Message Information
- Key Scriptures: 1 Corinthians 15:1-4, 14, KJV
- Series: Four Facts about the Resurrection (2016), no. 1
- Date: Sunday, March 13, 2016 (Morning)
- Venue: Trinity Baptist Church — Seminole, Oklahoma
- Speaker: Jared Byrns
- Audio File: Open/Download
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Why the Resurrection Must Be Defended
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.
There is also room underneath if there are other things that you want to take notes on. We will use this Sunday morning and next Sunday morning, so hang on to it in your Bible, at least until next Sunday. A lot of times I will go to things and hear presentations and think, “Man, I wish I could remember what that guy said.”
I don’t say that because I think my presentation is going to be so wonderful this morning that you are going to wish you could remember all the wise things I said. But the material is important. Hopefully, even if you don’t remember every point I make this morning and next week, something in here will stick with you and give you something to say when you run up against people in the community, or even in your family, who might say, “What you believe is just a fairy tale.” It may give you something to say: “Well, what about this?”
I don’t profess to be able to make the case that will convince a hardened atheist or a hardened skeptic. But I can take you through this and explain how I came to be persuaded, at least in my own mind, that the resurrection is absolute scientific and historical fact. 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 realized that people tend to dig in their heels in their own positions and not get dislodged.
I do the same thing. Really, it is up to the Holy Spirit to break down those walls, not me. But I can still give people something to think about. My intent in this is not for it to be just a history lesson.
In the past, when I have preached on this, or on the evidence for this, or on how we know this is true, on at least one occasion—and maybe more—I have had a man come to me afterward and say, “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 by defending the resurrection.
I hate to break it to you, ladies and gentlemen, but we don’t live in the same world that existed fifty years ago. I say “we did,” but I wasn’t here. We don’t live in the same world that was here fifty years ago. We are surrounded by people who have bought into all sorts of ideas: that the Bible is not true, that the resurrection never happened, and that 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, “for the perfecting” or 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 sleight of men and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive.
Part of my job as a pastor is to teach the truth, and not just to expect you to give me blind faith. It is to 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. I don’t think any of us are there yet. The goal is that we would not be tossed with every wind of doctrine.
You can turn on TV, and from week to week you are going to hear somebody who has come up with some new word from God. Well, the word from God is what the Word of God says. It is my job to teach it and defend it, and to help you be able to defend it. If you can take one or two things away from this presentation that will help you in talking to somebody who says, “It’s just a fairy tale,” and you can answer, “That’s not what the evidence says,” and present even one point that gives them some reason to think about the claims we make, then I have done my job.
How the Question Became Personal
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, you registered for classes online. So I kept waiting and waiting and waiting to hear when you would go to the registrar.
My dad took twenty years to graduate from college, and he will tell you that because he went several places, changed his major several times, and went back to school after we came along. He really helped me navigate the red tape and the bureaucracy at OU. He was telling me, “You wait until they let you know you can come to the registrar and pick which classes you want.” Nobody told me that they had started enrolling online.
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 into philosophy classes because I had to take twelve hours of something. So I took philosophy classes. Even the next semester, being a freshman, I was the last to get to enroll, and all that was left were philosophy classes. I got a trial by fire my first year in college with philosophy.
My favorite class in that first year, as I’ve shared before with a few of you, was taught by a professor who held views sharply opposed to my Christian convictions.
We went back and forth through the whole semester, and I had 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 thought I knew everything I needed to know and found out very quickly that I did not know all the things I thought I knew.
That forced me to do research on my own. It forced me to do some digging on my own. One of the things those professors would ask, whatever the position was, was this: “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 would make you change your mind and think your position is not true?”
Of course, my knee-jerk response as somebody raised in church was, “No, there is 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. If that is your position, not just on Christianity but on anything—if your position is, “Nothing can convince me it’s not true”—then what you have is not faith. What you have is blind faith.
We want to praise the idea of blind faith, but the honest truth is that you can have blind faith and put it in the wrong thing. We want to make sure that we are taking our faith and putting it in something for which there is evidence. God has not left us without evidence.
