Golgotha & the Garden Tomb

The reason that we're here.

So if you got your Bibles, turn on to Matthew chapter 27.

Matthew 27 · chapter mention

We've been walking through the way to the cross, the way of the cross, and uh we started in Gethsemane, the garden, where Jesus swept great drops of blood and contemplation about what was coming in the crucifixion, what was coming in the cup of wrath, what was coming and holding a hundred billion persons' sins on his back.

And then last week we talked about the gates of heaven and the gates of hell and what that payment really did settle.

And so today I want to take you to Matthew 27, and we're going to look at Golgotha and the Garden Tomb.

Let me pray.

Father, we love you and God, as 1 Corinthians 15, 14 says, Lord, if there is no resurrection, then our preaching is in vain.

Our faith is in vain.

And so today we are so excited about serving a Savior who is not dead, but who is risen.

We have a God who's not in a tomb.

And so, God, thank you for being alive, being at the right hand of the Father, Jesus, mediating on our behalf.

Lord, we love you.

We pray that today you would be lifted up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So in Matthew chapter 27, I want to take you to point number one this morning.

Matthew 27 · chapter mention

Is this the trial to Golgotha?

The trial to Golgotha.

Golgotha means the place of the skull.

The place of the skull.

And I need you to understand about that place.

When Jesus got to this point, Jesus became eerily silent.

They started throwing accusations his way about his claim to be a king, about his claim to be able to tear down the temple and then three days build it back again.

And he began to become silent.

How many of you have a child that struggles being silent?

My son Weston is what we call a verbal processor, which means his thoughts don't come to his brain, they come to his lips.

And so he says things, totally unrelated things.

He just speaks and chat and chit and chat from the moment he wakes up.

It's going, going, going.

And I'm like, I am a morning person, but mostly a morning person in thought.

If you know what that means, when I wake up, I'm my mind is sharp, but I really don't want to talk.

And Weston's like shotgun going, and he just processes that way.

And I was thinking about Jesus here.

And if there was ever a time with such eloquence that someone could have argued their case, and the way that he shot down others with his eloquence, and they said, he taught as someone with authority, he spoke as someone that we've never heard.

Jesus does not argue his case.

Look at verse 12 in Matthew 27.

So they ask him in verse 11, Are you the king of the Jews?

Jesus says to them, merely, It is as you say.

And while he was being accused by the chief priests and elders, he answered, Nothing.

He was quiet.

I want you to look at verse 21 through 25.

It says this.

Pilate said to them, What then shall I do with Jesus who is called the Christ?

He said, Let him be crucified.

The governor said, Why?

What evil has he done?

And they cried out all the more, crucify him.

And Jesus stood there quietly, not arguing his case.

The chief priests, the elders, all of these.

Are you the king of the Jews?

He said nothing.

He remained quiet.

It's interesting that Pilate in another place goes on to ask him about the truth.

There's this back and forth, and he says, Jesus says to him, Everyone who knows the truth knows my voice.

And ironically, the man charged to investigate the truth dismisses the relevance of the truth to the man who is the truth.

He says, What is even truth?

While he was standing there next to him, John 14, 6 says, I am the way, the truth, and the life.

And Pilate announced, I found no guilt in this man.

So Jesus was then placed next to a convicted murderer named Barabbas.

And Pilate says, What should we should be done?

And you see the crowd starts yelling out, crucify him.

By the way, just because everyone in the crowd is yelling it out doesn't mean it's right.

Y'all with me?

There's a lot of the crowd trying to determine the way of our society today.

And I gotta tell you, it doesn't mean it's okay, right, or that you have to keep up.

Jesus stood by silently as his accusers yelled, crucify him.

Why in the world would a guilt-free man stand quietly?

I want you to understand something.

It was back in Gethsemane when Jesus prayed about this cup.

The cup was about God's will and the wrath that was coming, and he prayed and he groaned to his father about what was coming.

And he said, If this cup can pass, but this is what I want you to know that he left the garden surrendered.

And he said, God's will will be done.

Doing God's will, church, can mean some things that don't sound pretty.

Doing God's will can mean some suffering.

Doing God's will can mean standing silently and looking for a lesson, learning.

It can mean silence.

Jesus stood in silence.

Golgotha was a place of quiet silence from Jesus.

Well, he went from accusations to letter B.

It was a place of shame.

Now I want you to look at verse 28 through 31.

As the trial continued and they began to take hold of Jesus, I want you to see what they did to the Savior.

