A God of Resurrection

Acts 4:1-3

And as they were speaking to the people, the priests and the captain of the temple and the Sadducees came upon them, greatly annoyed because they were teaching the people and proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection from the dead. And they arrested them and put them in custody until the next day, for it was already evening.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part One)

Resurrection, you see, is the belief which declares that the living God is going to put everything right once and for all, is going (as we saw in he previous chapter) to “restore all things,” to turn the world the right way up at last.

And those who are in power, within the world the way it is [i.e., both political and religious power] are quite right to suspect that, if God suddenly does such a drastic thing, the (to put it mildly) cannot guarantee that they will end up in power in the new world that God is going to make.

[W]hat made them angry wasn’t just Peter’s announcement that God had raised Jesus from the dead. It was, as Luke puts it, a much larger thing: that Peter was preaching the resurrection of the dead, and announcing this revolutionary doctrine “in Jesus.” In other words, Peter was saying not only that Jesus himself had been raised, but that this was the start and the sign of God’s eventual restoration of everything (3.21) (63).

Aaron Orendorff

Resurrection is an impossible thing to manage. If God is in the business of giving “life to the dead and [calling] into existence things that do not exist” (Rom. 4:17), then God—the God revealed in and through Jesus Christ—is not a God who works within the structure (the “natural order of things”); such a God is not a God who acts in accordance with what is. Instead, a God of resurrection is a God who (to put it succinctly) does what he wants, how he wants, when he wants, with what he wants. Resurrection does not consult the dead and ask their opinion. Resurrections acts unilaterally to do not only what the dead cannot do for themselves but what is absolutely impossible for anyone to do or even to occur. Such a God is thoroughly unpredictable, thoroughly uncontrollable, thoroughly dangerous and thoroughly wonderful and worthy of worship.