I came to realize that the Bible has the answer to that question 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, as it talks about the resurrection of Christ, that the resurrection of Christ is the basis for the gospel.
I think I talked about this a couple of Sunday nights ago. First Corinthians 15, starting in verse 1, says, “Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which ye also have received, and wherein ye stand; by which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain.” The apostle Paul wrote to the church at Corinth and said, “Here is the basis, here is the essence of the gospel that I presented to you, and here is the basis of the gospel by which you are saved. Be warned not to drift away from that and forget what you have been taught.”
Then he says, “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.” That right there outlines the first three facts that we will get into today and next week: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, and that he rose again according to the Scriptures.
He goes on to talk about Jesus being seen alive again by eyewitnesses. Then, as he goes through that list of eyewitnesses and talks about the implications of the resurrection, he goes down to verse 16 and says, “For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised: and if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.”
There is the answer to that question: could anything be presented to you that would convince you that Christianity is not true? I came to realize that if the resurrection is not true, then Christianity is not true. You may be sitting there gasping in your mind. Nobody is doing it openly, but you may be thinking, “The pastor said that Christianity could, theoretically, be disproved.”
That is not me. That is the apostle Paul writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. If the resurrection is not true, there is no point to any of this. I will just be honest and tell you that. If the resurrection is not true, we need to close down and go home, because there is no point to any of this.
Our faith is vain. There is no forgiveness of sins. There is no salvation. There is no eternal life. There is no reason even to follow Jesus Christ.
Let me say this, and hopefully it does not sound disrespectful because I don’t mean it that way. Anybody can get himself killed. 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 and how vitally important it is. We would not be saved without his shed blood on the cross. But if that is 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, as he said he came to do? Folks, the resurrection proved it. The resurrection put that stamp of proof, that evidence, on everything he had said and done.
He claimed to be God. Some people say, “Jesus never claimed to be God. That is something his followers made up later on.” Really? Then what was that exchange about when he said, “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.
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, and have a more philosophical approach. That is fine. But for me, it came down to these four facts that show me, at least, that there is no other explanation for all of this than the fact that Jesus Christ rose again from the dead the way the Bible said he did.
By the way, if he did that, then Christianity is true. Everything else follows. That does not only have implications for Jesus. It proves that Jesus was the Son of God. It proves that he was able to forgive sins as he claimed. It proves that what he said was true in other places, because then he is God, who cannot lie. He affirmed the authority of the Scriptures and every book of the Old Testament. Everything follows from the resurrection. That is the keystone that holds everything together.
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 then we will continue this next week.
Fact One: Jesus’ Existence and Death Are Historically Verifiable
The first fact is that Jesus’ existence and death are historically verifiable. Follow me on this: if there was no such person as Jesus Christ, he could not die and he could not rise again. If he did not exist, then none of this could have happened.
There is not a pink elephant in the aisle. Therefore, he cannot charge up the aisle and stomp me to death. How do I know he cannot stomp me to death? Because there is no pink elephant in the aisle. So if Jesus Christ never existed, then he could not have risen from the dead.
But the fact is that Jesus’ existence, his life, 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 be of just about any other fact in ancient history.
Not everything in ancient history was written down by hundreds and hundreds of people. They did not do that. It is not like today, where they follow presidential candidates around and write about what they had for breakfast. It is insane. If you want to know what Donald Trump had for breakfast, I am sure you can find an article about it online. Somebody try that. I will give you extra credit. I am sure you can find it out if you are that curious.
They did not record every detail of everybody’s life unless you were the king. So there is a lot about ancient history that we do not know. Some people will say, “There is not much evidence about Jesus’ life.” Well, consider that it is ancient history. If we start throwing out what we have because we do not have as many copies of the Bible, or because we do not have as many writings about Jesus Christ as we want, we pretty much have to throw out everything we know about ancient history. There are not that many writings left of anything. There are not that many written accounts of anything.