They stripped him, verse 28.

They put a scarlet robe on him.

When they had twisted a crown of thorns, they put it on his head and a reed in his hand that would look like a scepter, and they bowed the knee before him and mocked, saying, Hail, King of the Jews! They spit on him.

They took the root reed and struck him with it.

They mocked him.

They took off the robe and they led him to be crucified.

Today I want you to understand if there is someone in prison, they have the opportunity to seek legal recourse about the way they're being treated.

But in those days, they were on public display.

Jesus had been stripped, beaten.

They put a robe and crown on him and said, Hail King of the Jews.

And I thought about this, and I want our students to listen.

We have a generation of people that are kidding just at the sake of someone else's feelings.

They'll say anything and then say, Well, I'm just kidding.

I was only joking.

We joke and we mock and we're sarcastic.

And there's an old quote that says, Imitation is the highest form of flattery, right?

You've heard this?

And so they're mocking and imitating him.

I know when I was a child, man, I love to imitate someone, so I'm going, John will appreciate this.

But I used to imitate the immortal Hulk Hogan.

Y'all with me?

Right?

Are you are you feeling it?

And so if you were one of my friends, you would come over to my house.

This is serious truth, okay?

I had a my buddy, whatever you call it, figure.

I don't want to say doll, because y'all will judge me.

I had a my buddy guy.

And then my grandma made me stuff, right?

Y'all remember the days when somebody would sew you up stuff?

My grandma made me a big stuffed dinosaur, and she made me a big stuffed bunny.

So when my friends would come over my house, I would imitate Hulk Hogan, and my friends were always the macho man Randy Savage.

And we would fight in the living room against my guy, not doll, my dinosaur, and my bunny rabbit.

And we seriously, I'd jump off the couch, landing elbows, I'd be body slamming, like we would full-on be doing this stuff.

And I want you to understand, I mean, I would say the things, I would, you know, I even could play the music.

And I was in, I was imitating something I wanted to be.

And listen to me, this was not anything like that.

They're mocking and looking in the eyes of the Creator in complete ignorance.

In his pain, they're peering into his eyes, and they're saying, Hail, King of the Jews.

They said he can't save himself.

He can't save himself.

He said he could tear down the temple, build it back in three days.

He can't even get himself from this place.

They said this to a man with their sins on his back and a hundred billion others.

He was omnipotent.

I need you to know he was fully God.

He was fully man, embracing the pain and the torture, but he was fully God.

And he did not break.

He says in another place, if I wanted to call down a legion of angels, I could do this, but he wouldn't.

Because back in the garden, he came to a place of surrender.

He said, I'm not, it's my father's will.

It's my father's will.

And he went on and he took that place of shame.

Well, that place of shame takes us to number two this morning.

The torture that's taken in at Golgotha.

The torture at Golgotha was like nothing you can really imagine.

I've made myself this week.

I kind of forced myself to go back.

I love it, but I kind of, it's hard.

I watched the passion of the Christ.

If you've never seen it, you need to see it.

But it's hard.

It's really hard.

And so it went.

I go back and I'm watching that and seeing the depiction of suffering.

Letter A this morning.

Is this a payment in suffering?

I want you to look at verse 26.

It says, They released, the people cried, I'll crucify him.

So they released Barabbas, the murderer, and then they scourged Jesus.

He was scourged in the Roman manor church.

That means he was stripped of his clothes.

He was tied to a post.

And then they pulled out what was called a flagrum.

Some people call it a cat of nine tails.

And it would have leather pieces on a strap.

And on the end of those leather pieces, there would be pieces of bone or pieces of glass.

And they would begin to whip a man.

And they would strike him.

And in Jewish law, you can see in Deuteronomy, it was Jewish law that if somebody was beaten in that manner, that they should only take 40 lashes save one, meaning 39 lashes.

The Romans didn't have such a law.

He was beat by Romans.

So we really don't know exactly what happened and how much happened.

But he was beaten with this, and they would whip him across his back, and he would take those lashes.

And I this is what I thought about.

Any of you here that have ever been in a fist fight, you know that in a fist fight, adrenaline kicks in for a little bit.

I've been in a fist fight.

Don't judge me in the lobby, but I got a crooked nose, okay?

And um, so I've been in a few fist fights, and this is what I knew in some of those moments.

I wasn't feeling the pain.

I was getting hit, and I knew I was getting hit, but my adrenaline had gotten the best of me.

But this is what I know.

