Who moved the stone

I just want to say thank you to folk who have worked hard during these last few days, and not least to the Flower Power group in the TAB, both men and women, who help us to keep this sanctuary looking so beautiful, and behind me particularly, bringing out the significance of these two great events, which are part and parcel, as I mentioned a few moments ago, of the same thing, the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, the blood that he shed, the body that was broken, the mighty resurrection that first Easter Sunday morning depicted by the tableau on my left and your right. We are so grateful for those who have helped with the singing and those who helped me earlier on in services throughout this week. This is the seventh or eighth service that we've had over Easter, and we're so grateful to God for the freshness of the message.

I as a preacher delight in speaking on the cross of our Lord Jesus and working out afresh the implications of the resurrection. Let me bring to you a quote from a man that I knew some years ago. He was a colleague of Enoch Powell, and he was a great classicist, as was Powell, and he's now with the Lord, E. M. Blakelock.

He was professor of classics in the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and this is what he had to say. If the bones of Christ lie somewhere in Palestine, there too lies the Christian faith, the Christian hope, and all that brought vitality to a dying disillusioned age. But the Christian need not torment intelligence, abandon reason, or mistake myth for history if he continues to base faith in all that flows in steadying strength from faith on the conviction that those who saw the linen clothes lying were witnesses of God's clear, strong sign to men that life is not darkness to the core.

If the bones of Christ lie somewhere in Palestine, there too lies the Christian faith. But that's not the case. The record makes it so very, very clear.

I've never really been able to understand so-called liberal scholars who question in any way the literal nature of the resurrection of Jesus. Let me give you some rapid quotes to add to what you've already had this evening from Scripture. Here in Matthew's Gospel in 27th chapter, tucked away at the end, is the security measures that those who were against Jesus, the religious mafia, took as they were in conniving swith in collusion with the Roman militia.

The next day, verse 62, one after preparation, the chief priest of the Pharisees went to Pilate. He was the boss. Sir, they said, we remember that while he, Jesus, was alive, that deceiver said, after three days I'll rise again.

So give the order for the tomb to be made secure until the third day, otherwise his disciples may come and steal the body and tell people that he has been raised from the dead. And this last deception, this was almost prophetic, though, skip the word deception and put something else in, this last miracle will be greater, or as they put it, will be worse than the first. So Pilate says, okay, mount security yourselves, and I'll also give you an additional guard.

Now you move across to Luke's Gospel, Luke written by a doctor who's very concerned about detail, and he makes reference to what happened as far as the women folk were concerned when they came into the tomb of the Lord Jesus. And they're told that he's not there, he is alive. But verse three particularly, when they, the women, entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus.

They didn't find the body. And yet the tomb had been made so secure. So you flip over to John's Gospel, and just backtracking to the 19th chapter where reference is made to the final hours of the life of Jesus before crucifixion came to its dreadful culmination, and it says that one of the soldiers pierced Jesus' side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water.

But that's just a little aside, I'll come onto that in a moment or two. And then drop down to the 20th chapter, and you've got Simon Peter with John, they go jogging, run towards the tomb, having heard from the Simon Peter, who was behind him, arrived and went into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus' head.

The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen. So you put that lot together and what do you find? Well, you find that the Scriptures are emphasizing that the tomb of Jesus was not just open, but the body had gone. So who stole it? Who opened the sepulchre? Now, get away from Broadwater Cemetery, the Offington Roundabout Cemetery, get away from the crematorium, that you've got to imagine a cave that's been man-hewn.

In other words, it's not a natural cave. And just by the cave, there's a little channel, and it's on a slope. And over against the entrance to the cave, there's a whacking great stone.

We're not talking about pounds, we're talking about tons. And that stone is propped up by a wedge. And when, because this was the grave of a very wealthy man, when the grave has been entered and a body has been put in, and the wedge is shifted, the stone rolls back and covers the entrance to the grave.

Now that, if you've imagined it, is a scene of the death of Jesus. And that stone is rolled back, the grave is empty, and Jesus' body is nowhere to be found. So the question is, who did it? Who moved the stone? Who took the body? Now, forget all this notion that the Jewish authorities were careless, they're anything but.

