Grace Church
257 Kendall Street
Burlington, WI 53105

(262) 763-3021

Without Christ’s resurrection, we’re all dead Acts 2:22-24 We Believe Sermon Series #10 On February 27th, 1991 Ruth Dillow was at home in Chanuk, Kansas when the phone rang. It was bad news from the Pentagon. Her son, Private First Class Clayton Carpenter, had stepped on a landmine in the Persian Gulf War and was dead. It was an awful, sickening reality to learn that her son would never come home again. Three days later Ruth received another phone call. The voice on the other end said, "Mom, I’m alive!" Ruth said that at first she could not believe it was the voice of her 23-year‑old son, over whom she had mourned for nearly three days. Ruth said, "I jumped up and down. I was overjoyed! You just don’t know how much." Can you imagine the excitement of a mother who thought her son was dead only to find that he was actually alive? That was not though the initial reaction to Jesus’ resurrection. Although Jesus had told of His coming death and resurrection before it even happened, most either did not believe or did not understand. But it did happen. The Apostles’ Creed states, “I believe...the third day He rose again from the dead.” The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of the Christian faith. But our faith in the resurrection is a not a blind leap of faith. Etched in my memory from childhood are those lines from a familiar Easter hymn in evangelical circles, "He Lives": "You ask me how I know He lives? He lives within my heart." Please hear this, in spite of the warmth that such sentiment offers, it hardly fits the bill sketched out by the apostle Peter: "Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have" (1 Peter 3:15). Saying “This is what I feel” doesn’t seem to fit what Peter was telling us to do. In a recent informal survey of evangelical Christians, nearly everyone agreed with the statement, "It is more important for me to give my personal testimony than to explain the doctrines and claims of Christianity." Such an emphasis on personal feelings and experience is completely opposite of the apostles and the early church. They focused on the facts, not on their own experiences and feelings. "What Jesus Means to Me" or "How Jesus Changed My Life" was not part of their vernacular or thinking. Now what I’m saying is contrary to modern day American culture and contemporary Christianity but please stay with me because this is so important. Our world will accept our faith as long we talk about how we feel, but they scoff and spurn it when we say it is based on facts. For a lost world, questions of reason and science are based on facts, while religious claims are a matter of "faith” and feelings. But faith is defined in Scripture as requiring confidence in these events to which eyewitness testimony is given. Faith is not a synonym for irrationality or nonsense. It does not belong to the non-rational, non-historical, non-intellectual realm of blind leaps and sheer acts of will. Far from separating faith from the rigorous questions that belong to reason and history, Christianity makes public claims that must stand the test of any other. In fact, the burden of proof rests on the Christian to make the case for the Biblical faith, with the Resurrection as its cornerstone. Our faith is built upon the testimony of eyewitnesses who observed events upon which we cast our hope for eternal life, 1 John 1:1-4 (p. 862). Now this is not to say that our faith is based only on reason. It is not enough to just have an intellectual faith. But Biblical faith begins in the mind and then moves through the will to the emotions. We believe that on “the third day He rose again from the dead,” not just because we feel it in our heart but based on the facts of eyewitness’ accounts. What would happen to your faith if tomorrow morning the Milwaukee Journal carried this headline, “Body of Jesus Found near Jerusalem”? What if the newspaper printed that headline because someone really did find the bones of Jesus in a grave in the Holy Land. What would be left of our Christian faith? Would it matter at all? Or would we go on as if nothing had happened? It’s at this point the Creed offers an unambiguous affirmation: “The third day He rose again from the dead.” No ifs, ands or buts about it. Jesus died on Friday but on Sunday morning He came back from the dead. The resurrection is not based on what Christians feel, it’s based on fact. As we make our way through the doctrine of Christ’s resurrection, let’s ask several questions. 1. What do we mean by the resurrection? What do we mean when we say, "The third day He rose from the dead"? Creeds and confessions written much later than the Apostles Creed expanded the statement for more precision. For example, the Articles of the Church of England expresses it this way; "Christ did truly rise again from death, and took again His body, with flesh, bones, and all things pertaining to the perfection of man’s nature." The article emphasizes three great truths: first, the fact of the resurrection ("Christ did truly rise again from the dead"); second, the identity of the risen body (He "took again His body."); third, the change in the risen body (He "took again His body, with flesh, bones, and all things pertaining to the perfection of man’s nature”). When we say that Jesus rose from the dead on the third day, we mean that Jesus truly died on Friday