⁹ … and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved …

Belief in the resurrection also is required for salvation. If Jesus hadn’t been raised from the dead, there is no Gospel message. Why? Because it was through the resurrection that Jesus was “declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead, according to the Spirit of holiness, Jesus Christ our Lord …” (Rom 1:4). Jesus, when He was living on the earth pre-resurrection, repeatedly spoke about the importance of the resurrection as proof of who He was. For example:

“An evil and adulterous generation craves for a sign; and yet no sign will be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet; for just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” (Matt 12:39–40; see also Matt 16:4, Luke 11:30-32)

He taught the disciples, “The Son of Man is to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill Him; and when He has been killed, He will rise three days later” (Mark 9:31).

To the Jews He proclaimed:

“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “It took forty-six years to build this temple, and will You raise it up in three days?” But He was speaking of the temple of His body. (John 2:19–21)

To the Corinthians Paul fleshed out the importance of this:

Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you …For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures… (1 Cor 15:1–4)

Emphatically, “[I]f Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins. If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied” (1 Cor 15:17-18). Belief in the resurrection is not just an arbitrary, peripheral point of faith, but is central to the reality of salvation.

Father, I believe in the resurrection of Your Son, my hope of eternal life.