Why Should We Believe You?

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Well, last week I was on my way to take Madeline to school in the morning. We had actually gone into Shawnee and had Chick-fil-A for breakfast, and then I was taking her to school. And she and Benjamin were in the backseat of the truck, and they got to arguing, as kids do.

And sometimes it’s annoying and sometimes it’s funny, the conversations that go on, and I guess a lot of it depends on my mood. And that particular day it happened to be funny, and they’d heard something on the radio talking about Texas, and they were arguing about Texas. They’ll argue about anything, but they were arguing about Texas, and one, I don’t remember who said what, but one said Texas was part of the United States, and one said Texas was a separate country, and they went back and forth, and no, Texas is a state.

No, Texas is a country. No, Texas is a state. No, Texas is a country, and I’m sitting in the front seat thinking, You’re both kind of right.

I don’t really know which side to come down on here. But they kept arguing, and finally, my son, who’s, as you saw a moment ago, growing up to be opinionated like his daddy, looked at his sister and said, Oh, yeah? Well, why should I believe you?

It’s not like you have a degree in Texas. And I thought, well, wow, maybe I shouldn’t teach him anything either. My degree’s not in Texas either.

apparently that’s you you have to have that degree in texas or you can’t have an opinion I wow I don’t know I don’t know where that came from except for maybe well actually I guess I do came from homeschooling and the constant wanting to argue with uh mom and dad and finally me having to tell him she has a she has a degree in literature and I’m about six hours away from a master’s degree in apologetics you’re in second grade quit acting like you know more than we do so maybe that’s where the degree talk came from but he was a little skeptical because his sister didn’t have a degree in Texas and so he said why should I believe you and that’s a pretty common question why should I believe you even if we don’t come out and say those exact words you see people arguing with each other on on Facebook and one will say something oh yeah well you know how do I know you know what you’re talking about.

We tend to be skeptical anymore of anybody who tries to speak with authority. We tend to be pretty skeptical of those who sound like they think they know what they’re talking about, especially if we don’t know their qualifications. And so the question, why should I believe you, is a pretty common one, even if we don’t use those exact words.

And people ask this question about Jesus. They say, well, why should I believe him? We say, you know this is what God’s word says this is what I believe this is right this is wrong because that’s what God’s word says this is what Jesus taught and a lot of times the response even if it’s not these exact words the response is to question his authority and say well why should I believe him why should I believe what he has to say and I hate to break it to you Jesus doesn’t have a degree in Texas either but he’s still abundantly qualified to speak on all the issues that are meaningful to our lives.

But the question has often been, why should I believe Jesus? They ask it now, and they asked it in his day. And we’re going to start a series this morning, as I mentioned to you earlier, on some of the questions that people asked Jesus during his ministry.

Now, I’m not going to go through every question. I sat down and tried to make a list of every question that Jesus was asked in his ministry. Let me tell you, there are a bunch.

There are a lot of questions. And then you put on top of it that there were times that people came to Jesus and they asked a question without asking the question. You know, they were trying really hard to not ask him something.

But they came to him seeking an answer. I count that as a question as well. And so you get right down to it.

A lot of people wanted answers from Jesus. And I looked at this long but not complete list of questions that Jesus was asked, and I picked out four that I thought still were, I think they’re all relevant today, but I picked out four that I think are maybe the most relevant, at least in my view of it, the ones that people are still asking today. The questions that people are still asking of Jesus or if he walked in physically that people would want to know from Jesus, both in the church and outside the church.

And so as we’re going to look at these questions, some of which are still being asked today, his answers, we need to realize that Jesus’ answers, the answers that he gave the people during his earthly ministry are still just as relevant today as they were 2,000 years ago, and they’re still just as needed today by the people who are asking those questions as they were needed 2,000 years ago by the people who first asked them. And this morning, I want us to look at this question, why should we believe you? And for us to look at that, we need to go to Matthew chapter 12.

