Four Facts about the Resurrection [C]

Listen Online:

Transcript:

The whole reason we are here this morning is to celebrate the fact that, as Brother Ken sang about, he is gone. Not in the sense that he no longer exists, but in the sense that he was dead. And then when they went to the tomb that Sunday morning, he was gone.

He wasn’t there. The body was not there because Jesus had risen again. We’re here this morning to celebrate the fact that out of all the religions of the world, we don’t follow the teachings of a dead philosopher.

We follow after a living Savior who died for our sins and who rose again and who now lives to make intercession for us with God the Father. We’ve been talking for the last few weeks. I’ve been doing most of the talking.

But we’ve been talking for the last few weeks about the resurrection. And he’s right. I did get a little wound up last week.

I always do. I always do when I talk about the resurrection. This is one of my, you know, every preacher I think has a pet message.

This one’s mine. the resurrection. I’ve talked to you about the evidence for the resurrection.

We’ve spent the last two weeks going over some of the historical and scientific and medical evidence for the resurrection. How we can look back and we can see what did the historians who were alive at Jesus’ own time or thereabouts, what did they say about it? And we can look and say, what does science tell us we should expect from somebody who’s undergoing crucifixion?

And we see that all of those things line up with the crucifixion story. What did the eyewitnesses say at that time? What evidence do we have?

And we’ve gone over those things and have established three facts already about the crucifixion. One was that Jesus’ life and his existence and his death are historically verifiable. We can go back and we can be as certain, and I’m telling you this especially if you’ve not been here the last two weeks, you need to know this, and at some point I’ll have the audio of those messages available if you’re interested in that.

But you need to know that we’re not just here celebrating a fairy tale or it’s not a holiday about cute bunnies. His existence and his death are historically verifiable. I can take you back through ancient Greek and Roman and Assyrian sources and Jewish sources, people who did not believe in Jesus Christ. I think the gospel accounts are great enough eyewitness accounts.

But you can go back and see people who were not Christians, who wrote about the fact that Jesus lived and he caused quite an uproar in Jerusalem and he was killed for. So that’s historically verifiable. We can look back and see what historians say and what history tells us about crucifixion and the method of torture that he would have gone through, not only on the cross but before the cross, and we see that it lines up exactly with what the Gospels tell us should happen.

We’ve looked at the medical evidence and seen that all the things that a body would go through after the scourging and after being hung on a cross for six hours, what he would have gone through. He would have been in such shock from loss of blood. Folks, everything that medical science tells us to expect, we see.

And so we’ve established, at least in a satisfactory enough manner for me, we’ve established that his life and his death are historically verifiable. the second fact we looked at, the second fact that we looked at was that he was buried and that his tomb was empty three days later. The resurrection story, the empty tomb, doesn’t matter at all if he wasn’t buried.

No wonder the tomb was empty if nobody was ever in it, if it was empty to begin with. That’s not miraculous if it’s still empty three days later. But we can look at history.

We can look at the accounts. We can look at the fact that nobody had a reason to make any of this up because the guys who would have made it up, the disciples, looked really bad in the story compared to the women, compared to Joseph of Arimathea, they looked really bad in the story. There’s no reason to believe this was made up, and every bit of evidence to believe that it’s true.

Even the Jews and Romans didn’t deny the tomb was empty. They tried to cover it up, but they didn’t deny it. And so he was buried, and the tomb was empty three days later.

And then the third fact is that he was seen alive again by dozens, numerous eyewitnesses, upwards of 500 people. I don’t know why I said dozens. That’s a lot of dozens, isn’t it?

Upwards of 500 people saw him alive, and you know, not one of them ever recanted their story that we have any evidence of. Most of these people went to their graves, said, hey, we won’t torture you and kill you if you’ll just admit that the whole Jesus thing that’s all made up. Yeah, no, I’m not going to do that.

You know we’re going to kill you, right? Yeah. You know it’s going to hurt, right?

They still wouldn’t deny it. Okay, so I think we can make a pretty strong case. Do I have video of it?