Yet for somebody like Jesus, there is a lot of evidence. You will hear this today. People will come up with the idea that Jesus never existed, that even the man Jesus was a fairy tale. That is not what modern scholarship says. That is not the conclusion people who study this out, both Christians and non-Christians, have come to.
I want to give you a few quotes from people who have 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, wrote, “The evidence for the historicity”—that means his being a historical fact—“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.” 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 is 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 from early Jewish and Gentile writers,” it at least establishes, 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 foundational—for an unbiased historian, just as the historicity of Julius Caesar is. It is not historians who propagate the Christ-myth theories.
What he is saying is that some people say, “You can’t believe the Gospel accounts. They were biased. We have to look at non-Christian accounts.” And what he is saying here is that there are plenty of non-Christians from that time who say Jesus existed. Some people will try to say Jesus never existed, but he says it is not real historians who do that.
Then I thought this one was interesting. There is a man named Neil Carter. He is 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 is not like I am trying to track him down. “There are so many atheists in town, and we know where they live.” I am 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. Even he has been irritated by atheists promoting the idea that Jesus never existed. Neil Carter believes that Jesus was just a man, not God. But he says there is 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 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 that 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, in essence, “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 itinerant 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 monuments to be built to him by the powerful?
He says it is true that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but it is 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 there is plenty of evidence to believe Jesus existed. Whatever else you believe about him, there is plenty of evidence to believe that he existed.
Ancient Witnesses to Jesus’ Life and Death
Those are modern guys, and you may be sitting there thinking, “What other evidence is there?” First of all, I refer you to the Gospels. I know that skeptics would say, “They were Christians. They had an agenda.” I am going to go ahead and say that most people are not pathological liars.
I am a Christian. I have a bias. I have an agenda. My agenda is believing in Jesus Christ. But I am not going to stand up here and knowingly lie to you. Most people are not going to knowingly lie to you. There are some people who do it, but most people are not pathological liars. So I don’t think we can ignore the Gospels. These were men 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. The first is Pliny the Younger, a Roman magistrate. If you want to see these quotes later on, I will get them to you. I am not going to stand here and read all of them to you, but I will tell you basically what they say for the sake of time.
Pliny the Younger, who was a Roman magistrate, a judge, and a governor at different times, wrote a letter to the Emperor Trajan in the year 112 complaining about the Christians, complaining about those who followed Christ. It is not just today that people gripe about Christians. They have 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 never raises a question about whether Jesus Christ was a real person. He says they follow Christ, and because of that they refuse to worship our pagan gods. He does not say, “They believe that this Jesus Christ guy was real.” He just says they follow him, and so they will not worship the gods or do what we say. He assumes that Jesus was a real person.
There is another one named Suetonius, a Roman historian, and they get better after this. Any one of these on its own provides a weak foundation, but taken together we have pretty good evidence from ancient history. Suetonius 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.
What is interesting about this is that the Romans initially considered Christianity to be a denomination of Judaism. That is what the Council of Jerusalem was about in Acts 15, where they were trying to decide whether believers had to keep the law and do these things. They were trying to decide, “Is this just a branch of Judaism, or what?”
So when Suetonius writes about the Jews who caused so much trouble in Rome, he is really talking about the Christians. Emperor Claudius began expelling lots of Jews from Rome in the 40s AD. When Suetonius records that they made trouble, he makes a point of saying that Christ made them do it. They were doing this because they followed Jesus Christ. They followed him, and so they made so much trouble. He made them do it.
Again, he is talking about the Christians, but with the assumption that Jesus Christ is a real historical figure. This is not long after the life of Christ, either. Even early on, these Roman historians had no doubt that Jesus Christ was a real person.
Tacitus was a Roman senator and historian. By the way, all of these were pretty well-respected, reputable men in their time. Tacitus wrote about the actual life and death of Jesus Christ and recorded it as history. He was not merely implying it because he was writing about the Christians.
Tacitus wrote that, to suppress the rumor that he had burned Rome, Nero falsely charged the people commonly called Christians and punished them with the most exquisite tortures. They were hated because the community had grown so fast. They were hated because they caused trouble, as Suetonius wrote.
