Redemption: From Beginning To End

*Audio Available* Christ's Glorified Body, Hope for The Problem of Pain and Evil, and A New Creation

---

John 20:19-29

¹⁹ On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” ²⁰ When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. ²¹ Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” ²² And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. ²³ If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.”

Luke 24:36-43

³⁶ As they were talking about these things, Jesus himself stood among them, and said to them, “Peace to you!” ³⁷ But they were startled and frightened and thought they saw a spirit. ³⁸ And he said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? ³⁹ See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” ⁴⁰ And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. ⁴¹ And while they still disbelieved for joy and were marveling, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” ⁴² They gave him a piece of broiled fish, ⁴³ and he took it and ate before them.

Something about this story has plagued my mind for years.

There is not enough paper and ink in the world to explain these passages from every angle; there is a lot going on here. But there is one angle I rarely hear discussed, and it relates to a common question or doubt that many face. I have faced this doubt-inducing question many times myself. It is a question that lives at the root of the “problem of evil” and “the problem of pain” and it goes something like this, “why would an all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly-loving God allow humans to fall into sin and suffer?”

It would be hard to over-emphasize how huge this question is, and how many wrestle with it. I have lost count of how many stories I’ve heard of people losing their faith over this very question. I imagine this question has haunted us since the day after the fall, and from then until now has taken up an enormous amount of residence in the human mind.

I don’t know about you, but the typical answers I hear to this question, although true, can feel somewhat unsatisfying. Though the answer “God, though ultimately sovereign, made us with human agency/responsibility to choose” is very true, it doesn’t seem to answer the deeper question of why, or, for what ultimate purpose, God would allow us to fall into sin?

What was God’s end game or final goal? What was the ultimate plan God had in mind from the beginning?

Christ’s Glorified Body

Look back at John 20, I want to point out a critical detail in this story that often goes unacknowledged, let’s not miss it; Christ’s body in this story, with the holes still in His hands, feet, and side, is His resurrected body.

And, there is a sense in the passage that Jesus chooses to identify Himself to the disciples by these marks on His body, John 20:19b-20 says, “… Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord.” Also, see Luke 24:36-43.

But wait, stop and think with me for a moment, why would Christ’s resurrected (glorified, perfect, heavenly) body have holes in it?

Not to mention, holes that are specifically the marks of His suffering which are directly related to our sins? They weren’t just holes in His body while he hung on the cross, they were infected holes, poisoned with our sin.

Wouldn’t it make more sense that Jesus’s glorified body would have nothing on it that would call to mind our sin or His suffering on the cross? Why wouldn’t Christ’s resurrected body be spotless, free of all blemishes? Why wouldn’t His body be more like Adam's, restored to a pre-fall, Edenic state? After all, Eden is where humans were originally made in His image.

A few of the most common answers for why Christ’s resurrected body has the marks of His suffering are, 1. The holes are hard evidence this was actually Jesus, and His physical body had been raised from the dead and glorified, 2. The holes signify God’s love for us, they are a visual representation for the satisfactory payment of sin so we could be reconciled to God, and 3. They show Christ is a suffering Savior and He identifies with our suffering; He suffers with us and for us. All of these are true and good answers.

However, I’m not sure they tell us everything.

I am not sure Christ really needed the holes to prove it was Him in His glorified, human body. He first identifies Himself to Mary at the tomb by simply speaking her name (John 20:11-18). And Jesus eating the fish in Luke 24:42-43 shows that His resurrected body is clearly a human body.

The holes do clearly signify the deep love God has for us, and also that He suffers with us and for us. Yes and amen. I do not want to take anything away from that.

But could there be more going on here?

Can the holes in Christ’s glorified body provide deeper answers, meaning, or hope to two of our oldest, most difficult questions, problems, and sources of doubt? Can they speak to why we must have the problems of pain and evil?

Let’s pause and go back to the very beginning, before the fall, as God’s cosmic intentions were first unfolding, and consider Christ’s glorified body in the context of the entire Biblical story.

In the beginning, God made new and good things out of nothing, which is an inconceivable display of supernatural and miraculous power, something only an all-powerful, all-knowing God could do. But this of course wasn’t the end of the story. Adam and Eve sinned and humanity fell, and those shiny, new people that God created were now stained with sin and stuck with death. If the world were to go on, something had to happen; this fall demanded a solution. Right then and there, the solution was initiated. God promised that He would fix this.

Much later, Christ comes as God in the flesh to fulfill all the promises of God (2 Corinthians 1:20); to live a perfect life and die a shameful death as an acceptable payment for our sins.

But if we pay attention, we’ll see in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, something new is happening. This is without a doubt the same God from the Old Testament who was there when the foundation of the world was being laid (Ephesians 1:4), but He seems to be expressing a part of His character and power in a new way.

As the whole of the biblical narrative unfurls (Creation, Fall, Redemption, Glory) we see the culmination of the narrative is Christ’s resurrection. This brings us back again to John 20, where we discover Jesus’s glorified body still has the marks of His suffering.

But what do they tell us about His ultimate, sovereign plan, and our fall into sin?

Here it is: the holes in Christ’s resurrected body tell us that from before the very beginning, God knew he would ultimately, and most astonishingly, display His glory and power through the redemption of sin.

Back to our original question, “why would an all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly-loving God allow humans to fall into sin and suffer?” Because as God was laying the foundation of the world, He knew that redeeming sinners and restoring a totally broken world would be the most amazing way to unleash His redemptive power, and reveal His infinite glory.

