Luke 24:6 "He is not here; he has risen."
Acts 24:15 "...and I hold the same hope in God as they do that there will be a resurrection of good men and bad men alike."
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of the Christian faith; without it there is naught but the teachings of a good man of God - a prophet - who brought the message that the center of human purpose is love of God and of all humankind.
To me, the truth of the resurrection is most clearly evidenced by the actions of His followers in the days after the crucifixion: a band of despairing men, criminalized by association, who scattered from the scene became a cohort of disciples who preached the new gospel often with the reward of painful death.
We too have been promised a resurrection. But specifically what and where remains a mystery of faith. To the biblical writers, the known world was very limited, and heaven and hell nearby. Even to the savants of the day, the cosmos was limited to the sun, moon, a few nearer planets, and the vault of heaven. Now we are told of a universe which consists of multi-billions of stars in unnumbered galaxies incomprehensible distances from us, speeding away from one another into an undefined vastness. And this is just our universe; it is postulated that there are other universes also.
So, our God - the God of Abraham, is He the god of this world? Our solar system? Our galaxy? Our universe? Of all that is? As our knowledge expands, so too must our understanding of God enlarge and of resurrection refine. I don't see Heaven as some sort of Elysian field on some distant planet with bubbling waters; rather we rejoin the Spirit which is God with, I trust, our sense of personality which is the sum of our memories.
Dick Calhoun
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