Forget the notion that the Roman police were treating this matter with a greater leniency than it deserved. I mean, Palestine, as it was called then, was as hot a potato as Northern Ireland is today. And there was a red alert on, this was a religious feast and the Jews were not containable as a community at this time, so you got more soldiers in Jerusalem than ever.

The idea of someone saying that they were a Caesar and possibility of a kingdom and so on and so forth, that would alert the suspicion of Pilate, who knows that the Jewish religious leaders are ruffled, and so the whole thing would be a security high spot as far as he's concerned, for Pilate is already in trouble with Caesar and he doesn't want any further political difficulties. Now look, if the stone was not moved as a result of a divine miracle and Jesus's body was not raised equally supernaturally, then man or woman, I charge you, in the name of intellect, in the name of your reasoning powers, answer this question. Who or what caused the Christian church to cotton on to this remarkable idea that someone actually came back from the dead? Now the individual who suggested that what really happened was that Jesus did not die, he swooned, went unconscious, should be shipped to some sort of mental asylum and checked out because really the evidence will not allow for that whatsoever.

I mean the very flagellation, the beating of Jesus, the Roman whips, 40 lashes save one, it killed the majority of people and sent strong men mad and Jesus endured that. Then they put him on a cross and if that were not enough, right at the end, unnecessarily at the human level, but necessary as far as the predictions of Scripture are concerned, the soldier gets his javelin and sends it to pierce the heart of Jesus and from his body a mixture of blood and water flow. Now how in the name of sanity could someone in that condition come to life and shift a stone and in his bloodstained condition make his way out from that garden, find some security, recuperate and then convince the rest of his disciples that actually he'd beaten death.

Cast it on one side, it's utter rubbish. Well, here's another guy by the name of Renan, he's a French philosopher working in the 18th century, 19th century. Renan said, the world groaned to find itself presented with a God as a result of a hallucinated woman.

Well that was a very nice comment to make about women to start with, was it? I mean what he has in mind was the incident that we looked at this morning, Mary Magdalene who goes into the garden and she's very upset, that's true, she's crying and Renan comes along and with his philosophical stroke, psychological bent says, well what really happened is that she imagined, oh he's the gardener and it really was the gardener but she got it wrong and this hallucinated woman went back, convinced these skeptical disciples and in turn convinced another hundred people and then convinced another 500 people and all these people on block at some stage also had a similar experience as she did. In the history of hypnotherapy let alone in the history of psychology as it tracks hallucination, it is a well-known fact that no two people can have the same hallucination, let alone 500 on one occasion. You can dump that into the river of forgetfulness with the same alacrity with which you dumped the first.

And then there was the idea, the idea that these disciples, they got together and they decided that they would steal the body of Jesus. Now this was the earliest option put forward, Matthew's gospel tells you the Jewish authorities, they're so concerned, they have a seal put on the tomb, they have a guard and when the body is not to be found, if you read on in that chapter, you find that they bribe the guards who illogically are asked to state, when we were asleep, the disciples came and they stole the body. If they were asleep, how did they know it was the disciples? I mean, the evidence itself wouldn't stand up in Chichester Crown Court, let alone, how do you explain psychologically frightened disciples who've gone away like rabbits? The Garden of Gethsemane, when the soldiers came along and arrested Jesus.

These men who are so disillusioned that they speak in the past tense of him who had been their Lord, we had hoped that this had been the man who would have set up his kingdom, past tense. That these men would concoct a scheme where they'd have to be so brave as to slide past some of the cracked soldiers of the praetorian guard and get to the stone moved and then get the body and then what do you do with a body? I mean, what would be the point? Think it through, men and women, I ask you again in the name of common sense, think it through. These were ordinary working class folk, your garage hand equivalent of today.

Your man who's running his business. These were ordinary folk who are not gullible. Why should they do something like this? It just, it is utter nonsense.

So you put these theories together and you can add a few more. When you've gone through them one by one, as I tried to prove some years ago at a university and a mission in England, you are driven to the conclusion that there is no other explanation for the empty tomb and the absence of the body than that God, some supernatural force, miraculously intervened. Well, if you think that's too sweeping a statement to make, think it through more.

