Cancer Blog #74
By Brian Zimmerman
Begun on July 31, 2021
Email: dyingman1@yahoo.com
My Dying Words
Entry #74– Death Could Not Hold Him
February 24, 2023
[Act 2:23-24] 23 this [Man,] delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God, you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men and put [Him] to death. 24 “But God raised Him up again, putting an end to the agony of death, since it was impossible for Him to be held in its power.
This is a passage that we ought to read regularly. In a country that seems to be terrified of everything – an attitude of fear that many Christians seem to share – we have a passage that provides an antidote. For here Peter, preaching at Pentecost when the Holy Spirit descended, warns the unbelievers listening and comforts the believers present. Here he compares the power of God and the power of death. If you are afraid of facing death, here’s a message for you. Peter reminds the crowd of what they had done: nailing Jesus to a cross and putting Him to death, thus insuring their own inescapable guilt. But, Peter reveals to them that even such a wicked act was not outside God’s control; it was a part of His secret plan. The greatest evil act in history was not only known to God beforehand, but planned by Him! No lesser wickedness, even those acts against us, who are only His disciples, can be outside of that same plan.
“But” says Peter, making them pause for what follows. He goes on to inform those who had conspired to murder Jesus that that act of wickedness had been a forlorn hope in another way also. It never had a chance of succeeding as God was ready for the attack of death. God raised Jesus by His greater power, destroying the agony of death. My translation footnotes that the word “agony” is actually a translation of the word for “birth pains.” As we saw in an earlier entry, it means that the grave then became for Jesus not a final resting place, one of worms that eat and decay that consumes the corpse, but a womb, a place that would give birth to new life, in fact, a new kind of life, one immortal and invincible, never ending and never able to be defeated.
As Peter proclaims, death has now lost its power to hold Him. It is “impossible” for it to do so. Jesus’ new life is full of a power that creation has never known before. There is no more possibility of death for Jesus. Nor, we find out later, is there for us either. For if we are in Him, we share in that death and also in that being raised from the dead and in the end of the pain of death. A new day has come, the most important in history, because on that day a new life arrived. Death’s power was broken. You can now rest easy when death comes for you. For in Jesus, you too will be raised to the same new life He has. When you hear that terminal verdict sure to be delivered to you one day, remember also the impossibility of death holding you. It is “impossible” because it is not the end. It is instead the birth into a new and better life, one far better than you have ever had here. So I ask you to remember that when you hear that diagnosis. Rejoice in the hope you have!
Next: The Prince of Life