This lenten season has been a very special one. Not only am I back in the Lutheran Church after a year of absence, but for the first time I am gladdened when the service remind me of my Dad instead of saddened. My brother sent me a link to one of his Maundy Thursday sermons from his website, and I ran across an Easter sermon from 1995–two years before he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. If you have a minute, stop and read it (I’ve included it here). It made me rejoice again in the resurrection of my Savior.
Easter April 16, 1995
Oh, that my words were recorded, that they were written on a scroll, that they were inscribed with an iron tool on lead, or engraved in rock forever!
I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes – I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!
IN THE NAME OF OUR RESURRECTED REDEEMER, WHO LIVES AND BECAUSE HE LIVES WE ALSO SHALL LIVE, DEAR FELLOW REDEEMED:
“How sad! Easter Sunday and no voice with which to praise my living Redeemer’s name.” That’s what a great preacher, terminally ill with a particular kind of cancer that made him lose his voice, wrote to his daughter. But as he sat dejectedly looking out of the window, another thought came to mind. Reaching for his note pad, he wrote, “There’s only one thing more sad. That’s to have a voice and fail to use it to praise our living Redeemer.” Surely we would all agree. We’re here because we want to thrill to the news of the risen Savior and to praise his holy name. Accordingly, on this glorious Easter morning, we’ve turned to words that are not strange to us. We’ve heard them before; we’ve used them before. We often use them as the last verse for the committal service out at the cemetery because of the promise they contain. Some of us may even use them in daily life, when the going gets tough, because of the relief and promise they contain.
Strangely enough these words come, not from some illustrious pulpit, but from a cemetery. Also, strangely enough, they did not come from the pen of some great New Testament preacher of the resurrection like the apostle Paul, but from a man about whom we know little and who lived years before the first Easter Sunday. Yet in these Old Testament words we find, not only a shadow of the coming Savior, but his resurrection, and its meaning for believers. I invite you to listen to that ancient believer and to find in his words:
Easter Comfort from an Early Cemetery
I. Job’s opening grave
II. Job’s opened grave
III. Jesus’ emptied grave
I. Job’s opening grave
Cemeteries! Who of us wants to go to them, much less think about them? A cemetery is not one of the places we frequent or prefer to visit. But when we must, what are our thoughts? Are they thoughts of sadness and loss? Of how beneath those gravestones somebody’s loved one lies? What hurt there is in losing loved ones. What tears that keep coming back at unexpected times. What wounds that never seem to heal completely, regardless of how much time passes.
Or are they thoughts about the rapid flight of time? In our youth we think we’ll live forever. Cemeteries and thoughts about them are farthest from our minds. But almost before we know it we are walking out to the cemetery behind the caskets of classmates, coworkers, close friends. How soon it is really all over with us! How frail life truly is.
Are they thoughts tinged with fear? What will death be like for me? What will it do to me? No one has ever come back to tell us what it’s like and what we need to expect. Though artificial green grass may be draped over the dug grave at the cemetery, yet how deep and dark it appears. And how final!
Are they thoughts of despair bordering on defeat? What’s the use? It makes no difference what we do or eat or how we live; eventually death is going to get us all.
Cemeteries – who wants to visit them or even think about them? We don’t even like to think about what brings each one of us eventually to the cemetery, that phenomenon called “death.” Try talking to a loved one about death and see what happens to the conversation. Go down to the funeral home for that visitation and see how ill at ease and tongue-tied people can become. Look at our funeral customs with their flowers, gleaming caskets, and cosmetics and see how they try to mask death. Every ounce of our earthly fiber recoils at the thought of our mortality. And in us there’s the desire to deny, delay, disguise death. God did not have death in mind when he created his world and man.
Do we think it was any different for the man named Job in our text? We don’t know exactly when he lived; most scholars think about 1,900 years before the first Easter. Nor do we know exactly where he lived, except that it was in a land called Uz. We do, however, know something about the man. He was a believer, one who had been brought to faith in the coming Savior and who then lived his faith. “The greatest of the men of the East” was the title others gave him. But then in just one black day he lost it all – his fields full of cattle, his abundant land holdings, his houseful of servants, his substantial cash reserves, even his ten children. Can we even imagine the trauma? And then his own health was attacked. All he had left was his heart still beating within him, and now even that was soon to be lost. For a horrible skin disease struck him, covering him with horrendous boils. His diseased body and naked soul stood at the brink of eternity, and all he could see ahead of him was that opening grave.
Is this where we want to stop this morning, with all this down talk about sure death and opening graves such as Job was facing on the day of our text and such as we shall one day also face? I hope not! I don’t think such thoughts would make us want to sing praises today to our Lord or bring us back next Sunday to do the same. There has to be more, and there is. This fact Job also knew.
