Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

For the man who has everything there is now a solar-powered headstone.

John Dilks, a computer engineer for Western Electric designed this headstone with a recording device and a video display screen, which will display a biographical account and a computerized photograph.

Dilks Creative Tombstone Incorporated offers many options so you won't be just one of the crowed in the cemetery.

You can get a voice-activated box if you don't want just anybody toying with your tombstone tapes.

Other options include sensors to tell when a visitor is approaching, and when the grass needs cutting.

He will even include a nozzle that will spray incense.

For those who really think long range you can include messages for future generations, and so you will be able to speak some words of wisdom to your great, great, great, great grandchildren.

The potential of this device called "Imitations of Immortality" are nearly endless.

And the cost is only 39,500 dollars, if you throw in the bulletproof glass to protect from vandals.

Future generations will be going to the cemetery for multimedia presentations from the grave.

Death will be to some degree swallowed up in this death denying Disney Land display of data.

Technology has made it possible for modern man to talk from the tomb, and this gives him a sense of power over death.

This is all mere child's play compared to the game being played by the men described in the book The Tomorrow Makers.

We are talking about the top researchers of our day who are convinced that downloading will happen in our lifetime.

This means that man will be able to figure out how to make a copy of the human brain just like we now make copies of movies on videotape.

The brain can be hooked up to a computer and a copy made, and then that copy can be put into a robot, which will then be controlled by that tape of the brain.

When the machine wears out or becomes obsolete the brain can be transferred to a new model.

This is not fantasy.

It is the serious research going on in Carnegie-Mellon, MIT Stanford, and in Japan.

Many of these researchers have a passion to never die, but become immortal by means of downloading.

They believe that this could be the last generation that will have to die.

Hans Moravec says, "We are on a threshold of a change in the universe comparable to the transition from non-life to life."

Modern man is truly excited about the potential of developing power over death, and why shouldn't he be, for death is no friend.

Death is the final foe that man must somehow defeat if he is to live forever.

The problem is that man in his pride always wants to try the Moby Dick approach to life.

Moby Dick is Herman Melville's classic about Captain Ahab's search for a fierce white whale.

On the surface the novel seems like a story about whale hunting, but it goes much deeper.

Some consider it one of the most deeply theological novels ever written in America.

When Melville finished the book he wrote in a personal letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, "I have written a wicked book."

This was long before the "Save the whales" movement, and so he was not feeling guilty about the obsession of Ahab to get revenge on Moby Dick for his lost leg.

He was feeling guilty because his book was really about God and man.

The whale in all its brilliant whiteness was a symbol of God, and Ahab's obsession to hunt down the whale represents man's mad pursuit to reduce God to his slave in order to control God and use His power to achieve human ends.

The technological search for immortality is Captain Ahab at work.

Man wants to figure out some way to live forever without doing it God's way.

Man wants to be in control and do it his way.

In other words, it is the same old story of a works salvation.

Man does not want a handout and a salvation by free grace.

He wants to get it by his own power, even if he has to capture heavenly power to do it.

All of history is a power struggle between God and man, or Moby Dick and Ahab.

The good news of Easter is that the power to conquer death is already available to those who will humble themselves to receive it as a gift.

The power of the resurrection is so much greater than anything man has even imagined.

In the power of the resurrection of Christ there is available the power to give every person in history the gift of eternal life.

And not merely mechanical life that is lived by a machine, but the life of a real person in relationship to other eternal persons, including the Person of the risen Christ.

We do have to give man credit, for he is on the right track.

If man is going to live forever he must have a power source.

The problem with science and technology is that it is limited to the power available in creation.

That is mind- boggling power, but the Bible says it is but the work of God's finger.

The Bible, on the hand, puts us in touch with the work of God's Son, and not just His finger, but His only begotten Son, and in the Son we are dealing with the power of the resurrection.

This is power that is more than mind-boggling, for it is spirit-boggling.

It is power so incomparable that Paul in this passage uses all the resources of the Greek language to make us realize that this was the greatest event in history for the sheer magnitude and might of this miracle.

Paul assembles here the greatest array of terms for power that we find anywhere in the New Testament.

Verse 19 is the power pack of the Bible.

What did it take to get the body of Jesus back to life out of the tomb, and ascended to the right hand of God? Paul says it took-

1. POWER.

The Greek word here is dunimis from which we get dynamite.

2. ENERGY.

The Greek word here is energia.

3. MIGHTY STRENGTH.

It took only the work of God's finger to create this vast universe, but when He raised Jesus from the dead it took even almighty God the flexing of His muscles.

The resurrection of Jesus was no snap even for God.

It was not a mere saying let there be life and there was life.

It took the exertion of infinite energy to accomplish this miracle of all miracles.

Every miracle of the Bible falls into the category of minor miracles in comparison to the only miracle in its class, which was the mega miracle of the resurrection.

When we are talking about the power of the resurrection we are talking about the power of the Source.

This is power at its greatest, and this is the peak and pinnacle of power.

There is no concept of power that rises above it, for it is the ultimate demonstration of God's power.

God operates on different levels of power just as we all do.

Isa.

52:10 portrays God as rolling up His sleeves and flexing His muscles.

"The Lord will lay bare His holy arm in the sight of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth will see the salvation of the Lord."

It is not as though omnipotence is stretched by harder projects, but just that even omnipotence has to exert greater energy to accomplish certain things, and the ultimate exertion of power was when God raised Jesus from the dead.

Right away this should provoke a question in our minds-why should it take so much of God's infinite power to raise Jesus from the dead?

After all, there were other raisings from the dead in both the Old and New Testaments.

They were marvelous miracles and rank among the greatest miracles, but there is no stress that they took special power to accomplish.

This forces us to see the resurrection of Jesus as totally different from all other resurrections.

All the others were really resuscitations.

The spirit was restored to the body and they went on living for a time, but they all eventually died again.

There was escape and postponement of death, but no real conquering of death in all the other resurrections.

In order to see the uniqueness of the resurrection of Christ we need to see the uniqueness of His death.

Nobody ever died like Jesus.

Many died on the cross, but no one ever died tasting death for all people.

On Jesus was laid the iniquity of us all, and Jesus died for the sins of the world.

The Bible says He actually became sin for us.

He who knew no sin took on all sin, and He took on the wages of all sin, which was death.

He was the only man who never deserved death, and yet He is taking on Himself the death that all other men do deserve.

This is the one and only ultimate death.

Most die for themselves; some die for their friends, and a few die for a larger group, but nobody ever died for all people but Jesus.

When death took Jesus He was the most dead person that ever was.

No other person in history had ever been so dead, for He was held in death's grip by trillions upon trillions of sin that made Him the rightful possession of death.

The wages of sin is death, and Jesus picked up the tab for every sinner that ever was or will be.

This one of a kind radical death demanded more than a mere restoration of the spirit and the body.

This demanded an all out, head on confrontation of the power of heaven and hell, of light and darkness, of life and death.

This was not the battle of the century, but this was the heavy weight champion of the universe, which would determine the destiny of the universe and all who have ever lived.

Raising Jesus was equivalent to raising every person who had ever died.

Raising others from the dead was like reaching over the fence and plucking a apple from the tree of an enemy and bringing it back to your side of the fence.

Raising Jesus was more like an all out evasion into enemy territory to take every orchard and every tree and every apple into His possession.

Paul says that Jesus led captivity captive.

All who were under the power of Satan were liberated, and Jesus became the conquering King over hell itself, and He took possession of the keys of death and hell.

What a powerful victory when the most in bondage to death person who had ever existed, not only gets free himself, but becomes the Lord over death with the right to grant freedom to all He chooses.