“He is not here; for He is risen, as He said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay” (Mat. 28:6).
Christ died an innocent death, and conquered death by rising from the grave. Jesus is the first born of resurrection. The Bible says in Acts 26:23 that, the “Christ would suffer, that He would be the first to rise from the dead”, You may say, but what about those who resurrected prior to Jesus (e.g., Lazarus or those raised by Elijah and Elisha)? While some dead people were raised prior to Jesus’ death and resurrection, there is a fundamental difference between those instances and the one Jesus experienced. In all other cases, the person who was raised returned to an earthly sinful body and therefore, they had to die again one day.
Those resurrections were the demonstrations of God’s mighty power at work, but they do not represent a solution for the fundamental problem of sin and death. If Lazarus still died again, then his earlier resurrection did not conquer death and the question remains how does he conquer death once and for all? The answer is by faith in the one who conquered death, Jesus Christ! He died to pay our sin debt and rose again to prove His power over death. And most importantly, Jesus never dies again. The Bible testifies that unlike Lazarus and others who were resurrected prior to Jesus, our Lord will never suffer death a second time: “knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him” (Rom. 6:9).
- Thank you for reading our devotional on “He Conquered Death”.