I mean, Jerusalem is nowhere near as populated as it is today, but there were a few thousand people there. The three main Jerusalem. Remember that this event is one of the most staggering problems that Pontius Pilate has to face.

His credibility is on the line. His relationship with Caesar, to which I'll not go into, was already very, very precarious. The last thing he wants, like a hole in the head, is some further difficulty from the Jews on the part of some carpenter from Nazareth who's already provoked his own curiosity for Pilate as a sort of superstitious man.

The last thing he wants is for some notion to go around that this man has been miraculously raised from the dead. He doesn't want the Jewish authorities to be offended. He doesn't want problems in the Roman province of Palestine.

So what does he do? Well, what do the police do in Northern Ireland time and time again? They put up roadblocks. There's only three roadblocks to check. Jerusalem is not that populated.

It's fairly easy for him to go around and have checks taken. Once the body's found, then his piece de resistance is to get that bloody decaying corpse, excuse the expressions, but it has to be said in stark reality, and impair it on some stick, on some pole, maybe outside the temple. That would have been attractive to Pontius Pilate's tastes.

There's your man. You see, that would have satisfied the Jewish high priesthood as well. This man from Nazareth, he's come back, go and have a look at him.

You see, it was for the benefit of the Romans, their military force in Palestine, it was for the benefit of the religious leaders, the Jews, to work in tandem, to find the body of Jesus, to expose that body, and once and for all, they would put to flight these ridiculous, absurd notions that this peasant from Galilee had come back. But they couldn't find the body. They couldn't find the body, and they couldn't get an explanation as to what had happened.

Now, those are the enemies of Jesus, but what about the friends? Well, Peter, we've already, in that sort of semi-humorous little scene in the reading and the comments before, we've already seen that he's done an about-turn. I mean, he was blaspheming Jesus, and not just blaspheming him. He used the worst possible terminology.

This man, he's not susceptible for conversion, for an about-turn at this point. The disciples, they're meeting in locked rooms. Why? Well, to give it to you in the Latin, they have they have engaged in what is known as a religio illicita, an illegal religion.

And though they would not be crucified, they could be stoned to death. And Jesus, their hope had been eclipsed. He'd been taken from them.

They don't want to die unnecessarily. Now, what explains their turnabout? What about Thomas? Cynical? Skeptical? You can't get anyone who's more cynical than Thomas. Let's go to Jerusalem, that we may die with him.

That's the helpful comment that he makes just a few weeks before Jesus does leave from Bethany and go into Jerusalem. These men were anything but pawns or clay in the hands of somebody who wanted to shift them or to mold their convictions. What changed them? What changed them? One of the great proofs of the empty tomb, one of the great proofs of the resurrection is that the church exists.

Hey, when did Jews go to the church? Let's put it in Judaistic theology. When do Jews worship God? In these days, on a Saturday. The Saturday is the Jewish Sabbath.

It was a culture that was embedded in Judaism for centuries. But that which was born from Judaism, the Christian church, has as its holy day Sunday. Why? The first day of the week commemorating the resurrection of Jesus.

I love Easter Sunday, but there's a sense in which every Sunday is an Easter Sunday because every Sunday recollects the day when Jesus was brought back from the dead. There's a seismic shift. You see, Paul, John, James, Thomas, you name them, they're Jews.

They were soaked in Judaism, but they're meeting the first day of the week. Why the first day of the week? Because, well, that commemorates when Jesus was raised from the dead. I believe that the greatest intellect next to Jesus Christ in our world was the Apostle Paul, an incisive mind, if ever there was one.

Reared in Tarsus, educated in Jerusalem, the man who would take over from Gamaliel, who was the chief theologian of those days. And this man, this bigoted man, who hated the Christian community because they thought that they may pollute Judaism, he has turned around a literal Damascus Road experience so powerful that that very terminology has been incorporated into the English language so that we all know what is meant by Damascus Road experience. I once remember in the Crown Court in Chichester, forgive me, I guess I've quoted this before, but not all of you will have heard this.

