Four Facts about the Resurrection [A]

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All right, if you haven’t looked in this already, this is a little booklet. If you don’t want to use it, don’t use it. But if you do want to use it, I know that when I’ve given this presentation in the past, people sometimes like to take notes because it’s a lot of information, and filling in the blanks keeps people awake during church.

And there’s also room underneath if there’s other stuff that you want to take notes on, feel free to do that. We will use this this Sunday morning and next Sunday morning, So go ahead and hang on to it in your Bible, if you would, at least until next Sunday. But I know a lot of times I’ll go to things and hear presentations and think, man, I wish I could remember what that guy said.

And I don’t tell you that because I think my presentation is going to be so wonderful this morning that you’re going to wish you could remember all the wise things I said. But the material is important, and hopefully something, even if you don’t remember every point I make this morning and next week, Hopefully something in here will stick with you and give you something to be able to say when you run up against people in the community, in your family even, who might say, oh, what you believe is just a fairy tale. And give you something to say, well, what about this?

I don’t profess to be able to make the case that’s going to convince a hardened atheist or convince a hardened skeptic, but I can take you through this and explain to you how I came to be persuaded, at least in my own mind, that the resurrection is absolute scientific historical fact. And I say persuaded in my own mind because I’m not much of an arguer or much of a debater. I used to be, and then I just realized that people tend to dig in their heels in their own positions and not get dislodged.

And I do the same thing, and really it’s up to the Holy Spirit to break down those walls, not me. But I can still give people something to think about. And I will tell you in this, my intent is not for it to just be a history lesson.

I know sometimes I have in the past preached on this or the evidence for this or how do we know this is true. And on at least one occasion, I think maybe more, I’ve had a man come to me afterwards and say, you know, you really don’t need to talk about that history stuff. You don’t really need to talk about that evidence.

Just preach the gospel. I’m sorry, I thought that’s what I was doing, defending the resurrection. I hate to break it to you, ladies and gentlemen, but we don’t live in the same world we did 50 years ago.

I say we did, I wouldn’t hear, but we don’t live in the same world that was here 50 years ago. We’re surrounded by people who have bought into all sorts of ideas that the Bible is not true, that the resurrection never happened, the virgin birth never happened. Part of my job as the pastor of a church is spelled out in Ephesians chapter 4.

it says that pastors and teachers were given, along with others in the church, were given for the perfecting or the completing of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, until we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, that we henceforth be no more children tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the slight of men and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to see.

Part of my job as a pastor is to teach the truth, and not just to expect you to give me blind faith, but to expect that I would teach the truth and tell you the reasons why you can know that the truth is the truth until we all come to completion in Jesus Christ, and I don’t think any of us are there yet, so that we’re not tossed in every wind of doctrine. You go turn on TV, and from week to week, you’re going to hear somebody who’s come up with some new word from God. Well, the word from God is what the word of God says.

And it’s my job to teach it and defend it and to help you to be able to defend it. And to that end, if you can take one or two things away from this presentation that will help you in talking to somebody who says, well, it’s just a fairy tale. Well, that’s not what the evidence says.

And present even one point to them that gives them some reason to think about the claims we make. Then I’ve done my job. This all started several years ago when I started at OU.

Nobody had told me back in 2004 that now that they had the Internet, that you registered for classes online. And so I kept waiting and waiting and waiting to hear for when you’d go to the registrar. My dad took 20 years to graduate from college, and he’ll tell you that, because he went several places, changed his major several times, and went back to school after we came along.

And he really sort of helped me navigate the red tape and the bureaucracy at OU. And so he was telling me, you know, you wait until they let you know you can come to the registrar and pick which classes you want. Well, nobody told me that they started enrolling online.

So by the time I got to it, there was nothing left but philosophy classes. As a freshman in college, fresh out of high school, I got dumped in philosophy classes because I just had to take 12 hours of something. And so I took philosophy classes, and even the next semester, being a freshman, you’re the last to get to enroll, all that was left were philosophy classes.

So I got a trial by the fire my first year in college with philosophy. And my favorite class in that was taught, as I’ve shared before with a few of you, was taught by a professor who was a militant atheist, and I think he would wear that title as a badge of honor and was a homosexual and had some very far-out ideas about justice and about the sanctity of life or whatever the opposite of sanctity is, the non-sanctity of life. And we went back and forth through the whole semester, and I got a chance to examine a lot of my beliefs at that point.

I was raised to believe the resurrection and went into college thinking I could defend Christianity. I knew everything I needed to and found out very quickly I did not know all the things that I thought I knew. And so it forced me to do research on my own, forced me to do some digging on my own.

