Good Thursday morning! Up the hill at 0530 to wait on the sunrise, camera in hand - down the hill at 0550, lightning in the area. By the way, the peak time for the sunrise is now just before 0600, not 0530. The heat tells us that it is very much still summer, but the daylight is starting to look more like fall. In either case, we still have a month of summer left on the calendar, and yesterday was too hot for me. A little whining in the morning is not going to spoil the day, but I do hope we can leave the triple digit temps behind us for the year.
After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered he had said this, and they believed both the Scriptures and what Jesus had said. (John 2:22)
Whoops, this verse just gave away the entire story! We haven't even finished the second chapter of John's gospel and we already know the main character is going to die, that he will be raided from the dead, and that the disciples had some doubts about both the Scriptures and whether Jesus was the Messiah. If you firmly believe that Jesus is the Messiah, you won't be doubting what he said. If you believe what the Scripture said about the Messiah and that Jesus is that person, then you have no problem believing the Scripture. We are shown in one verse that John's gospel is not going to be a thriller that leaves us wondering if the main character gets to live happily ever after. We can read in today's verse that Jesus does indeed live happily ever after dying. Eh? The writer has already given away the ending, but what's this about "after he was raised from the dead?" That is a potent statement to write. Even Snoopy's famous novel could be changed in interesting ways:
"It was a dark and stormy night. But after he was raised from the dead, he realized that he had never seen a more beautiful night."
The whole tone of the writing changes. The very thought of what happens after death is foreign to us. We can't see to that time. Actually we can't even see tomorrow, but we have a much better chance of imagining tomorrow than we do the day immediately following our death. If you work in a cubicle in the corporate world, you can probably imagine way too much of what tomorrow will look like. I apologize for that vision, you probably didn't want a bucket of gloom dumped on your head already this morning. Come back to that first clause in today's verse, I can't stop thinking about it. Just a simple 'after he was raised from the dead...' seems to hang in your mind. If you didn't expect such a thing in a novel, that little group of words would tend to bring your reading up short. For a person reading the Gospel of John for the first time, this verse might seem like a rope strung across a jungle trail about ankle high. Reading through the wedding at Cana and then about Jesus clearing the temple, the reader gets an impression of this Jesus character. But then verse 2:22 comes along and reading right through it, 'wham', the reader figuratively sprawls across that rope and plants a face in the turf. What do you mean, "After he was raised from the dead?"
A person might think he would have to read in Acts or at least the end chapters of John to get to the parts about Jesus dying and being raised up from the dead, but no, it's right here near the end of Chapter 2. After we get over the shock of the first little declaration in this verse, we get to see some of what Jesus' resurrection accomplished. His disciples were transformed from doubt to belief in Jesus and what he said. The disciples no longer doubted the prophecies in Scripture or the application those prophecies had to the Messiah. Of course, we immediately want to know how we can be raised from the dead too. We'll have to be patient as we read verse by verse each day.
Give glory to God on this fine day!
Bucky
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