Four Facts about the Resurrection

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1 Corinthians chapter 15 verse 17 says, And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain, ye are yet in your sins. Folks, that’s such an important verse of Scripture. If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain, ye are yet in your sins.

I hear churches all the time. I hear people that profess to be Christians all the time. I hear it more and more often, it seems like, that they’re interested in the teachings of Jesus.

They’re interested in following Jesus. They’re interested in calling themselves Christian. And what’s the Christian perspective on this?

the Christian perspective on that. But when you get to things like miracles, when you get to things like the resurrection, when you get to things like the virgin birth, they just don’t believe them. And I don’t understand what the point is of calling yourself a Christian if you don’t believe in such things as the virgin birth, the resurrection, the substitutionary atonement, which just is a fancy way of saying he died for our sins.

As a matter of fact, I hear more and more about preachers that don’t believe in what they call the substitutionary atonement theory. They call it a theory. Folks, I don’t understand what else the cross could mean other than the fact that he died for our sins.

But folks, the Bible is clear that there are some things that if you’re even going to call yourself a Christian, there are some things we have to believe, even if the world thinks they’re a little bit ridiculous. And the world does think that the resurrection is a little bit ridiculous. But folks, the Bible says if Christ is not raised, if he did not rise from the dead the way he said he would do, the way the Bible says that he did, then our faith, the very faith we profess, the very faith we try to live, the very thing we call ourselves, It’s all vain.

It’s all worthless and useless. And I want to talk to you tonight about evidence for the resurrection. I remember recently reading, one pastor had written on the Internet, that if your church does a sermon or a sermon series on evidence, why the Bible is the Word of God, evidence for this, evidence for that, that it’s a sign that your church is in bad shape, because that should be something we all agree on anyway.

Well, I say there’s nothing wrong with shoring up the defenses even when they’re strong. I don’t bring this to you tonight necessarily to convince you. As I said this morning, I hope you’re already convinced.

And just from knowing those of you who are here tonight, I believe you are convinced. But we live in a world that is increasingly not convinced by the resurrection. And we need to be able to present a reasonable answer to people for the hope that we have.

The Bible says being able to present an answer, give an answer for the hope that we have. And folks, the hope that we have centers on the resurrection. We ought to be equipped at least a little bit.

I’m not saying you have to be a great theologian and understand all the arguments. I don’t even understand all the arguments. But we ought to be equipped a little bit to give an answer for when our neighbor or our family member or the person at work starts talking about how the resurrection is just a fairy tale.

Folks, nothing could be further from the truth. I told you this morning the resurrection is, I believe, the best attested fact of history. I may have gone a little overboard on that.

I need to clarify that. The resurrection is the best attested fact of ancient history. Obviously, we don’t have video of the resurrection.

I watched a documentary this week about Black Hawk down and shooting down the helicopters over Somalia in 1993. That’s a pretty well-attested fact. We still have eyewitnesses here alive with us.

We have video. We have all these things. We don’t have all of that for the resurrection.

We can’t go and roll the videotape. But by the standards of ancient history, nothing else really compares to the resurrection. As a matter of fact, if people held the New Testament to the same standards that they hold the rest of ancient literature, it would be the best attested, most reliable book in the entire body of ancient literature.

There are books with fewer manuscripts, newer manuscripts further removed from the source, from the event, that are considered more reliable by the world than the New Testament for the very simple reason that the world chooses not to believe the New Testament. Folks, we need to be able to tell them why they can trust what the Bible says about the fact that Jesus Christ died, was buried, and rose again. I told you the story before that sitting in the philosophy class my freshman year of college, in some ways I hated the class, in some ways I loved the class.

It was taught by an Ivy League educated professor who was a hardened atheist and was what I would call a militant homosexual, completely 180 degrees opposite of everything I believed in, and yet I loved his class because it made me question what I believed and get my faith to where it wasn’t just what I’d been taught, but what I knew to be the truth. And I’d go into his class and he would just have these arguments where he would just tear apart the Bible, tear apart Christianity. And he had his own ideas, his own philosophies.

