Tozer, and a Post-Easter Caution

“To the early Christians, Easter was not a holiday…It wasn’t even a holy day for them. It wasn’t even a day at all. To the early Christians, it was an accomplished fact that lived with them all year long. They did not celebrate his rising from the dead and then go back to their everyday lives and wait another year. They lived by the fact that Christ has risen from the dead and they had risen with him.” -- A.W. Tozer

Tozer (1897-1963) couldn’t have summed up my post-Easter caution any better. It seems at least on the outside, that we modern church folks relegate the cognizance of Jesus’ resurrection to Easter. I wonder if it's because we’re not really living with it in our sights the rest of the year? To the early Christians, Christian life was resurrection life. Paul’s whole ministry was driven by his apprehension of “the resurrection of the dead” (Ac.24:21), that is, “the resurrection of both the just and the unjust” (24:15). 

Why did the resurrection matter so much? Because death came through sin, and God, who can “make alive” (Deut.32:39) promised his people that he’d one day swallow up/abolish death (Is.25:8). The effect of this abolition is a resurrection of humanity from the dust of the earth (Dan.12:1). Ezekiel saw it imagined figuratively at the valley of dry bones, where the pile of dead peoples’ bones come back together to form a living army for the Lord (Ezek.37). Behind all of this, the promised messiah would bear the peoples’ sins and death, after which he would then “prolong his days” (Is.53:11-12), suggesting that the resurrection everywhere else promised comes by him, to be given out to others. 

So the apostles’ message is that Jesus is the New Adam who takes our sin at the cross along with sin’s judgment (death), and then rises from the dead to give his resurrection to us. Paul, then, centered his preaching ministry around Jesus, who is “first to rise from the dead” (Ac.26:23), the “firstfruits” of the resurrection (1Cor.15:20, Col.1:18). The reason Paul was so committed to this is that Jesus’ resurrection was “the promise made by God to our fathers” (Ac.26:6), vivified to Paul when Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus. Paul couldn’t help but preach it, since his life had been re-centered on the risen Christ. Christians, likewise, are those who’s lives center on and flow out of the risen Christ. 

So to the early Christians everyday was supposed to be Easter: Our life is lived in union with the risen Christ even now: Being reconciled to God by the death of his Son, now much more we’re saved by his life (Rom.5:10). His life in us is our very hope of making it to the new heavens and new earth (Col.1:27). How could we relegate the resurrection to one day out of 365, when Jesus’ risen life is the very fuel of our own hope for life from the dead? What would everyday life look like for you if every day was Easter? To be a Christian is to believe, contrary to external or even internal pressures, that it is.