Resurrection From the Dead, Part 3

 

Reprinted March 17, 2023

 

Let’s pick up right where we left off last week.  We were talking about the revelation of Resurrection that comes in water baptism.  The truth contained in this revelation is nothing short of stunning!  In order to get a hold of it, however, we have to be able to shut down all of the pre-conditioning we’ve had throughout many generations.

 

The objective here is that — as Paul puts it — we have know and have the revelation of Him, His onoma, His character and makeup.  But there’s much, much more!  It isn’t simply that we have a revelation of Jesus in water baptism: we also receive a revelation of the miraculous power and might released in His resurrection.

 

And still there is more!

 

We get to be a partaker of the sufferings He endured — the beatings, the stripes, the disfigurement that occurred when His beard was ripped out of his face, the unutterable pain that occurred when the crown of thorns was shoved into His skull.

 

How are we a partaker of those sufferings, you ask?  By receiving what He paid for on our behalf when all that took place.

 

Every single stripe of the cat-o-nine tails that ripped the flesh on His body represents a disease or an infirmity that He took for us.

 

The disfigurement that took place when His beard was ripped out, leaving loose flesh hanging from His face, His chin and His neck paid for the disfiguring injuries that men and women suffer in today’s so-called “advanced” society as a result of diseases or accidents of one kind or another.

 

The pain and suffering that occurred with the planting of the crown of thorns into His skull paid for all of the mental anguish, the torment of our minds, the agonies we suffer with the thoughts of the past, the concerns of the present and the future.

 

Are you now beginning to grasp the significance of getting to “know the fellowship (Greek: koinonia: partnership and participation with) of His sufferings?”   We partner with Him; we partake of those sufferings by being IN Him when we are immersed in the waters of baptism.

 

Let me pause here for a minute to take you to Isaiah’s prophecy concerning Jesus:

 

Isaiah 53:3-5:  “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.  But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.”

 

Isaiah was able to see some 700 years or so into the future, and what he sees is exactly what took place with Jesus’ suffering, the betrayal, all that He took upon Himself, and all that He accomplished on our behalf.

 

But Isaiah also saw far into the future to our present day.

 

Here’s how the Hebrew text describes the picture:

 

He is disdained and scorned, and considered as having ceased to exist by men: a man of anguish and pain, and has known grief by seeing and experiencing it; and we hid as it were our faces from Him; He was disdained and scorned, and we maliciously fabricated, invented and treated His suffering and death as void.

 

Surely He has suffered and accepted as His own our maladies, our anxieties, our calamities, our disease and sicknesses, and carried our anguish, pain and grief: yet we fabricated and maliciously invented His being stricken violently, beaten, punished, wounded and slaughtered as if by God -- choosing to believe that God browbeat, demeaned and looked down upon Him.

 

But He was broken and profaned for our rebellion, our revolt, our apostasy and our [religious] quarrel against God; He was crushed, oppressed and smitten, and (emotionally) broken into pieces for our perversity, our evil, our mischief, sins and faults; the breaking and ridiculing of our peace, our welfare, our prosperity, our health and our safety was upon Him; and with His bloodied and blue wounds we are cured, mended, repaired and made thoroughly whole.  (Isaiah 53:3-5, RAC Translation & Amplification)

 

You see the difference in the picture, don’t you?  Isaiah is actually seeing how the world today treats Jesus, despite all that He did on our behalf!  The world — and a whole fistful of folks who call themselves Christians — still consider that God demeaned and looked down on Him.  So many folks today treat His death as null and void when and where it applies to every aspect of their lives.  Jesus left NOTHING undone!

 

Listen to how Paul finishes with his explanation of what takes place.  He wraps all of this up with this phrase: “being made conformable to His death.”

 

There’s a 64-dollar word for you!  Conformable.  It comes from the Greek word: summorphos.  It translates literally to: being jointly formed; fashioned with and like.

Understand?  We are jointly formed with Jesus Christ INTO His death.  He dies.  We die with Him.  The old us is dead.  What used to exist of us is now nothing more than a corpse.  Jesus has died and is buried in a tomb.  We have been formed INTO Him so that as He died, so did we.

 

In the same way that Jesus’ death finished the past, the sin, the sufferings, the diseases and everything that went with the curse that came upon the human race, our having been jointly formed and fashioned like Him, means that our past — and all the consequences of the sins, the iniquities of our fathers, the diseases that have plagued us, the infirmities of our flesh, the poverty that came with the curse — and death itself! — has been finished IN US!

 

But that’s only the first part of baptism.  That’s the dying and burial part.  But we don’t remain in the grave!  The power of the Resurrection has been made available to us.  Here’s what Jesus said about it when He was talking to Martha (and you’ll remember that we quoted this last week:

 

John 11:25-26:  “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:  And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?”

 

Paul deals with this when he writes his letter to the Ekklesia in Ephesus:

 

Ephesians 2:4-7:  “But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us,  Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;)  And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus:  That in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus.”

 

It couldn’t be any clearer!  We were dead with our lives measured by the Law of Sin and Death.  But Jesus incorporated us with Him when He died.  We were woven into His being so that when He died, carrying our sins, we died at the same time.