The problem was he would introduce philosophies from other great men that are looked up to and revered by philosophers and scholars. And they’re not all on the same page. They disagree with one another.

And you leave out of there thinking, well, maybe nobody really does know. Folks, I’m not satisfied with saying, well, maybe nobody really does know. I just think this is what I like the best. I want to know for sure what the truth is.

Don’t you? And so as I began to study, you know, I don’t believe this can’t just be a fairy tale. There’s no way I can believe this is just a fairy tale.

How can I know for sure? And folks, just like this verse says, it came down to the resurrection. He and I could argue for weeks on end about the inerrancy of Scripture.

Incidentally, I’m for it. He was against it. We could argue about various other things, but when it came time to argue about the resurrection, we argued back and forth a little bit, but there just weren’t as many answers coming from his side.

And what I’ve got for you tonight, I won’t tell you that if a hardened atheist like him sat in here tonight, that I would be able to convince him with the brilliance of what I’m going to give you. But at the same time, it gives us some ideas that we can tell people that maybe aren’t as hardened in their position about why they can believe that Christ rose again from the dead. In our world, we don’t have to prove.

You can’t prove Christianity. It’s a matter of faith. You can’t absolutely prove it scientifically and philosophically.

Folks, all we’ve got to be able to do is make the case that Christianity is not a fairytale. And I believe we can do that. Why should we care about the resurrection?

Four reasons, real quick. I’m going to try to move through this stuff tonight quickly. And I may throw a bunch of stuff at you.

I know some of you keep notes. If you’re not able to keep up, I can get you some, I can retype these in a more useful form for you and get you my notes. But four reasons why the resurrection is important.

We’re going to talk about something like this. I’m going to lay out why it’s important for you. First of all, the reason the resurrection is important to Christians it involves the justification of our sins.

He says in Romans 4. 25, speaking of Jesus, who was delivered for our offenses and was raised again for our justification. Now, this doesn’t mean that Jesus completed the work of salvation in the tomb.

When he said, it is finished, he meant, it is finished. However, for him to die on the cross and just remain dead, he would be just any other man claiming, it is finished. When he rose again from the dead, he proved that he had the power to do what he said he did when he came and died for our sins.

And so if he didn’t rise again from the dead, there’s no reason for us to believe our sins are justified, that we’re justified before God. That’s reason number one why we can’t let go of the resurrection. Reason number two is it gives validation of our faith.

The verse we’ve already looked at says, and if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain and ye are yet in your sins. It provides the basis, the reason, the evidence for our faith. It provides something that we can look at as historical fact.

And when the world says, oh, the Genesis account, the virgin birth, the miracles, all this stuff, they’re just fairy tales. We can look and say, what about the resurrection? And if the resurrection is true the way the Bible says it is, then Jesus was who he said he was.

Then the prophets and Old Testament scriptures that he validated are what they say they are. Everything falls into place. I believe the resurrection is the keystone of all of this, of making the case for Christianity.

Third of all, it’s demonstration of the power of God. In Acts chapter 2, verse 24, it says, again, talking about Jesus, whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible that he should be holding of it. It proved that this was the Son of God, and that God would raise him from the dead, and that he could do everything he said he could do again.

And it demonstrates God’s power. And finally, it gives us preparation for our future hope. 2 Corinthians 4, verse 14 says, Knowing that he which raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise up us also by Jesus, and shall present us with you.

The very fact that Jesus proved he was able to conquer death, Jesus had taught about a resurrection, had taught about a resurrection of those who trusted in Christ, and one day we’d be all resurrected together. Folks, those were just empty, meaningless words, if Jesus Christ did not himself have power over death. And yet he rose again from the dead, and folks, if he could be raised up from the dead himself, then what he talked about our resurrection is all the more believable.

