Three Clues that Confirm the Resurrection

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We spend a lot of time at our house talking about evidence and reality, and it’s probably because Charla and I are a little warped in that direction. We’re probably warping the minds of our kids, but it can be mundane things like who broke the lamp, and of course, everybody blames nobody and not me. They are our worst children, nobody and not me.

But next thing you know, Charla is cross-examining everybody, and I’m making charts of timelines. And not because we are that worried about the lamp, but just because we want to know the story of what happened. We want to know what really happened.

It can be something that mundane. It can be something as consequential as trying to help Charla navigate the waters of how is it that we’ve told him monsters are not real because you can’t. .

. Do you see monsters around you? Do you see monsters under the bed?

Do you see monsters in the closet? And yet we tell him Jesus is real and he can’t see Jesus. So helping him navigate those waters and trying to talk on a very child-friendly level about evidence.

We talk about evidence. We talk about reality. Because I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to believe a lie.

Sometimes we might find it a little comforting to believe a lie, but in the long run, I would rather be comforted by the truth, even if in the short term it’s a little bit uncomfortable. one of my greatest you know I’ll just call it an obsession one of my greatest obsessions in life is the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ and that goes back to going off to college when I was 18 years old walking into a freshman philosophy class because that’s all I could get into everything else was booked that should have been my first clue that this wasn’t going to go well But walking into one of those classes and the professor, here I thought I knew everything, and that professor ate me alive and so many others. Talking about how Christianity is a fairy tale.

All religions are fairy tales. That they’re all just based on feeling. There’s nothing in them that you can even evaluate to see whether it’s true or not.

It’s all just subjective and it’s all just non-factual. There’s no way you could ever know if it was true, so you might as well just move on from this nonsense. And I thought, that doesn’t sound right. And as I studied further, I realized Christianity comes with its own test baked right in.

There is something that separates Christianity from every other religion, every other philosophy, and that I believe is the key to us knowing that Christianity is the truth, and that is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. You see, it’s not my opinion, it’s not this church’s position, it’s in God’s Word. that if the resurrection did not happen, there’s no point to any of this. We can just pack it up and go home.

1 Corinthians chapter 15 is where we’re going to start this morning, where we’re going to finish up. We’re going to look at several things this morning. But one of the things Paul points out in 1 Corinthians 15, as he is talking about the resurrection, as he’s explaining the importance of the resurrection, is to tell the church at Corinth that the resurrection is either true or it’s not.

If it is true, then Christianity is true, and you better take Jesus seriously. If it is false, then none of this has any meaning to it. And so I want to, this morning, go through a little bit of the evidence.

It’s all circumstantial. I’ll grant you that. Unfortunately, we don’t have video of the empty tomb. They just didn’t have that in that day.

Historical records are a little bit sparse, but historical records are sparse of just about everything from the ancient world. But there is a ton of evidence that leads us to the empty tomb. I don’t have time to go into all of it this morning.

A couple of years ago, I spent four consecutive Sundays talking about the evidence. and still didn’t get to the end of all of it. I’ve written my dissertation on evidence for the resurrection.

I’m in the middle of writing two books on evidence for the resurrection because one was not going to be big enough. And I don’t say all that to say, oh, look at me. I say that to tell you, look at all the evidence there is.

And we cover some of that from time to time as it comes up. But today I want to look at three overlooked clues that give us reason to think the resurrection is true. Three historical pieces of evidence that point to the truth of the resurrection.

But if you would, start with me in 1 Corinthians chapter 15. And we’re going to look at this passage where Paul talks about it. 1 Corinthians 15, if you can’t find it in your Bible or don’t have your Bible, it’ll be up on the screen.

And once you find it, if you would, stand with me as we read together from God’s Word. But it says, starting in verse 14, And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain. Your faith also is vain.