afternoon, and on Sunday morning He personally, bodily, physically, actually, literally rose from the dead, never to die again. He rose personally. It was Jesus himself, not some substitute. He rose bodily, meaning that it was His crucified body that was raised from the dead. He rose physically, meaning that He wasn't a ghost or a phantom or a figment of someone's imagination. To say that He rose actually and literally means that it really happened. And the word "resurrection" means that He was raised immortal and incorruptible, never to die again. During His earthly ministry, our Lord raised several people from the dead, most notably Lazarus. But those miracles were resuscitations, not true resurrections. Lazarus was destined to die again. But Jesus, having once experienced death and having triumphed over it, would never die again. He was raised immortal—alive from the dead—and He still lives today. That's what we mean when we say that on the third day He rose again from the dead. 2. Is there evidence for Christ’s resurrection? During the late 1800’s, Alexander Whyte pastored a large Presbyterian church in Edinburgh, Scotland. During that time, a salesman by the name of Rigby would travel to Edinburgh regularly just to hear him preach. Over the course of many years he often invited other businessmen to accompany him to the services. One Sunday morning he asked a fellow traveler to go to church with him. Reluctantly, the man said yes. When he heard Whyte’s message, he was so impressed that he returned with Rigby to the evening meeting. As the preacher spoke, the man trusted Christ as his Lord and Savior. The next morning, as Rigby walked by the home of Pastor Whyte, he felt impressed to stop and tell him how his message had affected the other man’s life. When Alexander Whyte learned that his caller’s name was Rigby, he exclaimed, “You’re the man I’ve wanted to see for years!” He then went to his study and returned with a bundle of letters. Alexander Whyte read Rigby some excerpts, all telling of changed lives. These were the business acquaintances that Rigby had brought to hear the gospel over the years. But if the resurrection were not true, then Rigby would be a false witness. And so would Alexander Whyte. But the resurrection is true. That’s why so many lives were changed, and even today lives are being changed because of the resurrection. The question is though “Is there evidence for the resurrection?”  A) The evidence of the resurrection narratives. An important evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ is that of the resurrection narratives themselves. There are four of them, one in each Gospel; they are more or less independent. Yet they are also harmonious, and that suggests their reliability as historical documents. That the accounts are basically independent is evident from the considerable variations of detail. The four Gospel writers obviously did not sit down together and conspire to make up the story of Christ’s resurrection. If four people had sat down together and said, "Let’s invent an account of a resurrection of Jesus Christ" and had then worked out the details of their stories, there would be far more agreement than we find. We would not find the many small apparent contradictions. Yet if the story were not true and they had somehow separately made it up, it is impossible that we should have the essential agreement we find. In other words, the nature of the narratives is what we would expect from four separate accounts prepared by eyewitnesses. For example, there is the variety of statements about the moment at which the women first arrived at the tomb. Matthew says that it was "toward the dawn of the first day of the week" (Mt. 28:1). Mark says that it was "very early on the first day of the week ... when the sun had risen" (Mk. 16:2). Luke says that it was "at early dawn" (Lk. 24:1). John says that "it was still dark" (Jn. 20:1). These phrases are the kind of thing the authors would have standardized if they had been working on their accounts together. But they are in no real contradiction. For one thing, although John says that it was "still dark," he obviously does not mean that it was pitch black; the next phrase says that Mary Magdalene "saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb." Presumably, the women started out while it was yet dark but arrived at the garden as day was breaking. Another proof that these are accurate historical accounts is that they leave problems for the reader that would have been eliminated if they were fictitious. For example, there is the problem, repeated several times over, that the disciples did not always recognize Jesus when He appeared to them. >From the point of view of persuasion, the inclusion of such details is foolish. The skeptic who reads them will say, "It is obvious that the reason why the disciples did not immediately recognize Jesus is that He was actually someone else. Only the gullible believed, and that was because they wanted to believe. They were self‑deluded." Whatever can be said for that argument, the point is that the reason why such problems were allowed to remain in the narrative is that they are, in fact, the way the appearances happened. Consequently, they provide strong evidence that these are honest reports of what the writers believed to have transpired. Finally, the Gospel accounts evidence a fundamental honesty and accuracy through what we