What Is Significant About the Resurrection of Jesus?

Question 3014.

The resurrection of Jesus is the hinge on which the entire Christian faith turns, and I say that without any exaggeration. Paul makes the same point in blunt terms in 1 Corinthians 15: if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. He is not softening the stakes for effect. He means it exactly as it reads. So when I ask what is significant about the resurrection of Jesus, I am not handling one interesting doctrine among many others of equal weight. I am describing the single fact without which there would be no gospel, no church, and no lasting hope worth building a life on.

Let me walk through why Scripture places such enormous weight on this event, because once you see the full shape of it you will not read the empty tomb accounts quite the same way again.

The resurrection of Jesus vindicates everything He claimed

Jesus made claims about Himself that no sane teacher makes lightly. He told His disciples plainly that He would be killed and would rise again on the third day (Matthew 16:21). Anyone can claim to be the Son of God. Very few stake that claim on a precisely dated prediction of their own execution and resurrection, and then deliver on it in front of witnesses who had every reason to expose a fraud if one existed. When the tomb was found empty and the risen Lord began appearing, God the Father was placing His own public seal on every word His Son had spoken. Paul writes that Jesus was declared to be the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead (Romans 1:4). The resurrection of Jesus is not a happy postscript to His teaching. It is the Father’s verdict, delivered in history, that everything Jesus said about Himself was true.

Take that verdict away and Jesus becomes simply another failed rabbi, one more tragic figure whose movement should have dissolved quietly after His execution, the way so many messianic movements of that period did dissolve once their leader was killed. Instead the tomb was empty and He was seen repeatedly, by people who had nothing to gain and everything to lose by lying about it. That single fact explains why men who had scattered in terror on the night of His arrest were, within weeks, proclaiming Him openly in the very city that had crucified Him, at the eventual cost of their own lives. Something happened that Friday’s apparent failure cannot explain, and the New Testament writers are unanimous about what it was.

It secures our justification before God

Paul writes that Jesus was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification (Romans 4:25). Notice the pairing there. The cross deals with our guilt; the resurrection announces that the payment was accepted. If Jesus had died and simply stayed dead, we would have no way of knowing whether His sacrifice had actually satisfied God’s justice or simply added one more Roman execution to the historical record. The empty tomb functions as God’s receipt. It tells us the debt was paid in full and that the Judge Himself has accepted the payment on our behalf.

This is why I want you to hold the cross and the resurrection of Jesus together rather than treating them as separate events, as if the cross were the substantial part and the resurrection a nice conclusion tacked on afterwards. Scripture never allows that separation. Your justification rests on both. Christ crucified deals with sin; Christ risen declares that dealing complete and effective. Without the second, the first would remain forever uncertain in the mind of anyone honestly examining the claim.

The resurrection of Jesus guarantees our own future

Paul calls the risen Christ the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep (1 Corinthians 15:20). Firstfruits is an agricultural picture drawn straight from the Old Testament calendar, the first sheaf of the harvest offered to God as a pledge that the rest of the crop is coming. Jesus rising bodily from the grave is not an isolated miracle performed for His benefit alone. It is the first sheaf of a harvest that includes every believer who has died trusting Him. His resurrection body, still recognisably Him yet gloriously transformed, is the pattern for what our own bodies will one day become (Philippians 3:21).

That matters enormously at a graveside, and I have stood at enough of them to know it. Grief is real and Scripture never asks us to pretend otherwise. But we do not grieve as those who have no hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13), because the resurrection of Jesus is not a metaphor about spring returning or memories living on in the hearts of the living. It is a body walking out of a tomb, eating fish on a beach, and inviting a doubting friend to touch His scarred hands. What happened to Him is the pattern for what will happen to everyone who has trusted Him.

I think of an elderly member of my own congregation, now with the Lord, who used to say that she was not afraid of dying, only of the process of it. That is a wise distinction. The process can be hard and Scripture does not minimise that. But the destination is settled, because the tomb Jesus left behind is the same tomb every believer in Him will eventually leave behind. Death becomes, for the Christian, a doorway rather than a wall.

It proves God’s power over death itself

Every other religious founder in history remains in the ground. Their tombs became shrines precisely because their bodies are still there. Jesus’ tomb became famous for the opposite reason: it was empty. Peter preaches this with striking confidence in Acts 2, declaring that God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it. Death had no legal or physical claim strong enough to hold the Author of life. That is not poetic language. It is a statement about raw power, the same power that spoke the universe into being now reversing the one enemy no human strength has ever defeated.

I find real comfort in that when I sit with people facing terminal illness. Death is not, in the end, the strongest force at work in the universe. It met its match at a borrowed tomb outside Jerusalem on the third day, and it lost decisively. Every funeral I take as a minister, I take in the shadow of that fact, and it changes what I am able to say to a grieving family that a purely secular counsellor could never say with any honesty.

The resurrection of Jesus establishes His present reign

Because He is risen, Jesus is not a historical figure we simply remember fondly. He is alive now, seated at the Father’s right hand, exercising real authority over His church and over history (Ephesians 1:20-22). I have written more fully on where He is and what He is doing there, and I would encourage you to follow that thread if it interests you (Where Is Jesus Now?). The resurrection is not the closing scene of the story. It is the opening of His present reign, a reign that will one day be visible to every eye when He returns (What Is the Rapture?).

Why the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus still matters

I take seriously that some readers want more than a theological summary; they want to know whether this actually happened. I have addressed the historical case at greater length elsewhere, and I would rather point you there than compress a large subject into a single paragraph here (Did Jesus Really Rise From the Dead?). What I will say is that the earliest Christian preaching, recorded within a generation of the event, already assumes an empty tomb known to friend and enemy alike, and no rival body was ever produced to end the movement in its cradle. You can trace the Greek term for the resurrection itself, anastasis, right through the New Testament and it never softens into metaphor. The resurrection of Jesus was defended from the very beginning as a historical claim, not a purely spiritual experience, and it still is today.

So, now what?

If the resurrection of Jesus is true, and I am convinced that it is, then it is not a fact to file away alongside other interesting historical trivia. It changes what you can expect from your own death. It changes whether your sins are dealt with or simply postponed. It changes whether the God who made you has any real power to keep the promises He has made. Sit with that for a moment rather than rushing past it as background information.

Let the resurrection of Jesus do its intended work in you today. If you are grieving, let it steady you with something more solid than sentiment. If you are afraid of death, let it disarm that fear at the root. And if you have never staked your own life on the truth of it, ask yourself honestly what is holding you back, because the tomb really was empty, and He really is alive.

“He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay.”

Matthew 28:6, ESV