That word vain means empty or meaningless. I’m telling you right now not because I say so but because the Bible says so that if the resurrection is not true then everything we’re doing here is meaningless moreover we are found we are even found to be false witnesses of God because we testified against God that he raised Christ whom he did not raise if in fact the dead are not raised so Paul says and if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead we’re false witnesses about what God has done we’re telling lies on God we’re accusing him of things he didn’t do for if the dead are not raised not even Christ has been raised Christ has not been raised, hear this, your faith is worthless, you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.

If we have hope in Christ in this life only, we are of all men to be pitied. Excuse me, we are of all men most to be pitied. He says, if Christ is not raised, then those that you know who have gone on before, they’ve just died, they’ve just ceased to exist. And if the only hope we have in Christ is in this life, this idea that he’s going to set a good example for us and teach us how to live and teach us how to be nice.

If that’s all there is to it, then we are the most miserable of all men. He says in verse 20, but now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who are asleep. And you may be seated.

You may be sitting there saying today, well, where’s the evidence in that? That’s not the evidence. That’s explaining why this all matters.

Because without the resurrection of Christ, a Christianity without the resurrection of Christ is little more than a self-help program from some guy who got himself and I think it’s important that we go over this this morning, because our world has grown increasingly, I mean, there was never a golden age when everything was perfect, but our world has grown increasingly hostile toward Christianity over the last couple of generations. I think we as churches have, by and large, let these things go by too frequently unanswered when there are answers to the objections, and so we’ve let the world around us think that it’s just a subjective faith, It’s just something we believe because we feel some of you in here this morning may be Christians because you feel it’s true. And I’m glad you’re here.

I’m glad you think it’s true. But I don’t want you to leave here feeling like it’s true. I want you to know that it’s true.

Insofar as we can know anything from 2,000 years ago, I want you to know it’s true. I want you to have reason for why you believe it’s true. Maybe you’re here this morning because you don’t particularly believe in Jesus, but somebody dragged you here this morning and you came along just to humor them.

We’re glad you’re here too. I want to give you something to think about. It may not fully convince you, but at the very least, if it convinces you, maybe there’s more to this that I need to check out than I’ve done my job.

I want to give you some reasons to maybe consider that it might be true. As I said earlier, these are not the only pieces of evidence, but I think these are three that are fairly compelling and all too often overlooked. And by the way, these are pieces of evidence that almost all historians agree are true.

Dr. Gary Habermas, who teaches at Liberty University, is one of the foremost experts on the resurrection. I want to be him when I grow up.

He has compiled a database, I guess you’d call it, of every scholarly piece of writing that’s been written on the resurrection since 1975. And talks about how these facts and some others that he calls the minimal facts argument, these have been agreed upon by virtually every scholar of virtually every viewpoint. Evangelical, liberal, atheist, it doesn’t matter.

They all agree that these facts are basically historically accurate. And the first one I want to take you to is the transformation of Peter. The Apostle Peter.

This is not simply taught in the Bible, but it’s agreed upon by historians that Peter’s entire life was turned upside down. And we do see evidence of this in the Bible. That’s our primary source, although there are other historical records from church tradition and so on that deal with Peter.

Peter’s entire life was turned upside down. And as we’ve been studying as a church through the book of Mark, we’ve seen some of the things already that took place in Peter’s life, what kind of man he was initially. He thought he was a brave man.

He wanted to be a courageous man, but all too often he fell short of that. Anytime he was challenged, as a matter of fact, he would fold and he would cower. He boasted to Jesus at the Last Supper about his courage.

And even after Jesus warned him, you’re not going to be able to withstand this, he boasted to Jesus and said in Matthew 26, 33, even if they all fall away because of you, I will never fall away. So when Jesus said, I’m going to be betrayed, you’re all going to scatter, Peter looks at everybody else in the room and said, they will all deny you, I never will. And then practically the next breath, I know it was a couple hours later, but we’re not talking days and weeks down the road.

A few hours later, Jesus is arrested. They all scatter like Jesus said. And then Peter follows at a distance to the place where Jesus was being questioned before the official trial. And three times, just like Jesus said he would, three times Peter denies Jesus.

