Why the Resurrection Is the Confirmation

The stone rolled away on Sunday morning is not the moment of victory. The moment of victory was Saturday.

This requires saying carefully because it is easy to misread. The resurrection is not incidental. The resurrection is essential. Without the resurrection the descent is an event that happened in a realm no one can access, with no visible confirmation, and the disciples in the locked room are simply wrong about what their grief means. The resurrection is what makes the descent knowable. It is the public announcement, in the mode that human beings can observe and report, of what was accomplished in the mode that human beings cannot observe and report.

But announcement is not accomplishment. The announcement comes after the accomplishment because the accomplishment happened first, in the dark, in the unseen realm, without any human witness. What the women found on Sunday morning was not a victory being won. It was a victory being revealed. The tomb was empty not because something powerful was happening inside it at the moment they arrived. It was empty because the work was finished.

Jesus said so from the cross.

"It is completed!" — John 19:30 (NET)

The Greek word is tetelestai — a single word, the perfect tense of a verb meaning to complete, to fulfill, to bring to its purposed end. It is completed. Not: the suffering is ending. Not: the biological dying is nearly complete. The work is done. And the work, as this book has been arguing from the first chapter, was the direct reversal of the primary consequence of the fall — the entry into and conquest of the condition of Sheol-separation. That conquest, announced on the cross, was completed in the descent, and confirmed by the resurrection.

The empty tomb is the proof. Not the accomplishment. The proof of an accomplishment that happened where no human camera could have recorded it, in the territory that every generation before Christ had understood as the realm of the irreversibly dead.

It was not irreversible. It turned out to be reversible. Because the one who entered it was the one who made everything that was made — including whatever Sheol is made of.