The Resurrection of Christ [B]

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Transcript:

We’re going to finish up the message from this morning and begin looking at Acts chapter 4, where we were this morning, Acts chapter 4. You’ll recall in this passage that just before this, Peter and John had healed a lame man, or better said that God had healed the man through them, and they were being called to give an answer for the preaching, because when the people saw what had happened, they wanted to know, they wanted to understand, how is it that you were able to do this? And they began talking to them about Jesus.

They began talking to them about his resurrection. And it says, starting in verse 1, and as they spake unto the people, the priests and the captain of the temple and the Sadducees came upon them, being grieved that they taught the people and preached through Jesus the resurrection of the dead. Guys, they could have preached on healing.

They could have preached on any number of things. But when it came time for them to give an answer to the people, what they focused on, what they talked about, was the fact that Jesus Christ had died and risen from the dead. The resurrection was central to their message.

And they laid hands on them and put them in hold unto the next day, for it was now eventide. Howbeit many of them which heard the word believed, and the number of the men was about five thousand. And it came to pass on the morrow that their rulers and elders and scribes and Annas the high priest and Caiaphas and John and Alexander and as many as were of the kindred of the high priest were gathered together at Jerusalem.

And when they had set them in the midst, they asked by what power or by what name have you done this? So they were upset that they were preaching the resurrection. They were upset that they were causing people to believe that Jesus was resurrected from the dead.

and they came and asked him, who said you could preach about this? Who gave you the authority? And then it says in verse 8, Peter, filled with the Holy Ghost, said unto them, Ye rulers of the people and elders of Israel, if we this day be examined of the good deed done to the impotent man, by what means is he made whole?

Be it known unto you all and to all the people of Israel that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the dead, Even by him doth this man stand before you whole. So he reminds them that what we’re talking about here, what you’re upset about, began not just with us standing and preaching, but began with the healing of the man. And if you can find any fault with that, go ahead.

But the healing was done through the same Jesus who you crucified and God raised from the dead. And this is the stone which was set at naught of you builders, which has become the head of the corner. I like that too.

Jesus Christ was the stone that you builders threw aside, and yet he’s become the cornerstone of everything. And it says in verse 12, neither is there salvation in any other, for there is none other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved. That’s still true today, regardless of what any church or denomination teaches.

There is no other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved. It says in verse 13, now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men, they marveled and took knowledge of them that they had been with Jesus. And as I reminded you this morning, they had prior to this, when Jesus was crucified, they ran and hid.

When he was undergoing his trial and arrest, Peter was denying him, saying, I don’t know him, I never knew him. When he died, they went and locked themselves away and hid. These were not men that you would look at and say, okay, they’re going to start a worldwide movement.

And yet here they are standing out in the midst of the people and they’re preaching with boldness. And then when they’re confronted, when they’re arrested, detained by the authorities, and facing possibly some serious trouble here, they answer with this boldness. There’s a boldness about them that can only be explained in one way, and that’s by their encounter with the resurrected Christ. And even his enemies, even the enemies of Christ who here have taken hold of them, look at them, and it says they marveled and took note of the fact that they had been with Jesus.

And beholding the man which was healed standing with them. Guys, they hauled in the man who was healed for questioning too. I never noticed that before.

And beholding the man which was healed standing with them, they could say nothing against it. But when they had commanded them to go aside out of the council, they conferred amongst themselves, saying, What shall we do to these men? For that indeed a notable miracle hath been done by them is manifest to all that dwell in Jerusalem, and we cannot deny it.

But that it spread no further among the people, let us straightly threaten them that they speak henceforth to no man in this name. So they said, the miracle’s happened, it’s done, it’s out there, we can’t stop it, we can’t stop the news from spreading, we can’t pretend it never happened, everybody saw it. It’s known and it’s done.

But we can make sure that they don’t spread their message any further than this because we will threaten them and say, you don’t speak anymore in his name or else. And they called them, verse 18, and commanded them. They called them back into their council meeting and commanded them not to speak at all nor teach in the name of Jesus.

