Without Christ’s resurrection, Christian hope disappears. Among many indispensable articles of our faith, Christ’s resurrection crowns the list. Part of the reason for its critical role is because we worship the risen Christ, who is God the Son in power with all authority in heaven and on earth (Rom. 1:4; Matt. 28:16–20). He is the risen, reigning king, and the truth claims of our religion come to naught if Christ is not the living God who conquered death (1 Cor. 15:17–19). So, Christ’s resurrection is crucial due to its significance as the historical foundation of our faith.

Christ’s resurrection is nonnegotiable also because of its theological significance. It is not only the historical foundation in the sense that our beliefs and practices flow downstream from when the apostles saw and proclaimed the risen Christ. It is also the reason that salvation comes to us and that we can trust God with full assurance. As Peter explains,

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. (1 Pet. 1:3–5, emphasis added)

The blessings of our new life in salvation and the guarantee of incorruptible life in glory all come through Christ’s resurrection.

This essay focuses on the two aspects of hope flowing from Christ’s resurrection that we have already highlighted. Our personal reception of Christ’s benefits, often called the “order of salvation” or ordo salutis, comes from how Christ earned those blessings for us. The fulfillment of all that God long promised his people that he would do, known as the “history of salvation” or historia salutis, comes to a head in Christ rising from the grave. Christ’s resurrection is pivotal for the ordo and historia salutis.

Both aspects of hope connect to our covenant theology. Christ earned those saving benefits for us specifically as the last Adam, the covenant head of all his people. Christ also fulfilled the promises that God had made throughout redemptive history to his covenant people. Christ’s resurrection is, then, the ground of covenant blessings and the fulfillment of covenant promises.

The Risen Christ as Guarantor of Covenant Blessings

Christ’s resurrection is God’s statement that his Son earned exalted status. Hence, we distinguish Christ’s humiliation and exaltation. Before rising from death, Christ endured his state of humiliation, as Westminster Shorter Catechism 27 explains: “Christ’s humiliation consisted in his being born, and that in a low condition, made under the law, undergoing the miseries of this life, the wrath of God, and the cursed death of the cross; in being buried, and continuing under the power of death for a time.” We should remember that Christ, as the Nicene Creed says, “for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven” to endure this humiliation. He did it for us.

Once Christ completed this suffering, he rose from death in exaltation. Reflecting upon the results of the Son assuming our nature and dying for us, Paul said,

Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Phil. 2:9–11)

Strikingly, Christ’s reception of this highest glory in this way came to him because he successfully passed through his state of humiliation and attained this state of glory for fulfilling the mission that the Father had given him. Why would that shift from humiliation to exaltation be necessary for our salvation?

When God created Adam, he covenanted with him to reward his perfect and personal obedience with everlasting, heavenly life for himself and his posterity. If Adam had not sinned and had kept the whole law, God would have granted him entry into new-creation existence. When Adam broke this covenant by sinning, he plunged us all into misery under God’s curse. We now owe God a twofold debt: a principal debt still to fulfill the law perfectly and an accrued penalty debt to endure the everlasting curse of death in this life and the next.

In this covenantal context, Christ came as the last Adam. He came to pay, through his work of humiliation, this twofold covenantal debt on our account. He fulfilled that covenant’s conditions to earn everlasting, heavenly life for us. This reality about how God created us to achieve this state of higher blessing is the focus on Paul’s reflection on creation’s relationship to the resurrection: “If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, ‘The first man Adam became a living being’; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit” (1 Cor. 15:44–45). The last Adam, Jesus Christ, gives spiritual life because he has done all that the first Adam—and we as Adam’s descendants—was supposed to do to obtain life in the new creation in deeper communion with God.

Jesus rose from death because he had fulfilled all these covenantal conditions for his people to enter this everlasting life. In this respect, his resurrection had twofold significance. First, it was God’s legal declaration that our new representative had fulfilled all righteousness and achieved the legal status needed for entry into the new creation. Christ “was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 1:4). By the resurrection, the Spirit legally declared the Son’s exalted status to have all authority in heaven and on earth. Commenting on the same reality, Paul explained, “God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory” (1 Tim. 3:16 KJV, emphasis added). The resurrection was a legal announcement that Christ satisfied the covenantal condition for righteousness and attained that legal status of being justified. Because he attained this righteousness, he was exalted unto glory. The resurrection demonstrated that, for us, he fulfilled every condition and satisfied every covenantal debt that his people owed to God.

