This morning (at church) I am going to talk about the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. I am going to begin the teaching by showing a picture of and talking about our compost pile. What a simple thing--put some organic material in a pile, add water, and it will eventually turn back into "dirt."
We put a variety of items in our compost pile: Leaves, grass, weeds, plants, kitchen waste, coffee grounds and filters, egg shells, etc. All of these things eventually turn into "dirt" which we then place back upon the garden. This dirt, of course, is full of biological life (redundant, eh?). Again, I want to reiterate that the turning of organic material into dirt is quite easy--throw the stuff in , mix it a bit if you want to, add some water, wait a bit, and "bingo"-->you have dirt (humus).
Easy, easy, easy--we've done this for years.
I am truly amazed at the technological progress that we have had in my lifetime. My first PC didn't have any storage at all--it all went on the floppy disk. In 1987 I purchased my first hard-drive, 20MB for $200! This was the penultimate purchase...it couldn't get much better than this! This morning I am going to carry a 2 GB flash drive in my pocket that I purchased for $9.00 sometime last year. It has 100 times the storage capacity of my first hard drive at about 1/22nd of the cost. I have seen 64 GB flash drives at the store. I am not being sarcastic (though I could be), I really am impressed with our gains in computer technology.
Back to the compost pile...
With all of our gains in technology, if you asked a group of top scientists to turn back the process in my compost pile and turn a little, itty, tiny bit of it back into one original leaf they would say, "Preposterous, impossible, inconceivable, unprecedented, etc!!!!!" Can't be done! We can send a man to the moon (or can we?) but we can't re-create one leaf that has been through the composting experience.
How then can we say that we understand the concept of the resurrection?
The people in Christ' day were much closer to the earth than we are. They saw the "circle of life" process on a daily basis in their lives...death, change, life. Jesus told them that He had to die and be born again. He showed them that it was possible by resurrecting Lazarus from the dead (Lazarus had been "composting" for four days). Still, they truly had no concept of bodily resurrection, whereby something dead was fully reanimated. Dead "stuff" turned into dirt, was mixed back into the soil, and was used to begin the process of life again. How could it be reanimated back to the same thing that it was before? When they saw the empty tomb, they ALL thought that the Romans had just moved His body.
Ok, ok, ok...the point is this: We can't reanimate one simple leaf that has been turned back into dirt. Let's don't think that we really understand this resurrection thing. We really are just familiar with the conoept. When you meditate on the resurrection of Jesus it eventually should make your head swim--the God who raised Jesus from the dead can take/find all of the molecules that make up your body and put them back together again--no matter how far they are scattered across the universe. Perhaps a Christian Dr. McCoy wouldn't have feared having his atoms scattered across the universe via a transporter (original Star Trek analogy)?