But Peter and John answered and said unto them, whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God judge ye. Essentially saying, if God tells us to speak and you tell us to be quiet, who do you think we should listen to? For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard.

They said we cannot, we cannot shut up about the resurrection. We cannot stop talking about what we’ve seen and heard. We have an obligation to our Lord, the one who was resurrected, to continue telling people about this.

We have an obligation. We have a debt to our fellow man to continue to tell them that Jesus Christ died for them and rose again from the dead. We cannot.

We cannot. God will not allow it. Our conscience will not allow it for us to stop talking and be silent on the matter of Jesus and his resurrection.

And so I pointed out to you this morning that this wasn’t something that came up decades later or centuries later as the legend grew. Guys, we know how legends grow and things get blown out of proportion and over hundreds of years legends arise. That’s why I was so disappointed to find out that it’s probably not true, the story about George Washington and the cherry tree and saying I cannot tell a lot.

That was disappointing to me. I loved that story as a child. But over hundreds of years legends can develop, and some of them are like that.

I’m sure even if it didn’t happen, it probably accurately reflects the man’s character. He was known for his honesty. and so it’s fairly insignificant whether it was true or not.

Something like this is a big deal. The resurrection, true or not true, is a big deal. It makes a difference whether it’s true or not true. George Washington, whether or not he cut down the cherry tree and then told his dad, I can’t tell a lie, has no bearing on my eternity or yours. But whether or not Jesus Christ was raised from the dead or whether it was a legend has immense repercussions for all of us.

And so we need to know. And folks, the fact is, this wasn’t some legend that developed decades later or even centuries later. This was something they were talking about within the year.

They were talking about it as soon as it happened. In Acts chapter 2, he talks about it, and that was some 50 days after the fact. Here is a little later on.

I don’t know exactly when it happened, but it had to have been less than a year after the resurrection. They are already talking about it, and it’s not just something incidental to their message that they remember and talk about at the end or talk about once or twice a year, it was the very reason why they were out there preaching. It was the very reason why they were commanding the attention of the people to tell them, Jesus Christ died for your sins and rose again.

It was the very reason for what they were doing. And their response to that was not, okay, we’ll talk about other things and we’ll leave the resurrection alone. No, we cannot stop talking about the resurrection because it’s central to everything.

we believe. It’s why we’re even here serving Christ and telling people about Christ. So we talked this morning about how it’s central. It should still be central to everything that the church teaches, to everything that this church teaches or any other church. If a church, you know what, if the Lord should someday remove you to another place, if you move out of Lindsay and you’ve got to find another church because you’re no longer here, if you go to a church and they do not preach the resurrection, if they do not preach the literal truth of the resurrection, that’s not the church you need to be a part of.

Because if the resurrection, I’m sorry to say, if the resurrection is not central to what we do, it’s not Christianity. It’s some kind of man-made religion. The resurrection from the very beginning has been central to everything Christianity’s been about.

We talked this morning about what the resurrection is. I don’t want to belabor the point too much, but just to remind, I don’t know if anybody else had a much-needed, well-deserved nap this afternoon, but I did. And so you might have forgotten a little bit of what we talked about this morning.

But the basics of the resurrection, the tent poles of the story, if you will, that we need to make sure we have right for it to be the biblical resurrection story. Jesus Christ died for our sins. If he didn’t die, there’s no need for a resurrection.

Jesus Christ was buried. That’s the only way to make any sense of the empty tomb. Otherwise, it could be empty because no one was ever laid there.

That his tomb was then again seen to be empty. and he was seen to walk alive again by eyewitnesses, by credible eyewitnesses. And those things to me, and I think any person who’s going to take an honest look at the evidence here, and say, okay, he was dead, and for us not only did he die, he died for our sins.