If you haven’t already turned there with me, we’re going to look at Matthew chapter 12 and a question that was asked of Jesus. Starting in verse 38, it says, Then certain of the scribes and of the Pharisees answered, saying, Master, we would see a sign from thee. Now, if you look at verse 38, grammatically it’s a statement.

You won’t see a question mark there. It’s a statement. We want to see a sign from you.

But sometimes statements are really questions, aren’t they? If you don’t know what I’m talking about, well, you probably don’t have a wife if you don’t know what I’m talking about. And I’ve never had a wife if you don’t know what I’m talking about.

I’ve learned that when my wife says, I need someone to change the baby, that is not a statement of fact. And, oh, that’s interesting, is the wrong answer. I’ve never looked at her and said, oh, that’s interesting.

But I’ve learned that is not a statement of fact. I need somebody to change the baby. That she’s just telling me because it’s true.

What that really is is a veiled question. Would you please change the baby? By the way, also, she’s learned from dealing with me.

Don’t ask, would you like to change the baby for me? Because the answer is no. Will you change the baby? Yes.

That’s a different question. Will you? But will you?

Yes. Do I want to? No.

But I will. Okay, so we’ve gotten very specific about our questions around the house. But it’s a veiled question.

When they come to him and they say, we would like to see a sign from you, they’re looking for an answer. They’re coming to him with a question in the form of a statement. Sort of like a reverse jeopardy here.

They’re asking for a sign. And what they’re asking for a sign of is they’re saying, prove to us that you’re the Son of God. You’re the Son of God, prove it.

In the verses before this that we’ve not read, but I’d encourage you to go back and read them on your own time. We don’t have time this morning. But in the verses just before this in chapter 12, they were accusing him just before this of working for Satan.

Let me say that again. They were accusing Jesus of working for Satan. And he argued because he had cast out demons, and they said he was doing it by the power of the devil.

And he argues with them and says, that’s impossible. That’s ridiculous to think that I would cast out demons by the power of the devil. And in that conversation is where the principle and the statement comes from that a house divided against itself cannot stand.

That didn’t come from Abraham Lincoln. He borrowed it from Jesus. So Jesus was saying, the devil doesn’t work against himself.

It doesn’t work that way. He argued that it was impossible. He told them instead, I’m working for my father.

I’m his son, and I’m working for him. And so they came back at Jesus, and when they said, we would see a sign from you, what they were saying was, oh yeah, prove it. Prove it.

We want to see proof. And when they said sign, they’re talking about something miraculous. And they’re not looking for a birth certificate.

They’re not looking for him to show them empirical data. They’re looking for some kind of miraculous sign, some kind of miracle that he could perform on command, like he’s their dancing monkey that they can just make him do things, that they want it on their own time. They want just the sign they want.

Oh yeah, prove it. We’re going to set the parameters and you prove to us that you’re the Son of God. Now, what we need to understand is that this kind of questioning totally ignores all the other miraculous things that he’d done throughout his ministry.

Everything else that he’d done up to this point in his ministry, they just have to totally ignore that in order to have the audacity to come to him at this point and say, oh yeah, well, we need a miraculous sign. If I were Jesus, I’d be saying, oh, really? because I’m kind of confused as to what I’ve been doing for the last year.

I’ve been doing nothing but providing miraculous signs. Okay, by this time, about a year into his ministry, I sat down and counted, and again, I might have missed some things, but he had turned water into wine in front of people, in front of witnesses at a wedding in Cana. He had already cast a demon out of a man in the middle of the Capernaum synagogue on the Sabbath day.

All these witnesses, he’d cast a demon out of the man. By this time, he had already healed at least 11 people of visible illnesses in front of witnesses. And he had already raised at least two people from the dead by this time.

And these lunatics want a miraculous sign. Hello? It’s right there for you.

It’s right there for you. If they didn’t believe Jesus, if they didn’t believe Jesus by this time, it wasn’t because of a lack of evidence on Jesus’ part. It was because of an abundance of stubbornness on their part.