Can I give you the forensic evidence? Can we go through and prove it like they do on CSI? No, we can’t.

But we have more evidence for these things than we have for any other event in ancient history. If there’s not enough to believe in Jesus and the resurrection, that he existed, that he died, that he. .

. If there’s not enough evidence for that, you know what? There’s not enough evidence for Julius Caesar.

There’s not enough evidence for a lot of other events and people from ancient history. This morning, after we’ve discussed all those things, I want to bring you to the fourth fact, because I told you when I started into this a couple weeks ago that there were four facts about the resurrection, that as I started studying this out myself, that really convinced me. I already believed in the resurrection.

I was raised by Christian parents, raised in church, raised to believe the resurrection, but as I told you, I got to college and realized not everybody believed that, and not everybody’s going to cut you some slack if you don’t know what you’re talking about. And so I was really forced to dig in and study and see why do I believe these things. Are they as true as I’ve been led to believe?

And these are the things that convinced me. The fourth fact of the resurrection is that Jesus’ resurrection led to changes that cannot be otherwise explained. So we’re talking this morning about the after effects.

What happened after the resurrection that only the resurrection explained? The other day, my wife and kids and I were on our way to the city, and we had a limited time frame. We had somewhere we had to be at a specific time, which is not usually the case, but this would be the one time we got stuck in traffic, and I mean bad traffic.

I don’t know when was the last time you were on I-35 between Moore and Norman, but it’s bad even on a good day. And so we’re headed into the city from Norman, and trying to get somewhere, and didn’t figure in the evening there’d be a lot of traffic, and we get up and we see red lights. Three lanes of red lights in front of us, and I’m in the far left lane.

Oh, this is great. Well, we started thinking, there must be a wreck. Must be a wreck.

And then we see people trying to switch lanes and get over into a different lane, and we thought there must have been a wreck. Then we get a little further, and we’re crawling. I mean, we just crawled.

When you can see the detail of glass on the highway, you know you’re moving slowly. And we saw glass, and we saw taillights, and we saw this and that on the highway. There must have been a wreck.

Then we get up and we see the highway patrol, and they’ve got their lights on, and they’re making people move over, and we see a car that’s missing its front half. It looked like everybody had gotten out of it. It was just the front, like the engine area of the car was falling off.

There must have been a wreck. We crawl a little further, and we see another car that’s missing its back half. There must have been a wreck.

Did we see the wreck? I mean, did we see the wreck happen? No.

We missed the dramatic event of the wreck. But you know what, we could see the evidence of that car-on-car collision all around us. We could look at the effects and you put everything together and it spelled, oh, there was a wreck between two cars.

Sometimes even if you don’t see the dramatic event yourself, you can look back and say, okay, I see this evidence, I see this evidence, I see this evidence. These things can only be explained by this event. And if you’ve not been, especially if you’ve not been with us for the last two weeks, you may be wondering, what is the point of all of this?

Why talk about this? Well, if you’ll turn with me to 1 Corinthians chapter 15, Paul explains why this is important. This is the very cornerstone of Christianity.

And I have told the congregation the last two weeks that if the resurrection of Jesus Christ is not true, and is not true the way the Bible claims it, then you have me admitting that there’s nothing to Christianity. You have me admitting that Christianity is pointless, and we should just board the doors up and go home. Or maybe go home and then board the doors up.

It’d be hard to get out if we boarded them up first. Go home, board the doors up, shut down, go enjoy your Sunday, because there’s no point to any of this. That’s not just me saying that, that’s the Apostle Paul saying that. He said in 1 Corinthians chapter 15, starting in verse 1, he says, Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand.

He said, I’m going to remind you of the gospel you’ve already heard from me, you’ve received, that you stand in. He says, by which also you are saved, if you keep in memory what I have preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain. He says, I’m going to remind you of what I’ve already taught you, and what you already know, and what you already believe, and that message that has saved you.

He says in verse 3, For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received. What I also heard is what I told you. And the Apostle Paul said elsewhere, that what he received, he received directly from the mouth of Jesus Christ. It wasn’t Peter.

