Now
after the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first
day of the
week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to look at
the grave. 2 And behold, a severe earthquake
had occurred, for an angel of the Lord descended from
heaven and came and rolled away the stone and sat upon
it. 3 And his appearance was like lightning,
and his clothing as white as snow. 4 The
guards shook for fear of him and became like dead men.
5 The angel said to the women, "Do not be
afraid; for I know that you are looking for Jesus who
has been crucified. 6 "He is not here, for He
has risen, just as He said. Come, see the place where He
was lying (Matthew 28:1-6).
So says one of four
gospel accounts of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This
event has been called “the fundamental truth of the
Christian faith,” “the very citadel of the Christian
position.” R. A. Torrey said, “While the literal bodily
resurrection of Jesus Christ is the corner-stone of
Christian doctrine, it is also the Gibraltar of Christian
evidence, and the Waterloo of infidelity and rationalism.
If the Scriptural assertions of Christ’s resurrection can be
established as historic certainties, the claims and
doctrines of Christianity rest upon an impregnable
foundation.” Others have called it the “crowning proof,”
the “foundation,” and the “centerpiece” of Christianity.
John Stott said, “Christianity is in its very essence a
resurrection religion. The concept of the resurrection lies
at its heart. If you remove it, Christianity is destroyed.”
So it makes
sense, then, that if anything is going to be attacked by a
godless and non-believing world, it is the resurrection of
Jesus Christ. If you can somehow undermine the resurrection
by suggesting that it is nothing more than a mythological
creation of a group of deluded disciples who wanted to
perpetuate a movement that their dead Messiah was no longer
able to sustain, then you can succeed in calling the very
authenticity of Christianity into question.
So when it was
established unequivocally from all viewpoints that the tomb
was empty, the Jewish authorities immediately crafted and
circulated a story in an attempt to explain what could only
reasonably be explained as the resurrection of Christ.
Matthew records,
Now while they were on their way, some of the guard came
into the city and reported to the chief priests all that
had happened. 12 And when they had assembled
with the elders and consulted together, they gave a
large sum of money to the soldiers, 13 and
said, "You are to say, 'His disciples came by night and
stole Him away while we were asleep.' 14
"And if this should come to the governor's ears, we will
win him over and keep you out of trouble." 15
And they took the money and did as they had been
instructed; and this story was widely spread among the
Jews, and is to this day (Matt 28:11-15)
This was apparently the
first attempt to explain the empty tomb apart from
acquiescing to the reality of the resurrection. Other
attempts have been multiplied through history. Kirsopp Lake
suggested that the women who reported the body missing
simply went to the wrong tomb. The unbelieving disciples,
who went to see for themselves, of course, must have also
gone to the wrong tomb. But if that were the case, it would
have been simple for the Jewish authorities to go to the
real tomb where the Roman soldiers stood guard, break the
seal, roll the stone away, and produce the body.
Another
popular explanation is the “swoon theory.” This suggests
that Jesus didn’t actually die; He simply fainted from
exhaustion and loss of blood. Everyone thought He was dead,
but when He revived, the disciples believed that He had been
resurrected. Never mind the fact that a Roman soldier had
rammed a spear into His side to make certain He was dead,
the thought that a man could spend six hours on a cross as
the culmination of a much longer period of sleepless
beatings and abuse, then be embalmed and wrapped with near
one hundred pounds of spices and grave clothes, and without
medical treatment for three days could have the strength to
role away a massive stone, overpower a detail of Roman
soldiers and somehow present the image of being resurrected
and glorified to a group of unbelieving and downcast
disciples, is ten times harder to believe than the
resurrection itself.
But that is just the
length people will go to in order to avoid acquiescing to
the reality of the resurrection. Because if people concede
to the truth of the resurrection, they are forced to admit
what Paul affirmed in Romans 1.4, that Jesus “was declared
the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the
dead.” Preaching to a group of pagan Gentiles in the city
of Athens, the apostle Paul proclaimed, “Having overlooked
the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all
people everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day
in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a
Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men
by raising Him from the dead” (Acts 17.30-31).