can only call their natural simplicity. If we were setting out to write an account of Christ’s resurrection and resurrection appearances, could we have resisted the urge to describe the resurrection itself; the descent of the angel, the moving of the stone, the appearance of the Lord from within the recesses of the tomb? Could we have resisted the urge to recount how He appeared to Pilate and confounded him? Or how He appeared to Caiaphas and the other members of the Jewish Sanhedrin? The various apocryphal Gospels (the Gospel according to the Hebrews, the Gospel of Peter, the Acts of Pilate and others) contain these elements. Yet the Gospel writers include none, because either they did not happen or else the writers themselves did not witness them. The Gospels do not describe the resurrection because no one actually witnessed it. It would have made good copy and a better story, but the disciples all arrived at the tomb after Jesus had been raised.   B) The evidence of the empty tomb. A second major evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the empty tomb. We might deny that an actual resurrection took place, but we can hardly deny that the tomb was empty. The disciples began soon after the crucifixion and burial to preach about the resurrection, at a time when those to whom they preached could simply walk to the tomb to see if the body of the supposedly resurrected Lord still lay there. The Jewish authorities hated the gospel and did everything in their power to stop its spread. They arrested the apostles, threatened them and eventually killed some of them. None of that would have been necessary if they could have produced the body. The obvious reason why they did not is that they could not. The tomb was empty. Jesus’ body was gone.   C) The evidence of the not quite empty tomb. According to John, the tomb was not quite empty. The body of Jesus was gone but the graveclothes remained behind. The narrative suggests that there was something about them so striking that when John saw them, He believed in Jesus’ resurrection.       Every society has its distinct modes of burial, and that was true in ancient cultures as today. In Egypt bodies were embalmed. In Italy and Greece they were often cremated. In Palestine they were wrapped in linen bands that enclosed dry spices and were placed face up without a coffin in tombs generally cut from the rock in the Judean and Galilean hills. Many such tombs still exist and can be seen by any visitor to Palestine.  It must have been in a similar manner that Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus buried Jesus Christ. The body of Jesus was removed from the cross before the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath, was washed, and then was wrapped in linen bands. One hundred pounds of dry spices were carefully inserted into the folds of the linen. One of them, aloes, was a powdered wood like fine sawdust with an aromatic fragrance; another, myrrh, was a fragrant gum that would be carefully mixed with the powder. Jesus’ body was thus encased. His head, neck and upper shoulders were left bare. A linen cloth was wrapped about the upper part of his head like a turban. The body was then placed within the tomb where it lay until sometime on Saturday night or Sunday morning. What would we have seen had we been there at the moment at which Jesus was raised from the dead? Would we have seen Him stir, open His eyes, sit up, and begin to struggle out of the bandages? We must remember that it would have been difficult to escape from the bandages. Is that what we would have seen? Not at all. That would have been a resuscitation, not a resurrection. It would have been the same as if He had recovered from a swoon. Jesus would have been raised in a natural body rather than a spiritual body, and that was not what happened. If we had been present in the tomb at the moment of the resurrection, we would have noticed that all at once the body of Jesus seemed to disappear. John Stott says that the body was “vaporized,  being transmuted into something new and different and wonderful.”  What would have happened then? The linen cloths would have collapsed once the body was removed, because of the weight of the spices, and would have been lying undisturbed where the body of Jesus had been. The cloth which surrounded the head, without the weight of spices, might well have retained its concave shape and have lain by itself separated from the other cloths by the space where the neck and shoulders of the Lord had been. And that is exactly what John and Peter saw when they entered the sepulcher. A glance at these graveclothes proved the reality, and indicated the nature, of the resurrection.   D) The evidence of the post-resurrection appearances. A fourth evidence for the resurrection is the obvious fact that Jesus was seen by the disciples. According to the various accounts He appeared to Mary Magdalene first of all, then to the other women who were returning from the tomb, afterward to Peter, to the Emmaus disciples, to the ten gathered in the upper room, then (a week later) to the eleven disciples including Thomas, to James, to five hundred disciples at once, to a band of disciples who had been fishing on the lake of Galilee, to those who witnessed the ascension from the Mount of Olives near Jerusalem, and last of all to Paul, who claimed to have seen Christ in his vision on the road to Damascus. During the days following the resurrection, all these persons moved from blank, debilitating despair to firm conviction and joy. Nothing accounts for that but the fact that they had indeed seen Jesus. During the last century a well‑known critic of the Gospels, Ernest Renan, wrote that belief in Christ’s resurrection arose from the passion of a hallucinating woman, meaning that Mary Magdalene was in love with Jesus and deluded herself into thinking that she had seen Him alive when she had actually only seen the gardener. That is preposterous. The last person in the world that Mary (or any of the others) expected to see was Jesus. The only reason she was in the garden was to anoint His dead body.   