It wasn’t James. It wasn’t John. It wasn’t anybody.

It was Jesus Christ who told him these things. How that Christ died for our sins. Okay, don’t ever miss that.

For our sins. He died for me and for you. He didn’t get himself killed because he was a revolutionary or because the people didn’t like him or this or that.

I mean, all of those things contributed, but the ultimate reason why he died was for our sins. He was taking the responsibility for my sins and your sins that would have condemned us before a just and holy God, he was taking responsibility for those sins and took the punishment for them. So Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures, just as the scriptures had said for hundreds of years that he would, and that he was buried.

See, Paul notices the importance of the burial too. The empty tomb is not impressive if it was always empty. He was buried, and that he rose again the third day, according to the scriptures.

Now the scriptures also foretold, and Jesus with his own mouth foretold, that he’d rise again in three days. After that, he goes on and says, And he was seen of Cephas, that’s Peter. Then of the twelve, after that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain unto this present, that some are fallen asleep.

He says, There are a few who have died, but there were over five hundred brethren who have seen him. Most of them are still alive. Go ask him.

You don’t believe me? Hey, believers at Corinth, they weren’t there in Jerusalem. They were hundreds of miles away in Greece.

So we’re telling you, he rose again from the dead. You don’t believe me? Go ask the people who saw it with their own eyes.

And after that, he was seen of James, then of all the apostles. And last of all, he was seen of me also as one born out of due time. Okay, so then he goes on and talks a little bit more about the resurrection.

We pick it back up in verse 17. He says, and if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain, ye are yet in your sins. Let me say that again.

If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain, ye are yet in your sins. That’s where I take it from, that if the resurrection is not true, then Christianity is not true. If the resurrection is true, it doesn’t matter what you believe that you’ve ever been taught in church.

You’re not saved. There’s no life after death for you. There’s no hope in any of this.

It’s just empty, vain tears. And that’s a pretty bleak outlook to say that if the resurrection is not true, then there’s no point to any of it. But folks, I believe as firmly as I believe that I’m standing in front of you today, I believe that the resurrection is true because of the evidence.

Because of the evidence that we’ve already discussed, but because of the changes also that we’ve seen in the world after the resurrection that can only be explained by the resurrection. And I want to take you through those things today. As we finish talking about these facts of the resurrection, the final fact, again, as I said, is that his resurrection led to changes that you can’t explain any other way.

You can look at these changes and you can say, well, maybe that happened for that reason, or maybe that happened for that reason, but you put them all together and you look at all the revolutionary changes that took place starting in Jerusalem in the 30s AD and how the world was turned upside down from that point. The world as a whole and the world for those who saw this. I mean, the lives of people who claim to have seen the resurrection were changed from then on forever as a result of what they witnessed.

And you put all of this together, and folks, there’s no other conclusion that I can come to that makes half as much sense as the resurrection. And like I told you last week with the idea that became popular in the 1800s and early 1900s that Jesus just sort of passed out on the cross and came to in the tomb and got better and walked out. Once you start picking that apart, it takes more faith to believe that than it does just to believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross.

When you start looking at other explanations for how these things happened, it takes more faith. I don’t have enough faith to believe these alternative theories. The first thing that we look at and see, this is a big change that took place afterwards, is that the disciples were suddenly bold witnesses in the face of martyrdom.

They went out, and you look at Acts chapter 2, Peter stands up and preaches, and he’s like a lion. I mean, he just tears into the Jewish religious leaders. He tears into the political leaders.

He tears into the nation of Israel and says, you know what, you can mock us if you want, but the Son of God, the Messiah that you’ve been looking for, he was sent to you, and you took, and with your own dirty hands you put him to death. You killed him. But you know what, it doesn’t matter that you killed him, Because God, God allowed it to happen and God brought him.

He stood there and he stood down. He challenged the entire nation of Israel. Knowing what they had just done to Jesus, what would keep them from doing it to Peter?

And you might think, well, that’s an apostle. We would expect him to. Of course, that’s his job.