One of the things that these professors would ask is whatever the position was, is there anything that could convince you that it’s not true? Is there any piece of evidence that could be shown to you that if they could say this, this is the way it is, that you would change your mind and think your position is not true? Well, of course, my knee-jerk response as somebody raised in church is, no, there’s nothing that could ever be shown to me that would convince me Christianity is not true.

Then I had to take an honest look at it, because if that’s your position, not just on Christianity, but on anything, if that’s your position, nothing can convince me it’s not true. Then what you have is not faith, what you have is blind faith. And we want to praise the idea of blind faith, but the honest truth is you can have blind faith and put it in the wrong thing.

We want to make sure that we’re taking our faith and we’re putting it in something that there’s some evidence for. God has not left us without evidence. And I came to realize that the Bible has the answer to that question that I was asked.

Is there anything that could prove to you that your position is not true? The Bible says in 1 Corinthians chapter 15, if you’ll turn there with me. In 1 Corinthians 15, it talks about the resurrection of Christ. And it talks about the resurrection of Christ being the basis for the gospel.

I think I talked about this a couple Sunday nights ago. 1 Corinthians chapter 15, starting in verse 1, says, Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which you have received, and wherein ye stand, by which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I have preached unto you, unless ye believed in vain. The Apostle Paul wrote to the church at Corinth and said, Here’s the basis, here’s the essence of the gospel that I’ve presented to you, And here’s the basis of the gospel by which you are saved.

And please be warned not to drift away from that and forget what you’ve been taught. He says, here’s the basis of it. For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures.

And that really right there outlines the first, you know, I told you this presentation was four facts on the resurrection. That really outlines the first three facts that we’ll get into today and next week. That Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and he was buried, and he rose again according to the scriptures.

Now he goes on to talk about Jesus being seen alive again by eyewitnesses. But then as he goes through that list of eyewitnesses and talks about all these things and then talks about the implications of the idea of the resurrection, he goes down to verse 16 and says, For if the dead rise not, then is Christ not raised, And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain. Ye are set in your sins.

And there’s really the answer to that question. Could anything be presented to you that would convince you that Christianity is not true? And I came to realize, okay, if the resurrection is not true, then Christianity is not true.

And folks, you may be sitting there gasping in your mind. Nobody’s doing it openly. But you may be thinking, the pastor said that Christianity could be, you know, theoretically disproved.

That’s not me. That’s the Apostle Paul. writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

If the resurrection is not true, there’s no point to any of this. And I’ll just be honest and tell you that. If the resurrection is not true, we just need to close down and go home because there’s no point to any of this.

Our faith is vain. There’s no salvation for sins. There’s no forgiveness of sins.

There’s no salvation. There’s no eternal life. There’s no reason even to follow Jesus Christ. Let me say this, and hopefully it does not sound disrespectful because I don’t mean it to sound that way.

Anybody can get themselves killed. okay we talk about Jesus dying on the cross and I don’t want to trivialize that I hope you know I believe in the importance of that how how vitally important it is we would not be saved without his shed blood on the cross but if that’s all it was anybody could get himself killed how do we know that he really was able to seek and save that which was lost like he said he came to do folks the resurrection the resurrection proved it the resurrection put that stamp of proof, that evidence, right on everything he had said and done. He claimed to be God.

Some people say, well, Jesus never claimed to be God. That’s something his followers made up later on. Really?

Then what was that exchange about when he says, before Abraham was, I am? He was identifying himself with the God of the Old Testament. He claimed to be God.

He claimed to be able to raise the dead. He claimed to be able to forgive sins. How do we know he was able to do that?

because he proved it when he conquered death. He proved it with the resurrection. And what I intend to share with you this morning and next week are just four facts.

I know there are some people who can give a much better presentation, have more information, have a more philosophical approach. That’s fine. But for me, it came down to these four facts that show me, at least, there’s no other explanation for all of this than the fact that Jesus Christ rose again from the dead the way the Bible said that he did.

And by the way, if he did that, then Christianity is true. Everything else follows. Because not only, that doesn’t only have implications for Jesus, that proves that Jesus was the Son of God.

It proves that he was able to forgive sins like he claimed to. It proves that what he said was true in other places, because he’s God then who can’t lie. He affirmed the authority of the Scriptures.

Every book of the Old Testament, you see everything follows from the resurrection. That’s sort of the keystone that holds everything together. So these four facts prove to me that Jesus Christ really did rise from the dead.

