Hope in Times of Fear: The Resurrection and the Meaning of Easter

by Timothy J. Keller

The greatest threat to our hope for a better world is not the natural environment but the various evils that continually spring from the human heart.

that the resurrection, the Great Reversal, brings us both the power and the pattern for living life now connected to God’s future new creation.

The resurrection was indeed a miraculous display of God’s power, but we should not see it as a suspension of the natural order of the world. Rather it was the beginning of the restoration of the natural order of the world, the world as God intended it to be.

When a false identity is endangered, the result is always hostility.

when you create an identity by despising other groups, it makes you dependent in many ways on them. Ironically, the “other” becomes part of who you are. You need for them to stay in their place and to fit your stereotypes of them. And if something threatens your one-dimensional, negative view of them, it shakes your very foundations. This is what brought Cain to kill Abel, and why Peter responded violently as well. Their false identity was shaken, and rather than change it and give it another foundation, they lashed out at the people who were endangering

The default mode of the human heart is to believe that it is strength that connects you to God, but the gospel says that it is weakness that connects you to God. Only to the degree that you see you are weak are you strong.

“As G. K. Chesterton wrote . . . the result of ceasing to believe in God is not that one will then believe nothing; it is that one will believe anything.”23

Defiance comes from looking at ourselves. Hope comes from looking at him.