3-6 The Proof Of The Resurrection Is The Church

If they persecuted Him in His preaching, they will persecute we who, as in Him, preach as His representatives. Thus the early believers, when persecuted, quoted a prophecy foretelling how the rulers would gather together against Christ as a comfort to them personally (Acts 4:25-29). The early church increasingly "had favour" with God and man (Acts 2:47), just as Luke had recorded was the initial experience of the Lord Jesus Lk. 2:52). The church was Jesus personally; for Luke speaks of all the works of Jesus during His ministry as merely what He had begun  to do and teach, the Acts of the Apostles being the continuation of His doing and teaching through the church which was effectively His body in this world (Acts 1:1). Paul placarded Him forth as crucified to men through the example of his own life of death and resurrection, daily, with his Lord (Gal. 3:1). We may well ask how the Jews would “hereafter…see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power” (Mt. 26:64). He is now sitting at the Father’s right hand; but how would the Jews “see” this? Was it not that in the witness of the Lord’s followers to them, those Jews would see the evidence for the exaltation of Jesus? In seeing them, they would see Him.

The resurrection of Jesus was to give assurance “to all men” (Acts 17:31). But how? They haven’t seen Him. There is no Euclidean reason for them to believe in His resurrection. How is it an assurance to all men? Surely in that we are the risen Lord’s representatives “to all men”, and through us they see the evidence of Christ risen, and thereby have assurance of God’s plan for them. In the same way, the wicked and adulterous generation to whom the Lord witnessed were given the sign of the prophet Jonah- that after three days, the Lord would re-appear. But that sign was only given to them through the preaching of the apostles- that generation didn’t see the risen Lord Himself (Mt. 16:4). But the witness of the disciples was as good as- for in their witness, they represented the Lord. When the father of the dumb child brought him to the disciples, he tells Jesus that “I brought unto thee my son”, but the disciples couldn’t cure him (Mk. 9:17 RV); he perceived Jesus as His followers, just as folk do today. When the disciples went out preaching around Israel, Herod heard of the fame of Jesus- because they so manifested Him (Mk. 6:12-14).

The ‘resurrected’ Jonah was a type of the Lord- and he was a ‘sign’ to the Ninevites presumably in that he still bore in his body the marks of a man who had been three days within a fish. It could be that the fish beached itself, and vomited Jonah out of its stomach in its death throes (this is how beached whales meet their end). In this case, the fish would have drawn the attention of the local population, as would have the man with bleached hair and strange skin who walked away from it. We too as witnesses of Christ will have something about us that is unintentionally striking in the eyes of those with whom we mix. There was no human chance that Jonah would be listened to when he came to preach judgment against Nineveh. Some guy standing on the edge of town, saying ‘You’re all gonna be destroyed’. People would have laughed, ignored him, or told him to shut up. But there was something about him that was gripping and arresting. He was living proof that the judgment of God is real, and that His mercy is just as real. Presumably Jonah must have said far more than “Nineveh is going to be destroyed”.

Even in the Millennium, the basis of our witness to the world will be that we are in Christ. Thus Micah’s description of how “the remnant of Jacob shall be in the midst of many people as a dew from the Lord, as the showers upon the grass” (Mic. 5:7) is consciously alluding to the then-famous Messianic prophecy of Ps. 72:6: “He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass: as showers that water the earth”. The blessings Messiah brings are to be articulated through the witness of those in Him. Those who have lived in Him will then shine as the brightness of the firmament (Dan. 12:3). But the description of the Lord’s face shining as the sun draws on this; as if to say that our shining in the future Kingdom will be because we were and are in Him. We will shine forth then (Mt. 13:43), as the Sun of righteousness Himself.