Luke 24:6 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

Navigator

Luke 24:6

Comments

One of the things the angels are at pains to do is to show that this is all in accordance with God's plan. This was all foretold, this is all exactly in accord with God's eternal timetable: that Christ would come, that in the plan of God at a precise set moment he would suffer and die, and he would rise again from the dead. In Matthew's Gospel the angels issue a kind of invitation. They say, ‘Come, see the place where the Lord lay’; look into this. The resurrection is the basis of God's invitation, Calvary does away with our sin, and the resurrection is God inviting us to look into mighty things. John's Gospel tells us how Peter and John ran to the sepulchre, and how John got there first, but then when he got there he just stooped and looked. In reverence and fear he just kept at bay, but Peter went straight in and he saw the linen clothes and the napkin folded, everything orderly, everything just arranged. There are wonderful lessons you can draw from that. There was no robbery of this tomb. The place hadn't been ransacked; nothing was untidy, everything was just folded and as it should be, all indications to them of nothing untoward happening, but a mighty resurrection. Equally there was no hasty flight on the part of the Lord Jesus. He hadn't risen and thrown everything to one side so that things were scattered in as orderly way. Everything was folded, speaking of order and almost leisure; there was no undue haste, because everything the Lord Jesus was doing now was just in accordance with a plan. He was doing everything he did as one who knew exactly when and how. There was all the grand calm of God himself, completely in charge of the situation, and yet putting aside these garments, because they were earthly garments. In the resurrection we have no further use of anything which belongs to this earth, you can draw even lessons from the way in which the Lord arranged his tomb at the time of his resurrection.‘He is not here [among the dead], but is risen.’ You are looking in the wrong place, because you are looking for the wrong thing. All of these words are calculated to awaken faith in the women. ‘Remember’ – you heard it with your own ears when you were still in Galilee, a considerable time before these events took place. He did not have to come to Jerusalem, knowing what would take place; he could have avoided it by staying in Galilee, but this was all deliberate. There was no panic; there was no sudden last-minute change of plan; this was no unexpected upset. Sinful men took him, and appeared to prevail over him, but it was his will that it should be so. ‘If he foresaw all this, and if he told you about it in advance,’ say the angels, ‘then why are you have difficulty understanding it now that it has happened?’

Application

The angels’ mild admonition to the women is that they should have believed what the Lord said to them. He had given them this instruction well in time, in order to spare them distress, and they should have carried it with them. The Lord’s promises are sufficient for us, if only we will hold onto them, but so often we neglect them and suffer needlessly.

If we bow our heads and we really grasp and appreciate the resurrection – that the Son of God came suffered and died, and then broke the bands of death and was risen again – it is above all things calculated to evoke our admiration and awe, and our reverence and worship. Nobody ever grasps Calvary until they stand in awe of the living God. If there is somebody who knows about Calvary and about the suffering of death of Christ, but it makes no impression upon you, it doesn't touch your heart, it's because you have got no awe and reverence for Almighty God. You don't understand that all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do. As soon as you begin to have some awe and some reverence, some fear of God, then you are amazed at Calvary. You see the wisdom of it, and you see the vast love which is in it: that God came down from heaven to bear away my sin so that I could be pardoned and forgiven. But it was the resurrection that did this for the disciples.

Questions

Why is it that the resurrection brings Calvary to life and did so for them in such a wonderful way? The resurrection definitely led the disciples to understanding Calvary. You see that with Mary. Mary is left for a time all by herself at the sepulchre, and she thinks and she ponders and she goes in, and what happens? It leads to her meeting with the Lord himself. It is as the result of the resurrection and the appearance of the Lord that she believes, and runs to tell the disciples, and immediately the perplexity and horror of Calvary is lifted. The same is true with the two on the Emmaus road. It is as the result of the realisation that Christ is risen that they come to understand truly what he has done on the cross of Calvary, and who he is. Why is that? 1 Corinthians 15 gives us the answer. When the apostle Paul is referring to the resurrection, he makes the point that the resurrection proves and underlines the power and deity of our God. You can't understand Calvary until you understand God’s power. Oddly, in a way the disciples had a built-in disadvantage, the disadvantage of familiarity. They had got used to the Lord in his flesh. Even though he was totally without sin, – his whole bearing and deportment was marvellous beyond words to describe, he personified love and gentleness and every other possible virtue – they adjusted to having him with them. Two to three years, and they began to take the wonderful virtues and character of the Lord for granted. Did this somehow erode away their awareness of his deity, so that they were caught out thinking of him as a man? The disadvantage for the disciples was that it was rather easy for them to lose sight of the fact that he was also God, the second person of the glorious Trinity. If they had really grasped that he was the Son of God, they would have trusted Calvary. They would have realized that there must be more to this than meets the eye. And it took the resurrection to pull them up to make them again lost in awe and reverence, to restore their understanding and their faith, and to cause them to realize what he was doing on the cross of Calvary in suffering and dying for sin.

Outline

Purpose

Introduction

Luke 24:6 Commentary and Bible Study

The meaning of Luke 24:6 explained