Good morning everyone. I don't know if you noticed that the song group today was Michael Schwander in the wood family and Ted said we should name them Michael in the woods So I thought that was quite good. So yes, we are finishing up our study of the book of Mark And if I could define the book of mark in one way, I would say that the book of mark Tells us the progressive revelation of Jesus Christ the Messiah the very first verse in the book of mark is the beginning of the good news About Jesus the Messiah and so now we spend a year and mark doesn't really talk about his birth But we spend a year seeing Jesus progressively Revealed to his disciples an inner group a bigger group. We've seen his ministry We've seen his miracles We've seen his teaching and heard his teaching and last week Cole took us all the way through his his death on the cross for us And today I get to tell about the penultimate the final Progressive revelation of Jesus Christ and that is his resurrection.
So we're gonna talk about I told the group in the meeting this morning This is an Easter message in July. So here. We are in July of the Easter message I will say for you Markisians I apologize for the repetition, but I hope you will learn something you know who you are if you're there And then I also want to say a good portion of my material or a bit of it I got from this book the darkness in the dawn by Chuck Swendall most of you know him I can highly commend it for you So with that you can turn to mark 16 one through eight and if I could have the first slide, baby up. Oh I need to do it.
Oh It's up. It's just not back there. I'm sorry. Yes.
Okay. Do you believe in Easter is the title of my message? And I have a subtitle But we'll get to that a little bit later So mark 16 one through eight is our text today and as you can see from the screen I'm going to highlight versus six and seven, but we're going to read the whole thing when the Sabbath was over This is after Jesus death and he was now in the tomb Mary Magdalene Mary the mother of James and Salom brought bot spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus fight Very early on the first day of the week just after sunrise they were on their way to the tomb and they asked each other Who will roll away the stone from the entrance of the tomb? But when they looked up they saw that the stone which was very large had been rolled away as they entered the tomb They saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side and they were alarmed marks understatement Don't be alarmed.
He said you are looking for Jesus the Nazarene who was crucified He has risen he is not here. See the place where they laid him go tell his disciples and Peter He's going ahead of you into Galilee there. You will see him just as he told you Trembling and bewildered the women went out and fled from the tomb They said nothing to anyone because they were afraid so that's the passage I have and that's as far as we're going in mark So we are going to talk today Let's see here. I'm having trouble advancing heads making motions Just yell it out Ted turn it on.
Oh Okay, all right. Oh, it just buzzed. That's a good thing. All right.
I'm going to say something here So we are going to talk about this but for the first few minutes of this talk I am not going to talk about this portion and some of you are going to think weren't we supposed to talk? I promise you I will get back to mark 16 One six and seven by the time we're done but bear with me because we are going to talk about life But before we talk about life, we are going to talk about death. All right sounds ominous. It is I'll just warn you upfront Okay, so but a little bit of you how do we think about death?
How do we think first about death? Well, you know some of us is humor these are epitests on gravestones. I don't know if you can read this This is one from tombstone here lies Lester Moore four slugs from 44 no less no more Next one. This is from where ribs for England on the tomb of one Anna Wallace the children of Israel wanted bread The Lord sent them Anna old clerk Wallace wanted a wife the devil sent him Anna The next one this is also English the English had away with this beneath this saw the lump of play Liza rebellion Who on the 24th of May began to hold her tongue and just to not let the guys off the hook the last one This is in an old churchyard in Vermont Sacred to the memory of my husband John Barnes who died January 3rd 1803 His cumbly young widow age 23 has many qualifications of a good wife and yearns to be comforted It's the original 19th century dating app before the body's even cold So we laugh about death But one of the things we know is that death comes to us all it comes to us all and I'm going to now go from humor to a little bit of darkness Here, I'm going to talk about the plague of 1665 in London, England The plague started as many of you know from a bacteria called your cine of pestis Which was in rats and then please bit the rats and the infected people or people handle the dead animals Or they breathed in the dust from around the dead animals and it transmitted from rats to humans in May of 1664 there were just a few dead nobody even knew what it was nobody even thought about it by May of 1665 600 people were dead June of 1665 6,000 July of 1665 17,000 and August 31,000 people had died and by the end of the time in London 100,000 estimated people were dead before the plague rippled across the rest of England in Europe London at the time had 400 to 500,000 people in it I want you to imagine it 20 to 25% of the people in Hillsborough died within the short course of four to six months It was a devastating event Out of that there's a song that came and nobody really knows the origin of this song But the best origin story I think there is is from this plague many of you know this song Tragically your parents taught it to you in childhood having no concept Of the catastrophe it was honoring the thought is the song came about from the guys that pushed the carts around London Picking up the body so what would happen is if a house was infected a guard would be posted outside the door of the house a watcher There would often be a sign above the door of the house They'd have God have mercy upon us and they would toss the bodies out and these men would come around and they would sing ring around the roses Pocketful opposed these ashes ashes we all fall down and the thought is the song I told you how it happened how how the plague happened But the positions in the day thought it was from the terrible pollution that was in London They didn't understand the cause of the infection and so the victims were put in a ring victims That could stand up victims of the plague around roses And they were meant to inhale the fragrance of the roses and the thought was that inhaling the fragrance of the roses may help with the disease If they were too sick for that the positions would put rose petals in their pockets Carry the rose petals in and sprinkle them on the patients bed And if they were even sicker they would burn the rose pillows and put ashes on the patient hoping that inhaling the ashes would help the thing And so here we have this song ring around the roses pocketful opposed these ashes ashes We all fall down and regardless as to whether or not that was true whoever wrote this song has their theology Exactly correct.