Tacitus says that Christ, or Christus, 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”—meaning the belief in the resurrection—was repressed for a time and then broke out again, not only in Judea, where the mischief originated, but in the city of Rome also.
By the way, he was not a fan of the resurrection or that message. He called it a pernicious superstition. But he said these people followed Jesus Christ, the one who lived in Judea, was put to death under Pontius Pilate, and then they believed he rose again. Even though Rome tried to stamp it out, the teaching of the resurrection broke out again, not only in Jerusalem but in Rome too.
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 Gospels. He affirms what we see in the Gospels.
Josephus was a Jewish military leader and a Roman historian. He tried to play both sides of the fence. He worked for the Jews, and he worked for the Romans, and he was never quite trusted by either in terms of where his loyalties lay. But he is trusted as a historian.
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 people I am talking about right now are believers. Josephus never became a believer. But there is a quote that includes things about Jesus being the Son of God and about him rising again. I thought, “If he believed those things, he would be a believer.” Some of those things seem like they were probably added later on.
As I read it, I highlighted the parts that sounded like they might have been added later on by an overly zealous Christian saying, “I’ll just correct the history.” Then, as I did more research on it, I found that some historians and experts on Josephus identified the same parts that I did. I thought, “Okay, then I am on the right track here.”
But even if we take out those parts that sound way too Christian for Josephus, he still wrote that there was about this time Jesus, a wise man. He drew over to him many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. When Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among the Jews, had condemned him to the cross, those who loved him at first did not forsake him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, were not extinct at that time.
So Josephus still says there was 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 were still people following him in Josephus’s day.
Some of these names are a little hard to pronounce. There is another man named Mara bar Serapion, who was an Assyrian historian. That is a tongue twister. Say that five times fast. I can’t even say it five times fast once. He wrote about Jesus. He talked about him being the wise king of the Jews and being put to death by his own people.
He compares him to Socrates and Pythagoras and a few other men that we only know from a few writings. Yet nobody doubts that Socrates and Pythagoras were real and that they existed. This man, Mara, wrote about Jesus being killed by the Jews as their wise king, which Jesus claimed to be, or at least was the claim attached to him. He wrote about him as being as real as Socrates or Pythagoras.
Then there is the Babylonian Talmud, a Jewish religious text. It did not like Jesus very much. Whoever wrote the Babylonian Talmud did not like Jesus. So it is not just Christians who say he was a real person. Even people who did not like him recorded that he was a real person.
The Babylonian Talmud talks about how, on the eve of Passover, he was killed. It says that for forty days before the execution took place, a herald went forth and cried that he was going forth to be stoned because he had practiced sorcery and enticed Israel to apostasy. It says he was killed on the eve of Passover. Some of those 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.
That is what we are looking for from history. Did those events really take place? There is also a Greek satirist named Lucian of Samosata. He wrote satirical plays, but he also wrote historical records. He talked about one named Christ being the lawgiver who persuaded the Christians to abandon their worship of the pagan gods.
That is seven of them, and that is it for now with the quotes. That gives you some idea that there were people in ancient history who wrote about Jesus and recorded him as a historical figure. Even in his own time, they believed and knew that he was a real historical figure. They did not like him very much, but they knew he was real.
So if you get on the internet today and read on Facebook or in the comments section of some website some guy living in his mom’s basement who is convinced that Jesus never existed and that he was a myth, I am going to take the word of the people who lived back in that time. They did not like Jesus very much, but they said, “We didn’t like him, but he was real.” I am going to take the word of the people from 2,000 years ago first.
The Gospel Accounts Fit What We Know of History
We see, too, that the biblical accounts of his death are consistent with history. Some people have claimed that the whole story was made up because, they say, the story of his death does not make sense. They say there are some things in the history that do not make sense.