Peter, this man who said he was going to be courageous that he would go and die with Jesus, Peter cowered in fear at the mere suggestion that he even knew Jesus. Three times. Matthew 26, 70 says, but he denied it before them all saying, I do not know what you’re talking about.

They said, you know Jesus, don’t you? He says, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Then again, Matthew 26, 72, he’s asked a second time about it.

And I think in each case, there’s, I think there’s a lot of chaos going on at this pretrial and different groups of people around. And I think Peter’s moving around the room, just the way it reads, you’ve got different people asking him questions. I think he’ll get in the midst of a group and he may have three or four or five people asking him questions at a time.

Wait, are you one of them? You are? You’re one of them too?

You know, that kind of thing. And I think he, oh no, I’ve been spotted over here, so I’m going to go mingle with this part of the crowd. He comes to another part of the crowd and they ask him, don’t you know Jesus?

At one point they even say, we can tell you’re with him because you’ve got a Galilean accent. It gives you away. And then again, he denied it with an oath.

I do not know the man. The idea of an oath, he was swearing. I swear I don’t know him.

I pinky promise I don’t know the man. He’s trying to save his skin here. Then we get a few verses later, Matthew 26, 74, they ask him a third time, do you know Jesus?

And it said he began to curse and to swear. I do not know the man. I mean, he’s bringing out the big words to let people know he’s serious that he doesn’t know Jesus.

Then we see later on when after Jesus has been crucified and now his body’s being taken down to be buried, Peter, we don’t even know where Peter is. He is nowhere mentioned in any of the accounts of the burial. The people that we know were there, Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, and a group of the women led by Mary Magdalene, some of whom are named by name. Peter is nowhere to be found.

Jesus is dead, and Peter’s off hiding somewhere. John 20, 19 tells us that Peter was hidden away later on in a locked room with fear with the other disciples. In the days after the crucifixion, Peter hid.

The others did too, that we’re talking about Peter here. Peter hid. They locked themselves up because they didn’t want to deal with anybody.

They didn’t want to, they were scared. And please don’t think I’m knocking Peter here because any of us could have just as easily been in that situation. But I want you to see where he was before so you understand the transformation that took place.

When Jesus rose from the dead and the story started to get out that the tomb was empty, nobody had seen his body yet, but they’d seen the tomb empty, and the angel had spoken to the women and told them that he was not there. The word starts to get back to Peter. Peter doesn’t believe it.

Luke 24 says, these words appeared to them as nonsense, and they would not believe the women. How many times? I’ve lost count, but as we’ve studied through Mark, how many times have we read that Jesus said, I’m going to be crucified, I’m going to be buried, three days later I’m going to rise again.

Well, everything up to this point has fallen into place the way Jesus said it would, and yet they come with this story that he’s risen from the dead, and he says it’s nonsense. When he does go and check out what is there at the empty tomb, it says he goes home marveling at what had happened. He was confused.

So this is not a man of great faith who was anticipating Jesus coming back. That’s who Peter was before Jesus, a man full of bluster and bravado, who when the chips were down, he would fold and go home, someone who did not have Jesus’ back. But then who was Peter afterwards?

Peter was a fearless advocate of Jesus Christ. On the day of Pentecost in Acts chapter 2, he comes in front of a group of people in Jerusalem, many of whom were part of the crowd that cried out for Jesus’ blood. And he gives one of the first recorded sermons in the history of the church. And some of the things he said to them that day, he got on to them for what they had done.

And he didn’t get up and give them the soft sell and be nice about it. He shucked the corn and told them what they had done. He said they had murdered Jesus.

On top of that, he said, you’re not just murderers, you’re bad at it because it didn’t do what you intended. You murdered him, but Jesus rose from the dead. And then he said, now you need to repent.

You’re wrong and need to repent. You need to turn to Jesus. The one you crucified, you need to run to him.