That’s why people don’t want to believe the
resurrection. The risen Christ is the one who will
judge the living and the dead. He is the One before whom
the nations will stand and give an account. Speaking to the
Jews in Acts chapter three, Peter boldly proclaimed, “But
you disowned the Holy and Righteous One and asked for a
murderer to be granted to you, but put to death the Prince
of life, the one whom God raised from the dead, a fact to
which we are witnesses” (vv.14-15). In Acts chapter two he
said,
“Men of Israel, listen to these words:
Jesus the Nazarene, a man attested to you by God with
miracles and wonders and signs which God performed
through Him in your midst, just as you yourselves
know-- 23 this Man, delivered over by
the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God, you
nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men and put
Him to death. 24 "But God raised Him up
again, putting an end to the agony of death, since it
was impossible for Him to be held in its power (Acts
2.22-24).
At the end of his sermon
he declared, “Therefore, let all the house of Israel know
for certain that God has made Him both Lord and Christ—this
Jesus whom you crucified” (v. 36). The risen Jesus
is both Lord and Christ. You can’t get around that. The
author of Hebrews said,
God, after He spoke
long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions
and in many ways, 2 in these last days has
spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all
things, through whom also He made the world. 3
And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact
representation of His nature, and upholds all things by
the word of His power. When He had made purification of
sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on
high (Hebrews 1.1-3).
The risen Christ
is seated at the right hand of God, vested with all
authority, ready to judge the living and the dead. He will
not take second place to anyone or anything. He demands
your utmost devotion and commitment, indeed, your worship!
That is why people don’t want to concede to the
resurrection. They want a dead Jesus, because a dead Jesus
doesn’t require anything. You can say He was a good
teacher; you can say He had noble morals; you can say He
lived a good life. But you can’t say that He was raised from
the dead, because then you’ve got to give your life to Him;
you’ve got to bend your will to His; He has to be God.
Jesus said, “If anyone whishes to come after Me, he must
deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me”
(Luke 9:23).
And what is
so amazing to me is that those who reject the resurrection
have not done so after sitting down to carefully and
objectively evaluate the claims of the four gospel
accounts. In fact, I don’t personally know one individual
who has done that! Do you? Toward the end of his Gospel,
the apostle John wrote, “Therefore, many other signs Jesus
also performed in the presence of the disciples, which are
not written in this book; but these have been written so
that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of
God; and that believing you may have life in His name” (John
20.30-31). It was as if John was inviting the unbeliever to
read his gospel and to see for himself what it was that
Jesus did and claimed. Yet those who reject the
resurrection and, therefore, Christianity, do so by clinging
to trite clichés handed down from the golden age of Greece.
They grab on to the first claim that opposes Christianity
and cling to it with dogged tenacity, all the while refusing
for one moment to take a Bible in their hands and evaluate
the historical veracity of the resurrection. Their railings
against it rival the thunders of Yahweh from Mt. Sinai.
Though I don’t know
anyone personally, I have heard of some people who have set
out to evaluate the historical data surrounding the
resurrection—not objectively—but with the intent of
disproving it and debunking Christianity. Josh McDowell
speaks of lawyer by the name of Frank Morison who set out to
refute the evidence for the resurrection:
He thought that the life of Jesus was
one of the most beautiful lives ever lived, but when it
came to the resurrection he thought someone had come
along and tacked a myth onto the story of Jesus. He
planned to write an account of the last few days of
Jesus. He would of course disregard the resurrection.
He figured that an intelligent, rational approach to
Jesus would completely discount his resurrection.
However, upon approaching the facts with his legal
background and training, he had to change his mind. He
eventually wrote a best-seller, Who Moved the Stone?
The first chapter was titled, “The Book That Refused to
Be Written,” and the rest of the chapters deal
decisively with the evidence for Christ’s resurrection.
Among others who have
evaluated the resurrection, Professor Thomas Arnold, author
of the famous three volume History of Rome, and
appointed to the chair of modern history at Oxford, said, “I
have been used for many years to study the histories of
other times, and to examine and weigh the evidence of those
who have written about them, and I know of no one fact in
the history of mankind which is proved by better and fuller
evidence of every sort, to the understanding of a fair
inquirer, than the great sign which God has given us that
Christ died and rose again from the dead.”
The English scholar, B. F. Westcott, said, “Taking all the
evidence together, it is not too much to say that there is
no historic incident better or more variously supported than
the resurrection of Christ. Nothing but the antecedent
assumption that it must be false could have suggested the
idea of deficiency in the proof of it.”