It wasn’t because Jesus hadn’t shown it. It was because they didn’t want to see the evidence that was in front of them. So if we look at verse 39, he gives the answer.

Up to this point, at verse 38, they’ve asked the question. Now 39, he comes back with the answer. But he answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign, and there shall be no sign given to it but the sign of the prophet Jonah.

Okay, they had plenty of evidence. They just didn’t want to believe. We can have plenty of evidence and just not want to believe.

This is what they call in psychology and philosophy, they call this confirmation bias. This is where, and we all have the tendency to do this. We have to be careful and try on purpose to not do it.

But we all have this tendency in our human nature that we want to look for evidence that confirms what we already believe, our preconceived ideas and biases. We want to look for the evidence that confirms what we already believe, and we tend to ignore any evidence that would dispute that or call that into question. That’s confirmation bias.

That’s exactly what they were doing here. totally ignoring all the evidence that he had already given because it didn’t fit with what they wanted to believe. And their problem was they weren’t willing to hear anything from God if it didn’t conform to what they already believed about God and about how the world worked.

They just weren’t interested in it. That’s not only why they were wrong here, that’s how they managed to miss Jesus through his whole ministry. We wonder, how did the prophets talk about Jesus for thousands of years?

And we can look back in hindsight at the Old Testament and see some of these passages that whisper about Jesus. And we can see some passages like Isaiah chapter 53 that are just a full-throated shout about Jesus. But he’s there all throughout the Old Testament in pictures, in prophecies, in promises.

He’s there. How is it that they missed it? You go back to their confirmation bias.

They were looking for something over here. And so anything over here, they’re ignoring the evidence for. They were just looking for what they wanted to see.

We have to be careful about doing this ourselves. And so they missed Jesus. They missed him being the Messiah.

They missed the whole point of his ministry because they were looking for what they wanted to believe. And so Jesus called the Pharisees evil and adulterous. Called them an evil and adulterous generation.

Now that word evil, we know what that means. That word adulterous, some of them were probably going out and having affairs as we talked about in previous weeks. But what he means here by adulterous is that they were unfaithful.

They were supposed to be faithful to God, and yet they’d gone out and pursued what they wanted instead. They weren’t interested in what God was doing. They wanted God to be about what they were doing.

And so their hearts were on things besides God. They were being unfaithful to God is the best way I know to put it. When they should have been singularly devoted to God and what God was doing, Their focus was elsewhere.

So he calls them an adulterous and unfaithful generation, but he’s still willing to offer them the ultimate evidence. He’s still willing to offer them the ultimate evidence. Look at verse 40.

He says, For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly, so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. And I want to point something out here because I’ve heard for years. I was raised with the story of Jonah and the whale.

And then I heard, you know, if you look at the book of Jonah, it never actually says it’s a whale. It says it’s a great fish. So I grew up thinking, okay, maybe Jonah was eaten by a shark.

No, no, the Bible does say he was eaten by a whale because Jesus said it in here. It’s not reported as whale in the book of Jonah, but Jesus said it was a whale. That’s a lesser important point to what I’m talking about this morning.

It says here, Jesus is comparing himself with the prophet Jonah. And just like Jonah was eaten by this animal, he was eaten by this whale, and he was presumably dead and gone. I mean, anybody that would have seen him get swallowed alive by this whale probably thought, he’s dead.

There’s no surviving that one. Still, God made the whale spit him out after three days alive. And Jesus said in just that same way, I’m going to be dead and presumably gone for three days.

The world’s going to look at it like I’m just gone. It’s over for three days. And then God was going to make the grave spit him out after three days.

The book of Acts says that he loosened the pains of death because it was not possible that he should be holding of them. The grave could not hold him. It could only hang on to him as long as God the Father said.

And when God the Father said, give him up, the grave had to spit him out after three days and he was alive again. And Jesus said that was the evidence. That was all the evidence they get.

You’ve ignored the healings. You’ve ignored the teachings. You’ve ignored the miraculous things I’ve done.

