The Resurrection was the physical proof of our Lord’s divine Sonship, the outward evidence that he was all he and his anointed servants said he was—the Messiah. If Jesus did not have the power to rise from the tomb—power to save the body—he did not have power to save the soul, the power to forgive sins. Even the sinless cannot save themselves. For example, “even if it were possible that little children could sin they could not be saved” if no atonement had been made (Mosiah 3:16).
But in fact “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Had Christ not interceded on our behalf, no person—great or small—would have qualified for a kingdom of glory. “No unclean thing can enter into” the kingdom of God; “therefore nothing entereth into his rest,” declared the Savior to the Nephites, “save it be those who have washed their garments in my blood, because of their faith, and the repentance of all their sins, and their faithfulness unto the end” (3 Nephi 27:19).
In Paul’s language “if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17). Elder Bruce R. McConkie has written: “Our spirits, stained with sin, unable to cleanse themselves, would be subject to the author of sin everlastingly; we would be followers of Satan; we would be sons of perdition” (New Witness, p. 130).