Where was Peter just a couple months before? He was hiding. He was hiding with the other disciples.

They ran and hid. If you’re not familiar with the story, go back and read it. If you just turn to any of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, and you look at the last couple chapters in any of them, it tells you the story.

These men who were supposed to be Jesus’ closest followers, they ran and hid. Peter denied three times. I don’t even know him.

And the last time he cursed at whoever it was and said, I don’t know him. Peter was scared to death. They’ve killed Jesus.

They’re coming for us too. What takes somebody from acting so timid and so afraid of his own shadow and turns him into a giant of a man like Peter who would stand up and stare down the entire nation of Israel for their sins. An eyewitness encounter with Jesus who was dead and now is alive again is a pretty good explanation.

I’ve heard it said that by about 25, you’re pretty much who you’re going to be in life. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Now, God can change you if he wants to, but personality-wise, you’re pretty much who you’re going to be by 25.

We don’t see radical changes in people’s personality just overnight for no reason. There’s got to be a cause, and it’s usually going to be a pretty big one. We look at the other apostles.

We see Peter and John. Well, Peter’s one of them, but we look at Peter and John just a couple chapters after Acts chapter 2. They’re going into the temple to preach and to share Christ, and the man is at the gate.

He’s crippled, and he can’t walk, and he’s asking for money, and they tell him, silver and gold have I none, but such as I have I give unto you in the name of Jesus. Rise up and walk. They tell this crippled man, get up and walk.

That would be insane if Jesus was dead to say in the name of Jesus, get up and walk and expect him to actually do it. But then he does it, and a crowd starts to form, as you can imagine. They’ve seen something miraculous, and they start to gather.

And the people say, what caused this to happen? And the Pharisees start to question them, what caused this to happen? They talk about Jesus, and then the council comes and arrests them.

And when they’re put on trial, they start talking about Jesus again. These men became bold witnesses for Jesus Christ in the face of martyrdom, in the threat of, we’re going to kill you. And of the 11 remaining disciples, the 11 remaining apostles, 10 of them would die as martyrs, and John would live out his life and be persecuted.

And yet it didn’t matter. You don’t go from being that timid, especially as a group, from being that timid to, we don’t care. We’re going full force on this, and we don’t care who it bothers unless something incredible is happening.

And that’s that they saw Jesus alive. Second of all, we see that skeptics and non-believers were drastically converted. It wasn’t just his followers who said, okay, yeah, Jesus is alive again.

There were skeptics and non-believers who because they saw Jesus dead and buried and then they saw him alive again said, wait a minute, maybe he’s been right all along. You realize Jesus had a brother named James who did not believe in him during his earthly ministry. I just realized that in the last few years.

He had a brother named James who didn’t believe in his earthly ministry, didn’t accept his claims to be God, didn’t accept his claims to be the Messiah. But later, we see in the Bible, James is not only a Christian, but he’s one of the leaders in the church in Jerusalem. So he goes from saying, yeah, that’s my brother and he’s not God.

Which I think any of us would look at our siblings and say, yeah, there’s no way. That’s my brother, and I don’t believe he is who he claims to be or who other people claim he is. And then shortly thereafter, you’re one of the leaders of the organization that is proclaiming he is God.

What happened in between point A in time and point B in time? All these eyewitness accounts. And here in 1 Corinthians chapter 15, it points out in verse 7 that he was seen of James.

His brother James saw Jesus alive again after he was dead. Even in their day, they had skeptics. That’s not new to 2016.

Even in their day, they had skeptics. And they had non-believers. And yet, even in his day, with the skeptics and non-believers they had, The resurrection was so convincing and so powerful that these people were drastically converted and began to follow Jesus Christ. Saul of Tarsus, you may know him as the Apostle Paul, but Saul of Tarsus hated Christians, started out, became famous by arresting Christians and putting them to death.

Nice guy, huh? I’ve described him before as basically the Osama bin Laden of his day. We’re going to kill the infidel, we’re going to get rid of him, and he had the papers to do it.

