All Your Tombs Are Empty

Yesterday, I was driving across town surfing through some radio stations when I came upon pastor Chuck Swindoll who was preaching a sermon. Swindoll said in essence, “The stone was not rolled away so Jesus could get out. It was rolled away so we could go in.” That comment hung in my mind throughout the day.

Jesus is recorded in Scripture appearing in locked rooms and moving through time and space without hindrance. He did not need the stone to be rolled away to resurrect. He merely stepped from this realm into eternity and back again as easy as you or I would walk from one room in our house to the next.

We needed to have the stone rolled away to remind us that the Jesus we serve is not another formula for success or a list of handy life-principles to make our lives more interesting or comfortable. He rose from the dead to tell us that if we follow Him we will experience life beyond death in this life and in the life to come.

He is the God who works miracles and stretches human thinking to the breaking point of comprehension. He is Lord of all realms of existence and all things existing within those realms. His resurrection was given to us as a gift of recalibration that can scrub from our thinking a concept of a miracle-less, trapped-in-our-limited-way-of-thinking-Jesus and the accompanying weakened theology that mindset produces.

Every dead and sorrow-ridden place in our life already has had the stone rolled away if we look with the eyes of faith. Everything in this life has been put in subjection to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Ask the Lord to help you see with His eyes the empty tomb of your greatest challenge. His sight will become your place of faith.

The stone has already been rolled away from every challenge and each heartbreaking situation in this life if you choose to see with the eyes of faith. The gift of the empty tomb was given to us as a reminder that nothing – no thing – can entomb Jesus and those who call Him Lord. That is why the stone was rolled away.