The Triumphant Power Of Life Over Death

Mark 16:6  And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him.
 
Further, that stone became the symbol of the mighty, triumphant power of life over death.

We are so familiar with phrases like that that perhaps they have lost their point; but is not God constantly solving our problems along this very line?

We are looking for things to happen, and yet all the time the power of His risen life is silently working and solving so many problems.

We look back and remember how often we felt that we could not go on any longer, that we could not survive very much more, that we were at the end of our resources...

The situation was really beyond us, and some tremendous thing had to happen.

The tremendous thing we expected did not happen.

The fact is that we are going on today after many such an experience of trial and helplessness;

We have quietly been kept going on, and we are going on; we are not yet submerged and overwhelmed and put out.

That is the miracle of His Divine life silently solving the problem, dealing with so many things that seem to say, Death, an end!

The power of His resurrection is the answer to many of our problems.

We look for acts; He proceeds along the silent course of life, the mighty power of life overcoming death.

 It was not possible says the Word, that he should be holden of it (death) (Acts 2:24).

They were saying, 'It is impossible for us to deal with this stone, this situation!' 

He was saying, 'It is not possible for death to hold Me'.

There are two ways of viewing the impossible. Everything depends upon where you put the impossibility - on the thing or on God.

The things which are not possible with men are possible with God (Matt. 19:26).

And He answers these impossible things in the normal way - for it is the normal way;

The abnormal would be by signs and wonders and extraordinary happenings: demonstrations to our senses;

But the normal way in the Christian life is the way of the continuous transcendence of His life over the working of death. 

That miracle is far more general than we recognize.

You have to live your life and do your work in a sphere of spiritual death where everything is against spiritual life, and there is nothing to support you at all...

And yet you go on there in the Lord, and are not swallowed up, engulfed and destroyed by that atmosphere and by those conditions.

That is the miracle of Divine life working silently.

Yours, then, is a life - as is the life of everyone - set in the presence of the great stone of death, spiritual death.

We know it, and yet we are preserved alive spiritually and we go on.

That is the great miracle. It is the miracle of every day.

That is the testimony that God raised Him from the dead. 

~T. Austin Sparks~