We all fall down. We will all die. I'm setting aside end-time rapture I'm saying we will all fall down and I want us for about five minutes here Just reflect personally on the fact that you will fall down What do the poets say about this? Tennyson crossing the bar Shakespeare the know that summons us to heaven or hell I like Browning the pale priest of a mute people, but the poets all grasped it.
We all fall down We're all in the grave. What does God say God is very clear on this? You can't get more than three chapters into the Bible when God says it is from dust you came and from dust you will return Right and Paul elaborates on why this happened why this death is happening why we are all going to fall down Therefore as through one man sin entered into the world and death through sin so death spread to all men Or all have sinned I like that I this version I use it's like the plague It's like the plague in London the contagion of sin spreads to all of us and because of that we all Fall down all of us fall down. So this is my personal reflection on this the one on your right up here is Mountain View Cemetery You force rovians know it.
It's just outside of town my family many members of my family are buried there I have gone up there on a beautiful fall day where orange and and yellow leaves are on the ground over the the nicely mowin Line and on a beautiful day you can look out and you can see Rainier St. Helens hood sisters jefferson as you look out across the Fall of the Valley and it's a very idyllic scenic place But here's the thing as I stand there Underneath my feet are people that I did Christmas with I did New Year's with I went to the beach with we had picnics together. They came to this church They're under the ground. They've all fallen down and someday I will fall down and here.
We haven't bought a plot yet I don't know You know I will fall down I will be there and you will be wherever you get planted by your family, right? Martha's family my wife they tend to cremation not in my family heritage But her family's ashes are spread around southeastern United States. They've all fallen down I want us just to intern I would like for you just and I know this is harsh. I'm going to get to the good stuff I promise I would like for you just to internalize for a moment You're gonna fall down you're gonna die you're gonna die right we all do so What do we do with this how well we can use humor we can I can show funny tombstones and read stuff about that But you know there are probably six or we can I think a lot of us what we do is we just try to not think about it Right like okay.
Thanks Keith. Happy Sunday to you, right? You know we just don't think about it But there are six or seven philosophies I would say about how we should live knowing that we all fall down right and and I Thought about going through them. I'm not gonna go through all of them But you see you guys know many of them You know a popular one right now is sort of Marcus Aurelius and stoicism and how that's a way to live like Elsie came back from Thailand Buddhism, which is really more of a life philosophy than it is a real religion That's why they can have more than one religion kind of thing going on right so Buddhism But I think in America I just listed the couple that I think would be most prevalent with us and the first I'll say is hedonism You can call it There's epic curious for those of you that epicure us who lived about 400 years before Jesus sort of but I think for us I think for Americans heat it which is hedonum is basically this we don't know if there's anything after death We don't know if there is something after death what it's gonna be like so your best bet It's just have a lot of fun while you're here.
That's that's the best bet pleasure fulfillment contentment safety security Your best bet is just that and it's interesting one Comptator notes it in almost every philosophy the book of Ecclesiastes which you will remember is a book about life under the Sun If you're just living here and he actually kind of validates this right? He says the teacher who wrote Ecclesiastes I commend the enjoyment of life because nothing is better for a man under the Sun than to eat drink and be glad right? So that's under the Sun hedonism. It's a way I think many many Americans pursue it another one that I would call is universalism or deism and I think a lot of Americans are into this as Well, and it's more along the lines of this well, I think there's a God.
I think there's somebody out there I think we might all have to stand and get judged about something but a we really don't know what that looks like and be I'm not that bad of a person right? That's the strategy right? I'm at least in the upper half of the bell curve right? I'm at least a C plus and so I'm thinking God.
He's gonna understand that and I'm gonna be okay, right? I just need to do a little more good. I'm not gangless con for goodness sake, right? I just need to do a little more good than that and it's even if it's not articulated.
It's a very Prevalent thought else you never talk about it. She just talked to one of her friends, and then that's what the person said I'm not that bad. I think I'm gonna be okay. I think God's gonna make it work out for me, right?
So there's that and then there's a third and that was also addressed in a cliz. That's the third one Which I don't think was addressed but I it's kind of a new one for us with this whole AI thing is this transhumanism thing You know where like your conscience is gonna be embedded in a block of silicone And then your body's gonna be all metal and plastic and you're just gonna you're gonna actually not not have a problem living a really really really Long time and we'll just push off the Mountain View cemetery experience for 500 years or so, right? And so and I wrote a quote here This is just from a fairly respectable magazine humans could achieve immortality by the end of this decade. It was written a year ago We got nine more years.