You’ve ignored the people that I’ve raised from the dead. You get one more piece of evidence. You get the ultimate piece of evidence.

The sign of Jonah. That’s all you get. See, I think they were wanting Jesus to call down fire or they were wanting Jesus to make something appear or make something disappear.

They wanted Jesus to put on a little magic act for their amusement and to tickle their intellectual curiosity. See, one of the great things about God is he doesn’t work for us. He doesn’t have to do the things that we demand for him to do.

Jesus said, there’s one more piece of evidence you get, and this is it. There’s no other sign that this wicked and perverse generation gets except the sign of Jonah. Just like he was in the belly of the whale for three days and three nights, So I will be for three days and three nights in the belly of the earth.

And then he was coming back. And he was coming back. When the people were asking, Oh yeah, why should we believe you?

Why should we believe you are the Son of God? He could have easily pointed them to all the miracles he’d done, but he knew they weren’t convinced by that. So instead, Jesus pointed them to the ultimate evidence.

He pointed them to the ultimate piece of evidence. And by the way, if somebody coming back from the dead isn’t enough to prove it to you, then you’ve got an unreasonable threshold of proof. If that’s not enough evidence for the Pharisees, there’s nothing that’s going to convince them.

I was reading an article this last week or a few weeks ago. I don’t honestly remember when. And I don’t remember who wrote it either.

It might have been Frank Turek. It was an apologist who was talking about the one question that Christians need to ask in dialogue with atheists. Again, not a gotcha question.

Not a question to make somebody look stupid, but a question to say, are we really having an honest dialogue here? And the question we need to ask is, what evidence could convince you that God exists? What evidence could convince you that Jesus Christ is the Son of God?

What evidence would it take to convince you that this is all true? And if the answer is, well, there’s no evidence that I’d be willing to look at, you’re not having an honest discussion. What you’re doing is you’re dealing with somebody like the Pharisees that say, no, I just want to see what I want to see and I want to hear what I want to hear.

But if somebody says, you know, this evidence, this would convince me. Okay, now we’re somewhere where we can have an honest discussion about what you believe and what I believe. And I think those things are constructive.

I think those are good things. If we were to ask the Pharisees, what would it take to convince you that Jesus is the Son of God? I honestly believe they would have said, there’s nothing that can convince me.

Because if the sign of Jonah, as Jesus calls it here, his resurrection couldn’t convince them, there’s nothing else. There’s nothing bigger than that that was going to convince them. I know that, well, I’ll get to that in a minute.

The evidence that he provided, the resurrection, and by this time, he’s pointing to it in the future. It hadn’t happened yet, but we also know the Pharisees didn’t believe after it happened. But what Jesus was saying, if you want to know whether you should believe in me or not, here’s the ultimate evidence, my resurrection.

Folks, we need to know on this side of it, we need to know for those asking the question today, that that resurrection really happened. That resurrection is one of, if not the best, attested facts in ancient history. And a while back, I took four weeks to go with you through the evidence for the resurrection.

I want to give you just the highlights this morning because I don’t have time to do four weeks today. We’ll be here all day. But I want to give you just some highlights about some reasons why I believe that this is true.

And as you may remember, I’ve distilled all this down into four facts. That if these four things, if these four facts are in fact true, then Jesus is the Son of God, the resurrection is true, all of this happens. I mean, it makes the case for everything as far as I’m concerned.

The first fact is that Jesus’ existence and death are historically verifiable. And I’ve got more information. If you want my more detailed notes, I can get those to you later.

But this morning, I have to tell you, there are ancient sources from around the time of Jesus’ life, both Christian and non-Christian, who attest to the fact that Jesus Christ was a real historical figure who taught, who ministered in Galilee and in Judea and who got himself killed. They document his life and his death, and most modern scholars accept that. When people say, oh, Jesus was a myth, that’s not coming from historians.

Historians accept that he was a historical figure, even if they don’t believe that he was the Son of God. And just a few of the ancient ones from around the time of his life that document his life and his death. Pliny the Younger, the Roman historian, wrote about him.