Talk about a confrontational message. Later on, he goes to a crowd at the temple in Acts chapter 3 and does the same thing. He goes and confronts the people again about their sin and about how they had turned on Jesus.

He goes to a group of the Jewish religious authorities who had orchestrated all of this in Acts chapter 4 and he takes the same message to them. He goes to a group of the Sanhedrin, which was the group that got together and condemned Jesus and took him to the Romans in Acts chapter 5. He confronts them with the same message.

We see a Peter, who cowered in fear like a whipped dog before, turned into somebody who’s not backing down. He doesn’t care what you throw at him afterwards. He preached about Jesus and the resurrection in Acts chapter 10 to Roman military leaders.

And historians tell us that he was crucified when he refused to stop preaching this message. Clement of Rome and Tertullian of Carthage write about how he went to his death, proclaiming that Jesus died and rose again. It’s a pretty dramatic change, right?

By the time we’re adults, our personality is pretty well set absent some kind of cataclysmic change. For somebody’s personality to change completely overnight, you’ve got to have a pretty good explanation. Something enormous has to have happened in their lives.

So what is it that happened in Peter’s life? He tells us. There in that sermon in Acts chapter 2 and several other places, he tells us what had happened.

He saw Jesus alive. He said in Acts 2. 32, God has raised this Jesus.

He’s talking about the one that they had crucified a couple months before. He said, God has raised this Jesus and we are all witnesses. We’ve all seen it.

I’ve seen him alive. You ever been in a situation where you know you’re right and you’re not backing down? That’s where he was about the idea that Jesus had risen from the dead.

He saw Jesus die. He saw the empty tomb. Then he met with the risen Jesus at least six times.

So whatever we think happened on that morning of the resurrection, whatever we think happened at that tomb has to be sufficient to explain the change, the transformation that took place in Peter. But wait, there’s more. There’s the conversion of James.

Tonight in the living Lord’s Supper, you’re going to see two Jameses. This is not one of them. This is a third James.

Jesus’s own brother changed his mind about Jesus being God. And I’ve always found this one to be particularly interesting because what would it take? If you have a sibling, raise your hand, okay?

Those of you that have your hands raised, is there anything you could see happening in normal circumstances that would make you think your sibling as God? What would it take to convince you? Think about that for a minute.

But James changed his mind. Look at how James viewed his brother before, how James viewed Jesus. He was skeptical of Jesus’s claims. He thought Jesus was crazy, as a matter of fact, at least crazy from overwork.

John 7, 5 tells us not even his brothers believed in him. Now, and part of the reason we know this is true is because James later on becomes a leader in the church. Nobody would want to embarrass James and say, oh, he was skeptical, he was not a believer, if it wasn’t true.

You didn’t make up stories that were going to put the church leadership in a bad light. That’s one of the reasons we know a lot of these details in the Gospels are true, because they make them look like idiots. The only reason to include these things in the story is because they really happen.

So John tells us that James did not believe in Jesus. James was included in a group of family members that came to Jesus when Mark records that they came to take him home. Jesus was out healing and teaching and doing miracles in Mark chapter 3 says, Jesus entered a house and the crowd gathered again so that they were not even able to eat.

There’s so many people around waiting to hear Jesus. When his family heard this, they’d had enough. It says they set out to restrain him because they said he’s out of his mind.

Jesus’s family thought he was crazy in the beginning. And it says they went later on in the chapter, they tried to take him home. So James starts out believing as I think all of us would, if our sibling claimed to be God, if our sibling started this religious movement and claimed to be sent by God, we would all think they’re crazy, right?

We would probably try to intervene like James did. I’ve already given you a clue as to who James turned out to be. How did James view Jesus after he became one of the most prominent leaders in the Jerusalem church?

There’s a historian named Hegesippus who tells us that he’s not the same as James the greater or James the lesser. He’s not the same James as the one that became the leader of the church is not the son of Alphaeus or the son of Zebedee. It’s the brother of Jesus.