 

We didn’t exit Him, and He didn’t eject us when He was raised from the dead.  Paul uses an interesting word in the Greek text when he says that God “hath quickened us together with Christ.”  The Greek word in this instance is: suzoopoieo, and it means: to reanimate, or to make one alive together (at the same time).

 

But our resurrection doesn’t stop with our being raised from the dead (what which occurs when we are raised out of the water).  Father God continued the “raising up” together IN Christ, and has made us to sit together — WITH Him, and IN Him — in Heavenly places, in the anointing of the Anointed One, the Lord Jesus Christ!

 

THAT, my friends is what takes place when we are baptized in water!  We’ll explore this a bit further next week, but I’d like to take a detour and talk about a different kind of transition.

 

Consider what Paul writes to the Corinthians.  We will explore the entire 15th chapter of I Corinthians later, but here’s something that has been the source of much discussion in the body of Christ for many years.  Many folks relate this passage of Scripture to an event that will transpire at some time way off in the future.  That’s wrong!  This is an event for the here and now!

 

I Corinthians 15:51-57, KJV:  Behold, I show you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,  In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.  For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.  

 

So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.  O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?  The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

 

Now, let me amplify this passage from the Greek text for the sake of some clarification.

 

Let me give you something that you can see with your spiritual eyes — a thing which has been hidden from natural discernment which I now reveal to you; we are not all headed for death and the grave, but we will — all of us — transform.

 

In an “atom” of time, in that same split second that the eye blinks, at the sound and reverberation of the final sound of the trumpet: for the trumpet shall sound a blast (both literally and figuratively), and those who are dead — both literally as corpses, and as flesh and blood with the sentence of death hanging over them —will be roused and awakened with all decay in their existence eradicated for all eternity.

 

What has been decaying and subject to decay must, of necessity, cease for all time; where we have once been mortals and subject to death, disease, sickness and weakness now changes so that we become immortals (restored to that image and likeness we were first created for).

 

Therefore, when this perishable existence now transforms into an unending, immortal existence, then we will see brought to pass the old saying that was written, “Death (and dying) have been engulfed and consumed by conquest and victory — totally vanquished.”

 

“Oh, death, where is your poison; where is the power of your pin prick?”

 

The poison and pin prick of death is sin — offenses against God: and the dynamic force of sin is embodied in the Law.  But, thanks and grace be to Father God who totally vanquishes sin through our Lord Jesus Christ!

 

Therefore, my dear and beloved brothers and sisters, be absolutely steadfast, settled and immovable, always excelling and super-abounding in the labors and direction of the Lord, knowing without question that your toil, your pains, your trouble and your weariness is not wasted, empty and in vain in the Lord.  (I Corinthians 15:51-57, RAC Translation and Amplification)

 

Are you seeing the revelation of this?  This is not a “when we all get to Heaven” event.  If  we don’t have this victory now, then why did John write the following statement in his general epistle to the body of Christ?

 

I John 3:2-3:  Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure. (emphasis, mine)

 

Get it?  John isn’t saying, “When we all get to Heaven, we will be like him.”  He is making it clear that we are NOW the sons of God, and that when the Lord Jesus Christ appears (HERE!) we will already be like Him!  That means that the transforming process will have taken place.  We will have made the transition from mortality to immortality.

 

That means that changes are going on in us now.  There is a transformative process taking place on a daily basis — with a caveat, of course.  The caveat is that we are responding to every quickening of Holy Spirit.  Whatever He speaks, whatever He whispers, whatever He nudges us with, we respond — IMMEDIATELY!!

 

There is no room — and no time — to “adjust” His Word to us to fit our thinking or our paradigm.

 

No matter how long we live, and no matter what our upbringing, we have all developed mindsets and mental protocols that cause us to either respond or react or “adjust” the Word spoken to us to fit our understanding.  It is mandatory that we overcome those mindsets and mental protocols.

 

More to come!

 

In case you are missing out on real fellowship in an environment of Ekklesia, our Sunday worship gatherings are available by conference call – usually at about 10:45AM Pacific.  That conference number is (712) 770-4160, and the access code is 308640#.  We are now making these gatherings available by Skype.  If you wish to participate by video on Skype, my Skype ID is regner.capener.  If you miss the live voice call, you can dial (712) 770-4169, enter the same access code and listen in later.  The video call, of course, is not recorded – not yet, anyway.

 

Blessings on you!

 

 

           

Regner A. Capener
CAPENER MINISTRIES

RIVER WORSHIP CENTER
Temple, Texas 76504

Email Contact: CapenerMinistries@protonmail.com

 

All Coffee Break articles are copyright by Regner A. Capener, but authorization for reprinting, reposting, copying or re-use, in whole or in part, is granted –provided proper attribution and this notice are included intact. Older Coffee Break archives are available at http://www.RegnersMorningCoffee.com. Coffee Break articles are normally published weekly.

If you would like to have these articles arrive each morning in your email, please send a blank email to: AnotherCoffeeBreak@protonmail.com with the word, “Subscribe” in the subject line.  To remove yourself from the mailing list, please send a blank email to
AnotherCoffeeBreak@protonmail.com with the word “Unsubscribe” in the subject line.

 

CAPENER MINISTRIES is a tax-exempt church ministry. Should you desire to participate and covenant with us as partners in this ministry, please contact us at either of the above email or physical addresses, or visit: http://www.RiverWorshipCenter.org.