What accounts for a belief in the resurrection on the part of Christ’s disciples? Nothing but the resurrection itself. If we cannot account for the belief of the disciples in that way, we are faced with the greatest enigma in history. If we account for it by a real resurrection and real appearances of the risen Lord, then Christianity is understandable and offers a sure hope to all.   E) The evidence of the transformed disciples. Another evidence for the resurrection flows from what has just been said, the transformed character of the disciples. Take Peter as an example. Before the resurrection Peter is in Jerusalem tagging along quietly behind the arresting party. That night he denies Jesus three times. Later he is in Jerusalem, fearful, hiding behind closed doors along with the other disciples. Yet all is changed following the resurrection. Then Peter is preaching boldly. He says in his first sermon on the day of Pentecost, “Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs which God did through Him in your midst, as you yourselves know—this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. But God raised Him up, having loosed the pangs of death, because it was not possible for Him to be held by it" (Acts 2:22‑24). Something tremendous must have happened to account for such a radical and astounding transformation as this. Nothing short of the fact of the resurrection, of their having seen the risen Lord, explains it. Chuck Colson, the convicted Watergate conspirator, writes, “If one is to assail the historicity of the Resurrection and therefore the deity of Christ, one must conclude that there was a conspiracy a cover‑up if you will by eleven men with the complicity of up to five hundred others. To subscribe to this argument, one must also be ready to believe that each disciple was willing to be ostracized by friends and family, live in daily fear of death, endure prisons, live penniless and hungry, sacrifice family, be tortured without mercy, and ultimately die all without ever once renouncing that Jesus had risen from the dead. This is why the Watergate experience is so instructive for me. If John Dean and the rest of us were so panic‑stricken, not by the prospect of beatings and execution, but by political disgrace and a possible prison term, one can only speculate about the emotions of the disciples...Yet they clung tenaciously to their enormously offensive story that their leader had risen from His ignoble death and was alive and was the Lord.” If the disciples were involved in a lie they pulled off the biggest cover‑up in history. But look at them before the resurrection. One of the loyal twelve betrayed Him. The strongest of the disciples, and their natural leader, denied Him. The rest simply deserted Him. But after the resurrection there is an amazing transformation. They are, without exception, willing to endure every form of hardship, suffering, imprisonment, and even death. Only one thing can explain the change in their lives: the resurrection of their living Lord.   F) The evidence of the new day of Christian worship. The final though often overlooked evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the change of the day of regular Christian worship from the Jewish Sabbath (Saturday) to Sunday, the first day of the week. Could anything be more fixed in religious tradition than the setting aside of the seventh day for worship as practiced in Judaism? Hardly. The sanctification of the seventh day was embodied in the law of Moses and had been practiced for centuries. Yet from the very beginning we see Christians, though Jews, disregarding the Sabbath as their day of worship and instead worshiping on Sunday. For them it would have been a violation of one of the Ten Commandments. What can account for that?    There is no prophecy to that effect, no declaration of an early church council. The only adequate cause is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, an event so significant that it immediately produced the most profound changes, not only in the moral character of the early believers, but in their habits of life and forms of worship as well. Sunday, the Lord’s Day became the weekly celebration of the Resurrection. The day was a festival marked by joy in the sharing of the essential Christian truth that the Lord Jesus Christ is risen. 