We may get through fact number one and maybe fact number two this morning, and we’ll continue this next week. But the first fact you’ll see, and if you’re following along in the blanks, fact number one is Jesus’ existence and death are historically verifiable. If there was, follow me on this, if there was no such person as Jesus Christ, he couldn’t die and he couldn’t rise again, right?

If he didn’t exist, then none of this could have happened, okay? There’s not a pink elephant in the aisle. Therefore, he can’t charge up the aisle and stop me to death.

Well, how do I know he can’t stop me to death? Because there is no pink elephant in the aisle. So if Jesus Christ never existed, then he couldn’t have risen from the dead.

But the fact is that Jesus’ existence, his life and his death, his existence and his death are historically verifiable. They are fact. We can be as certain of the existence of Jesus Christ and the death of Jesus Christ as we can just about any other fact in ancient history.

Now, not everything in ancient history was written down by hundreds and hundreds of people. They just didn’t do that. I mean, it’s not like today where they follow these presidential candidates around and they write about what they had for breakfast. It’s insane.

You want to know what Donald Trump had for breakfast? I’m sure you can go find an article about it online. Somebody try that.

I’ll give you extra credit. I’m sure you can find it out if you’re that curious. They didn’t record every detail of everybody’s life, you know, unless you were the king.

And so there’s a lot about ancient history that we don’t know. And so some people will say, well, there’s not much evidence about Jesus’ life. well consider that it’s ancient history if we start throwing out well we don’t have that many copies of the bible or we don’t have that many writings about jesus christ we pretty much have to throw out everything we know about ancient history because there aren’t that many writings left of anything there aren’t that many written accounts of anything and yet for somebody like jesus there was there there’s a lot of evidence and most you’ll hear this today you’ll hear this today where people would come up with the idea, well, Jesus never existed.

Even the man Jesus was a fairy tale. That’s not what modern scholarship says. That’s not what people who study this out, both Christians and non-Christians, that’s not the conclusion that they’ve come to.

I want to give you a few quotes from people who’ve studied this out and know. D. James Kennedy, many of you may remember him from being on the radio and TV when he was alive down at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Florida.

He wrote, the evidence for the historicity, that means him being a historical fact, the evidence for the historicity of Jesus 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 ever existed. So D. James Kennedy, who went on to found a seminary, said anybody who stands up and tries to claim that Jesus never really existed instantly loses credibility in the community of historians.

There’s a man named F. F. Bruce who was a professor of biblical criticism and exegesis at the University of Manchester.

He says, whatever else may be thought of the evidence, and this whole thing is not just me reading quotes, so don’t think, okay, I’m not going to be able to stay awake through this. Whatever else may be thought of the evidence from early Jewish and Gentile writers is 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.

Some writers may toy with the fancy of a Christ myth, but they do not do so on the ground of historical evidence. The historicity of Christ is axiomatic. That means it’s foundational for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar.

It’s not historians who propagate the Christ myth theories. And what he’s saying is, you know, some people say, well, you can’t believe the gospel accounts. They were biased.

So we have to look at non-Christian accounts. And what he’s saying here is there are plenty of non-Christians from that time who say that Jesus existed. And some people will try to say Jesus never existed.

But he said it’s not real historians who do that. And then I thought this one was interesting. This man named Neil Carter.

He’s an atheist. He’s an atheist writer. He writes a blog called Godless in Dixie. So he lives somewhere here in the Bible Belt.

I don’t know where. It’s not like I’m trying to track him down. There are so many atheists in town and we know where they live.

I’m not trying to track him down. But he went to seminary and was an evangelical Christian before for some reason he walked away from the faith. But even he has been irritated by atheists promoting the idea that Jesus never existed.

Now, Neil Carter believes that Jesus was just a man, not God. But he says there’s plenty of evidence to believe Jesus existed. He says there are at least a handful of things about the origins of the Christian religion which we can reasonably conclude based on the things that we know.

Among them are that there was most likely a guy named Jesus who preached and was killed outside Jerusalem, and after his death, a diverse following emerged, which built around that event, a narrative which grew to become the Christian faith. Too much has been made about contemporary silence on Jesus’ life, and he makes a great point here. He says, exactly how much notoriety would you expect a Jewish peasant to have in his context?

How worthy of public record was the life and execution of an itinerary rabbi from Galilee. He was just a homeless traveling preacher from the backwoods. How much writing would you expect there to be?

Would you expect there to be monuments built to him by the powerful? He says it’s true that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but it’s not extraordinary to claim that such a man got in trouble with the law and was executed, nor in that day and age would it be extraordinary to see a following emerge around his life and teachings. Even this atheist writer says, you know what, there’s plenty of evidence to believe that Jesus existed.

