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By Pastor Brian Bestian
One sunny day, a mother and her two young children visited a park close to their home. They were enjoying the great outdoors until a big bumblebee landed on the youngest boy and stung him. Like any other child, he began to scream as the wound on his arm became swollen. The bumblebee was still buzzing around, and his older sister was horrified. The mother comforted her daughter by saying, “Sweetheart, it’s okay. Don’t be scared! Look down here at your brother’s arm.” Right in the middle of the swelling was the bumblebee’s stinger. “Do you see that stinger?” the mother asked. “That bee can buzz and fight you, but he can’t hurt you. He can only sting once, and he has left his stinger in your brother.”
While death is a decided fact, death is also a defeated foe. Because of Christ Jesus and His resurrection, we are able to laugh in the face of death. Don’t be frightened! Death may buzz around you and intimidate you, but our Brother, our Risen Savior, the Lord Jesus, bears that sting. Jesus took the sting out of death, and He has given us an Easter hope that is steadfast and sure.
Paul writes in Romans 6:23, “The wages of sin is death,” but Jesus was not a sinner and did not have to die. Jesus lovingly, willingly, voluntarily, vicariously laid down His life for us, for the whole world.
Satan thought he had the victory. He probably shrieked a hoarse laugh and declared, “I have Him! He is mine. I have shackled Him forever with the bony fingers of death.” But after three days, the Lord Jesus majestically rose from His resting place. Jesus did more than survive death. He defeated Satan and decimated death in that tomb.
Jesus got up from the stone slab, turned around, and folded the linen cloth that covered His face. There was no hurry. He was in complete control. I love that part---when the disciples entered the tomb, they found the folded cloth that had been placed over His face.
Jesus reached up and pulled Death from the throne and cast him to the floor. Jesus put His heel on the neck of Death and reached down and pulled out its stinger. Jesus slipped on His crown and walked out of that tomb a risen, living, victorious Savior. Hallelujah!
One of these days, there is going to come a shout from the lips of the Lord Jesus when He returns. We’re going to hear the same shout that Lazarus heard: “Come forth!” The mighty voice of the Savior will roll through the length and breadth of Satan’s ruined empire and bring it crashing down. At the command of the Lord Jesus Christ, the seas will heave and give up the dead which are in them; the winding sands of the deserts will give up the dead that are in them; the battlefields of this world will give up the dead that are in them and the graveyards will, perhaps, look like plowed fields as the Lord Jesus shouts, “Come forth!” “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55)
Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed! Alleluia!
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