But say he was dead, he was killed, and there was no doubt about it. Then he was buried in a particular tomb that somebody would have known where it was, And yet that tomb was empty and could be shown to be empty because you notice they never dispute, the authorities never disputed the fact that the tomb was empty. And then eyewitnesses saw him alive.

I don’t care, hard to believe or not. That story adds up to really only a handful of explanations, and the best explanation is that he rose again from the dead. As a matter of fact, as we go through some of this, and as we talked about it back close to Easter, The only reasonable explanation, in my estimation, is that he rose again from the dead.

The other explanations that are thrown out there as possibilities don’t add up. We talked this morning about the fact that he didn’t merely pass out. We know this because there’s no way that a man could suffer what he suffered and not get medical attention and be laid in a dark cave and still walk out, roll that big stone away and be the picture of health.

It just doesn’t happen that way. And quite frankly, I’m glad that the swoon theory has been discredited, and most even atheist scholars don’t even believe it anymore. But even if it were possible for him to have somehow done that, the spear through the side, piercing the heart, causing the blood and water to gush forth from the wound, cleared up any doubt there might have been that he was dead when they took him off the cross.

There’s just no way, there’s no other way around it. He didn’t pass out on the cross and revive later. That’s one explanation.

alternative explanation given for the resurrection. The disciples didn’t hallucinate. We talked about mass hallucination this morning.

It doesn’t work that way. You know, people tend to, even if they’re hallucinating in the same place at the same time, they’re usually hallucinating different things. And Thomas, on top of that, was, they clearly all were skeptical to some degree of the resurrection story when they first heard it.

But Thomas especially was skeptical and said, I will not believe it. I unless I see and feel the wounds. He was not in a place where he was susceptible to hallucinations because that’s not anything he wanted to believe or was looking to believe.

Third of all, I don’t think we got to this one this morning. It wasn’t a case of mistaken identity. This is another one that is thrown out there sometimes.

Well, they saw someone who looked like Jesus. Most of the time, it’s pretty hard to find someone who, I mean, we see people all the time who bear some resemblance to each other. I’ll see people in town that remind me of people I knew in Arkansas.

But when you get close enough, you can tell it’s not them. I was watching a documentary earlier this week about the war in Iraq, about Saddam Hussein. And we know now that he used to use body doubles for him and his sons, that they would travel around the country.

That way the Americans and whoever else, I mean, this was even before we went to war with them again in 2003, so that his enemies, whether it be the Americans, the Iranians, people within his own country, would never know where Saddam was and where his two sons were because they moved around all the time and they had these body doubles. And there was an interview with one of the body doubles for his oldest son, and I thought, my goodness, that does look a lot like him. But the longer you watched him talk and listened to him talk, I’ve seen enough pictures and videos of the now deceased older son to realize, okay, that’s a good lookalike.

But even me, someone who never met the original, I can tell, okay, you look at him long enough, you realize that’s not him. At the school, sometimes, you get enough little kids in a room and they start to look alike. Especially when they’re all running around, kind of like a beehive, and all the bees start to look alike because they’re just buzzing every which way.

From behind, especially, a lot of the little kids look alike. And at our school, there are pre-K through sixth grade. And so Benjamin goes there.

There’s another little boy who from behind is about the same height and build as him, same hair color. And sometimes by the end of the day, I forget what clothes Benjamin had on when I brought him there, when I brought him there with me in the morning. And I’ll walk into that big room where they’re all running and buzzing around.

And I’ll see this other little boy, and I’ll want to reach out and grab him. And fortunately, I’ve stopped myself every time because I get close enough to realize, okay, they look alike, but that’s not my son. See, because I know my son.

I’ve spent three years now with him every day. I know him. I know his little voice.

I know my mother and sister may be in Walmart with him, and I’m going to meet them there, and I can find where they are without calling on the phone and saying, where are you? Because I can follow the sound of his little voice. I know what he sounds like.

I know what he looks like. I know his facial expressions. I would know my child.