But the Gospel accounts were written within about twenty-five years of his death. I know that sounds like a long time. I was five years old at the time, but I have a very fuzzy memory of things that happened twenty-five years ago. Those of you who are older may look back and remember a little more, but your memory may be kind of fuzzy about things twenty-five years ago. So we might say, “That doesn’t seem all that credible. They wrote these things down twenty-five years after the fact.”
These Gospel accounts were written within twenty-five years. That does not mean parts of them were not written down earlier. I might write down notes: “Here is what happened today.” Then I might write down notes somewhere else: “Here is what happened tomorrow.” Twenty-five years from now, I might compile them into one record of what happened. For all we know, that could have happened.
Nobody questions the truth of what we know about Julius Caesar. Nobody questions the truth about what we know about Nero. Take anybody from ancient history, and it seems like the records were written down years and years later. Twenty-five years, by ancient standards, is almost nothing. Some of these men had history written about them hundreds of years after the fact, and yet we do not question those records.
So why do we question the history of the Gospels, written within twenty-five years of Jesus’ death by people who were still alive? By the way, there were multiple people around who witnessed these events who could have corrected them if they had gotten something wrong.
People will say, “The scourging does not make sense.” But we know that criminals were scourged. That is one of your blanks as well. Criminals were scourged. We know this was not just some story made up by the Gospel writers to sound really good and tug at the heartstrings.
I remember, as a child growing up, hearing stories about the crucifixion close to Easter. One pastor in particular explained the crucifixion. He brought out something that looked like the crown of thorns—not rosebush thorns, but big spiky thorns that would have been driven into the scalp. He brought out a replica of a cat-o’-nine-tails that they would have been whipped with, and he brought out a railroad spike.
He walked down the aisle as he was talking, banging on that spike with a hammer as he talked about the nails being driven in. I remember being gripped to the heart, hearing about the details of what was done to our Lord. Folks, that was not just made up to make the story more emotional and more gripping. We know from history that the Romans scourged criminals.
They had it down to a science. We know from history that they did this. They had a cat-o’-nine-tails, or something known by various names. They would have these whips with several leather straps, and they would have pieces of broken glass, bone, or pottery embedded in the end, or sometimes even a metal ball or a rock embedded in it. Either way, it was going to grip into the flesh and tear, or it was going to cause bruising and significant damage.
They were very good at this. They knew how to give as many lashes of the whip as possible, inflict as many blows as possible, and put the person through as much torture as possible without killing him. These men were pros at this. They could get somebody as close to the point of death as possible without killing him.
This is not something the Gospel writers made up. We know from Roman records that the Romans did this. We also know that under Roman law, this practice was mainly reserved for foreigners. Jesus would have been considered a foreigner, not a Roman citizen. In all likelihood, he would have been bound to a post and beaten with a leather whip, and the lictor would have come in and beaten him, just as the Gospel accounts say. He would have been beaten as severely as possible without killing him.
The Romans made so many advances in civilization and technology. We really owe the Romans a debt of gratitude for a lot of things. But for all their civilization, they were pretty barbaric when it came to things like this. They wanted the person to be as alive as possible and to feel as much as possible. They wanted to keep him alive so he felt everything. They did not want somebody dying on them in the middle of the punishment. So Jesus would have gone through this excruciating agony. As a criminal, he would have been scourged. There is no reason to doubt that it took place.
Crucifixion was reserved for the worst offenders. They did not crucify everybody. I don’t think they crucified Roman citizens. They crucified thieves. They crucified people who did heinous things.
Some people have said, “Why would Jesus have been crucified? He had broken Jewish law.” He did not really break Jewish law. He broke the Pharisees’ rules. He claimed to be God. Basically, he had run afoul of the Jews. So why would the Romans put him through crucifixion?
It was that claim that he was King of the Jews. It was that claim that he was the Messiah, the one there to be the ruler of God’s people. The Romans were fairly tolerant of other systems of belief as long as those systems did not interfere with Roman power. “You let us be in charge, and you can pretty much do whatever else you want as long as you respect our authority.”
