Luke 24:3 Commentary and Bible Study

Here we see how the others without Mary enter in: ‘and [they] found not the body of the Lord Jesus.’ Having entered the sepulchre, there appear to them two men, who John’s Gospel tells us were angels (John 20:12). ‘With shining garments’, which evidently added to their sense that this was a supernatural appearance.As we consider the aftermath of the death of Christ and the events of his resurrection, the one thing that stands out is the confusion it caused even among the disciples. Great confusion! They too didn't seem to understand what was happening, even though they had been forewarned, even though it had all been explained to them exactly how things would fall out. They were perplexed and confused, baffled even, and very disturbed. Although they loved Christ, and although they had been in his school, as it were; although they had learned from him, and followed him, and trusted him implicitly, and listened to his every word, yet this was something so far beyond their understanding that it made it so difficult to take these things in. The arrest of Christ amazed them. His execution, crucifixion amazed them even more; shocked them. And then, his burial, and now his resurrection: they just didn’t understand. This was true of all of them, and it was a cause of fear, and even doubt, and despondency. They had supposed that this was the Son of God, that this amazing, perfect man, with his bearing and his amazing power to do mighty deeds – even to raise the dead – and with all the authority of his teaching was the Messiah, that he was the appointed one of God whom their whole Jewish background had taught them about. For this reason his death and burial just crushed them and left them utterly despondent and broken. It was the last thing that they had expected. It should not have been, because the same teaching from the Old Testament which had taught them to expect a Messiah, had also taught very clearly what he would do when he came. We can ourselves read such passages as the very famous Isaiah 53, where the Messiah is predicted as coming in the form of a suffering servant, one who would be despised and rejected of men, one who would be executed, put to death, led as a lamb to the slaughter, one who would bear, make an atonement for, the sins of his people, and suffer in their place. By his stripes we would be healed. It was all there, just to mention one prophet, Isaiah, writing approximately 700 years before Christ came. Many passages, explained this so fully and so completely. Then too the Lord Jesus Christ himself had said that all this would happen. One of the reasons for this was undoubtedly that, at or before the time of Christ, a teaching had arisen which had gained tremendous popularity. The chief priests and religious leaders had evolved an interpretation of the Old Testament, which went rather like this: when God's appointed one comes, what he will do will be to politically deliver the Jewish nation from the occupying Roman armies, from the bondage of their Roman overlords, liberate them again, and so empower them and build them up as a nation that they will be a kind of world centre, and they will be the most prominent and prosperous nation in the world. When the Messiah comes, his main work will be the political liberation and upbuilding, the material benefit of the Jewish people. This teaching had become so popular that they were not expecting a spiritual deliverer, one who would come from God to take man's place, to suffer and die for the sins of men so that they could be pardoned and forgiven, so that they could be spiritually reconciled with God and have their souls brought to life. That had been eclipsed. They were expecting material, physical benefits