Any one of you would be able to pick your child out of a lineup, even if it was somebody who looks similar. And I can always find my child in the midst of all those buzzing little children. Guys, just like I’ve spent three years every day with my son, and now two years with my daughter, they spent three years every day with Jesus Christ as they walked together, as they did ministry together, as they learned from him.

If anybody knew who Jesus Christ was, it would be these 11 men. If anybody could smell an imposter, it would be these 11 men. If there were 11 people on the face of the earth who would not be fooled by a body double, it would have been these 11 men.

Well, what if they were in on the conspiracy? I don’t think they were. If they were the ones to get the body double, why on earth would they go to their martyrdom declaring it was him?

It was him. And what kind of body double would go through the things necessary to have the wounds on the hands and the feet and the side? I’m not signing up for that job.

I don’t care what the benefits might have been. and probably there wouldn’t have been any. Guys, as much as we look at the apostles nowadays and say, what incredible spiritual men.

Some of the skeptical theories give them way more credit than we do. That this group of poor and unlearned fishermen were able to pull the wool over the eyes of everybody around them. Somebody would have talked and said something.

Somebody under pain of death would have said something. Wait, wait, wait, no, we made it up. And we see even they themselves were skeptical at first. I don’t think it was because it didn’t look like Jesus or because it wasn’t Jesus.

But it says in Luke chapter 24, And as they thus spake, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. But they were terrified and affrighted and supposed that they had seen a spirit. Now, I don’t think they thought they had seen a ghost because it didn’t look like Jesus.

But if somebody dies and then suddenly you see them in your living room, you’re not going to assume they’re living again. Even though we don’t believe in ghosts, the Bible doesn’t teach ghosts. We would assume it’s a ghost. I’m seeing things.

And they were frightened. And he said unto them, Why are you troubled? And why do thoughts arise in your hearts?

Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Handle me and see. For a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see me have.

And when he had thus spoken, he showed them his hands and his feet. So he showed them the wounds. And it says, And while they yet believed not for joy and wondered, he said unto them have ye here any meat?

Hey wait a minute. They saw the wounds in his hands and it said they believed not for joy. I don’t know that that means they didn’t believe but what I know is what I understand that to mean is they were not so convinced at that precise moment they were not so convinced that they were ready to jump up and down for joy that their Lord had returned.

Folks they were still skeptical at the very beginning. Now that sounds like an argument for oh it was an imposter. Not really, because they were skeptical. They were going to check this out.

They were going to listen to him. They were going to spend time with him. And after this moment of initial skepticism, they came out fully convinced and willing to go to their deaths for the fact that this was the man that they’d spent three years with.

Fourth of all, Jesus did not, it was not a mistaken identity. Fourth of all, Jesus did not just come back as a spirit. This one is popular in circles that don’t call themselves atheists, but would call themselves Christians.

Well, Jesus did rise again from the dead, but he rose spiritually. Folks, there’s a reason why we say that he physically, I can’t remember our doctrinal statement, they say he bodily arose from the dead. He came back in physical form.

It wasn’t just a spiritual resurrection. Hey, that would have been great enough. I mean, that would have been impressive enough that he would come back as a spirit and walk among them.

But the fact that he came back in physical form is something else entirely different, is something even more incredible. God raised him up, body, mind, and spirit. And the whole man, the whole God-man walked again among us.

That’s incredible. That does not happen every day. But there’s this idea that he kind of came back spiritually.

And you’ll hear this from some liberal Christian groups that it was a spiritual resurrection. You’ll hear this from, again, I think it’s the Jehovah’s Witnesses who, some of them say his body dissolved and he came back as a spirit or a hologram. That sounds like science fiction to me.

Now, spirits and holograms don’t eat. They don’t have, you can’t put your hand through the middle of a hologram or a spirit. But it says in John chapter 20, and after eight days again, his disciples were within and Thomas with them.

