish person is a person who ignores what God has clearly revealed, who ignores what God has revealed because they really want their own agenda, their own desires, their own preferences.

And so as a result of sticking with what they want, they lose the discernment to see what it is that God is doing right in front of them, right around them.

And that's the case, I believe, with Cleopas and his companion.

I mean, after all, they had the facts.

Look in verse 23:"They had heard the accounts that the angels at Jesus's tomb said that he was alive." They'd heard that.

Or verse 24:"They had heard from the other disciples who had actually gone to his tomb that they didn't find his body in the tomb, that the tomb was empty." These two had the facts, and yet they still didn't believe.

Why did they not believe, even though they had the facts right in front of them?

Why is it that you and I struggle to believe, even when we have the facts in God's Word right in front of them?

Well, I think we're much like these two.

Verse 25, referring back to verse 25.

Jesus says they didn't believe all that the prophets have spoken.

They didn't believe all that the Bible had said about him and what God was doing.

They were selective in their belief.

Verse 21 indicates that there were some promises in the Old Testament that they loved.

They loved the promises in the Old Testament that the Messiah was going to redeem Israel.

I mean, I'm sure they loved promises, prophecies like Daniel 7:14 promising how the Son of Man would be given dominion and glory and a kingdom, and that all of the peoples in the nations and languages would serve him.

Daniel 7:14

That's the kind of Messiah they hoped for.

That's the kind of M1essiah they could get behind and believe in.

But Jesus had been arrested.

Jesus had been defeated.

Jesus had been humiliated, crucified, killed.

Jesus was dead.

So maybe they had been mistaken about what they hoped, and maybe he wasn't the promised Messiah after all.

Maybe he was only a prophet.

Notice that's how they refer to him in verse 19.

What happened to their belief?

What happened to their belief is what happens to our belief all too easily: they had an agenda that Jesus didn't fulfill.

And that hits close, that hits home close to me.

I don't know about you.

How about you?

Just like the disciples, I am slow to believe all that the Bible has to say about Jesus.

We impose our own desires, we impose our preferences, we impose our agendas on what we read in the Bible.

We pick and choose from the Bible, and we match up the scriptures we really like, and that's what God should be like.

That's how God should interact with us.

This is who Jesus should be and what he should do.

We don't believe all that the Bible says about God and Jesus and his purposes, and as a result, it keeps us from seeing the Son rise.

Well, how did Cleopas and his companion actually come to recognize the risen Jesus?

They tell us in verse 32:"They experienced a burning within their heart as Jesus opened the scriptures to them." And by the way, here is one of the reasons why we depend upon scripture, why we are reliant upon scripture as we worship.

Here is the power of the Bible: that when it is accurately taught under the anointing of the Holy Spirit, under the illuminating work of the spirit of Christ.

When that happens, when the Bible is taught, and the spirit of Christ illuminates it, it sets our hearts on fire.

It burns the truth within us.

Mark describes this, or Luke describes this, in verse 27:"And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the scriptures concerning himself.""Moses and all the prophets", that phrase simply means"all of the Old Testament".

So what was going on here?

Well, it's about seven miles from Jerusalem to Emmaus.

I do a lot of walking.

A good pace is about three and a half miles an hour.

So they had like an hour and a half, two hours.

They got this amazing sermon.

I wish we had that sermon recorded and we could have heard that, as Jesus took them all the way through the Old Testament passage after passage, pointing to how each of these scriptures pointed to Jesus, pointed to what he did on the cross.

And in all of this, he showed them what they were missing, what they were overlooking, what we miss, what we overlook.

We see it in verse 26, that"the Christ had to suffer and then enter his glory." We overlook that.

We don't like that message of suffering in our lives anymore than Cleopas and his companion and the other disciples did, but the reality is he had to suffer to be the savior.

Now, Luke doesn't tell us what particular Old Testament passages Jesus explained to them, but there's a few key ones that come to my mind that he probably touched on.

