Christ’s Resurrection and the meaning of life

This weekend is the climax of the traditional Christian commemoration of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday.
Most Christians place their hope for life after death in this unique event, based on the New Testament Biblical teaching that Christ was the first fruit of the dead.
Agnostics and atheists say the Resurrection is a fanciful tale created by Christ’s followers hallucinating in the wake of His traumatic death.
Christ’s disciples were so convinced that He had resurrected that for the next 30 years they endured all manner of persecution and suffering to preach the Gospel.
It was one thing for the disciples to claim in the immediate aftermath of Christ’s death that He had risen from the dead.
But to endure persecution, imprisonment and dispossession for years on end would have sobered anyone whose claims about Christ’s resurrection had been based on an outright lie or a myth.
Let’s leave the question of the resurrection for the time being and examine history itself.
In the wake of the death of a relative, friend or colleague, we are quickly and cruelly reminded of how indiscriminate death is, be you billionaire or humble villager.
Before death, there is so much suffering on this earth. Too much monitoring of news and reading of history has left a sadness in me that can’t seem to go away.
Think of the millions taken as slaves over the centuries, the millions of others who perished in gruesome genocides.
What could possibly compensate mankind for all this suffering and loss? Money? An apology? What could ever make up for our pain?
Clearly, nothing short of a resurrection of the dead will ever do by way of recompense. Hence the aching question by the ancient sage Job (14:14), “If a man die, shall he live again?”
Life is the most precious thing by far that we have. Life and life alone is what makes us what we are.
Even if we were to go by the disputed claims of the Theory of Evolution, ironically it too is life-affirming.
According to evolutionists, all life is engaged in a constant, relentless struggle to overcome the harsh conditions it faces by adapting.
From microbes and viruses to flies, reptiles, mammals and trees, nature adapts.
As National Geographic magazine noted in its December 2004 cover story on evolution, “Insects and weeds acquire resistance to our insecticides and herbicides through the same process. As we humans try to poison them, evolution by natural selection transforms the population of a mosquito or thistle into a new sort of creature, less vulnerable to that particular poison.” (page 30)
Nature, even according to the theory of evolution, actively seeks to preserve itself, actively tries to cling onto life and to increase its chances of surviving to the next generation.
The question is: Why? Why would nature, from the simplest microbes to human beings, be so determined to live?
One could argue that there is a living spirit, a Higher Life, that created it all and so, ironically, the theory of evolution although used by scientists and sceptics to deny the existence of God or a higher intelligent being, is actually proof of the existence of this Being.
In the Biblical Book of Ecclesiastes is found a statement that says “Also He has put eternity in their hearts...” (3:11)
The idea that a consciousness, a questing, a struggling, a will to live and preserve oneself for as long as possible was put in mankind by a divine Being is revealed here.
Perhaps what agnostics term evolution is actually God’s hand at work, with all creation striving and struggling to survive.
So it is not as though we humans who believe in the afterlife are superstitious cowards trying to cling to any hope of eternity and a second chance at life.
If, for the sake of argument, a sceptic says religion is an invention by society to come to terms with our mortality and fear of the unknown, what explains the struggle to cling onto life by microscopic life like bacteria and viruses?
There should be no reason for animals and plants to want so badly to live and survive if life was an accidental result of a Big Bang some time into the distant billion-year past.
There should be no reason for the atmosphere and ecosystem around the earth to be so well suited for life. Somehow everything we need to sustain life is in place: oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, water, light, soil, plants, vitamins.
All the processes of photosynthesis, the nitrogen cycle, the white blood cells that fight off disease, blood that circulates nutrients through our bodies, the sensory nodes in our brains -- everything essential not just to basic live but advanced civilisation is in place.
If one were to argue that the original Big Bang that caused their formation happened by accident, their continued existence and replenishment to this day thousands or millions of years later suggests a purpose in that.
It’s very difficult to argue logically that all this sense of order and combination of all the right elements and ecosystems just happened by accident.
It is much easier to point out contradictions in the Bible, organised religion and doctrine than to argue that a divine Being does not exist at all.
Even if there were no Bible, Christianity or whatever, there would be, from the scientific evidence before us, a higher Being.
In the New Testament, Christ instructed His disciples to commemorate His death, not His resurrection.
And so, we legitimately look to the restoration of all things as symbolised by Christ’s resurrection from the dead.
It is not just religious “brainwashing”; all of creation from microscopic viruses to heads of state and kings longs for eternity, for perpetual existence.
In recent years in the wake of terrorist attacks in their cities, citizens of Sweden, France, Norway and other mostly secular countries have filled churches to mourn the dead and injured.
It suggests that even in 21st Century secular Western Europe with a majority of young people never having been raised to follow religion, the religious and spiritual yearning in humanity can never completely die out.

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