Yet those
who reject the resurrection continue to do so with
unflinching resistance. And again, it’s not because they’ve
carefully evaluated all of the pertinent information. The
battle is at the level of the will. They don’t want
to believe the resurrection; the stakes are too high; the
risen Christ demands too much. Ravi Zacherias once said,
“A man rejects God neither because of intellectual demands
nor because of the scarcity of evidence. A man rejects God
because of a moral resistance that refuses to admit his need
for God.”
Mankind is stubbornly and sinfully independent.
One of the
most striking features of the book of Revelation, I think,
is the resistance to God coming from those who are enduring
the cataclysmic events of the Tribulation period. God is
pouring out His judgment on a wicked and rebellious earth
and it’s undeniably obvious that it is coming from Him. And
what do the people say? Revelation 6.16-17 records, “And
they said to the mountains and to the rocks, ‘Fall on us and
hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the throne, and
from the wrath of the Lamb; for the great day of their wrath
has come, and who is able to stand?’” They recognize that
these judgments are coming from “Him who sits on the
throne,” and from “the Lamb.” These people will have
irrefutable, tangible, visible, empirical evidence for the
existence and reality of the all-powerful, triune God of the
Bible. And all they have to do is repent and give their
lives to Him. But they won’t do it! They won’t bend their
will to His; they would rather die. That is frightening!
People are
doing the same thing today with the resurrection. But if
you deny the resurrection, you shut off any possibility of
salvation from your sins. You see, the resurrection is at
the very heart of the gospel—God’s good news message to
mankind. Turn with me to the book of First Corinthians, to
chapter fifteen. Here we have the apostle Paul’s summary of
the gospel, and because He is explaining the gospel, he
speaks at length of the resurrection.
Now I make known to you, brethren, the
gospel which I preached to you, which also you received,
in which also you stand, 2 by which also you
are saved, if you hold fast the word which I preached to
you, unless you believed in vain. 3 For I
delivered to you as of first importance what I also
received, that Christ died for our sins according to the
Scriptures, 4 and that He was buried, and
that He was raised on the third day according to the
Scriptures, 5 and that He appeared to Cephas,
then to the twelve. 6 After that He appeared
to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of
whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep;
7 then He appeared to James, then to all the
apostles; 8 and last of all, as to one
untimely born, He appeared to me also (1 Corinthians
15:1-8).
Paul said in verse
three, “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I
also received.” He was saying that the gospel message that
he preached to the people in the city of Corinth didn’t come
from him. He didn’t invent it; he received it. It was
God’s message, sourced in God. What was that message; what
is the gospel? “That Christ died for our sins according to
the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was
raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.”
Notice that he said, “according to the Scriptures,” twice.
This refers to the Jewish Scriptures, what we call the Old
Testament today. Listen, the gospel—the message of a
crucified, buried and risen Savior—is not the invention of a
first century sect that broke away from Judaism. The Jewish
Scriptures had long predicted the coming of such a
Savior—His death as a substitutionary sacrifice in the place
of sinners, His burial, and His resurrection. Hundreds of
years before Jesus was born, the Jewish prophet Isaiah said
of the Messiah, “He was pierced through for our
transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the
chastening for our well-being bell upon Him, and by His
scourging we are healed” (Isaiah 53.4).
That’s the gospel
message in the Old Testament. It was “for our sins” that
Christ died. When He suffered and bled and died on the
cross, He did it in the place of sinners. The Bible says
that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”
(Romans 3.23). That’s a problem, because God’s standard is
nothing less than perfection. Because God is perfect, He
requires perfect obedience from us. Matthew 5.48 says, “You
are to be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” But
none of us have lived up to that standard, and there is no
way that we can earn our way back into God’s favor. You
can’t earn your salvation; you can’t right your wrongs; you
can’t save yourself from your sin!