I bet he began at the beginning, all the way back in Genesis, and I think of that promise of God about the Messiah all the way back at the fall of man and woman, in Genesis 3:15:"He will crush your head and you will strike his heel." I bet Jesus explained to them how this is a promise that the Messiah would come to crush the head of the serpent, the devil, to destroy, to crush his rebellion, to finally destroy him at the end of time.

But that, in order to do that, God would first allow Satan, the serpent, to strike his heel, to make the Messiah suffer, to send the Messiah to the cross.

He had to suffer to be the savior.

I bet Jesus took them to the life of Abraham and the promise that God gave to Abraham to make out of him a great nation.

I bet he explained the Abrahamic Covenant.

I bet he took them to Genesis 22, when God led Abraham up on Mount Moriah and said,"Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and sacrifice there." And how it wasn't until Abraham had the knife raised above Isaac, his only son, ready to plunge it in his heart, when God stopped him and provided a ram in the thicket as a substitute.

I bet Jesus explained to them what a vivid picture this is, of what God the Father did in offering up his only son to suffer in our place, as our substitute, and therein open glory to us.

He had to suffer to be the savior.

I bet Jesus took them to the Exodus.

As God led the nation of Israel out of Egypt and through the desert to the Promised Land, and how, on the eve of that very last plague in Exodus 12, that horrible plague when God was going to strike down all of the firstborn children in Egypt, how God provided the Passover and instructed them to slaughter the Passover lamb, to put some of the lamb on the doorposts, on the doorframes.

In other words, God provided a way that they could save their children.

He provided a substitutionary sacrifice of a lamb to be slaughtered in their place, and as they killed that lamb, and they took the blood of that lamb, and they put it on the doorpost, that blood was a sign that they were covered by God's mercy and grace.

This same illustration is what the Apostle Paul picks up on in First Corinthians 5 when he makes it absolutely clear:"Christ is our Passover lamb who is substituted for us." He had to suffer to be the savior.

I bet Jesus took them through the Psalms.

In Psalm 22, that great psalm of David, the psalm that was at once both the expression of David and what he was going through, and at the same time, it was something that pointed to what the Messiah would do when he came.

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" And we know from the Gospel of Mark 15 that this is the very same thing that Jesus Christ cried out from the Cross just before his death.

He cried out with a loud voice,"Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?""My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" He had to suffer to be the savior.

There was probably many more passages that he took them through in that hour-and-a-half-to-two-hour sermon.

Just one more that comes to mind: the song of the suffering servant in Isaiah 53, how the Messiah was pierced for our transgressions.

He was crushed for our iniquities, and surely they and we and anyone who considers the details of the crucifixion of Jesus realizes how Jesus the Messiah fulfills this.

How his hands and his feet were pierced with the spikes that nailed him to the Cross.

How his side was pierced, where the spear that was thrust into it by the centurion to ensure that he was dead.

How his head was crushed with a crown of thorns.

How he felt the crushing weight of carrying his own cross to his own crucifixion, his own execution.

And he did this all, as Isaiah says, for our transgressions, the ways, in other words, that we wander away from God.

He did this all for our iniquities, the ways that we violate the boundaries that God puts around us.

He did this all so that our transgressions and our iniquities would be put as far away from us as the east is from the west.

He had to suffer to be the savior.

You know, his unfolding of the scripture, this walking sermon, I think we can say, you know, probably lasted an hour and a half or more.

And you notice in the text here, they don't immediately get it.

They're like you and me: they hear scripture, we hear scripture, and we don't immediately get it.

They had to ponder it.

The Holy Spirit had to stir it in their minds and their hearts.

Their moment of illumination, we're told in Luke's account, came that evening when, verse 30:"they were gathered around the table, and this stranger took bread,, and he gave thanks and he broke it, and he began to give it to them.

Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him." I don't think this was any great mystical moment.

I think this was simply the spirit of Christ illuminating the word of Christ so that they could see the physical Christ, right there before them, who had been there all along.

I think the Spirit brought to their mind what it was that Jesus had said just a few nights earlier, on the eve of his execution, when he broke the bread and said,"This is my body, which is broken for you." This is the same illuminating power of the Holy Spirit that is at work in us today.

The Spirit does this very same work in us.

