Raised with Him.
A spiritual antipasto.
The resurrection of Jesus might be read like an epilogue to Good Friday’s agony. But we’d be reading it wrong. It is the breaking open of history. It is the shattering of the old order of everything. It is the eruption of new humanity in the very flesh of the Son. The resurrection wasn’t a private triumph. It was the birth of a people. Christ rises as the firstborn, as the living head who gathers us into His own risen life.
Some, rightly so, see the resurrection as incredibly impossible. The most charitable of those might say it’s a beautiful metaphor for some far-off hope that inspires the best of humanity. But they’d be wrong. It is the beginning of our own renewal—real, objective, already breaking into our existence, already changing our lives. In Him, our humanity is gathered up, transformed, and secured. His resurrection enfolds us, remakes us, and anchors our future in His living presence.
Every act of obedience, every trace of hope in suffering, and every movement of inner renewal does not arise from within ourselves. They are the overflow of a single, inexhaustible source: the crucified and risen Jesus. In Him, God has already intervened in our deadness, already brought us into his ascended life, already planted us in the soil of new creation. The future is not simply a promise; it has already started. We live from what Christ has accomplished, not toward it.
We are now united with Christ. And although that sounds like some speculative theological doctrine worth admiring, or maybe debating, it is the living center of reality—reality right now, the one we’re sitting in. With the resurrection, God wasn’t offering us a distant promise of life. It isn’t the proclamation, “You, too, will be raised to new life, out there, on the other side of the end of your life!” No! He has already made us alive together with His Son, raised us with Him, and bound our humanity to His own risen flesh. Resurrection is not a future event waiting at the end of history. It is the pulse of new creation already beating within us. Even now, we participate in the life of the age to come. Even now, resurrection power renews, strengthens, and sanctifies us.
In Him, the future has already invaded the present. The old image of Adam is being replaced by the image of the Heavenly Man. We are summoned to live now from the reality of resurrection already unleashed in Christ. This is not aspiration. It is right-now participation. It is the call to inhabit new creation, even as it unfolds among us.
He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead. — Colossians 1:18 God… made us alive together with Christ… and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. — Ephesians 2:4–6 Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep… For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. — 1 Corinthians 15:20–22 Just as Christ was raised from the dead… we too might walk in newness of life… consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. — Romans 6:4–11 One has died for all; therefore all have died… if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. — 2 Corinthians 5:14–17
This spiritual antipasto has an accompanying call to worship:
Proclaim the resurrection. It’s what we’re here for.
The church does not exist by its own strength or cleverness. It is called into being by the risen Jesus himself. The Holy Spirit gives the church power to step out in public witness, not because we are religious experts, but because of the undeniable reality of the resurrection.