And so if we hold on to the doctrine of the resurrection of Christ, we have all of these things. We have a Savior who was able to purchase our justification. We have proof that we can hold on to that Christianity is not just another of the world’s religions, not just a fairy tale.

We have proof that our God is all-powerful, and we have proof we have something we can hold on to that there will come a day when we are resurrected to be with Him forever. Now, I want to give you four facts about the resurrection tonight by the way of evidence. Fact number one is that Jesus’ existence and death is historically verifiable.

Jesus’ existence and death is historically verifiable. There are people, there are a few people, I should say, fringe people, who say that Jesus Christ did not exist. Do you know that? We’re not just talking people who say, well, he existed, but he wasn’t really the Son of God.

There are people who say that Jesus of Nazareth never existed. They’re not mainstream historians or mainstream scholars, I might add. The Bible, because I want to start with the Bible, before we talk about what human scholars tell us, it’s important to see what God’s Word says.

John chapter 1, verse 14, says, And the Word became flesh. the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten Son of the Father, full of grace and truth. Now, for me, that’s what I need to know right there, that God’s Word said it.

I used to see bumper stickers that said, the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it. I think there’s one phrase too many in there. God’s Word says it, that settles it.

It doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not. It’s true. The Bible tells us that He did exist. Then we come to our human scholars, these respected historians who back this idea up.

One of them was F. F. Bruce, who’s one of the most respected scholars, professors of Bible history from the University of Manchester.

He died in 1990, but he said, Whatever else may be thought of the evidence from early Jewish and Gentile writers, as summarized in this chapter in the preceding one, it does at least establish for those who refuse the witness of Christian writings the historical character of Jesus himself. He said there are people that reject the Christian writings, so we’ll look at the Jewish and Gentile sources that they do respect, of people who didn’t believe in Jesus, and it does establish that he existed historically. Some writers may toy with the fancy of a Christ myth, but they do not do so on the ground of historical evidence.

People that claim he was a myth don’t have a historical basis for what they say. The historicity of Christ is axiomatic for unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar. It is not historians who propagate the Christ myth theories.

So what he basically said in all of that is that if you don’t believe the New Testament, fine. We have enough Jewish and Gentile sources, non-believers from that time, who talk about him in his existence to prove that he is just as much a historical figure as Julius Caesar. And he says that anybody that disagrees on that fact is not a serious historian.

D. James Kennedy, some of you may remember him from being on the radio before he died, said that, this quote has stuck with me for years, the evidence for the historicity, the historical existence of Christ, is so great that I know of no historian in the free world who would dare place his or her reputation on the chopping block by denying that Jesus Christ never existed. Both of these men were believers.

I won’t say that they necessarily agreed with everything we teach, but they were believers in Christ. So what about these sources? How do we, what is the evidence that they talk about? I want to give you some quotes.

I’m not going to spend the whole night reading quotes, don’t worry. But I want you to hear what some of the people that lived around this same time said and recorded about Jesus. Pliny the Younger, a Roman writer and politician, one of the witnesses to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, said those who denied that they, he was involved in trying to persecute and capture and run down the Christians, by the way, those who denied that they either were or had been Christians upon their calling on the gods after me, and upon their offering wine and incense before your statue, as he writes to one of the Roman generals, which for this purpose I had ordered to be introduced in company with the images of gods, Moreover, upon their reviling Christ, none of which things it can be said, I’m sorry, it is said, can such as really are and truly Christians be compelled to do?

These I deemed it proper to dismiss. So he writes about the fact that there were a group of people who were dedicated to this man called Jesus Christ. Even at that time, they believed he was real, believed he existed. And he said, if they really did believe in him, you couldn’t convince them to waver and say they didn’t.