What the Romans did not like was somebody else coming along and saying, “I am the leader of this group. We don’t recognize Caesar. We recognize this king.” Why do you think Herod put the babies to death when the wise men came along and said, “Where is he who is born King of the Jews?” It was the claim that he was the King of the Jews. That is why it was inscribed over him on the cross. That was the charge placed over him when it said, “King of the Jews.”
They were not identifying him as that in faith. That was a sarcastic thing. That is what he was up there for: because he thinks he is the King of the Jews. So as somebody who, in their minds, was inciting rebellion and committing treason against the Roman Empire, he would have been one of the worst offenders. They were going to come down on him as hard as they could.
So it makes sense that Jesus would have been crucified for that. We may only make it through point one. I don’t want to leave off in the middle of a point or fact. We are still on the fact that his life and death are historical fact.
The story is consistent with history. The idea that he would be scourged is consistent with what we know about history. The fact that he would be crucified is consistent with history because he would have been considered a rebel against the Roman Empire.
The Death of Jesus Fits Medical Science
We also know that the biblical accounts of his death are consistent with medical science. The details of the crucifixion are not something the Gospel writers could have made up. None of them had medical training except Luke, who was a doctor. Even Luke did not have modern medical training.
Today, I would think that the twisted minds that write CSI and some of these other shows could write a story like this and get all the details right. It is unbelievable to me that a doctor and some other uneducated men 2,000 years ago could come up with a story that meets all the details modern medical science would tell us to expect.
Believe it or not, people really can sweat blood. That always grossed me out when I was a child. It always seemed weird to me. I thought, “I have never seen that happen. How could that be possible?” But people can sweat blood.
The Bible talks about Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, and with the stress of his impending crucifixion, he began to sweat drops of blood. We sing about it too: “He bore no tears for his own griefs, but sweat drops of blood for mine.” That is an unusual but documented medical condition called hematidrosis.
According to one of the consultants at the National Institutes of Health, severe anxiety causes the release of chemicals that break down capillaries in the sweat glands. As a result, there is a small amount of bleeding into those glands, and the sweat comes out tinged with blood.
Now, you have to be under severe stress. Hear me in this: it is not just, “It’s tax time, so I am going to start sweating drops of blood.” I don’t know, unless you are Kathy, maybe. You might be under that much stress. But when you are under severe stress, stress can do weird things to your body.
When I was finishing college, I spent the last three semesters I was there writing a thesis. I did not know you had to write a thesis for a bachelor’s degree, but I happened to pick the one bachelor’s degree where you did have to write a thesis. That was such a big undertaking and so stressful for me that my fingernails started to grow funny. I started to grow ridges in my fingernails horizontally—not vertically, which comes from nutritional imbalance, but horizontally—because of the stress.
Stress does weird things to your body. It can release chemicals under extreme stress that would break down those capillaries. We know they are delicate anyway. That is why you can bump into something and get a bruise. It is those capillaries breaking. Well, those chemicals can break the capillaries into your sweat glands, and blood can come out. Modern medical science knows this is possible and knows how it happens. I don’t think they would have known about hematidrosis 2,000 years ago to make that up.
Second, we know that blood loss affects the whole body. Modern medical science would tell us to expect this. In the story of the crucifixion, this explains several things that took place. I am almost through with fact one.
Before Jesus was even nailed to the cross, he would have suffered extreme blood loss just from the scourging. He would have been in what they call hypovolemic shock. We know what shock means. Hypo means low, vol has to do with volume, and emic has to do with the blood. It is shock from low blood volume.
He would have lost so much blood that his body would be going into what modern medicine calls hypovolemic shock. It is a form of shock caused by the loss of massive quantities of blood. It leads to extreme forms of hypotension, which is low blood pressure, tachycardia, which means an elevated heart rate, and polydipsia, which means extreme thirst. I know, those are a lot of medical terms. Just remember extreme thirst, low blood pressure, low blood volume, and elevated heart rate.
As you lose blood, your heart has to pump faster and faster to try to keep the blood going because there is not as much of it. Your heart begins to beat very fast. You get very thirsty because you are losing moisture in your body, and your body is trying to take what moisture it has and make more blood.
