What Will You Do with Jesus?

It's hard to believe, but we're about to celebrate Easter. I think Christmas will be here again before we know it! I remember growing up and dying eggs and anticipating all the chocolate that awaited me in my Easter basket so very early on that Sunday morning. Like everything else in our society, Easter has become a multibillion dollar business. But is it just bunnies and candy, or something more?

According the New Testament, which we've seen is historically reliable, Jesus claimed to be God and He proved to be God through miracles, and especially through the resurrection. Peter says in his first sermon in Acts 2:33, 36, "God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of the fact …Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ." Then Paul says in 1 Cor. 15:13-15, "If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead." It doesn’t get much clearer than that. Christianity hinges on the resurrection. No Easter equals no Christianity!

We can’t repeat the resurrection in a lab, or look through a telescope and observe it. It’s a matter of history. It’s an historical investigation. It should be no surprise that people deny the resurrection today. Some people even deny that the holocaust happened! So do we just take the resurrection on some type of "blind" faith or do we have good reason to believe the disciples were not deceived? We've seen that God exists, and therefore miracles are possible. And as I said earlier, we've seen that the New Testament is historically reliable. With that in mind, I believe we have very good reasons to believe in Jesus' resurrection. In fact, I think everyone should believe in Jesus' resurrection because of five historical F-A-C-T-S. Even most critical scholars will grant these historical facts as true.

Paul says in 1 Cor. 15:3-8, "For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born." He wrote this in about AD 55, about 25 years or so after the crucifixion. Most of the above passage is probably a creed of the early church that was memorized and passed on to others. We can trace this creed back to about 3-8 years after the cross. Notice what Paul emphasizes. He says that Christ died, He was buried, He was risen, and then He appeared to more than 500 eyewitnesses. So lets briefly examine these F-A-C-T-S.

F - FATAL CROSS
Jesus died by crucifixion. It's hard to have a resurrection without first having a death. Time does not permit a detailed examination of crucifixion, but we can be certain that Jesus was indeed dead upon removal from the cross. He did not later somehow recover and leave the tomb as beaten and bloodied figure in order to deceive the disciples of his resurrection. Dr. William D. Edwards wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association, “Clearly the weight of the historical and medical evidence indicates that Jesus was dead before the wound to His side was inflicted…The assumption that Jesus did not die on the cross appears to be at odds with modern medical knowledge.”

A - A BORROWED TOMB
Jesus was probably buried in a borrowed private tomb that was later found empty (agreed upon by 75% of scholars). The early church simply wouldn't have gotten off the ground without the empty tomb. The New Testament says that women were the first to discover the empty tomb. As you probably know, in those days, a woman's testimony was not considered trust worthy. Sorry ladies, don't shoot the messenger. If the disciples were making up this story, why would they include such an embarrassing detail? Matthew also reports that the Jewish leaders made up the story that the disciples stole the body. The disciples, of course, were scared and in hiding and had no means, motive, or opportunity to steal the body. Apparently the body was actually missing however. If not, the Jewish leaders could have simply paraded Jesus' dead body through the streets and ended Christianity before it even got started. Yet, here we are 2,000 years later.

C - CONVERSION OF THE DISCIPLES
As I said, the disciples were scared and in hiding after the crucifixion. They had nothing to gain and everything to lose by proclaiming the resurrection. Yet, something happened to turn these fearful disciples into a band of brothers that would "turn the world upside down." They believed they had seen, spoken with, ate with, and touched the risen Jesus. And they were willing to die for that belief. Tradition holds that all but one of the disciples died for proclaiming the resurrection. Who would willing die for a lie? While it's true that people die for what they believe in all the time, the case of the disciples is different. They didn't just die for what they believed in. They died for what they knew for a fact was either true of false because they were there and were eyewitnesses.

T - TRANSFORMATION OF JAMES
Jesus' half brother James did not believe in Him. Mark 3:21 says, "When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, 'He is out of his mind.'" John 7:5 says, "For even his own brothers did not believe in him." Yet, later James became the leader of the church in Jerusalem and, according to the Jewish historian Josephus, was killed for his faith in AD 62. Something major happened to James. According to Paul, he had seen the risen Jesus.

S - SAUL BACAME PAUL
As you know, Saul (Paul) was on a mission to kill the early church. Yet he goes from Saul, extreme persecutor to Paul, believer and apostle just a couple of years after the crucifixion. He wrote most of the New Testament and is our earliest source of resurrection. He says that Jesus appeared to more than 500 eyewitness. In other words, he's saying, "Hey, if you don't believe me, go check it out for yourselves." Lee Strobel says if all the listed eyewitness were allowed to give a 15 minute testimony about their Jesus encounter, it would take 129 straight hours to get through it. That's almost 5 1/2 days!

There are of course other theories out there that counter the resurrection and attempt to account for the data. However, they all fail in various respects. Again, given the fact that God exists and miracles are possible (not to mention the fulfilled prophecies that we haven't even mentioned), based on our 5 historical F-A-C-T-S, everyone should believe in Jesus' resurrection because that is the best explanation of the data.

This has tremendous implications on our lives. It means that Easter is no longer about bunnies and candy. It's about a man who claimed to be God, the second Person of the Trinity, and He proved to be God by raising Himself from the dead. That means that what He says is true, because God cannot lie. And He says He is the only way of salvation and He is calling each of us to be reconciled to Him!

I shared a short C.S. Lewis quote a couple of weeks ago. I'd like to share the whole quote to emphasize this point again. He wrote, "I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon, or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

So the question is, what will you do with Jesus this Easter?

For His glory,
Adam Tucker