He Has Risen
Preached by Jason Abbott
April 20, 2014
The following statements are true:
Christianity is a terrible, hellish lie if Jesus is not raised from the dead!
You’re wasting your time today and every Sunday that you worship as the church if Jesus is not raised from the dead!
Jesus Christ should be placed in the vile historical company of figures like Ivan the Terrible, Adolf Hitler, and Idi Amin if he has not risen bodily from the grave!
Such statements are true unless Jesus, as the gospels testify, defeated death. However, if you don’t believe me then believe the Bible on this matter—for this is precisely what the Apostle Paul tells us in the New Testament. He warns:
If Christ was not raised from the dead, then what we preach to you is worth nothing. Your faith in Christ is worth nothing. That makes us all liars because we said that God raised Christ from the dead…. If Christ was not raised from the dead, your faith is worth nothing and you are still living in your sins…. If we have hope in Christ in this life only, we are more [pathetic] than anyone else (1 Corinthians 15:14-15, 17, 19, NLV).
The Christian faith stands or falls with the real, bodily resurrection of Jesus. Consequently, this Easter (this day on which we celebrate Jesus’ defeat of death), while I have you captive, I want us to reflect on three reasons that have helped me to believe in the real resurrection.Here they are: (1) The resurrection accounts are written like real histories; (2) The arguments offered against the real resurrection are not convincing; and, (3) God through faith has graciously given me faith in the real resurrection.In a moment, we’ll begin to unpack each of these three points one by one. But before we begin reflecting on some good reasons to believe in the resurrection, I invite you to pray with me and encourage you to ask God to soften your heart—even as I ask him to soften mine—to anything which he would teach us, individually, during this time.I believe in the real resurrection of Jesus because:
1. The resurrection accounts are written like real histories.
Consider Luke’s account for example.
Luke 24:1-12
24:1 But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared. 2 And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3 but when they went in they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. 4 While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel. 5 And as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead? 6 He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, 7 that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise.”8 And they remembered his words, 9 and returning from the tomb they told all these things to the eleven and to all the rest. 10 Now it was Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James and the other women with them who told these things to the apostles, 11 but these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. 12 But Peter rose and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; and he went home marveling at what had happened.Here are two things that, for me, cry real history in Luke’s account:
a. Women are smart and men are stupid.
Darrin Patrick, in his book entitled: Church Planter, coins the term “Ban.” Patrick uses this term to speak about grown men who continue to act like boys. They’re neither boy nor man so therefore they’re “Ban.”This is a trend that has been noticed and utilized in television comedies. Perhaps, the supreme example of “Ban” is the cartoon character, Homer Simpson. Despite being the patriarch of a family of five, every thought and action he has is more like that of a five-year-old boy!Moreover, who are the trustworthy and intelligent leaders of this family? The women (Marge and Lisa) are. Women, not men, are trustworthy and rational!Sometimes today, we err on the side of portraying men too stereotypically. (And, perhaps men, we are earning that reputation as Bans! Ask yourselves that.) The reverse, however, was true of first century near-eastern culture and society. They stereotypically portrayed and marginalized women as untrustworthy and irrational, second-class citizens.In the ancient near-east, the legal testimony of women wasn’t permissible. They’re testimony could not carry legal weight because it was deemed unreliable. In fact, we see such myopic thinking displayed—even in Jesus’ apostles—here. Luke records (for the ages) that, upon hearing the testimony about the resurrection, the apostles thought the women’s “words seemed…an idle tale, and…did not believe them” (v. 11).So, why does this resurrection account cry real history for me?It cries real history because, if one were making up a story to deceive others, he would want the witnesses in his story to seem as trustworthy as possible. However, in 1st century Palestine, women wouldn’t have seemed, to most people, to be those types of believable witnesses. As one scholar notes:
If someone were going to manufacture a miraculous story such as this, I sincerely doubt that person would make the truth of this incredible tale rest on the testimony of a few grief-stricken and frightened Jewish women whose report would most likely be cast aside as a womanish fantasy….1
No, they wouldn’t do that because then their lie wouldn’t be as believable, unless, of course, it was the truth—unless it was real history.A second thing about Luke’s account that cries real history to me is this:
b. The leaders of the Christian movement look incompetent.