I once remember in a sort of pussyfooting type of way, trying to convince a judge that the guy in the dock, although he was guilty, had changed. He'd gone through a discipleship class and so on and so forth, and I thought that the judge should deal leniently with him and perhaps entrust him to our pastoral care. And I did everything to miss evangelical terminology.

And I'd done all my sort of circumlocutions, I'd used every word that I could think of, instead of the one that I really needed to use. The judge peered over me with his glasses and he said, What you mean, Reverend, is this? He's had a Damascus Road experience. I said, Yes, Your Honor, and the barristers were falling apart at that point.

It was quite funny. The first time I've seen laughter in Chichester Crown Court, but then I don't go that often. Let me hasten to it.

Here's Paul, and he changes. Why does he change? He's not going to commit intellectual suicide, neither is he going to commit professional suicide. He's changed because he believes that the one who stopped him on the Damascus Road is none other than Jesus Christ, whose earthly ministry was occupied in preaching for three years the truth of the gospel, which Paul embraces.

Put all that lot together, and what are you left with? Well, the easiest thing, the most obvious solution is to believe what the New Testament tells you. Jesus Christ, born of a virgin, crucified under the procurator's weld stove, Pilate was procurator, was raised from the dead three days later, and made himself known to womenfolk and to his disciples and to 500 people over a period of 40 days, and then was taken back to where he'd come from in the first instance in order to speak into heaven as to what had been achieved on earth so that he who became man might as man represent us before God and say that the blood that he had shed, the punishment that he had gone through would pay the price for your sin, for my sin. That's the simple gospel of Jesus Christ as I understand it.

I'm just about through. One of the great followers of our Lord was his beloved disciple, John. John, who was the one exception and present at the cross.

John probably lived longer than any of the others, and he starts to write letters. The final book of the Bible came from the pen of John, the book of Revelation, but he wrote some letters, three letters actually. One's very short, the second one is a bit longer, but the first one is the longest.

And in the first one he says, speaking of Jesus, that which we have seen with our eyes and which our hands have handled. And he's not talking about Jesus before the crucifixion. He's talking about Jesus after the crucifixion.

It was no spook. It was no ghost. He doesn't understand the resurrection form of the body of the Lord Jesus, but John will tell you that Jesus did come back.

He was seen. He was handled, not only by Mary, but also by others, by Thomas, who Jesus says, come and put your finger into the print made by the nails and thrust your fist into the side. If you want empirical evidence, if you want it scientifically proven to you, Thomas, then come and handle me.

But Thomas, blessed are those who don't want empirical proof, who can hear the authority of the gospel as it's proclaimed down the years and will understand that this message is accurate. One of the favorite experiments that we used to do when I was a kid at school, in my grammar school in Sheffield, was to get a piece of paper in the science lab. In fact, I meant to get this and do this as an experiment now, but I forgot.

And we get some iron filings, okay? We've often done this, some of you kids in the galleries. You sprinkle the iron filings on a piece of paper and to quote a northern expression, they're higgledy-piggledy. They fall all over the place.

There's no pattern to them at all. Then you get a magnet. Now, you'd be a dummy if you put the magnet on top because all the iron filings would shoot to the magnet.

But use a bit of savvy and put the magnet underneath. What happens? The iron filings go to a magnetic pattern. There is form, there is symmetry, there is design because there's a power underneath that is employing its influence.

I see the disciples before the resurrection of Jesus have been like iron filings scattered. There's no form, there's no symmetry, there's no cohesion, there's no conviction. They're just scared.

But Jesus comes back. And when you start to read the Acts of the Apostles, you come across men who've been changed. Peter, who begins to preach, so he never went to a theological college.

You get James and John. And even the brother of Jesus, who wasn't one of the 12, is converted. You know, my brother knows more about me than I wish he did.

You know what elder brothers are like. I mean, he knows me as I am. It's hard to deceive within a family circle.

James, the blood brother of Jesus, who rejected Jesus with his brothers and sisters during Jesus' public ministry, becomes the bishop, the leader of the church in Jerusalem. And pens one of the final books in the New Testament. How did brother James convert? Because he was convinced that brother Jesus was different.

The Son of God. The Son of God. William, the conqueror.

News went out on one battle that he'd been killed. And his soldiers were disillusioned. And they were about to retreat.