And yet he comes around to be one of the greatest missionaries in the history of Christianity. And it’s because of a little story that took place in the book of Acts where he saw Jesus on the road to Damascus. He saw Jesus alive again and his life was never the same.

Third of all, we see where once observant Jews discontinued their animal sacrifice. Now what’s the big deal about this? If you were convinced that you had to do X, Y, and Z to get to heaven, I mean if you were absolutely convinced, you’d been raised to believe that, your family for thousands of years had done that, and you believed that you had to do X, Y, and Z to get to heaven, would you just stop for no reason?

No. If I thought I had to kill a sheep or a goat or something to get into heaven, I’m going to find a way to make that happen. And yet, all of a sudden, we see that these guys who followed him, you know, during his lifetime, they were going into the temple, they were worshiping, but something happened where Peter and James, another James, who’s not Jesus’ brother, Peter and James and John and the others, they quit with the animal sacrifices.

There’s an entire book in the New Testament written by one of them. We don’t know which one, but we can tell by the way it’s written. It’s written by an apostle, the book of Hebrews.

There’s an entire book of the New Testament that talks about how sacrifices don’t really do anything to earn you God’s forgiveness. That’s a radical change. And again, if you say, what’s the big deal?

Think about it in terms of that’s what they had been raised to believe was going to get them to heaven. You needed to be descended from Abraham and undergo all these rituals and these sacrifices, and suddenly their entire worldview shifts. And they said, no, no, we’ve been wrong.

That’s not what it is. Or we haven’t seen the full picture. That’s what it is.

I don’t know about you, but it is hard enough for me to admit that I’m wrong about anything. There is no taste worse to me in this world than the taste of the words, I was wrong. And that’s even about stuff that’s not regarding my eternal destination, whether I go to heaven or not.

It’s hard enough to convince me I’m wrong about little day-to-day stuff, right, Charles? Amen. But to change your mind about how you think you’re getting to heaven, there’s got to be a good reason behind that.

And they just gave up the animal sacrifices because they didn’t need them anymore, because a perfect sacrifice had been offered, and they had seen him alive again proving that the sacrifice was acceptable to God. Along the same lines, these once observant Jews viewed the law no longer as binding, no longer viewed the law as binding. The animal sacrifices were part of that.

But think about the laws and everything they had to follow and all the boxes they had to check off. You’ve got to do this and your clothes have to be exactly like this and your food has to be exactly like this and you can only travel so far on certain days and it would be exhausting. I mean the only thing I can compare it to today is trying to wade through the federal tax code.

And we’re all probably guilty of some violation without realizing it. It was impossible to keep the Old Testament law. They thought that’s how they were going to get to heaven.

But the whole point, they came around eventually to the teaching that the whole point of the Old Testament law was that we couldn’t. That’s a radical shift in your ideas. To say, I’m going to follow this set of rules and that’s how I’m going to get to heaven.

To coming around to saying, the whole point of this set of rules is to show me that they couldn’t get me to heaven. You don’t change your mind about something like that for no reason. And also, along with these other two, once observant Jews abandoned the Sabbath.

Used to, and still observant Jews today will worship on the Sabbath, starting Friday night at sundown through Saturday night at sundown. So most of it is Saturday. Well, the Sabbath is not Sunday, by the way, in case you thought about that, called it the Sabbath.

The Bible calls Sunday the Lord’s Day, but it’s not the Sabbath. Saturday is the Sabbath, but we don’t observe the Sabbath anymore. Why not?

Because they decided we’re going to meet together and we’re going to worship together on Sundays. Now, we’re going to meet together on the first day of the week instead of the seventh day of the week. Wait a minute.

We can just change God’s rules? We can just change what we’ve been taught for thousands of years? Again, they thought that something they had to do to get to heaven was to worship on the Sabbath.

That’s one of the Ten Commandments for the Old Testament. The fourth commandment, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. And all of a sudden, they get rid of the Sabbath day and say we’re going to start meeting on Sunday.

Something pretty dramatic had to happen for that to be the case. What happened on the first day of the week was that that’s the day Jesus rose again from the Sabbath. And to take these last three and to get you to see how solid, what a big deal these really are.