The Spirit of Christ takes the word of Christ, and as he works at in our hearts, in our minds, he makes the presence of Christ, the reality of Christ, there, apparent, real to you and to me.

Has he done that in your life?

Is he doing that this morning?

Have you seen the Son rise?

Do you see in the scriptures that this savior had to suffer for you in order to bring you into glory?

Do you see why it is that he had to suffer for you?

Romans 3 tells us why: there is not one of us who is righteous.

Not one, not me, not you.

None of us are good enough to stand in God's sight.

There is no one who understands God.

There is no one who seeks him, all who turn away.

That's a description of your and my rebellion against God, and in our rebellion against God, God's justice demands that our rebellion be punished, but the savior suffered this punishment in your place and my place.

He had to suffer to be your savior.

He had to suffer to be my savior.

Do you see in the scripture God's unfathomable prevision of this lamb, this savior, this Isaac, who suffered to bring you into glory?

First Peter 3:"Christ died for sins once for all the righteous--" that's him--"for the unrighteous--" that's you and me.

Why?

In order to bring you to God.

In order to open glory, to open heaven to you, and this is the only way that you or I can know God and know the promise of an eternity and glory with him is by Jesus Christ covering our unrighteousness with his righteousness.

He had to suffer to be your savior.

He had to suffer to be my savior.

Do you see in the scriptures this Easter morning how the one who suffered for you was vindicated by his resurrection, how if the resurrection hadn't happened, we would never know whether all these promises had been effective.

But in raising him from the dead, he vindicated and he proved that it is effective for your salvation.

He makes the hope of salvation real by rising from the dead.

And the passage that John Andrew read earlier, 1 Peter:"In his great mercy, God has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection from the dead." He had to suffer to be your savior.

He had to suffer to be our savior.

And so I come back to the question I asked you at the beginning: have you seen the Son rise this Easter morning?

I don't-- I'll just be blunt.

I don't assume that just because you're in church on Sunday morning or Easter morning, that you've seen that, that the resurrection of Christ is real to you.

So again, this is a question that I hope the Holy Spirit Burns into you, even as you leave today: have you seen the Son rise?

Is the resurrection of Jesus Christ real to you?

Is your life different because Jesus Christ rose from the dead?

Is the very same power of God that raised Christ from the dead at work in your life, transforming you?

And here's the baseline question: do you know Jesus as the risen son of God?

Do you know Jesus as your savior?

Do you know Jesus as your Lord, as your king?

And if you don't, or you're not sure, you're not sure whether you've seen the Son rise, in this sense, even this morning, you can ask God to do the same illuminating work in your heart that he did in the hearts of these two disciples on the way to Emmaus.

You can ask him to open the scriptures to help you see by the illuminating power of his Holy Spirit what is promised in scripture about Jesus, about the Messiah, about the salvation that he offers to you and me, that we can't see without the Spirit's illuminating work.

You can ask the Holy Spirit, you can ask God to, by his Holy Spirit, make your heart burn within you, to make his truth light up with fire within you.

You can pray that prayer this morning.

He is risen.

He is risen indeed!

Let's pray.

Lord Jesus, I am Cleopas.

I'm sure many of us could identify with that man, probably that woman, walking on the road to Emmaus.

We have all the facts in front of us.

We have the biblical accounts, the eyewitness testimony of what you have done, Jesus, what you did at the cross, what you did at the empty tomb, and yet we struggle to believe.

We have our doubts.

We need, Lord God, what you did on the way to Emmaus, we need that illuminating work of your Holy Spirit to help us see the risen Christ in the word of Christ through the spirit of Christ.

Lord Jesus, if there are some this morning who that has never yet happened, I pray this morning that that would be their prayer:"Lord, burn in my heart your truth.

Show me the risen Christ." Lord, for many of the rest of us, we've had that moment, but we are maybe at a place this morning in our faith where we feel we've drifted far from you.

Burn that anew in our hearts.

May the reality, Lord Jesus, that you are resurrected, you are ascended, you are returning in glory, may that become more real to us.

Lord Jesus, we worship you.

You are risen.

You are risen indeed.

Amen.