Whatever else you believe about him, there’s plenty of evidence to believe that he existed. Okay, these are modern guys. And you may be sitting there thinking, well, what is there, what other evidence?

First of all, I refer you to the Gospels. Now, I know that skeptics would say, well, they’re Christians, they had an agenda. And I’m going to go ahead and say most people are not pathological liars.

Okay, I’m a Christian. I have a bias. I have an agenda.

My agenda is believing in Jesus Christ, but I’m not going to stand up here and knowingly lie to you. And most people will say, I’m not going to knowingly lie to you. There are some people who do it, but most people are not pathological liars.

So I think we can’t ignore the Gospels. These were guys who were eyewitnesses, who wrote about the life of Jesus, and many of them died rather than deny what they saw. But if people don’t want to believe the Christian sources, there are plenty of others.

Ancient sources document Jesus’ life and death. Ancient sources document Jesus’ life and death. The first is Pliny the Younger, a Roman magistrate.

You know what? If you want to see these quotes later on, I’ll get them to you, but I’m not going to stand here and read them to you, but I’ll tell you basically what they say just for the sake of time. Pliny the Younger, who was a Roman magistrate, he was a judge, he was a governor at different times.

In the year 112, he wrote a letter to the Emperor Trajan complaining about the Christians, complaining about those who followed Christ. See, it’s not just today that people gripe about the Christians. They’ve been doing it all along. His biggest complaints about them were that they refused to renounce Christ and that they refused to worship the pagan gods.

I think those two should go hand in hand. If you believe in Jesus Christ, you should refuse to worship the gods of this world. While what he wrote focuses primarily on the Christian community, he’s not specifically writing about Jesus.

He’s writing about the Christian community. He never raises a question whether Jesus Christ was a real person. He says they follow Christ, and because of that, they refuse to worship our pagan gods.

He doesn’t say they believe that this Jesus Christ guy was real, and because of that, they worship the pagan gods. He just says they follow him, and so they won’t worship them. They won’t do what we say because they follow him.

He assumes that Jesus was a real person. There’s another one named Suetonius, a Roman historian, and they get better after this. Any one of these on their own provide kind of a weak foundation.

But taken together, we have pretty good evidence from ancient history. Suetonius was a Roman historian. He wrote a history about how the Jews created trouble in the Roman Empire, so much trouble that the Emperor Claudius began to kick many of them out of Rome.

Now what’s interesting about this is that the Romans initially considered Christianity to be just a denomination of Judaism. So when he’s talking about the Jews who were, and that’s what the Council of Jerusalem was about in AD 50 in the Book of Acts, where they try to decide, did you have to keep the law, did you have to do this? They were trying to decide, is this just a branch of Judaism or what?

So when he writes about the Jews who caused so much trouble in Rome, he’s really talking about the Christians. And so much so that Emperor Claudius began expelling lots of Jews from Rome in the 40s AD. and when he records that they made the trouble, when he writes about the Jews causing so much trouble, he makes a point of saying, and Christ made them do it.

They’re doing this because they follow that Jesus Christ. They follow him, and so they make so much trouble, he made them do it. And so, again, he’s talking about the Christians, but again with the assumption that Jesus Christ is a real historical figure. And this is not long after the life of Christ, either.

So, even early on, these Roman historians had no doubt that Jesus Christ was a real person. Tacitus, the third one we’re talking about this morning, was a Roman senator and historian. He was a Roman senator and a historian.

So by the way, all of these pretty well-respected, reputable guys in their time. Tacitus wrote about the actual life and death of Jesus Christ and recorded it as history. It’s not just implying it because he’s writing about the Christians.

I will tell you, he wrote this one. He 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. They were hated because they grew.

The community had grown so fast. They were hated because they caused trouble, as Suetonius wrote. And Christ, or Christus, he says, 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, that means the belief in the resurrection, he didn’t, by the way, not a fan of the resurrection or that message.

He calls it a pernicious superstition. repressed for a time, broke out again, not only through Judea where the mischief originated, but through the city of Rome also. He said these people followed Jesus Christ, you know the one who lived in Judea, got himself killed, put to death under Pontius Pilate, and then they believed he rose again, and even that awful superstition, and even though we tried to stamp it out, that teaching of the resurrection broke out again, not only in Jerusalem, but in Rome too.

And so Tacitus, one of their greatest Roman historians, records Jesus Christ as having been a real person and gets all these details correct that we see in the Gospel. He affirms what we see in the Gospels. Josephus was a Jewish military leader and a Roman historian.