“The wages of sin is death,” says Romans
6.23. That’s not just physical death; that’s eternal
spiritual death—separation from God in the conscious torment
of hell forever. And because all of us have sinned, that’s
what we’ve earned. You might say, “How can that be? How
can God punish for eternity someone who has lived and sinned
only 60 or 70 years?” I’ll tell you how. When we sin
against God, we sin against an infinite being. The penalty
for that sin, then, is unlimited, eternal in its duration,
because as finite beings we will never be able to pay for
it. We understand that even in our present system of
justice. A murder that takes only a second to commit yields
a life sentence for the perpetrator. And the eternal
fires of hell cannot be hot enough for the one who has
sinned against God. Let me tell you why. Because God
in His grace, mercy and love has made a way for us to be
forgiven for our sins; He’s made a way for our sins to be
cleansed and washed away.
When Jesus suffered and bled and died on
that cross, He did it in your place and mine. As One who
was fully God and fully man, He was the only One who could
pay the penalty for our sins. When we sin against God, the
infinite One, we commit a sin for which we can never pay.
But when Christ Jesus, who Himself was fully God, infinite
in His nature, yet united with humanity in that He was fully
man, died on the cross, He paid the penalty for our sins.
His sacrifice in our place was sufficient to appease God’s
wrath toward you and me on account of our sins (Hebrews
2.14-17). “He Himself bore our sins in His body on the
cross,” says 1 Peter 2.24. “He made Him who knew no sin to
be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the
righteousness of God in Him,” says 2 Corinthians 5.21. When
Jesus died on the cross, God looked at Him as if He had
committed every one of your sins and mine, so that He could
look at us as if we lived the perfectly righteous life of
Christ. The Bible says, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you
will be saved” (Acts 16.31). Romans 10.9 says, “If you
confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your
heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be
saved.” To confess Jesus as your Lord is to say that He is
your Master; He now rules your life. Acts 17.30 says,
“Having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now
declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent.”
To repent is to change your mind. It is a commitment to
turn away from your sins and to turn to God in faith so that
Christ is now seated on the throne of your life. It is
dying to yourself; it is the end of you. Your life now
belongs to Christ.
Romans 6.23 says, “The wages of sin is
death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ
Jesus our Lord.” Do you want to know why the eternal fires
of hell can’t be hot enough? That’s why! It’s because
eternal life is a free gift. It’s because God
sent His own Son to die for us. We receive that free gift
by believing that Christ paid the penalty for our sins. If
you reject that gift; you’re rejecting the Son of God;
you’re rejecting God’s provision for your salvation and
saying that you think you can earn it on your own. That is
the epitome of arrogance. Do you think that you are going
to stand before God some day and argue that He should let
you into heaven based on the fact that you are generally a
“good person?” Listen, if that’s what you think, I’ve got
news for you; you’re on your way to hell. Salvation from
the penalty for your sin is an infinitely valuable gift. To
reject it is to incur a punishment of infinite duration. To
accept it is to gain eternal life in the presence of God in
heaven. We do this by faith—“Believe in the Lord Jesus, and
you shall be saved” (Acts 16.31).
That Christ was buried and raised on the
third day is essential to the gospel. His burial testified
to His certain death, and His resurrection was like God’s
stamp of approval on His sacrifice in our place. So Paul
moved on in First Corinthians fifteen as if to say, in case
you doubt the resurrection, “He appeared to Cephas [Peter],
then to the twelve. After that He appeared to more than
five hundred brethren at one time” (vv.5-6). That Jesus
appeared to Peter and to the disciples at different times
and in different locations is significant, but that He
appeared to more than five hundred people at one time is
impressive. Of those five hundred Paul said, “Most of whom
remain until now, but some have fallen asleep.” Some of
those witnesses had died by the time Paul wrote this letter
to the Corinthians, but most were still living. If people
didn’t believe Paul’s claim, they could have asked those
witnesses.
Rejecting the resurrection is the worst
decision any person has ever made, and it is so sad that all
too often that decision is made without ever cracking open a
Bible. It is a desperate attempt to deny what history
records, driven by a will that won’t submit to Jesus Christ
as Lord.
“In the early 1920s, Nikolai Bukharin was
sent from Moscow to Kiev to address a vast anti-God rally.
For an hour he abused and ridiculed the Christian faith
until it seemed as if the whole structure of belief was in
ruins. Questions were invited. A priest of the Orthodox
church rose and asked leave to speak. He faced the people
and gave them the ancient Easter greeting, “Christ is
risen.” Instantly the whole vast assembly rose to its feet,
and the reply came back like a crash of breakers against the
cliff, “He is risen indeed.”