Christ lived, died, and rose as the second Adam and, so, for us and for our salvation. Reflecting on how God counted Abraham’s faith to him as righteousness, Paul connects that truth to how our justification is bound into Christ’s resurrection: “It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Rom. 4:24–25). Jesus died to forgive the sins of his people and rose to prove that he had earned our justification—the declaration that we are righteous in God’s sight and have citizenship in heaven with the right to enter the new creation city (Phil. 3:20; Rev. 22:14).

Because Christ secured the legal ground to enter glorified life and has entered that blessed state as the forerunner of his people, we have full confidence that we will one day rise from death and be made like Christ in glorified life. Hebrews points to this certain hope of our entry into the holy places: “Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh” (Heb. 10:19–20). Moreover, so sure is our entry into glory that God has “made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:5–6, emphasis added). The new life we have in Christ means that our resurrection and life in glory is so sure that we can say we already have it. These blessings come to us from the risen Christ.

The risen Christ procured and grants these blessings that secure our future life with him but also pours the Spirit upon us now so that we experience a measure of that life in the age to come even in this age. This blessing is still connected directly to his role as our covenant representative. Having earned his resurrection glory by fulfilling the terms of the covenant for us, Christ gained new possession of the Spirit, whom he then gives to us: “Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing” (Acts 2:33). Since we have Christ’s righteousness imputed to us, we have right to new life in the Spirit. So, Christ gives us his Spirit to indwell us so that we might walk in newness of life as we wait to receive that life in full measure at the resurrection.

[God] saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. (Tit. 3:5–7)

We have hope because our salvation is grounded in Christ rising from death as the second Adam, our covenant representative who fulfilled everything we need to possess life.

The Risen Christ as God’s Fullest “Yes” and “Amen”

These blessings are also the fulfillment of all that God had promised to his people before Christ came. Christ’s resurrection is the high point in the story of God’s covenant people. As God made covenants with his people throughout redemptive history, he used those covenants to push history forward toward the culmination of his plan of salvation. Christ’s resurrection is the climax of that plan, fulfilling all God’s covenants.

Because Christ’s resurrection secures all the saving blessings that we considered above, it is the way that God fulfills all the covenants he had made with his people in the past. We already saw how Romans 1:4 shows Christ’s resurrection as the announcement that he has earned exaltation, which, as Paul just before explained, is linked to “the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning his Son” (Rom. 1:1–3). The gospel of the risen Christ fulfills all that old covenant Scripture. For this reason, “all the promises of God find their Yes in him. That is why it is through him that we utter our Amen to God for his glory” (2 Cor. 1:20). The story of all God’s covenants comes to its completion in Christ’s resurrection as he fulfilled all the covenantal conditions for us to enter life with him forever.

Hope in the resurrection gives evidence that we faithfully adhered to the teaching of the Old Testament, showing how the resurrection is the high point of Scripture’s covenantal drama. When Paul addressed Felix, the governor at Caesarea, he invoked the resurrection as the reason of his hope:

But this I confess to you, that according to the Way, which they call a sect, I worship the God of our fathers, believing everything laid down by the Law and written in the Prophets, having a hope in God, which these men themselves accept, that there will be a resurrection of both the just and the unjust. (Acts 24:14–15)

Paul worships “the God of our fathers,” referring to the Old Testament patriarchs, and believes everything written in the Old Testament Scriptures. This connection shows that Christ’s resurrection is the grand fulfillment of many things formerly promised.

Great Hope

Christ rose from death to secure salvation as the fulfillment of the story of redemption that God had been orchestrating across redemptive history. For those twin reasons, we have great hope. Because the story before us is that, since Christ rose from death as our champion, he will raise us with him: “we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep” (1 Thess. 4:13–14). As we celebrate Christ’s resurrection, we rest assured that we look forward to joining him in resurrection life forever. Great is our hope because Christ is risen and our covenantal communion with God is everlastingly secure.

The author is pastor of Oakland Hills Community Church in Farmington Hills, Michigan, and senior research fellow at the Craig Center for the Study of the Westminster Standards. New Horizons, April 2025.