Have you ever gotten a paper cut?

Little bitty paper cut?

Ain't no adrenaline strong enough for a paper cut.

You will jump and hop and ooh, right?

Doesn't matter.

Oldest of persons, little babies.

A paper cut will mess you up, right?

You're like, I did it on a band-aid once.

I'm like, how did this this isn't even supposed to help me?

Right?

And so, but but I know this.

Man, cutting and ripping at flesh is immediate pain.

It's not like the adrenaline in a fist fight.

And so they would whip at him and it would wrap around his skin and it would pull it back off, and you would see pieces of flesh just being torn at, cutting and ripping.

It was brutal.

The reason they wanted to keep 40 lashes save one was that for this torture that was coming, the crucifixion, they did not want a man to die.

They wanted him to be able to stay alive so that he could go on to the next level of torture.

It was inhumane, it was barbaric.

And so they would whip him, and the Romans perfected it.

I believe that the gospel writers show great restraint in the way that they write in just mentioning scourge or just mentioning this.

Because when you read about it, words I think are inadequate.

It's really hard to capture in words the type of pain that goes through when somebody's flesh is ripped over and over and over again.

One man said it this way: it was to die a thousand deaths.

I don't know if you know this, but the word excruciating, the word for excruciating comes from the Latin from the cross.

We get the word excruciating pain from the cross.

Well, the soldiers would then take Jesus' arms.

After they finished the scourging, they made him carry his cross.

He walked down Golgotha's road and they took him to that point.

They laid him down on the cross.

Soldiers would hold one arm and they would take a seven-inch nail and they would drive it.

They would pull him out and stretch him out as far as they could on the other side.

And pound a seven-inch nail through his other hand, and they would pull his two feet together, and they would pound through his feet.

And he went through this excruciating pain.

The weight of his body, they would lift the cross and they would let it fall down into place, and his whole body would tear pieces and tendons tearing through this process.

And the weight of all of his body would be hanging in those wrists, and and and he would begin immediately to have trauma to breathing.

All of the blood that he had lost, everything that had been happening, it'd begin to bear much weight upon his chest, and it'd be pulling apart there, and he'd try to lift himself up, and trauma would begin to hit his rib cage, and he'd have to force with everything almost a perpetual state of suffocating.

And he'd come back down.

The impact on his lungs and heart.

There's a song.

God brought it back to me this week, and I can't get it out of my head when I think about what was happening to Jesus at the crucifixion.

The song is an old hymn and it says, Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

He says, Oh.

Sometimes it causes me to tremble.

Tremble, tremble.

He said, Were you there when they nailed him to the cross?

It causes me to tremble.

There's a story of an old preacher who was studying, getting prepared for an Easter Sunday, and he was inundated in his study over the cross, over the crucifixion, and he had a dream that night, and it was so vivid.

He could see the whole scene happening in front of him.

Jesus being beaten.

Jesus walking down Calvary's Road.

Jesus being nailed to the cross.

And it said that as he was watching that dream, he got so saddened by it, and he just wanted to stop it.

And he wanted to stop the men, and he wanted to stop what was happening to Jesus.

And so he got up and he saw a soldier at his back and he grabbed a hold of the soldier's shoulder and he turned him around.

And he saw his own face.

And he said, I was there when they crucified my Lord.

It was my sins that nailed him to that cross.

It was mine and your sins, church.

Oh, it causes me to tremble.

Tremble.

Were you there?

Well, it was a payment.

Let her be as this.

The cross was a payment for salvation.

There's a scene in a movie.

Um this movie called The Hunger Games.

And in the Hunger Games, there's one male and one female chosen in each of 12 districts to fight to the death in front of people.

It's a barbaric show in the movie.

And in this scene, there's a 11 or 12-year-old girl, 11 to 18-year-olds get chosen.

And this 11 or 12-year-old girl gets chosen, and she's called out to be the next to fight for her district.

And her name is Prim.

And as she's chosen, the screen shows in on her.

She's skinny and she's a pretty young girl.

And she begins to uh fearfully sort of walk out into the road that's gonna take her up in front of everybody.

And as she's walking out in a dramatic turn of events, her older sister yells out, I volunteer.

I volunteer as tribute.

I can't over-emphasize, church, how helpless and hopeless we were, except Jesus said, I volunteer, Father.

I will go and pay their payments on the cross.

Church, we're without any hope of salvation.

And I want you to know this nobody crucified Jesus without his consent.

Nobody could crucify him if he didn't go of his own will.