We, as readers, know these women are, in fact, telling the truth about Jesus; they are right and will be proven to be right just a bit further on in this narrative. On the flipside of that storyline, the early church’s leaders—the first leaders of the Christian movement—are about to be proven wrong about Jesus in this narrative! So then, how does this cry real history?Well, it cries real history because it makes the bosses look really, really bad! Again, if you’re making up a story to persuade people to join your organization, would you make the group’s leadership look so incompetent? I doubt you would! Truly, the early “church would not have created an account about the resurrection that portrayed its leading figures this way. The account [therefore] rings true.”2So, again, the first reason I believe in a real resurrection of Jesus is because the accounts that detail his resurrection are believable as historical documents.Another reason I believe in the real resurrection of Jesus is because:
2. The arguments offered against it are not convincing.
Recall that I earlier said that the Christian faith stands or falls with the real, bodily resurrection of Jesus. I sincerely believe this is the reality of our situation; we have no hope otherwise.Consequently, if you want to undermine Christianity, if you want it to fall, then you set your sights on the resurrection! It’s the bull’s eye!So, for the last two thousand years, enemies of the faith have taken aim:They’ve argued:
a. Jesus swooned or passed-out, but he wasn’t really dead. Certainly, Jesus appeared to his disciples following his crucifixion, but he wasn’t back from the grave—just back from an unconscious death-like sleep!
Problem 1: Roman soldiers weren’t bad at killing; they were very good at it. Thus, the chances of them mistaking a passed-out guy for a dead guy are unlikely.Problem 2: A half-dead Jesus isn’t likely to inspire fearful followers. Yet, such followers were inspired by him and, then, proceeded to change the world!They’ve argued:
b. The resurrection witnesses simply hallucinated. They were under immense stress, and this stress caused them to sincerely (yet mistakenly) believe that Jesus had risen victoriously from the dead.
Problem 1: Outside of the disciples getting ahold of some pretty potent stuff (if you know what I mean) and being really generous (like with around 500 people) over a number of weeks and, coincidentally, all those people (on separate occasions) having the same type of illusory encounter with the resurrected Jesus—then the hallucination argument probably isn’t a very good argument.Problem 2: All the enemies, of the early followers (and there were plenty), would have had to have done, in order to disprove the Jesus resurrection rumors, was simply go to the tomb and get Jesus’ rather dead body and: Voila! Resurrection hallucination over! However, they didn’t because they couldn’t.They’ve argued:
c. The disciples stole the body and made-up the resurrection story. They did this, presumably, in order to secure power for the Jesus movement and to win favor with the people.
Problem 1: The disciples would have needed to have been brave enough, smart enough, and organized enough to pull this off against armed Roman guards. Enough said!Problem 2: Sometimes people will die for what they believe true (Sept. 11). However, nobody dies for what they know is actually a lie, what is actually false. And yet, that’s precisely what this argument claims nearly all of Jesus’ disciples did in the end—died for what they knew wasn’t true!I could detail other arguments which attempt to discredit the resurrection. Yet, none of them would be any better at explaining what took place a couple thousand years ago than those I’ve already offered.Furthermore, I believe that all of the arguments against the real resurrection fall far short of reasonably explaining all that has happened in the past 2000 years! In order to change the world—as a group of uneducated, small-town followers of a crucified leader changed the world—they would need far more than a well-told lie about a resurrected man.They wouldn’t only need to sincerely believe that Jesus was bodily raised; they would need his resurrection power working in them in order to triumph!So, the second reason I believe in a real resurrection is simply that no other argument, in my opinion, comes close to explaining the transformation and triumph of Jesus’ church on the stage of world history.Finally (and by far most importantly) I believe in the real resurrection of Jesus because:
3. God through faith has graciously given me faith in his real resurrection.
John Updike, a Pennsylvania poet, wrote of Jesus’ resurrection:
Make no mistake: if he rose at allIt was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.
And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.3
Will we walk through the door? Take that step to trust in real resurrection? It is a door that I walked through—a step of faith I took—just about 20 years ago. And that exercise in faith has been used by God in order to build an increasing trust in the reality that Jesus conquered death for me.But, without that initial step, without 1st walking through the door of faith, there’s simply no way to argue ourselves into Christianity!Paul wrote this to a struggling church:
[Brothers, I] did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified…. [So] that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God (1 Corinthians 2:1-2, 5).
I could detail arguments for the plausibility of Jesus’ resurrection all day. But, there’s no absolute proof for it; it’s not believed through the wisdom of men. There is no scientific method that can lead us to God!Rather, we must walk through the door of faith, trusting in Jesus’ real death and real resurrection for us, in order to truly begin to know that He Has Risen!
Christianity is the one true and real way to commune with and know God if Jesus is raised from the dead!
You are wasting and ruining every aspect of your life with which you are not honoring God if Jesus is raised from the dead!
Death no longer has the final word if Jesus is raised from the dead!
Because, Jesus Christ is God’s Son, the Savior of the world, the perfect love of God in flesh and in action if he has risen bodily from the grave!
1 Michael F. Bird, Evangelical Theology, 437.
2 Darrell L. Bock, Luke 9:51-24:53, 1882.
3 John Updike, Collected Poems, “Seven Stanzas at Easter.”