3. Why did God raise Jesus from the dead? First, to show His acceptance of Christ’s sacrifice. The death of Jesus Christ was either a horrible tragedy or it was an unbelievable victory, depending on your point of view. If Jesus was simply a good man who died a horrible death, it was a horrible tragedy. If, on the other hand, it was what He said it was, it was a supreme victory. Before His death Jesus said, "No man can take my life from me, I have power to lay it down and I have power to take it up again." He also said concerning His death, "I have come to give My life as a ransom for many." Either those statements were true or utterly, totally false. By raising Christ from the dead, we believe that God reached down and said, in effect, "Son, I am with you. You re absolutely right, and I totally approve of all that you have done." Then God looked at the world and said, "World, listen up a minute. You have done your worst with my Son. Now watch, and will do my best." And He raised Him from the dead. "World," said God, "that’s what you think of my Son: you put Him on a cross. Now watch; this is what I think of my Son." And He raised from the dead. Why did God raise Him from the dead according to the apostolic preaching? It was to show that He accepted Christ’s death on our behalf as substitutionary payment for our sins.   Secondly, He did it to demonstrate His divine power.  There are many, many things that are terribly difficult for us in life.  Often we wish that there were a power somewhere to help us stay firm, to overcome, to keep going. The biggest enemy, the Bible tells us, is Death itself. Death is awesome and horrible, and death is something we cannot resist. It’s an enemy. During each week we hear and see lots of news reports. It seems that the media has a fixation on death. If it isn’t a war somewhere, it’s a plane crash, a terrible accident on the freeway, somebody murdering somebody, or somebody drowning in an accident. It’s always death. And we sit there and it grips us because it bothers us, because there s nothing we can do about it. Then it strikes home to our own hearts. But the question is, Is that dreadful enemy going to win in the end? And the answer is, If you believe in the Resurrection, no. When God raised Christ from the dead, He demonstrated His mighty power to be greater than our greatest enemy. He did it to put His seal of approval on Christ’s passion, to demonstrate His mighty power, and to fulfill His eternal purpose. God’s purpose was to create a universe and a humanity with which He could have intimacy of fellowship. Humanity decided to thwart the divine purpose by abusing its God‑given free will. The result was a humanity cast adrift from God. God was not through with humanity. His eternal purpose had not changed, to enjoy intimacy with humanity. So God took the initiative and in the Incarnation, sent His Son. In the Crucifixion, His Son bore the consequence of our sin so the barrier between humans and God might be removed. In the Resurrection He defeated death. And in the Ascension He opened a way into the presence of God. The eternal purpose of God required incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension to bring an estranged humanity back into relationship with God. The eternal purposes of God required the Resurrection. The insistence of the early church on the Resurrection was easy to understand, for everything hinged on it. Conclusion: Thanks be to God for the empty tomb. As much as I marvel at the virgin birth of Jesus, as much as I wonder at the sinless life of Jesus, as much as I glory in the cross of Jesus, it is the resurrection of Jesus that makes Christianity unique among all of the world religions. Go to the tombs of the founders of the great world religions and call the roll: Mohammed “Here,” Buddha “Here,” Confucius “Here,” ...Jesus Christ...No answer. Because He is not there. The tomb is empty. Doubt if you will, but the tomb is still empty because He is not there. He is risen, just as He said. In the early church Christians greeted each other this way: One would say, “He is risen.” Another would answer, “He is risen indeed.” Sir Winston Churchill planned his own funeral, which took place in St. Paul’s Cathedral. He included many of the great hymns of the church and used the eloquent Anglican liturgy. At his direction, a bugler, positioned high in the dome of St. Paul’s, after the benediction intoned the haunting melody of Taps. The melancholy air gave the universal signal that Churchill’s day had come to an end. But as soon as Taps had ended, Churchill had instructed another bugler, placed on the other side of the dome, to play Reveille: It’s time to get up in the morning. That was Churchill’s testimony that the last note of his time on earth was not Taps, a final end, but Reveille, a new beginning. At the Cross we witness Taps being played for Christ, the awful hours that led to that final moment in which darkness fell, Jesus died, and Taps moaned for all humanity.  That was not, however, the last note. That first Easter Sunday morning, the bugle rang out with a new strain, Reveille. It was time for Jesus to get up, step out of that tomb and stride into the morning of eternity. My friend, unless Jesus first returns, Taps will sound for you someday. But if you are a believer, the same bugler that trumpeted Reveille for Jesus on that resurrection morning will play for you as well. Death will not be the final twilight, but a new and vastly more glorious morning. Will this new morning dawn for you? It becomes ours when we follow Jesus from death to life. The vital question this morning is, “Have you, by faith, put your life on His path? Have you accepted Jesus Christ, our risen Lord, as your Lord and Savior?”   “I believe . . . the third day He rose again from the dead.”