And so he said, anybody that says, I don’t believe in Christ, and would offer wine and incense to the gods and to their statues, he would let them go, because obviously they’re not Christians, because people who are dedicated to this man, Jesus Christ, this is how they behave. And so he wrote about the Christians and about Christ early on. Suetonius, another Roman historian, wrote, since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, or Christ, he expelled them from Rome, talking about the Emperor Claudius.

He said the Jews, now he’s writing about Christians, but they considered them at that time to be Jews, that just happened to believe in Jesus as the Messiah. The Romans weren’t really concerned with the difference. He said, because these people made so many disturbances in Rome, at the instigation of Christ, he said, basically, it’s Christ that’s making them cause all this ruckus.

Emperor Claudius threw them out of Rome. Tacitus, another Roman historian and senator, said, hence to suppress the rumor that he had burned Rome, Nero falsely charged with the guilt and punished with the most exquisite tortures the persons commonly called Christians who were hated for their enormities, the growth. Christus, the founder of that name, was put to death as a criminal by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea in the reign of Tiberius.

But the pernicious superstition repressed for a time broke out again, not only through Judea where the mischief originated, but through the city of Rome also. So he talks about the Christians causing all this trouble, Nero persecuting them. And he says, by the way, they were founded by Christus, or Christ, in Judea, who existed and was crucified under Pontius Pilate.

And by the way, whatever we do to stifle the rumors about him, they keep coming back, not only in Judea, but they’re here in Rome now also, he says. One of my favorites is Flavius Josephus, a Jewish historian. He was not a believer.

This quote, some people think well-meaning, but misled Christians added to it later on. I tend to agree with that myself. It says, Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as received the truth with pleasure.

He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again on the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day. He lays out the fact that Christ existed.

He was crucified, suffered under Pontius Pilate, rose again. He calls him the Messiah. The problem with this quote is that Josephus was not a believer.

This does not sound like something that a Jewish writer would write. But there are different versions of this that they leave out references like he was the Christ. And instead of saying he appeared to them on the third day, he says they claimed he appeared to them on the third day. But folks, what we’re looking at right now is the fact that Christ existed and died as historical fact.

And regardless of which version you look at, the one that they think Christians tampered with, or the ones that they think are more accurate, They both talk about the fact that he existed. He was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and his believers thought that he rose again on the third day. We’ve got one more.

A Syrian philosopher from around that time, named Mara ben Serapion, said, For what benefit did the Athenians obtain by putting Socrates to death, seeing that they received as retribution for it famine and pestilence? Or the people of Samos, by the burning of Pythagoras, seeing that in one hour the whole of their country was covered with sand? He’s talking about countries that executed some of their most brilliant minds, and how they suffered as a result.

Or the Jews by the murder of their wise king, seeing that from the very time their kingdom was driven away from them. For with justice did God grant a recompense to the wisdom of all three of them. For the Athenians died by famine, and the people of Samus were covered by sea without remedy, and the Jews brought to desolation and expelled from their kingdom were driven away into every land.

And that talks about the passage that we discussed this morning, when Jerusalem would be conquered. but he said they killed their wise king. Folks, nobody else in, at that time, recent Jewish history fit the bill.

He’s talking about the fact that they killed Jesus Christ. These are just a few. I’m done reading quotes for now. If you’re trying to keep up with all those names, sorry, those are just a few names.

See, Christians are not the only ones that came up with stories about Jesus. There were non-believers around who wrote and attested to the fact that he existed and he died, he was crucified. And so to say, well, he’s just a myth, he never existed, he never died on the cross, is foolish, absolutely foolish.

Unless we’re going to go to the same standard and say, well, Julius Caesar never existed because we don’t have DNA evidence, or we don’t have a videotape. That would be ludicrous. So why do we hold the Bible to a different standard?

Quite simply because people don’t want to believe it. Fact number one, Jesus Christ existed and was crucified, and that’s attested by historians of the day. Fact number two, the tomb is empty.