Suetonius, a Roman historian, wrote about him. Tacitus, a Roman historian, wrote about him. Josephus, a Jewish historian writing for the Romans, or working for the Romans, wrote about him.

Marabar Sarapion, an Assyrian, wrote about him. The Babylonian Talmud, a Jewish book, really hates him, but writes about him as a real figure. Lucian of Samosata, a Greek satirist, wrote about him.

They all accept the fact that he lived and he died. and I’ve read recently where an atheist even says, you know, people complain about there’s not that much evidence and not that much writing about Jesus. He was a carpenter who started a small following in the backwoods of the Roman Empire.

How much writing would you expect there to be about him in his day? I mean, I think this is pretty good that there are this many people that attest to his life and death. We know that Romans crucified the worst offenders, just like the Bible describes.

We know that Jesus probably would have been considered one of those worst offenders because he was a threat to Roman security. The Jews were about to have a riot, and Romans, like my wife, like order. Okay?

They like order. And so they were just putting a stop to that. They would have considered him a security threat.

We know that the biblical descriptions are consistent with medical science. We know that in extreme cases of stress, people can sweat blood. It’s called hematohydrosis.

We know that his blood loss and his suffocation that he experienced on the cross would have caused him to say some of the things that the Bible records, like being thirsty. Well, yeah, most of the moisture from your body is gone, and your body is desperately trying to get something pumping through the blood veins. You’re going to be thirsty.

And the asphyxiation would have caused his heart rate to speed up to such a point that he would have realized the end was coming. He would have known what he was talking about when he said, it is finished. His life and his death are historical fact.

Second fact, Jesus was buried, but his tomb was empty after three days. The earliest Christians believed, and it’s documented, that the earliest Christians believed that he was buried in Joseph’s tomb and that that tomb was empty three days later. You may say, well, who cares?

The Christians could have been wrong. The evidence doesn’t lean that direction. And it certainly wasn’t a legend.

If within three years we know that they are preaching this, that he was buried and rose again, it’s part of their creed of the earliest Christian church. Within about two or three years, it’s documented that that’s what Christians believe. There’s not time for a legend to develop.

They believed it. The story of the empty tomb was way too inconvenient to be a lie. If the apostles made it up, the hero of the story wouldn’t be Joseph of Arimathea, a Jewish member of the Sanhedrin, the group that voted to put Jesus to death, he wouldn’t be the one who offered Jesus up for burial, or offered to give Jesus a proper burial when the disciples ran and hid.

If the disciples made the story up, he wouldn’t have been discovered by women while the disciples ran and hid. If the disciples made it up, if I’m going to make up a story, I’m going to make up a story that probably doesn’t make me look real bad. The disciples don’t come out well in the story.

They were the people who walked with Jesus most and believed in his message least. Believed in the idea of the resurrection the least until they saw it with their own eyes. On top of that, there are no plausible suspects to have stolen the body or faked the resurrection. The Romans had no motive.

The Jews had no motive. The disciples didn’t have the opportunity because of the Roman guards out front. And on top of that, the disciples had no motive because they didn’t believe he was coming back.

They were as shocked as anybody. And the idea that he just sort of passed out and came back to life when he was in the tomb and came out is ridiculous if you think that he could go through everything he went through and exist for three days in a dark, damp cave without medical attention and then come back and be so healthy that he convinced everybody, I’m alive again. You have more faith than I do.

Just believe it in the resurrection. I don’t have enough faith to believe that story. They immediately said the tomb was empty.

If it was just a mistake, the authorities could have taken the disciples, marched them out to the tomb, and showed them his dead body. From the story of the empty tomb, nobody ever refuted it. Nobody ever came out and said, no, the tomb is still occupied.

Instead, they said, okay, the tomb’s empty, let’s cover it up. And the Jewish authorities paid the Roman guards to say that the disciples came and stole the body. Jesus was buried, but his tomb was empty again after three days, with no plausible explanation for how it was empty.