He allowed the guards to take him in the garden.

You can see it back there if you go in scripture.

He says to the disciples, it's time that we rise up, for our betrayer is coming.

And he walks with them.

In fact, Peter slices off a soldier's ear.

Jesus picks it up and heals the man in that moment.

I can't wait to get to heaven and find out about Malchus, whose ear was healed in that moment.

Did he get saved?

I mean, can you imagine?

And he walks himself.

At any moment he could have said no.

But he volunteered to be my payment.

He who knew no sin became sin for me.

The wages of sin, Romans 6.23, is death, and Jesus became my payment and yours.

Look at verse 46.

He'd been crucified, he'd been on that cross.

Now the sixth hour until the ninth hour there was darkness.

And about the ninth hour, verse 46, Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli Lama Sabakhtani, which means, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

This was what Jesus was going through the mental anguish in the garden about in Gethsemane.

Have you ever seen a child hold on to their mother going into preschool?

And the preschool's teacher's like, it's gonna be okay.

Don't worry about it, we'll take good care of them.

And they're like, no, no, I'm never once gonna learn.

Right?

Have you ever seen this?

Like, I'm gonna look when and I'm always the one, I've always had to drop off the kids.

So I've you know, made myself a process.

I drop them on, I don't give hugs, kisses, all that.

Like, I'm like, here you go, boom, I'm out.

Because I don't even want to give them one second of a chance.

I don't want to see their sweet little face.

I don't want them to say my name.

I have heard it a couple times and start choking up while we're looking.

Daddy.

Listen to me, church.

For eternity past and all of time, Jesus, I don't know how else to explain this, has been connected to God the Father in perfect union.

We don't know perfection like that.

We don't know love like that.

And so he could barely bear the idea of being separated from his father.

And in this moment, he says, Father, why?

Why?

Jesus couldn't bear that.

And for a moment he was separated because the father couldn't touch wrong, and Jesus took a hundred billion wrongs.

They were separated because the father could not be touched by sin.

And this shows a picture that he was fully God, but his full humanity comes out in this moment.

Because he says, Why?

It's been said that Jesus didn't die that day of the wounds, but that Jesus died that day of a broken heart.

Look at verse 50.

It continues for a few moments in verse 50.

And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit.

He said, It is finished.

It is finished.

Well, I want you to go down to verse 59 and 60.

And I know that this has been heavy, and it's been heavy for three weeks, but I can promise you, 59 and 60, we're getting somewhere that we don't have to feel the depth of this pain as much.

So go with me to the time of the garden tomb.

That's the third point this morning.

The time of the garden tomb.

Says, when Joseph had taken the body, he wrapped it in a clean linen cloth and he laid it in his new tomb, which he had hewn out of the rock, and he rolled a large stone against the door of the tomb and departed.

So about three years ago, on Good Friday, with about three hours of sleep, I flew from Atlanta to Baltimore and found myself in one of the strangest places a person can find themselves.

If you live long enough, you're gonna go to one.

I was in a funeral home.

There are eerie places, they're places where people are crying, uh, mourning, and I've preached several funerals.

There's a casket in the place, which is, if you really think about it, a strange idea, and it's just unforgettable.

I thought about, imagine the type of people, I'm thinking this while I'm there with three hours of sleep, the type of people that work in these places for a living.

Like, can you imagine?

It's just so eerie.

It's just so and being with dead persons and and day after day I thought about, can you imagine if you were there late at night and a door slammed or something dropped?

Like, get me out of here.

Like, I don't.

Well, after I preached this funeral, we went outside.

Just as weird.

A cemetery is a strange place.

Big stones sticking out of the ground, metal nameplates all over this field, walking over the places where the former living are placed.

And I thought about these differences.

There's difference across all kinds of cultures in this world.

But most cultures, tribes, and nations have devised means to entomb their dead.

And the most sacred or remember for what they contain.

But I want you to know something, church.

The most important tomb in history is not known to be a great structure or for what is inside, but what is missing from it.

And so I want to talk to you about that tomb.

Letter A this morning is this the contents of the tomb.

So what was in the tomb?

If you do any kind of deep study on what was in tombs, the first thing that you would see, there's a giant thing called a sarcophagus.

A sarcophagus is like a life-size cereal bowl almost.

It could be cereal-like or it could be square.

And it was a receptacle made of limestone, and they would put bodies in there.

Why?

Because limestone helps a body to continue decomposing.

And I want to get to a point here.

