Salvation Step-by-Step
Christ Rose from the Dead
It was through His resurrection that Christ,
in regards to His humanity, became the Son of God
[The gospel] concerning His Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead.
— Romans 1:3-4
“God has fulfilled this for us their children, in that He has raised up Jesus. As it is also written in the second Psalm:
‘You are My Son,
Today I have begotten You.’”
— Acts 13:13
From the time Adam and Eve fell until today, no one other than Christ has ever been able to overcome death. The Bible tells us:
No man has power to retain the spirit, or power over the day of death.
— Ecclesiastes 8:8
Whenever death has come, it has been victorious; we simply cannot refuse it. And even those few who, according to the Bible, were raised from the dead, eventually just died again.
But Christ changed all of this. He did not avoid death, but instead, by becoming a man and passing through death, and then coming out of the tomb in resurrection, He completely defeated death and all of its power.
When Christ arose He didn’t simply return to the life He had before. He was the same, with the same body, and yet, not completely the same. For, through His death and resurrection His humanity, including His physical body, had been “glorified” by the divine life. In fact, although in terms of His deity Christ had been the Son of God from eternity past, we may say that as a man, Christ became the Son of God through the resurrection. This is why Paul, in Acts 13:33, quotes Psalm 2: where God says to the Son:
“You are My Son,
Today I have begotten You.”
— Psalm 2:7
And because His humanity has been uplifted with the divine life, He can no longer be subject to death in any way. As the Bible says:
Death no longer has dominion over Him.
— Romans 6:9
And as we shall see in the upcoming pages, this is the very came process that we ourselves will go through, so that we to can become the many sons of God.
Praise the Lord for the marvelous death and resurrection of Christ!