He kind of tried to play both sides of the fence. He worked for the Jews and he worked for the Romans and was never quite trusted by either. And yet, I mean, in terms of where his loyalties lay, but he’s trusted as a historian.

And Josephus wrote some things about Jesus Christ that as I read them, I thought, that doesn’t sound like Josephus because he never became a believer. None of these guys that I’m talking about right now are believers. Josephus never became a believer, but there’s this quote that includes things talking about him being the Son of God and includes things talking about him rising again.

And I’m thinking, if he believed those things, he would be a believer. Some of these things seem like they were probably added later on. And I went through, and as I’m reading this, I sort of highlighted the things that I thought, and that sounds like it might have been added later on by an overly zealous Christian, saying, I’ll just correct the history.

And as I looked at this, I did some more research on it, and some historians, some experts on Josephus identified the same parts of it that I did. And I thought, okay, then I’m on the right track here. But even if we take out those parts that sound way too Christian for Josephus, he still wrote, there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, He drew over to him both many of the Jews and of the Gentiles.

And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among you, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at first did not forsake him, and the tribe of Christians so named from him are not extinct at this time. So he says still, there’s a man named Jesus. He taught lots of Jews and Gentiles followed him.

When the Jews put him to death under Pilate on the cross, he died, and yet there are still people following him to this day. So even Josephus said he’s a real person. Some of these names are a little hard to pronounce.

There’s another man named Marabar Sarapion, who’s an Assyrian historian. That’s a tongue twister. Say that five times fast. I can’t even say five times fast once.

Five times fast, Assyrian historian. He wrote about Jesus. He talked about him being the wise king of the Jews and being put to death by his own people.

And he compares him to Socrates. He compares him to Pythagoras. A few other guys that we only know from a few writings that they existed.

yet nobody doubts that Socrates and Pythagoras are real, that they existed. And this man Mara wrote about Jesus being killed by the Jews as their wise king, which Jesus claimed to be, or that was the claim that was attached to him, wrote about him as being as real as Socrates or Pythagoras. Then there’s the Babylonian Talmud, which was a Jewish religious text.

It didn’t like Jesus very much. Whoever wrote the Babylonian Talmud did not like Jesus. And so it’s not just Christians who say he was a real person.

Even people who didn’t like him wrote down and recorded that he’s a real person. The Babylonian Talmud talks about how on the eve of Passover he was killed. For 40 days before the execution took place, a herald went forth and cried.

He’s going forth to be stoned because he’s practiced sorcery and enticed Israel to apostasy. And that he was killed on the eve of the Passover. Now, some of these details differ from what the Gospels say.

But they agree with the Gospels on the fact that Jesus was real, that he taught there in Judea, that he caused trouble by challenging the religious views of the religious leaders at the time, and that he was killed for it. And that’s what we’re looking for from history. Did those events really take place?

And then there’s a Greek satirist named Lucian of Samasana. He wrote satirical plays, but he also wrote historical records. And he talked about one named Christ being the lawgiver, persuaded the Christians to abandon their worship of the pagan god.

Okay, that’s just seven of them. But that’s it for now with the quotes. That gives you some idea that there were people in ancient history that wrote about Jesus, recorded him as a historical figure, because they, even right there in his own time, they believed and they knew that he was a real historical figure.

They didn’t like him very much, but they knew he was real. And so if, you know, you’ll get on the Internet today and you’ll read on Facebook or read in the comments section of some website some guy living in his mom’s basement who’s convinced Jesus never existed. He was a myth. I’m sorry.

I’m going to take the word of the guys who lived back in that time and didn’t like Jesus very much who said, you know, we didn’t like him, but he was real. I’m going to take the word of people 2,000 years ago first. And we see, too, that biblical accounts of his death are consistent with history. Now, some people have claimed that the whole story was made up because they say, well, the story of his death just doesn’t make sense. There are some things with history where it just doesn’t make sense.

But you know what? The gospel accounts were written within about 25 years of his death. And I know that sounds like a long time.

I mean, I have a very fuzzy, of course, I was five years old at the time, but I have a very fuzzy memory of things that happened 25 years ago. Those of you who are older may look back and you remember a little bit more, but your memory may be kind of fuzzy about things 25 years ago. And so we might say, well, that doesn’t seem all that credible.

They wrote down things 25 years after the fact. These gospel accounts were written within 25 years. That doesn’t mean that parts of them weren’t.

You know, I might write down notes. Here’s what happened today. And write down notes somewhere else.

Here’s what happened tomorrow. And 25 years from now, I might compile them into one record of what happened. And for all we know, that could have happened.

But nobody qu

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