II. Job’s opened grave
Job saw not only the grave opening before him at the cemetery. He also saw that grave being opened on the last great day. Listen to his words, “After my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes – I, and not another.” Job flew across the centuries, not even knowing how many there would be, and saw himself coming out of his tomb. For him it was “ashes to ashes” and “dust to dust” as his own words pointed out, but that was not his end. In faith Job saw two doors in his grave, one marked “entrance” and the other “exit.” And he saw the Job who was soon, it appeared, to use the entrance door, also eventually coming out of the exit door. Notice how he insisted that it would be the same Job, with his own body restored and with his own eyes able to see the Lord. Job himself, would see God after the grave.
What do we have here, some 1,900 years before Christ, but the firm hope in the resurrection of the body, the comforting hope beating in the heart of a believer, that the grave which was opening to claim his dying form would on the last day be opened to give back that body in renewed and perfect form?
Isn’t that the same hope we have for loved ones whom we have left out at the cemetery? How horrible it would be to say good-bye to them, never to see them again! How much more comforting to be able to say “see you later,” in that glorious resurrection on the last day! How horrible it would be to lay to rest that form in which we learned to know and love our dear ones, never to see them again! How much more comforting to see with faith’s eye the family reunion of believers in heaven. How horrible to throw dirt on top of that lifeless form and think only of it turning into dust. How much more comforting to await the day when that dirt will move aside, and that lifeless form will rise to new and perfect life.
Yes, how much more comforting. But will it happen? Can we be certain? Did Job know what he was talking about? Or are we only fooling ourselves? If we had no way of knowing for certain, would we be here today, eagerly singing the praise of our Lord and anxious to return next Sunday to repeat the hymn again? I hardly think so.
III. Jesus’ emptied grave
Let us go back to that cemetery where Job was facing his grave. Listen closely, and we shall discover that it wasn’t so much of his own opened grave that Job was speaking, but of the emptied grave of his Redeemer. “I know that my Redeemer lives,” he said, “and that in the end he will stand upon the earth.” What a wealth of truth and comfort is contained in that sweet sentence, “I know that my Redeemer lives!”
Let’s take that sentence apart word by word so as not to miss an ounce of its comfort. Job called Jesus his “Redeemer.” The Hebrew word means one who lays down a pledge or pays a price to free someone from bondage of some sort. Job’s friends had chided him for his sins, and Job was painfully aware of those sins himself. But Job knew that he had someone who would redeem him from sin’s bondage. With eyes of faith worked by the Spirit he looked ahead to Calvary and saw the blood of his Redeemer freeing him forever from sin’s curse and paying every last cent of sin’s wages.
Job further saw that his Redeemer “lives.” Again, with the penetrating eyes of a prophet, Job looked ahead through the ages to the dawn of that first Easter. He saw Jesus breaking the bonds of death, rising triumphant from the grave, gloriously alive as a sure sign of his victory over sin, death, and the devil. And in that living Redeemer Job placed confident trust for his own deliverance from sin, death, and the devil. He even saw in that living Redeemer a rock-solid guarantee of his own resurrection on that day when the Redeemer would return to judge the living and the dead.
Note also the little two-letter word Job used, “MY Redeemer lives.” The risen Redeemer was not some empty Bible doctrine, some nice-sounding theological abstraction for Job. It was something wondrously personal, intensely practical for him as an individual. Like Simeon in the temple years later, Job held the living Redeemer with arms of faith and exulted, “This is MY Redeemer. He has ransomed me from sin and death. He lives in me and I in him now and forever.” Satan and circumstances may have stripped Job of everything else – his health and wealth, his family and friends – but they could not wrench the Redeemer from him. Here was Job’s Redeemer, who had opened for his soul that sure entrance into heaven at death’s very moment and who would also return to claim his body on that last great day. In that living Redeemer Job had everything he needed for life and death.
No wonder Job wanted this sweet sentence written down in a book somewhere for all people of all generations to read. No wonder he wanted his words engraved with hammer and chisel into rock and lined with lead so that they would never fade. He knew that his Redeemer lived and wanted everyone else to know it too.
Blandon Churchyard in England, where the statesman Winston Churchill is buried, has a roofed overgate as do many English cemeteries. Here the pallbearers wait with the casket until the minister comes out to escort them. If the weather is bad, they find shelter beneath the roof of that gate. Over the gate at Brandon are Job’s words, “I know that my Redeemer lives.” That sentence, however, is not stenciled on the entrance side, but on the exit side of that gate. How fitting! How comforting for a family that has just left a loved one behind in that cemetery! How comforting for us when the time comes for loved ones to carry us into such a cemetery and leave us there! We have a living Redeemer, and because he lives, we shall live also. The soul will live already at the moment of death, and the body also at the time of the resurrection, through him and with him, in our Father’s house.
Oh, the sweet joy this sentence gives, “I know that my Redeemer lives.” Amen.