William realized what had happened. So he takes a running jump, lands on his horse, and gets the horse full speed to go right into amongst his troops. And he says, I'm alive! I'm alive! I'm alive! And as a result, his troops took fresh heart.

And together with William, they conquered. Jesus came back and he said, I'm alive. I'm alive.

And that ramshackle mob, Peter and the rest, duplicated to 120, put them all together. They took heart, and empowered by the Spirit, they made an impact on the society of their day, which was unbelievable. The repercussions, like the ripples on the pond, they're with us today in the 20th century.

Who moved the stone? God Almighty in sovereign power had that stone moved. Who brought Jesus back from the dead? The Father. Why was it necessary to twin the resurrection with Calvary? So that we will know by the blood of Jesus Christ we have been saved.

By His resurrection we are justified. And Jesus returned into heaven, and He pleads the course of you and me who have confessed Him, and said, Father, that part of the family, the family for whom I died, my people, prepared for an eternity, a new heaven and a new earth, which is yet to come. Brothers and sisters, affirm that.

Those of you who are not Christian at this moment, embrace this truth. Confess Him as your Lord. Confess Him as your Savior.

One of the things I said this morning about life in New Testament times was just a reminder that we moderns are not necessarily that much more intellectual than people who lived 2,000 years ago. In fact, one could argue that the reverse may be the case. The idea that people in those days were so gullible that they take everything in is really quite absurd.

There are atheists, there are agnostics in those days. Rome talked about its gods and so did Greece, but particularly in Rome, well, apart from allegiance to the emperor, a lot of people questioned the gods and the whole idea of Greek mythology and Roman mythology and so on and so forth. It's not true to say that people were gullible, more gullible than they are today.

Probably about equal. Maybe we're a bit more gullible now than we were or they were then. I don't know.

But we'll settle for about average. When you come to the Gospels, you actually do meet ordinary people who do a real turnabout in terms of where they were at in convictions. Not everyone believed immediately.

They had to fight their way to faith. They sifted the evidence and they used reason as well as responding to the emotional influence of the Holy Spirit upon their lives. I'd like to introduce you to a guy called Suetonius.

He's a little bit of a cynic. And he's going to read from the account of Paul who actually tells us how many people he knows of who witnessed the resurrection of Jesus. Hi, Suetonius.

Come and have a surprise surprise that it should be you. Surprise indeed. A little reading you've got for us.

Right, okay. Paul wrote this in his letter to the Corinthians. Jesus appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.

Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, some of whom are dead. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.

For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God, I am what I am, and his grace towards me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that was with me.

So Paul is reckoning there that, and the rest of the chapter, that if Jesus Christ did not come back, that at least four or five things follow. I wonder what that means today. Faith is valueless.

Well, in that case, you should sell the tab to Sainsbury's, or Rupert Murdoch, or turn it into another nightclub. Might as well. All the witnesses in the New Testament were deceivers.

Yes, right. Hand out the Oscars. One each for Peter, best actor, James, best supporting actor, John, Thomas, Mary, the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, James, the brother of Jesus, and I forgot, Paul as well.

But why Paul? Because he just deceived more than the rest of them, really. He did very well. He should get four Oscars.

One for the Archbishop of Canterbury too. Why him? Well, best looking actor. I don't know, he's just a really nice guy.

I mean, he does a nice job. Could have done a better job, perhaps, managing Brighton and Hove Albion, because they need a bit of saving. Let's just do a review of that.

So, if faith is valueless, sell the tab to Sainsbury's, or Murdoch, or someone. All the witnesses are deceivers? Give them all Oscars. Give them Oscars as well, but give them Oscars.

Prepare that. Then men are still sinners. That means everybody will need a psychiatrist.

To deal with the problem. Precisely. The dead rot.

Bernard Russell was right. Because he reckoned he'd rot. And he did.

You know. I know, I've checked. So put that lot together and life is meaningless.

Yeah, that's right, that's pretty true. In which case, I think you should stop the train, because I want to get off. That's a good point to your lead.

Thank you for coming this evening. Thank you very much. Well, Suetonius the cynic, but many cynics and sceptics did convert.

