Mark 16:4’s words, “… when they looked up, they saw that the stone (in front of Jesus’ tomb) had already been rolled away,” hold immense comfort for me. especially those times in my life when I know that all my human resources are exhausted, but that my God, whom I serve and trust, had long ago made a plan for this.
While we are busy reflecting on the events of that week in April 30 AD, I want to ask you: Do you realize what it all means that the stone in front of the tomb was rolled away that very day when the women arrived there?
Yes, when they heard from the mouth of that young man who was sitting on the right side of the stone, wearing those shining white clothes, as the other Gospels also tell us in Matt. 28:1-8; Luke 24:1-12; and John 20:1-10:
“Do not be afraid!” he said to them. “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen from the dead. He is not here. See, there is the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and especially Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.”
Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified and died, rose from the dead, as he had prophesied many times before. He is alive!
For 40 days after this, He appeared alive to more than 500 different people, and to some of them, such as to His group of close disciples, several times.
This irrefutably established and confirmed everything about Jesus, who He was, His actions, and everything He said about Himself, once and for all! This Jesus was not just an ordinary man! He was not even just a prophet! No, He was so much more than just that!
So much so that John, in his Spirit-inspired version of the Gospel that he had to tell about Jesus and His life, after these events, wrote the following (and I will try to summarize it in my own words):
There in John 1:
This Jesus was the Word. He was God who became man and through whom God Himself spoke to us all the time, those 33 years that He was a man here on earth.
“Did you hear?” John is asking all of us. This Jesus was truly God who became a very ordinary man!
However incomprehensibly wonderful it may sound to you!
To try to translate this incomprehensibly wonderful truth into ordinary human language, John uses a word in Greek that I think we have not translated correctly in Afrikaans.
The Afrikaans translations translate this word, “monogenes” (as in Joh. 1:14; 1:18; and even in the well-known Joh. 3:16) with “Only One”.
While this word in the Greek is trying to say: “Totally unique!” “Like no one has ever been before!” “The Only One of His Kind ever!”
How else can one describe in ordinary human language this miracle that happened in the man, Jesus!
Especially after His death and especially after these events that Mark 16 and the other Gospels tell us, that He rose from the dead and He is alive!
Yes, this Jesus was and is truly God, the totally unique God, the Son, who became an ordinary man to come and do for me and you everything that He was meant to do from before the foundation of the world.
With this in mind, you can now read John 1:1 to 18; John 3:16 to 18; and go read the rest of the Gospel of John to understand exactly what John wrote there in chapter 20, verses 30 and 31:
“Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these signs are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”