Except for fact number three, that Jesus was seen alive again after that time, according to numerous eyewitnesses. Numerous eyewitnesses at numerous times, in numerous places, in various combinations of individuals and groups. He was seen by nearly 500 people, many of whom are name by name.

I guess not the majority of them, but there were several who were name by name. And you know what? Most of those who were name by name, well, all of those who were name by name said, yeah, I saw it.

And almost all of those who were name by name were willing to suffer grisly deaths as martyrs rather than deny that they ever saw it. And nobody from these groups of 500 came out and said, that’s not true. He didn’t appear to us there.

You know how I know that? That nobody came forward like that? Because it would have put a stop to the rumors right then and there.

You and I probably would never have heard about this Jesus who allegedly rose again from the dead if they’d put a stop to the rumors right then and there as people said, no, he’s still over there. I never saw him alive. He’s still buried over there.

We know that it was a physical resurrection because some of them touched the prints of the nails in his hands. They ate with him. We know that it was a real resurrection, not an imaginary resurrection, that idea that it was a mass hallucination.

That’s not how hallucinations work. Read what some psychologists say about hallucinations. You don’t all typically hallucinate the same thing, and you have to be primed for hallucinations.

Again, the disciples didn’t think he was coming back. They thought it was over. They were not the best candidates for hallucination, and even if they were, they weren’t all going to be seeing the same thing.

It was a real, not an imaginary resurrection. And fact number four, Jesus’ resurrection led to changes that cannot be otherwise explained. For big changes to happen, a lot of times it takes a big cause.

And there were earth-shattering changes after Jesus’ resurrection. Now, I’ve made a long list of them, but I’m going to give you four of the top ones today. First of all, the disciples who were so scared, and they were hiding, and they were running after the crucifixion.

After the story of the resurrection, suddenly these men are bold. I mean, these men are ready to charge hell with a squirt gun. And ten of the remaining eleven apostles, as I said, died as martyrs.

because the world said, if you stick to this story about you saw Jesus again alive from the dead, we’re going to kill you. And they said, go ahead. We’re not going to lie and say we didn’t see him.

We know he rose from the dead. We know that there were skeptics, hardcore skeptics who were converted. One of those hardcore skeptics was Jesus’ half-brother, James.

And James, we see in the book of Acts, we see in the Gospels, he didn’t believe Jesus was the Son of God during his lifetime. But we see in the book of Acts, James is one of the leaders in the church in Jerusalem. What happened?

The resurrection. What would it take to convince you your brother was the son of God? Julie, be nice.

And take something pretty big, right? Jesus rose from the dead. We know that there were observant Jews who walked away from their old way of doing things.

Of the sacrifices. They walked away from the observance of the law. They walked away from all the things that they had been raised for generations to think were going to get them to heaven.

They were part of their very identity, who they were as a nation. They walked away from those things. Why?

Because they’d seen Jesus raised from the dead. And then I think this is incredible. But the message, the message of a poor carpenter, an itinerant preacher, a nobody, from some backwoods, backwater of the Roman Empire, a message about following him, following this nobody.

Please understand, I don’t mean that disrespectfully. I mean from the world’s perspective, a nobody exploded. His message exploded, and suddenly people all over the Roman Empire and all over the world, up to this day, people are following him.

There were lots of other nobodies who claimed to be the Messiah, but people today are still following him inexplicably. It can’t be explained other than the fact that somebody saw him alive again from the dead. Folks, his resurrection is a historical fact, and it changed everything.

And so he gave that to them as the ultimate evidence, this resurrection. And if we look at verse 41 now, we see that others were willing to believe God even with less evidence than the Pharisees had. look at verse 41 the men of Nineveh Jesus said shall rise in judgment with this generation and shall condemn it because they repented at the preaching of Jonah and behold a greater than Jonah is here he reminds the Pharisees that the pagans in Nineveh they didn’t have some great evidence they didn’t have some miraculous signs all they had was somebody who got thrown up by a whale on the beach and walked in presum