One of the most astonishing turnabouts was a man who was a fisherman. And Peter's dropped in this evening from 2,000 years ago. He might look like someone that some of you have met recently.

Tell us a little bit about yourself, Peter, because we suddenly find that you've become a preacher, but your profession's a fisherman. Give us a little breakdown of where you're at and where you came from. All right.

Well, I protested my absolute loyalty to Jesus. Others might let him down, all the disciples, for instance, but not me, Peter, bold Peter. But I, Peter the terrible, became Peter the terrified.

I denied Jesus when questioned three times by servants. One was just a young girl. I denied I knew him.

And I used the most, well, I used the worst swear words I could think of to make the point clear. But now listen to me, 40 days later, speaking about Jesus to a crowd of 3,000 people plus, 300 people, and remember, I never went to London Bible College, nor Moreland's, nor London Theological Ceremony, nor Worthingstown College. I was never trained to preach.

I, well, I just got on with it. As we all know, anyone can preach if they want to. Well, give us a bit of your preaching.

Okay, just off the top of my head? Well, no. Okay. A bit deeper now.

All right. Men of Israel, listen to this. Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders, and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know.

This man was handed over to you by God's set purpose and foreknowledge, and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him. David said about him, I saw the Lord always before me, because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken.

Therefore, my heart is glad, and my tongue rejoices. My body also will live in hope, because you will not abandon me to the grave, nor will you let your Holy One see decay. You have made known to me the paths of life.

You will fill me with joy in your presence. Thanks very much. That's not bad for a starter, is it? No.

Thank you, Peter. Let's indicate our pleasure at listening to him. You don't have to read between the lines, but you do have to read the Gospel account carefully to recognize the value of women in the ministry of Jesus, something that is not always appreciated by the evangelical church.

Let's call a woman up, a lady up, to just take part. Maybe you've got some statement to make about womenfolk in the days of Jesus. The evidence of a woman in those chauvinistic days was not accepted as legally binding.

Jesus didn't share the masculine bias. He had women followers. They became supremely important at the cross and in the garden.

A handful came to anoint the body on Easter Sunday morning. They were the first to see that the tomb had been opened. They ran back to the disciples, but men, typical, didn't believe them.

Let's hear more. On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus.

While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. In their fright, the women bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He has risen.

Remember how he told you while he was still with you in Galilee, The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, be crucified, and on the third day be raised again. Then they remembered his words. When they came back from the tomb, they told all these things to the eleven and to the others.

It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them who told this to the apostles. But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense. Thanks very much.

They didn't believe the women. So you can strip from any motion that you may have locked into your mind that this bunch in the New Testament times were easily led on. I mean, what was being referred to then was not the ordinary, casual Tom, Dick or Ruben on the streets of Jerusalem.

I mean, this bunch to whom the women went were none other than the disciples of Jesus. They'd been with him for three years. And yet what the women had to say seemed like utter nonsense.

Interesting to bear that in mind, isn't it? Geoff, you and Ruth were practicing something I very much appreciated earlier on this particular event. Would you like to come and sing it and then lead the congregation in a couple more songs? This song is called Bruised, Beaten and Cast Aside. It basically tells the story of Easter.

Bruised, beaten and cast aside What they did wasn't justified This man did nothing wrong at all We should get what our deeds deserve In his last words it was heard For him to say it is finished He took it upon himself To die for us and to set us free He lived and died for you and me And he came back to life again He was recognized when he broke the bread He fulfilled all that was written You only have to look at the holes in his hands And his feet, the bones on his brow The blood that was spilled The people that wept in the darkness That fell on the land But he rose up He entered the glory He shone the way to the kingdom of God Our God is in paradise And we'll be right there by his side One day he'll return to take us home And while we wait let's celebrate Worship him and proclaim his name He is supreme, he is the king And he rose up He entered the glory He shone the way to the kingdom of God He is supreme, he is the king And he rose up He entered the glory He shone the way to the kingdom of God The kingdom of God Our God is in paradise And we'll be right there by his side One day he'll return to take us home And while we wait let's celebrate Worship him and proclaim his name He is supreme, he is the king La, la, la, la, la, la, la La, la, la, la, la, la, la