It’s Good Friday and we know that death must precede resurrection. This is how I understood the principle…

“Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.” ~ Martin Luther. 

Once, in Australia, I stumbled across a dead hummingbird on a walk in the morning sun. It’s feet were tucked quietly under its belly and the green iridescence of its top feathers was still shimmering. I cried.

I cried because something beautiful was dead. I had a similar reaction when Princess Diana died, when 911 happened, when Notre Dame burned, and when my grandmother went on to be with Jesus.

Death strikes the chord of grief. It marshals in feelings of loss, hopelessness, despair, and darkness. It confronts the living with finality. As we look at scripture, we see a reiterated biblical principle of death and resurrection as found in the stories of Jonah, Lazarus, and the ultimate culmination in Jesus’ own death and resurrection.

This principle teaches us that death precedes resurrection. Things must die before they can be raised up in new life again.

This principle teaches us that death precedes resurrection. Things must die before they can be raised up in new life again.

Resurrection is a word used to describe something that has been brought back to life and comes from the Latin word, resurgere, meaning to “rare up again, lift oneself, be restored/rebuilt, revive” and also to “rise/appear again.” The implication can be both literal and metaphorical. People come back to life. Broken relationships are restored. Long-held dreams are revived.

We see this cycle of death in God’s created order everyday. John 12:24 (NIV) says, “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”

Just like the seed falls to the ground, sometimes in our own lives, we must allow things to fall away and die, so that God can resurrect them and breathe new life back into them in his timing. We must allow ourselves to experience the darkness of those seasons, just like the seed under the soil, so that we can fully embrace the light of life again.

In Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller says, “Sometimes the path of joy winds through a dark valley.”

In Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller says, “Sometimes the path of joy winds through a dark valley.” Good Friday preceded Sunday. The journey towards resurrection is through a dark valley.

I know this to be true in my own life and I’m sure you do as well. The darker the season, the brighter the light and joy feels at the end. Sometimes the darkness is the death that we feel - the graveyard where our hopes and dreams have gone to die.

And yet, hopelessness, death, and grief is sometimes just the beginning of a new life cycle. God is at work through death.

In 2021, I launched a new public ministry endeavour, and three months later, I felt God calling me to take everything off the table and go back into a simple season with him alone. Everything public had to be pulled - ie. my dreams had to die. But in that time of incubation, quiet and dark, as I sat filling my heart with his Word, he awakened dead dreams and breathed fresh life into them, charting out a new course for my future. That path is the one I’m walking today, and the one where in all my years, I’ve felt most alive in his purposes.

Sometimes things have to die in order to come back to new life in God’s full purposes. Look at Jesus. He used death to defeat death, so that we could live,

How have you experienced resurrection in your own life? What things have you had to let fall away and die, in order for God to raise them up again in his purposes and his timing?