Then came Jesus, the doors being shut. So they were still locked away and stood in the midst and said, peace be unto you. Then saith he to Thomas, reach hither thy finger and behold my hands and reach hither thy hand and thrust it into my side and be not faithless, but believing.

Thomas was given the opportunity here. If you don’t believe, touch the wounds. And I can assure you that the wounds didn’t come back as spirit.

We can’t touch spirit. We can’t touch a ghost. That Thomas was so convinced, he answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God. He confessed him to be who he said he was.

And Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed. Which is good. That’s a good thing.

To see Jesus and believe is a good thing. A lot of people saw him and didn’t believe. But Jesus said, Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed.

Then in John chapter 21, it says, Jesus then cometh and taketh bread and giveth them and fish likewise. Now that this is the third time, excuse me, this is now the third time that Jesus showed himself to his disciples. And after that, he was, excuse me, I’m seeing words that are not there that make it mean something else.

Let’s try that again. This is now the third time that Jesus showed himself to his disciples after that he was raised from the dead. Not and after that he was raised from the dead.

That wouldn’t make sense. After he was raised from the dead, this was the third time that he had showed himself to his disciples. And it said he ate with them.

He had bread and he had fish. In the previous passage in Luke, I mentioned, he ate fish and he ate honeycomb with them. And spirits don’t get hungry.

They don’t have the same needs that we have. You have hunger when you’re in physical form. You have wounds when you’re in physical form.

Those things tell me that it is not possible that Jesus merely came back in a spiritual resurrection, but that he came back body, mind, and spirit. Fifth of all, the disciples did not steal the body. That’s another theory that still floats around today.

They had no, well, they had reason to, but they were hardly in a frame of mind that they were thinking, hey, let’s build something off of this tragedy. When John chapter 20 says that same day, verse 19, that same day at evening, being the first day of the week when the doors were shut, where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the midst and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. These were men who were terrified.

These were men who were afraid for their lives. Even if they had gone and stolen the body, which I think is incredibly unlikely, because they were probably thinking not, hey, let’s start a big movement. Let’s go steal the body and start a big movement.

They were probably thinking, how do we get out of this? How do we get out of town? How do we go where nobody’s going to know that we were involved in any of this?

And they were hiding. Folks, even if they had conspired together to steal the body, how come nobody talked under pain of death? People die for a lie all the time.

How many people over the last century alone have died for the cause of communism or Marxism in any form? And folks, if there ever was a lie, that’s a lie. How many people have given their lives for that lie?

How many people have given their lives for all the false religions of the world? People will die for a lie, but they won’t die for a lie that they conceived themselves. See, there’s a difference.

Me dying for Christianity doesn’t necessarily prove that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. But the men who were there, the men who were there and saw the resurrected Christ, for them to still be willing to die sticking by their story, that lends credibility to the story. The disciples didn’t steal the body, or they wouldn’t have been willing to risk martyrdom.

Just on the off chance that some 2,000 years later we would look back at them and have this special admiration for them. Wouldn’t be worth it. Sixth of all, the authorities didn’t misplace the body.

This is a theory, I don’t know if I was familiar with this before this week or not, but some people say, well, they just, they went to the wrong tomb. Oh, really? Because the Romans weren’t organized at all.

The Romans were real bad about misplacing things. I don’t think so. They had the tomb under seal and under guard.

And if the disciples and the women had gone back to the wrong tomb and then came back to Jerusalem and said, He’s alive! He’s alive! And they’d just gone to the wrong tomb.

You know that the ruling council and the Roman authorities would have been only too glad to march them back down to the correct tomb and show them where they’d gone wrong. They didn’t misplace the body. The disciples didn’t go to the wrong tomb.

It would have been very easy to say, Now here’s the body. Everybody’s just gone to the wrong tomb. But there’s no hint of that.

There’s no hint of that anywhere in the scriptures. There’s no hint of that accusation anywhere in history up until recent times. As a matter of fact, in the earliest days after this happened, right after the resurrection in Matthew chapter 28, it says, Now when they were going, behold, some of the watch came into the city and showed unto the chief priests all the things that were done.