Okay, so Jesus is in there.

He's laid in this new tomb.

He's put into a sarcophagus.

He was then put into, he was mummified.

The process would then suffocate a person.

If he wasn't dead when he got in there, this process would make him dead.

Jesus had a shroud, a full-length sheet.

They call something a sudarium, which was a sweat cloth.

Put around him strands of cloth tied to hands and feet.

Jesus' church was dead.

There's no doubt that Jesus Christ went into that tomb dead.

They would then begin to anoint, before the closed, they would anoint the body with a hundred pounds sometimes of myrrh and aloe, a symbol of a sweet-smelling sacrifice.

Well, if that weren't enough, the decomposing, the wrapping, the putting over of the breath, everything would say that this person that had to be in there was dead, they said that you need to roll a stone.

It's been estimated that the stone that was rolled in front of the grave was two to four tons in weight.

They would have dug out a trench so that it would fall into the ground, so that anyone on the inside of it could not push it with any kind of pressure to get it open because it was down in a trench.

And so Jesus went into this grave physically dead, and it was impossible, impossible for him to get out.

Jesus was dead, church, and dead men don't walk out of tombs.

Well, if that wasn't enough, look at verse 64.

It says here in verse 64 that the command that the tomb be made secure until the third day, lest his disciples come by night and steal him away and say to the people, He is risen from the dead, so the last deception will be worse than the first.

Pilate said to them, You have a guard, go your way, make it secure.

So everything on the inside says that somebody in there has to be dead.

They've put a stone in the way.

Then he says, If that's not enough, if somebody can manage to get this thing moved, we're gonna set a guard.

Nobody's getting this body.

And so I want you to understand what the contents, what the tomb look like.

Well, let it be is this.

This is important, the course of three days in the tomb.

I want you to look at verse 63.

Three days in the tomb.

Why is that important?

So remember while he was still alive, how that deceiver said, After three days I will rise.

Therefore, command that the tomb be made secure for that time.

And so the tradition, Jewish tradition was this, that a soul and spirit remained in a dead body, and that it was not considered fully dead until three days in Jewish tradition came to pass.

And so it had to be three days.

Three days the soul and spirit in Jewish tradition, then it was departed.

If Jesus' resurrection occurred the same day or even the next day, his enemies might argue he was never really dead.

He never truly died.

Isn't it interesting when Lazarus died that it says Jesus waited several days?

Why do you think that was?

Day one or two, it might have just been a fluke.

His soul and spirit might not have been alive.

But it says that when Jesus arrived at Lazarus' place, you know what they said to him?

Jesus, the body stinks.

Which is saying it's been decomposed.

I know.

In our old home in Connorsville, I came downstairs one morning.

I'm like, man, it stinks.

What in the world is happening in this house?

And I'm looking and looking, and I cannot find what the smell is.

Now, Heather can smell like a thousand times better than me.

Y'all, ladies, or some of y'all like that.

Your husband don't smell nothing.

We're just used to the stink, I guess.

I don't know.

Anyway, Heather smells things all the time.

But I smell this and I'm like, what in the world has happened?

And I look around.

And the night before, Heather had poured bleach, some solution of bleach into the sink to let it sit and clean.

Well, a mouse fell into the bleach.

And what I found was a pile of goo.

And let me tell you something that I found out that today.

I'm not a scientist, he's outside, but what I found out was he was dead.

The stink proved to me something.

He was dead.

That was the smell of death.

I want you to know, church, that Jesus was dead.

Jesus was dead.

There's people that want to fight this.

Jesus was dead, and he was dead three days.

And dead men don't walk out of graves.

Something took place in that tomb as the three-day bell rung.

And I want to tell you what happened in that tomb.

Turn to Matthew 28, verses 2 through 5.

Matthew 28:2–5

There was a transformation.

Oh, I wish we, I wish there was in this day of YouTube and video.

I wish there was a way to see what happened in that tomb.

But I'll talk to you about the effects that the world felt from it.

Letter A is this.

The earth felt the effects of the tomb.

28 verse 2 through 5.

And behold, there was a great earthquake.

For an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone from the door and sat on it.

His countenance was like lightning, his clothing as white as snow, and the guards shook for fear of him because they became like dead men.

But the angel answered and said to the women, Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified.

He is not here, for he is risen.

Y'all say this with me He is risen.

He's risen.

Suddenly it says that the earth felt the effects.

There was an earthquake.

It shook, it reeled, and it rocked, and the ground quaked at what happened in that tomb.

