Resurrection and the Triumph of Love

All Christians recognize that the resurrection of the Lord Jesus is critical to the Christian faith and the hope it holds forth. But too often they restrict the significance of the resurrection to the fact that it attests Jesus' atonement for sin. The natural result is that the message of the resurrection is reduced to the matter of forgiveness of sin rather than the truth that God has fulfilled His purpose to restore all things to Himself in a new creation, evidenced in Jesus as the firstfruits of that new creation. And in that Christians are sharers in the new creation in Jesus by sharing in His resurrection life, it follows that the Church - not historical and archeological evidence or logical arguments - is the sure and unassailable proof of Jesus' resurrection. How tragic, then, that Christians so often fail to live out Jesus' life in the Church and in the sight of the world.