Okay, we’re sitting in a Baptist church this morning. Sorry to shock you if you didn’t realize that. Show of hands, how many in here were raised Baptists?

Okay, most of us. A good number of us. If you weren’t raised Baptists, that’s okay.

We love you anyway. Most of us in here, or at least a good portion of us in here, were raised Baptists. I mean, there are different flavors and varieties of Baptists, but generally we believe a lot of the same things.

For you to change some of those deeply held beliefs, what would it take? I mean, some of the things that we as Baptists believe, salvation by grace through faith without works. The idea that you get to heaven because of what Jesus Christ did and not because of any good you do and trusting him as your Savior.

That’s how we get to heaven. That’s a basic principle of Baptist churches, of Baptist teaching. That the Bible is the inspired and authoritative word of God.

And I know some people in Baptist churches today say, well, no, it doesn’t mean, okay, I’m not talking about liberal baptism. But we believe the Bible is the word of God, that it means what it says. It doesn’t change.

Okay, that’s something we believe. We believe in baptism as a sign of obedience to Christ, as a picture of the death, burial, and resurrection, and as a way of identifying with him and with his church. These are some of the basic things we believe.

Not all of them, but these are some of the basic things we believe. What would it take to get you to change your mind about those? I can’t think of anything.

For me, it would pretty much take God showing up and saying, wait a minute, that book’s been wrong, here’s what. . .

And even then, how do I know you’re really God? It’s been so ingrained in me. For better or for worse, it’s been so ingrained in me.

The Jews were even more serious about the religious education of their children. If you can’t think of anything that would change your mind, and I can’t think of anything that would change my mind, it’d be even harder for them, for the disciples. And yet all these things change.

Something pretty drastic happened to cause that. The Jews’ understanding of God changed. These people were devout Jews.

They were taught there’s one God, which we still believe today. But in their religion, they were made to even recite every day the Shema, which is from the Old Testament. They were made to recite, in Hebrew, Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu.

I shouldn’t have started down that. I forgot the words. But in English, it’s, Here, O Israel, the Lord our God is one.

The Lord our God is one. They were made to recite that every day, to be reminded. You don’t follow these pagan gods of the countries around you.

It’s not, God’s okay as long as we worship Him. We can worship these other gods, but as long as He’s. .

. No, God is one. There is one God, and He wants to be your only God, and the only one you worship.

God is not interested in a fraction of your heart and a fraction of your worship. He wants all of it. For them to go from saying, there’s one God, period, to saying there’s one God, and He reveals Himself in three persons, the three eternally distinct persons.

There’s God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. And they’re all three distinct persons in the Trinity, and yet they’re all one God. First of all, it’s hard even for somebody who was raised up in that way of thinking to wrap my mind around that.

But for them to go from one God, period, to one God in three persons is a pretty big shift. Something had to change their mind about that. Something had to show them that Jesus Christ was God.

Now, if he was still dead and in the tomb, there’s no reason for them to believe he’s God. There’s no reason for us today to believe he’s God if he’s still dead. Folks, they saw his tomb empty and they saw him with their own eyes alive again.

Their understanding of the Messiah change. We’re almost finished. Their understanding of the Messiah change.

For 4,000 years, they had been looking for 3,000. They’d been looking for God to send somebody who was going to be the Savior of the Jewish nation. But they were looking for a political Savior.

At this point, they were looking for somebody who was going to kick the Romans out and restore a perfect kingdom on earth, who was going to set them free, who was going to do all these wonderful things. And that’s part of the reason the people turned on Jesus. They were ready to usher him in on Palm Sunday and make him king.

And yet a week later they were crucifying him because they realized he wasn’t the guy who was going to kick the Romans out. They were looking for somebody who was going to be that political leader. Even his own disciples still, up until the time of his crucifixion, thought he was going to usher in that kind of kingdom.

And yet suddenly something else changed where they began teaching about a kingdom that’s not of this world. And the fact that he came as the Messiah as a sacrifice. As a sacrifice to set G

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Powered by atecplugins.com