If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly-loving, and also completely sovereign, then we must embrace the possibility that He knew, from the very beginning, we would fall into sin. As mentioned earlier, I can appreciate that this is an incredibly difficult possibility.

But stay with me, if He is good and He knew we would fall into sin, there must have been a higher end; a truer, more ultimate purpose in His mind that was even bigger and more beautiful than creation in the beginning.

Look again at the holes in Christ’s resurrected hands and tell me which is more impressive: a new hand that never had holes? Or the ability to completely wash the sin-soaked and death-stained holes and restore the hand? Is it more impressive to make a new body from dust, or to take a bloody, broken, sin-soaked body and redeem it into a glorified, heavenly one?

Both creation and redemption are without a doubt clear displays of God’s singular, divine power. In no way are they opposed to each other. In a way, they compliment or mirror each other; creation= making new things, redemption= making things new.

But does Christ leaving these marks on His glorified body reveal something new is happening?

Is there a new creation taking place?

A New Creation

The holes in Christ’s glorified body are a signal that this story in Luke and John is a new creation story. And this new creation story isn’t simply about restoring creation back to its original condition. It is about much, much more.

Look again at Luke 24. The portion I quoted above ends with verse 43 where Jesus eats the fish. The very next verse 24:44 starts an articulation of The Great Commission, often understood as a fulfillment of The Cultural Mandate in Genesis 1:28-31.

Christ is the “last Adam” (1 Corinthians 15:45). The one in which human beings are recreated. Because of Christ’s obedience, we can be reconciled to the Father. And as R. C. Sproul once wrote “the believer’s spiritual union with Christ is nothing less than participation in ‘the new creation.’”

Recall the creation of Adam in Genesis 2:7, “Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”

Now look at John 20 verse 22, “And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

Union with Christ; the new creation.

All of this calls to mind God’s original creation story, and more specifically His original dwelling place, Eden. In Jonty Rhodes’ book “Reformed Worship” he says,

“The first temple in the bible isn’t built with human hands. No, the first meeting place between God and man is in the Garden of Eden. Here, God ‘walks in the cool of the day’ (Gen. 3:8). In fact, the garden is described in very temple-like language. Or, rather, the tabernacle and temple that come later are depicted as miniature Eden’s. The temple curtain, guarding the way to the inner sanctum where God’s footstool -the ark of the covenant- rested, had cherubim sewn into it. Why? Because the Garden of Eden was guarded by cherubim. The candlestick in the Holy Place is shaped like a tree, and the temple is decorated with pomegranates and fruit, again to remind the worshipper of the original meeting place between God and His people. The tabernacle had to be set up with the entrance on the east, just as the garden has its entrance on the east (Gen. 3:24).”

In John 20 when Christ breathes on the disciples and says “receive the Holy Spirit” He is filling His new temple with the presence of God. One of the new promises of the new covenant is that it is not longer the Garden of Eden, the tabernacle, or the temple where God will dwell, but we the Church, Christ’s body, are now the temple and dwelling place of God (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).

The holes in Christ’s body in this new creation story are a sign to us that redemption is the fulfillment of creation. They tell us that redemption, from the very beginning, was the way God would ultimately and most clearly display His power and love, and how He would be most glorified.

Christ’s glorified body and this new creation story says something unthinkably profound about us. That through redemption, God is rewriting our creation story, we are being recreated. And one day, we will not only be free from all sin and death, we will be remade into a glorious temple, a beautiful place for God to dwell.

End

Though Jesus’s resurrected body has the marks of His suffering, we don’t know if the same will be true for our resurrected bodies. We also don’t know if, like Jesus with His disciples, we will identify one another in heaven by similar marks on our heavenly bodies. I think this story in John and Luke along with 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, Galatians 6:17, Philippians 3:20-21, and 1 Corinthians 15:42-29 give us hints that both could be true, but we can’t be sure.

What we can be sure of is that “… if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to Himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:17-18).

Back to our original question, “why would an all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly-loving God allow humans to fall into sin and suffer?”

Because it was always about redemption, from the very beginning to the very end.

What do the holes in Christ’s resurrected body say to our deepest, most difficult questions about pain and evil?

That there is hope to be found in the person and work of Jesus Christ, because since before the creation of all things, He was and is The Great Redeemer who says, “Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5).

---

“Suffering in Christianity is not only not meaningless, it is ultimately one of the most powerful mediums for the transmission of meaning. We can stand in adoration between the cross, and kneel and kiss the wood that bore the body of our savior, because this is the means by which the ugly, meaningless, atheistic suffering of the world (the problem of evil) was transmuted into the living water, the blood of Christ, the wellspring of creation. The great paradox here is that the tree of death and suffering is the tree of life. This central paradox in Christianity allows us to love our own brokenness precisely because it is through that brokenness that we image the broken body of our God, and the highest expression of divine love... that God in some sense wills it to be so seems evident in Gethsemane: Christ prays “not my will, but thine be done“ and when God‘s will is done it involves the scourge and the nails. It’s also always struck me as particularly fitting and beautiful that when Christ is resurrected his body is not returned to the state of perfection, as the body of Adam in Eden, but rather it still bears the marks of his suffering and death, and indeed that it is precisely through these marks that he is known by Thomas.”

-Melinda Selmys

---

Thank you so much for reading. If you read this and have a thought, please leave a comment here or email me (below). I would love to hear your thoughts.

jeffreycharlescaldwell@gmail.com

---