You know that? The tomb that was empty that first Easter Sunday is still empty today. Now, there are all kinds of explanations that people try to give for the empty tomb.

And none of them hold water except for the fact that it is the way the Bible said it was. Now, we can’t say the tomb is empty because Jesus was never crucified. We know from historians that that’s not the case.

He was crucified. We know, more importantly from the Bible, that that’s not the case. He was crucified.

Having been crucified, he was put in a tomb. But people doubt the tomb story. Say, well, there’s no empty tomb.

It’s all just a. . .

Folks, there are plenty of reasons. And I’m going to try to hurry. We’re a little over time tonight.

The music went a little long, which is okay. I enjoyed the music. But if y’all can bear with me, if you really need to leave, that’s fine.

But if you can bear with me just a little longer, I’ll try to hurry and make it worth your while. There are plenty of reasons to believe that the tomb really was empty the way they said it was, and for the reason they said. The first was the fact that the empty tomb was first testified to by women.

When you think about their day, that women were not considered equal to men. As a matter of fact, their testimony was not even legally valid in courts of law. Think about the fact that if the disciples later on were going to make up some myth about the empty tomb to try to convince people, why in the world would they pick women to be the first ones to testify to the empty tomb?

And I’m not saying anything against women. I’m talking about in their time. Why would they choose women to try to convince the world that Jesus rose again from the dead?

That was sort of an embarrassment at the time, that, man, it sure would have looked better if men had been the ones to. Folks, the only explanation for that is that they recorded the events exactly as they happened. If they were going to make it up, they would have had Peter and John discover the empty tomb, not Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary, and the other Mary.

That may not be the right number of Marys. Also, it’s unlikely that they fabricated the story of the empty tomb given the fact that Joseph of Arimathea factored so prominently in the story. Joseph of Arimathea, if you’re not familiar, is the one who went to Pontius Pilate and asked for Jesus’ body to be given to him so that he could give him a proper burial. It’s a nice story, but Joseph of Arimathea was a member of the ruling Jewish council that was complicit in Jesus’ death.

Why, if the Christians later on were going to, if they were going to make up this story later on, and the Jewish council had been portrayed so negatively, why would the hero have been Joseph of Arimathea as opposed to them? They, by their own admission, were in hiding at this point, doubting the fact that he was going to come back like he said he was. They were in hiding.

They thought their world was over. hiding cowardice. And yet this man who should have been their enemy steps forward and goes to the authorities and says, I want to give Jesus a proper, honorable burial. Folks, if they were fabricating the story, again, it would have been Peter going and getting the body.

It would have been James and John getting the body. But the fact that it’s kind of embarrassing to the disciples when you really get down to it, that they were hiding, and this member of the council went and got Jesus’ body to give him the burial in his tomb. And incidentally, the tomb, as told in the story, fits what we know with archaeology about how they did burial at that time.

It only makes sense that why would they make this up and make this man the hero of that part of the story, other than the fact that they were recording events exactly as they happened. Then we have the fact that there wasn’t time to go from true events to legends. Many of the texts in the New Testament that talk about the resurrection, there are others, but these include Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and 1 Thessalonians, just to name a few, were all written, I believe, within 30 years of the events they described.

written within 30 years. There were still people alive and walking around Jerusalem who were eyewitnesses to the events that had taken place surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus. And if these things had not been true, if he had not risen from the dead, if there had not been a credible fact of the empty tomb, they would have said something about it and immediately shut down the rumor.

Folks, don’t let people convince you that these books were written hundreds of years later. At least these books were written within about 30 years. I believe all of them were written by about 90 AD, but these were written within the first 30 years after the events they described.

There wasn’t time for it to grow into legend before these were written. And finally, on the empty tomb, there’s no plausible alternative explanation. See, nobody else, not nobody else, nobody had the means and the motive and the opportunity to go in and steal the body.

You realize they said that at the time, that, oh, somebody stole the body. People still say that today. The disciples stole the body.