That would explain why Jesus collapsed on the road carrying the cross. He did not have enough blood. He blacked out, and it became necessary for Simon of Cyrene to carry the cross for him. It also explains why he cried out on the cross, “I thirst.”
I always wondered why they put that in there. When I was a child, we were taught, “Well, it just shows us that he was human.” We already knew he was human. I think that is one of those things God put in there for us to see 2,000 years later and realize that this fits with what modern medical science tells us to expect.
Finally this morning, he knew that his end was coming. On the cross, the instant before he died, just before he died, he declared that the end had come when he said, “It is finished.” He cried out several things: “It is finished,” and “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” He knew he was going to die.
I have always questioned, not in a way that I doubted it, but in the sense of asking how that works. How did he know when he was going to die? How did he know it was going to be that moment? Some people question it and say, “That story doesn’t make sense. How could he know that he was about to die in that moment?”
One of the things I mentioned was the elevated heart rate. Sometimes something can happen, and my adrenaline goes up, and I can feel my heart rate go up. That is something I can feel even as a presumably healthy individual. At the last checkup I had, I was healthy anyway. We can feel our heart rate increase. Under those extreme conditions, that tachycardia, Jesus would have felt his heart rate increase.
He would have felt it increase and increase until he knew it could not increase anymore. He had suffered this immense anguish. He had been up there for six hours going through this asphyxiation, because when somebody is crucified, he does not die from blood loss. He dies from suffocation.
When your arms are pulled behind you and up, and you are placed in that position, it is hard to breathe. I can’t even really demonstrate the position, but it is hard to breathe even for a few seconds. His arms would have been pulled even farther back. It makes it hard to breathe. Your diaphragm is almost paralyzed. He would have had to pull up against the nails in his hands or push up against the nails in his feet for every breath he took.
After being there for six hours, being completely exhausted, realizing he did not have the strength anymore to pull himself up, and realizing his heart rate was increasing to a speed that did not feel normal, there is no reason for me to think that he would not have known he was about to die.
The same expert from the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Alexander Metherell, wrote that as the person slows down his breathing, he goes into what is called respiratory acidosis. The carbon dioxide in the blood is dissolved into carbonic acid, causing the acidity of the blood to increase. Eventually, this leads to an irregular heartbeat. With his heart beating erratically, Jesus would have known that he was at the moment of his death, which is when he was able to say, “Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit,” and then he would have died of cardiac arrest.
I am still out of breath from just holding my hands in that position for a few seconds. It makes me imagine what he went through for us.
What His Death Means for Us
Folks, as believers, we can know that it is not just a story we have been told that he lived and died. Modern scholars, at least most of the credible ones, believe that he really was a real person and that he really died. The people in his own day believed he was a real person and that he died. The story of his death lines up with everything medical science tells us we should expect.
Everything we know about history and science tells us that the story of Jesus Christ dying on the cross is as accurate as if we were recording it today. If we were looking at it today, we could not paint a more accurate picture. And if you are thinking, “How are we going to get through all four facts?” the other three are shorter than the first one.
But this lays the foundation, because if he was not real, then he could not have died. If he did not die, he did not rise again. And as I made the point at the very beginning, if he did not rise again from the dead, then there is no point to any of this.
But folks, as I will present next week, there is a point to all of this. He did live. He did die. And he did rise again. Because of that, everything that he said is true. Everything he taught is true. Everything he did accomplished all the things he said it would.
This morning, as we talk about him dying on the cross, he did that, as he said, to seek and to save that which was lost. He did that for us. This passage in 1 Corinthians says he died for our sins.
Each of us has sinned against a holy God. Each of us deserved the punishment that Jesus took, and more. We deserve separation from God in hell after death. Yet Jesus came and took responsibility for our sins.
Folks, everything he went through on the cross, all this horrible suffering, and everything he went through beforehand, was him bearing the punishment that we deserved. He took responsibility for it. He was punished in our place. After that, he died and rose again, proving that he had the power to forgive.