The Easter season brings to all Christian Scientists renewed gratitude, as well as a quickened appreciation of what the life and example of Christ Jesus mean to them. This is especially true as we come to understand better the significance of the Master's culminating triumph over all evil, as witnessed in his crucifixion, his resurrection, and his ascension. These unparalleled incidents are for us the crowning evidence of man's indestructible and continuous identity. They give to you and me the irrefutable proof of individual permanency.
Paul in his first epistle to the Corinthians indicated that he was at that time meeting with scoffers and skeptics, doubters questioning the validity of the resurrection, for he said (15:14, 15): "If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not."
At the same time Paul also declared that to entertain merely a hope or belief in Christ can give little comfort or assurance of Life's continuity and of man's individual eternality, for he wrote (verse 19), "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable." And then, with a courage and confidence born of his spiritual understanding and conviction of Christ's sonship with God and that of all men as well, he said: "But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept. For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. But every man in his own order: Christ the first-fruits; afterward they that are Christ's at his coming."