And when they were assembled with the elders and had taken they gave large money unto the soldiers, saying, Say ye his disciples came by night and stole him away while we slept. And if this come to the governor’s ears, we will persuade him and secure you. So they took the money and did as they were taught.

And this saying is commonly reported among the Jews until this day. So in the earliest days, when the authorities were told the tomb is empty, here’s what we saw, here’s what happened. Now the disciples are spreading the news of the empty tomb.

The authorities didn’t dispute it. The authorities didn’t say, no, the tomb is not empty. They didn’t say, no, he’s over here.

He’s still dead. They said, let’s cover this up and say the disciples stole the body, which again doesn’t work. So the resurrection is that Jesus Christ died for our sins, was buried, that his tomb was shown to be empty again after three days, and he was seen by multitudes of eyewitnesses.

It is not, it is not a resuscitation after he merely passed out. It’s not a mass hallucination. It’s not a case of mistaken identity.

It’s not a spiritual event alone. It’s not a stolen body and it’s not a misplaced tomb. Folks, the resurrection that we teach and that we must teach, the resurrection that must be non-negotiable to us is that Jesus Christ died and then lived again in bodily form, that he rose again from the dead, just as the Bible says he did.

Now, very quickly, because we’ve already hit on some of this, two things and then will close, why the resurrection is non-negotiable. And you’ve probably picked up on this already, so I won’t spend much time on either of these points. But the resurrection is non-negotiable because it is the entire basis for Christianity.

It’s the entire basis for Christianity. How’d you like this morning that I gave everybody who was here and out to go home if they needed to? That if we’re not preaching the resurrection, there’s no, I mean, not that it has to be the sermon topic every week.

But if we don’t believe and teach as a church the resurrection, there’s no point in them even being here. There’s no point in you being here tonight. There’s no point in coming to church, having church.

There’s no point in following the Christian religion. And that sounds horrible for me to say, but that’s not my opinion. That’s what the apostle Paul said.

If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain. Your faith is worthless. Everything That if Jesus Christ didn’t rise again from the dead, then all of Christianity is about the teachings of a good man, still just a man, who got himself crucified and taught some really nice things.

Love one another. Turn the other cheek. Do the right thing.

Love God. But why follow his teachings any more than that of any other good teacher? There’s no point to it.

If Christ be not raised, our faith is vain. If Christ be not raised, there’s no point to any of this. If we give ground on the resurrection, we might as well hang the rest of it up.

Because there’s no point to any of the rest of it. The resurrection is the central event of human history. It’s the central event of Christian history.

And it’s the bedrock on which our message stands. So the resurrection is non-negotiable because it’s the whole enchilada. It’s the whole reason for the Christian faith in everything that we do.

And second of all tonight, the resurrection is non-negotiable because there’s no forgiveness without it. Well, wait a minute, I thought he purchased our forgiveness on the cross. Well, sure he did, but how would we know?

He didn’t, as some people have taught, die and then have to go suffer three days in hell to finish purchasing our forgiveness and our freedom. I don’t know who got that idea started, but I know of longtime church-going Baptists who believe it because they heard it from some TV preacher. When he said, it is finished, folks, that’s what he meant.

He didn’t mean it’s kind of, sort of finished. It’s part way. 95%.

care of the rest of this. No, when he said it is finished, when it’s paid in full, he meant paid in full. But as for this matter of there being no forgiveness without it, again, not my opinion.

Paul said to finish that verse, and if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain. You are yet in your sins. You are still in your sins.

Because if Jesus Christ didn’t prove who he was by the resurrection, then he was just another good man. And no matter how good he was, he couldn’t die for your sins are mine. He couldn’t pay the penalty for your sins are mine.

So when he said it is finished at the cross, he meant it is finished. But the resurrection proved that it was