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VBVMI Staff
Did Jesus resurrect Himself from death, or did God raise Jesus from the dead?
When we come to respect the mystery of the Trinity, we will be quick to see that we will never fully understand how God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit work separately, yet completely together. This will continue to baffle any human this side of Heaven. However, the scriptures do shed some light on specific roles of each Person of the Godhead but also shows how each works simultaneously.
Paul says in v.11 that the Spirit is responsible for the resurrection of Jesus. Yet we must understand that this is also the Spirit of Christ working in and through Christ's body, in complete obedience to the will of the Father. Therefore, all three Persons are at work in the resurrection.
Furthermore, we have Jesus professing His authority to lay down and raise up His own body:
The Father loves the Son because the Son takes upon Himself this task of dying for the sins of mankind and then bringing His lifeless body to life again, defeating death once for all. Jesus says He lays His life down so that He may take it up again. In other words, Jesus is revealing not only the necessity of His death but also His coming resurrection. By this act Jesus' death saves us from our sins BUT it was His resurrection that made possible our glorification into a new body.
Finally, Jesus’ act of dying a sacrificial death on our behalf did not make Him a victim nor does it mean Jesus was less powerful than His enemies. On the contrary, Jesus says He lays His own life down of His own initiative. The word initiative is important to understanding what Jesus is saying about His death; the word in Greek is emautou, which is a compound word meaning “of myself .” By choosing this word Jesus explains that He lays down His life of Himself, therefore, everything about this event came from Jesus.
He decided it would happen from before the foundations of the world, He decided the way it would happen, He decided the time it would happen, He decided who would accuse Him, who would condemn Him, and how He would die.
Remember His words to Pontius Pilate:
Jesus placed Himself on that cross, aligning Himself to the Fathers will, worked out by the Spirit.
Moreover, Galatians points to the resurrection being that of the Father:
Again, more proof to show the Godhead is working in unison to bring forth salvation to those who believe.
From the Biblical text gathered we are confident to say that God raised Jesus from the dead, acting with the Son and Spirit in triune nature. While we cannot fully comprehend the Trinity in this life, scripture clearly teaches that God is three Persons in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, yet is also One God. Scripture will also, at times, refer to the Persons of the Trinity interchangeably. An example is the Spirit of Christ in Romans and 1 Peter which clearly refers to Jesus and the Holy Spirit as One:
Jesus even says that He and the Father are One in John 10:30:
How is this possible? Again, we don’t know, but we will all know when we meet our glorious God in heaven.
To say plainly we are chosen by the Father, reconciled through the Son, all by the Spirit.
Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. www.lockman.org