Who was there? Who was involved? The soldiers were there, and they faced harsh, extreme punishment for abandoning their post, as they did.

Why would they want to steal the body and incur the wrath of their superiors? The disciples admitted to the embarrassing fact that they doubted and hid. So here we have these cowardly men going in and overpowering the Roman guards and breaking the seal. I don’t think so.

And furthermore, that would assume that they composed this lie about him rising from the dead. And then later on, they would suffer, they would be tortured, and they would die for what they knew to be a lie. Folks, men will die for a lie, but they don’t die for things that they know are lies.

Somebody would have confessed and given up the secret. The Jews had no motive to steal the body. They didn’t want the idea of him rising from the dead.

The Romans had no motive to steal the body because they just wanted law and order, and as long as there was friction between the Christians and the Jews, that wasn’t good happy times for the Romans. Using real technical terms here, right? Wasn’t happy times.

And the women, folks, they couldn’t have overpowered the guards and stolen the body. That’s ridiculous. There’s one more idea that people talk about today called the swoon theory.

I was asked about that at my ordination. Do you believe in the swoon theory? Absolutely not.

It’s disgusting to me. The idea of the swoon theory is that Jesus didn’t really die on the cross. He just appeared to die, and he was buried in the tomb, and somehow or another resuscitated over those three days, and then came walking out of the tomb, and he was fine.

He didn’t rise again because he didn’t actually die. Folks, that assumes that Jesus Christ was beaten beyond recognition, lost so much blood that he went into what they call hypovolemic shock. They thrust the spear through his side, rupturing not only the heart but the pericardium, which would explain why the blood and water came.

Then, with all of those injuries, he was put in a dark, wet tomb, all wrapped up for three days, with no life-sustaining treatment. He managed to break the seal, single-handedly roll the stone away, overpower the Roman guards, walk out of there on bruised, pierced feet, and convince his disciples to die for what they knew to be a lie. Folks, I can’t think of any truer expression, if that’s the case, than for the centurion to say, truly this is the Son of God.

Because I can’t imagine anybody but the Son of God being able to do that. Folks, the swoon theory is ridiculous. He was also man, and nobody can survive something like that.

Folks, if the tomb wasn’t really empty, the Jews or the Romans could have easily produced the body and stopped the rumors, and yet the earliest Jewish response to the idea that Christ had risen from the dead was not to refute the idea, was not to produce the body, not to say, how can this happen, but to assume that it did happen and to try to cover it up. Matthew 28, look at it. When the soldiers came and told them what had happened, the Jews offered them money to keep it quiet.

Fact number three. We’re almost through. Fact number three.

Eyewitnesses saw the physically resurrected Jesus. Eyewitnesses saw the physically resurrected Jesus. We’re not talking one or two eyewitnesses.

We’re talking he was seen by over 500 people. If he didn’t really rise again, folks, these were people who had walked with him for over three years. If they’d seen him and it had been somebody else, not Jesus, they would have known.

He wouldn’t have looked like him. He wouldn’t have acted like him. He wouldn’t have taught like him.

Yet 500 people who knew him, who had walked with him, saw him and knew who it was. And folks, many of those people died as a testimony to the fact that they really had seen what they claimed to have seen. We know that he wasn’t merely a spirit or a hologram as some people claim.

I read that at one point the Jehovah’s Witnesses were saying he didn’t really rise again from the dead, that God kind of dissolved him into gaseous vapors and reanimated him as a hologram on the outside. That’s just bizarre. That takes more faith than just believing what the Bible says.

He wasn’t merely a spirit or a hologram or something like that. We know that because Thomas was given the opportunity to touch the male prince in his hands. And because he went and he ate with his disciples.

Ghosts don’t need to eat. I’ve watched enough episodes of Ghost Adventures on Travel Channel. You know, they’re up to a lot of trouble that they don’t need to eat.

And then