You got to make it nine years. You're gonna make it then right? All right, so but is there another way? I will argue these ways I will argue what Marcus said remember the good news About the beginning of Jesus Christ was I and here we are now to the end is there another way and I switch to the good news Do you believe in Easter right so now I'm back to our text don't be alarmed He said you are looking for Jesus the Nazarene who was crucified.
He is risen. He is not here What an amazing Complete revelation of who Jesus Christ is again. We've seen not in mark Jesus Creator of glory descending condescending the Bible says Immanuel God with us. We've seen him live his ministry We've seen him do all these things as Colesol art fully said last week We saw him suffer and bleed and die for us I take minor issue with Cole because he said that that was the pivot point of history I think my message is the pivot point.
No, it's all one I think these these three days between Cole and me is the pivot point of history, right? It's all one Jesus I'm gonna quote there's a man named GK Chesterton if some of you know him This is out of a book rejoicing in Christ by Michael reason I want to just well on this for a minute and this is speaking to my passage the friends of Christ Coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away in varying ways They realized the new wonder But even they hardly realized that the world had died that night that what they were looking at was the first day of a new creation With a new heaven and a new earth and I just want us to internalize that as well What happened on this Easter morning in our passage, right? Is the end of a whole old world? It's the end of a thousands of years of men and women trying to appease God trying to follow the law an endless stream of animal sacrifices to temporarily Give God what he needed to cleanse us from our sin right all of that God God at a distance from us the veil not porn God not with us all of that ends with Jesus Christ coming and as Chesterton says it's the first day of a new creation And what that means is even though we all fall down We are living and I'm gonna say it's still in a transition of a new creation It's yes Lewis calls it the stealthy invasion The stealthy invasion has happened and we are the first roots of becoming new men and women in it And I love the symmetry of Chesterton's last point in the semblance of the gardener the gardeners not mentioned in my portion But we all know who that is I hope in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden in the cool Not in the evening but in the dawn if we know the story of Genesis you'll understand the symmetry of what he's trying to say here That's the good news of mark 16 one through eight that is the good news.
I'm going to end with a story Do you believe in Easter and I told the story of marquee? I've condensed it marquee people so you don't have to listen through the whole thing There was a woman named Edith Burns in San Antonio, Texas And she was known for introducing herself as hello My name is Edith Do you believe in Easter and she was an avid evangelist and well known for this? And had led actually quite a few people to Christ with this approach because she would ask them if they believe in Easter And then would share the good news of Jesus Christ his death and resurrection She had a doctor who's the one that related this story doctor Phillips Yeah, William Phillips and one day he brought her into his office and he said Edith I have some very bad news you have terminal cancer and you do not have long to live and at that point he said this Why dr. Phillips?
Why are you so sad? Do you think God makes mistakes? You have just told me that I'm going to see my Lord Jesus my husband and many of my friends You have told me that I'm going to celebrate Easter forever and you are having difficulty giving me the ticket. I like that Weeks later, she's admitted to the hospice unit of her hospital where she continues to introduce herself as hello My name is Edith Do you believe in Easter to the staff and other patients coming into the hospital?
And in fact several came to Christ through that experience There was one nurse Phyllis who was particularly antagonistic to the gospel and she cared for Edith, but Edith never said to her do you believe in Easter and It bothered Phyllis enough that one day she came into Eve and she said why haven't you? Asked me if I believe in Easter and Edith said she holy spirit thing here I just didn't quite feel like it was right to ask you and tell you asked me, but now you've asked Do you believe in Easter Phyllis and Phyllis said I really want to and He just had the opportunity to lead Phyllis to Christ through telling the story of Jesus death and resurrection a week or two later Past Phyllis and East and Edith had come closer in fact I forgot to say this one she was so known for this Easter thing that they started the staff started calling her in the hospital Easter Edith Easter so her name became Edith Easter but anyway a week passes Phyllis and she becomes close and it's Easter morning and Phyllis goes to the hospital gift shop because she wants to buy a lily for Edith on Easter morning and she comes up to the room and Edith has gone and This is what dr. Philip says I'm thinking it's true Edith had her big black Bible open and her left hand was on John 14 1 and 2 in my father's house says wait. I'll back it up Do not be trouble you believe in God believe in me also in my father's house or many rooms If it were not so I would have told you and I go and I'll prepare a place for you And I'll come back and I'll take you to be with me so that where I am you may be also Her right hand was in Revelation 21 4 God will wipe every tear from their eye there will be no more death morning crying or pain for the old order of things Has passed away so remember I talked about Chester's in early saying it's the beginning beginning of a new world this Revelation John he's seen the culmination when in fact the entire old world there will be no more we all fall down There will be life and joy in the resurrected Jesus Christ Last side low in the grave he lay Jesus my Savior Waiting the coming day Jesus my Lord up from the grave heroes and mighty triumph or as opposed he arose a victor from the dark domain And he lives forever with his saints to reign he arose he arose hallelujah Christ arose.
Let's pray. Thank you father Father just give us a sense that we all fall down But give us a sense of the joy it is that we will raise again We will raise with Jesus the Messiah our Lord our Savior and reign with him forever And we are so thankful for mark the whole book revealing Jesus Christ our Lord our Savior our Messiah help us to live in the light of these things amen