The rocks erupted, the earth cracked.

It says that the olive trees in the garden waved and their limbs twisted.

Nature was shaken.

The earth trembled in its sorrow at the crucifixion, I think, because we see that when Jesus died, that there was an earthquake.

But it leaped for joy at the resurrection.

The quake attests to the cosmic significance of this event.

I was saying this the other day about the weather.

Look, I know who James Spann is, but I know the weatherman for real.

Y'all with me?

Oh, I was so excited yesterday when I woke up and seen that from 11 o'clock to 4 o'clock during our extravaganza, the best chance of no rain.

Oh, do you know who the weatherman is?

We've been praying to, but he said, rain, rain, rain, rain.

Stop.

Rain, rain, rain, rain.

I'm like, yes! I took a picture of it because I'm gonna show it to James Spann and tell him I know the weatherman.

The weather reacted to what was happening, and I know who controls the weather.

Listen to me.

It says this that the guards felt the effect.

The guards were so shaken from fear of him.

It says that they became like dead men.

They stood as corpses, they shook in their sandals.

The ones watching over the dead became as ones dead.

They were scared.

Heather and I, when we first got married, we lived in an apartment.

And um, I don't remember all the scenario, but in the middle of the night, right?

That's the good part for every story.

In the middle of the night, there's always a noise.

If you're youngly married or going to be married, there's going to be a noise, and you're going to be in charge of taking care of it.

Whatever it is.

So there was a noise, and I'm like, I get up, and I heard it, and it felt like it was behind our bedroom window.

The apartment went outside, and I'm like, so I get up and I stood in the middle of the bedroom, and she's like, What are you doing?

I'm like, shh.

I was completely still.

I thought they were right there, and I'm like, I don't know.

And she started to get up out of the bed.

I'm like, get down.

I like crept my way to the front door and I'm looking around and I call the police and I'm trying because it's going on.

Something is happening out there.

There's noises, there's clattering, there's people speaking.

And like, are they trying to get in my bedroom?

So I call the police.

The police get there.

The police come to the door and I'm waiting.

I can't wait for the police to get there.

So as soon as they get to the door, I open the door.

I promise you this happens.

All of the power in the entire apartment complex goes out as I open the door.

The policeman cusses.

He says, Well, he had a gun in his hand and he goes, I'm like, what is going on?

Right?

Okay.

They got him.

It ended up being like some man was drunk.

He was trying to climb from the bottom floor up to the balcony.

And he was hanging when the policeman got to him.

Like, he's like, get down.

But I remember this moment, and I was terrified.

Can you picture being the guards and seeing the angel?

And whatever happened, they're like having a divine coma.

What in the world is happening?

What is happening?

Well, not only the guard, but the women who came to see the tomb felt the effects.

It says the first day of the week was dawning, and Mary and the other Mary went to view the tomb.

They came to anoint the body with more spices.

In route, they became concerned about how would they even get the stone rolled away.

When they got to the stone, let me tell you, it was more than moved.

They saw a bright light, and the angel said, Ladies, he's not there, he's risen.

Earth felt the effects.

Well, let me tell you this, and I'll be shutting down.

Eternity felt the effects of the tomb.

Eternity felt the effects.

Jesus went into the tomb crucified and was dead.

And dead men, church, don't walk out of tombs.

That stone shook, and I want you to go, I need you to look just for a moment, 1 Corinthians 15.

He's even proving now who's in control of the weather.

1 Corinthians 15, 14 said, If Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is worthless.

If he's not alive, there's no reason for church.

There's no reason for the song we sing.

There's no reason for what we did yesterday.

But Jesus' church went in dead, and on the third day he strolled out of that grave alive.

And dead men don't walk out of tombs.

He came out alive.

And this is what's crazy about the miracle.

Jesus had raised others from the dead.

But when you yourself are dead and you raise your dead self from the dead, what a miracle this was! Well, let me tell you what it says in 1 Corinthians 15, 54 through 57, about what happened at the tomb.

I believe this is the song of the tomb.

It says this.

Verse 55, it says, Oh death, where is your sting?

Christian, if you are gonna die one day, you're going to heaven.

Where is your sting?

It said, Oh hell, where is your victory?

Jesus just conquered hell.

The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is law.

But thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Death, grave, nails, whippings, a two ton stone, guards, nothing could hold him in the tomb.

Today, Jesus is alive.

Can we give him a clap for being alive?

I prayed about how to share.