After the resurrection and the ascension, the book of Acts tells us that James was part of the group that gathered in Jerusalem and waited for the Holy Spirit to come. So even before the church really gets off the ground, James is with the disciples, hanging out with them, waiting for the Holy Spirit so he can be there at Pentecost. When Peter got out of prison in Acts chapter 12, Peter says, send word to the church, and he specifically mentions James. Go tell James that I’m out of prison.

In Acts 15, there’s a council at Jerusalem when the church at Antioch started having trouble about, do we have to be circumcised? Do we have to follow these rules in addition to Jesus? Do we have to do all these rituals?

Or is Jesus enough? And so they called all the leaders together at Jerusalem and said, what’s the answer here? What do we do?

And we have record that they got up and deliberated. They discussed. They talked back and forth.

And James speaks more than anybody, including Peter, and sways the discussion probably more than anybody, including Peter. Everybody says, oh, Peter was the head of the church after Jesus. Not according to James.

They all followed after James in Jerusalem. And you say, well, I might say my brother was awesome too if it got me all that power. Now, let me tell you what he got for all his power and all his influence.

Multiple historians tell us that James, the brother of Jesus, refused to quit preaching who his brother was and what his brother had done. And as a result, he was thrown off of a high point in the temple complex. And when that didn’t quite kill him, the members of the Sanhedrin got down there and clubbed him to death.

So the idea, well, he did it for the power and the influence. That didn’t really fly with me. James started out believing as any of us would that his brother was crazy.

And then all of a sudden he believes, he believes that his brother is God. And I go back to that question, what would it take to convince me that my sibling is God? I can’t even imagine, but it would have to be pretty big.

And history tells us what happened in the meantime. It was that he saw Jesus. He saw Jesus.

He’d been dead. He’d been buried. Suddenly, he’s up walking around again.

James saw that, and it was enough to convince him of this brother he’d been so skeptical about. I want to show you one more thing this morning. This is not what anybody calls it, as far as I know, other than me, the Corinthian creed.

I just do that as a shorthand. It’s not because it came from Corinth, but because it’s recorded in the book of 1 Corinthians. The Corinthian creed shows us that the resurrection story is as old as it could possibly be.

This idea that it is a legend that came up decades, if not centuries later, is just not true. Because Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, just before the section we read earlier, at the beginning of 1 Corinthians chapter 15, he writes something about the resurrection that scholars across the theological spectrum and historians across the spectrum recognize is an early Christian statement of faith, an early creed that they would memorize, that they would recite, that would reinforce what they believed. And here’s what he said, starting in 1 Corinthians 5, verse 3.

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, that’s Peter, then the twelve. And after that, he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all of the apostles.

So in this statement, this creed that records what happened and what the earliest Christians believed, it emphasizes four crucial points that are essential to what we believe about the resurrection. Jesus died, Jesus was buried. That’s important because if He wasn’t buried, the empty tomb is, of course it was empty.

But He died, He was buried, He rose from the dead, the tomb was empty, and He was seen alive again after rising. Gary Habermas that I quoted earlier, or talked about earlier, said, Virtually all scholars agree that 1 Corinthians 15, 3 and following records an ancient oral tradition that reports the gospel data. Jesus Christ’s atoning death, burial, resurrection, and appearances to many persons.

Although the Apostle Paul wrote the passage, it is not his material, but is actually much older than the book where it is recounted. And elsewhere he writes that this confession is an early Christian pre-Pauline, meaning before Paul, creed, is recognized by virtually all critical scholars across a very wide theological spectrum. What does this mean?

What this means, the evidence from the text itself tells us that Paul wrote this letter around AD 54. the year 54 that was after he had been in the city of Corinth with them in the year 51 and he tells us in verse 3 he delivered to them what he had received so we have Paul saying I told you this back in 51 AD this tells us the Corinthian creed right here is no more than 18 years after the death of Jesus Christ that this was it wasn’t a legend that came about centuries and decades later this was the teaching of Christianity no later than 18 years after Jesus died, the belief that he rose again from the dead. But it goes further than that.

