…that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures… (1 Corinthians 15:4).
The Bible of the early church was the Bible of the Hebrew people – what the Jews called the Tanakh and what we refer to as the Old Testament (OT).
So, when Paul in his classic resurrection passage (1
Corinthians 15), asserted that the Scriptures predicted the resurrection of
the Lord Jesus from the dead, Paul was referencing the OT Scriptures.
Could you have foreseen the Resurrection from simply
reading the OT?
Jesus expected His followers to recognize the OT as
predicting His resurrection. And they had the additional advantage of hearing His teaching and therefore should have anticipated Jesus’ rising from the dead on the 3rd day: He said to them, How foolish you are,
and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! (Luke
24:25).
The Twelve were slow to grasp that Jesus would die and
rise again, predictions that He had made on 5 different occasions recorded in
the Gospels
Here’s His forecast as He led the disciples from Galilee to the Holy City:
We are going up to Jerusalem, he said, and the Son of
Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and teachers of the law. They will
condemn him to death and will hand him over to the Gentiles who will mock him
and spit on him, flog him and kill him. Three days later he will rise
(Mark 10:33,34).
Subsequently, as they studied their Scriptures months and
year later, it became embarrassingly apparent to them that with these repeated
words of Jesus, the OT prophets were clearly foreshadowing the rising of the
Messiah from the dead.
Consider the 3 following OT texts:
Psalm 16:9&10
Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices; my
body also will rest secure, because you will not abandon me to the grave, nor
will you let your Holy One see decay. (Psalm 16 was Gordon Kannegiesser’s favourite psalm.)
Both the apostles Peter (in Acts 2) and Paul (Acts 16)
quoted from this text as evidence of the resurrection of Christ. Paul further
observed that in this text David was not referring to himself, but looking
ahead to the Messiah:
For when David had served God’s purpose in his own generation, he fell asleep; he was buried with his fathers and his body decayed. But the one whom God raised from the dead did not see decay (Acts 16:36,37).
Isaiah 52:13
See, my servant will act wisely; he will be raised and
lifted up and highly exalted.
In a Jewish culture that placed significance on numbers, 3
was reserved for the sacred. Therefore, God was holy, holy, holy (Isaiah
6:3).
This short prediction about the Messiah asserts three observations, making a Jewish reader recognize a subtle reference to God. Consequently, the Suffering Servant – whose brutal treatment is described in Isaiah 53 – would be resurrected (raised), ascended into heaven (lifted
up), and highly exalted to the place of prominence in the eternal
Kingdom.
Isaiah 53:11,12
This classic passage describes the Servant’s anguished suffering and death: For he was cut off from the land of the living (v.8)…He was assigned a grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death (v.9).
And yet the subsequent verses make clear predictions of the Servant’s returning to life and the activities as Victor that await Him, because of the ultimate sacrifice of His life – perhaps the clearest OT prediction of Christ’s resurrection:
After the suffering of his soul, he will see the
light of life and be satisfied; by his knowledge my righteous servant will
justify many, and he will bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will give him a portion among the
great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out
his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the
sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.
Takeaway: the resurrection of the Lord Jesus was
clearly an essential component of the Gospel planned by the Triune God before
the foundations of the world were laid.
By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures…(1 Corinthians 15:2-4).
He is risen. He is risen indeed!