Paul says he received this. He would have learned this during his time with believers in either Damascus or Jerusalem that are both recorded in Acts and Galatians. But the phrasing of the creed, the fact that he mentions James, the fact that he uses Peter’s Aramaic name, tells us he learned this in Jerusalem most likely.

We know from history that Paul was converted and became a follower of Jesus Christ in AD 34, about a year after the crucifixion. It was three years later, in around AD 37, then that Paul went to Jerusalem to meet with the apostles. That tells us the Corinthian creed, this belief in the resurrection comes from no later than four years after the death of Jesus.

And Habermas actually says we can proceed back two stages earlier. The tradition would have actually been formulated before Paul first heard it, and the creed itself would be dated even earlier. Additionally, the independent beliefs themselves, which later composed the formalized creed, would date back to the actual historical events.

Therefore, we are dealing with material that proceeds directly from the events in question, and this creed is thus crucial in our discussion of the death and resurrection of Jesus. That tells us that this statement of belief goes back to the immediate aftermath of the discovery of the empty tomb. This is not, this is not something that people made up hundreds of years later.

This is what the people who were there in Jerusalem when it happened actually believed and staked their lives on. You can disagree with them all you want, but you can’t say that they made it up later. I’ve read where some writers have said it was not early enough for legend to develop.

Well, I mean, we see a lot of fake news and a lot of stuff that goes on that’s not true. It’s not too soon for legend to develop, but it’s too soon for legend to dominate. I mean, there are people now, what are we, 80 years later, trying to tell us the Holocaust didn’t happen, but there are still people alive who saw it and can set that to rest. That’s why the legend doesn’t dominate.

This goes back to no more than four years, and in all likelihood, the immediate aftermath of the empty tomb. This was what they believed, this is what they taught, this is what they were willing to die for. A lot of people today die for something they believe to be true that is not true, but people do not die for the things they know to be untrue.

The story of the resurrection is incredibly early. So what does this evidence mean? What does all of this mean to you?

What we have here in these three clues. We have two men whose lives were changed in dramatic ways that can only be justified by extraordinary events. Something major had to happen to transform Peter’s entire personality and convince James that his crazy brother was God.

And we have an explanation, and by the way, as I said, virtually all historians accept those to be the case. We have that extraordinary explanation that it wasn’t somebody came hundreds of years later and said, well, we’ve got to explain this somehow. It comes from right after the event.

It’s simply too early to be legendary. And as I mentioned earlier, I would love to say we have video. We can roll that footage of Jesus walking out of the tomb.

We don’t. We don’t have that footage. Everything we have from the ancient world is circumstantial. There’s a lot of stuff we know and conclude to be true from the ancient world based on the piles of circumstantial evidence.

And whatever we think happened that morning outside the empty tomb, it has to be able to account for Peter. It has to be able to account for James. It has to be able to account for that creed.

And I’ve not heard an alternative explanation yet that covers all the bases. And it’s for pieces of evidence like this, including these and like these, that make me as sure as I can be about something that happened 2,000 years ago, that Jesus Christ walked out of the tomb alive three days after he had been crucified and put there. And if the resurrection is true, then it confirms everything Jesus said about himself.

If the resurrection is true, then Jesus is our Lord. If the resurrection is true, then Jesus is our Savior. If the resurrection is true, then he is our only hope.

As verse 20 that we read in 1 Corinthians 15 earlier says, he is the first fruits. If Jesus Christ rose from the dead, he is merely the first of many who will rise from the dead. Because when he rose from the dead, it was after the crucifixion where he spilled his blood to pay for our sins.

Everything wrong that you and I have ever said, done, or thought that was offensive to God, put Jesus Christ on that cross, and he took responsibility for it. Because we could never