The historical event of Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead establishes the following:
- His claim to be the Son of God sent from His Father God
is true because only God can do what no man has ever done—get the victory
over death.
- His death on the cross paid in full for our sins.
The penalty for sin is death but Christ never sinned. So why did He die?
He died to pay the penalty for our sins and His resurrection proclaims
that God accepted His sacrifice as payment in full.
- He is the only way of salvation. Man cannot save
himself. Only God can save us and He did so through His Son’s death for
our sins. Therefore, there cannot be other ways to God because He only
provided one way through His Son.
- All other religions are false. If God saves people
only through His Son Jesus Christ, then no other religion saves.
- Every claim He made about Himself is vindicated as true.
- Everything He taught is the truth. Since He overcame
death which no man has ever done, then we need to listen to what He taught
and obey Him.
- The Scriptures are the word of God. Christ quoted
many times from the Old Testament as authoritative and commissioned His
disciples to write the New Testament.
- There is eternal life and there is eternal judgment
and annihilation.
- There is an objective and universal standard of
morality.
- Jesus Christ is Lord and King with authority over
all principality, power, might, dominion, and every name.
The entire
Christian faith stands or falls on the resurrection (1Cor 15:14, 17). If it
didn’t happen, then Christianity is a sham. If it happened, however, then
everything above and more is settled. The question now, is how do we prove the
resurrection?
The apostle
Paul wrote that after Christ’s resurrection, He appeared to not just five, or
even fifty, but to over five-hundred people at once (1Cor 15:6). But how can we
know this happened? Mainly, the credibility of Paul and all the apostles were
on the line because they were in agreement and fellowship with each other. Paul
said that James, Peter, and John gave him and Barnabas the right hand of
fellowship (Gal 2:9). Also, Peter read Paul’s letters and endorsed them (2Pet
3:15, 16). Therefore, this claim that Christ was seen by over five-hundred was backed
by all the apostles.
Also, since this
claim involved many hundreds of people, if it were false it could have easily been
exposed as such. Yet Paul even challenged the Corinthians to investigate the
truthfulness of it by stating, “most of whom are still living” (1Cor 15:6). In
effect he was saying that if they didn’t believe him then it wouldn’t be
difficult to track down some of those five-hundred and hear it from them
firsthand because most of them were still alive when he wrote the letter. He
wasn’t concerned about his claim being scrutinized.
What gives
substance to the Christian faith is that it’s established upon public events
that happened in human history. Other religions have to be followed blindly
because they consist mainly of “wise” sayings and commandments of men with no
proof they came from God. Only Christianity is grounded upon historical events,
political figures, geography, archaeology, nations, and people groups that can
either be verified as reliable or proven false. Christianity doesn’t shirk from
being examined and scrutinized. It’s proven objectively by those that were eyewitnesses
of the resurrected Christ. These Scriptures (Luk 24:46-49; Act 1:8; 1:21-22;
2:32; 3:15-16; 4:33; 5:32; 10:39-41; 13:31; 26:16), indicate the crucial nature
of eyewitnesses for the resurrection to be established as a historical event.
Salvation
comes by believing in Christ’s resurrection (Rom 10:9). To believe this one
event is to believe everything else about Him—that He is Lord and Savior of the
world. Does Christ require us to believe He was resurrected even though we have
never experienced the blessing of having seen Him with our own eyes? He said to
His disciple Thomas after His resurrection, “‘Thomas, because you have seen Me,
you have believed. Blessed are those
who have not seen and yet have
believed” (Jhn 20:29). We have no excuse for not believing even though we haven’t
seen because we have evidence of the eyewitnesses who did see Him. This is more
than sufficient evidence for belief but also for judgment against all that
reject it.
The Apostles’
Encounters and Claims
The apostles’
encounters with the resurrected Christ were face-to-face, close, and personal.
It’s not as though they only thought they had spotted Him somewhere in a crowd
but rather that He appeared to them several times over forty days (Act 1:3).
They saw Him with their eyes (Mat 28:17; Mar 16:14; Luk 24:36; Jhn 20:19), they
felt Him with their hands (Luk 24:40; Jhn 20:27), they heard His voice with
their ears (Mat 28:18-20; Mar 16:15-18; Luk 24:36-49; Jhn 20:19-29, 21:5-23),
and they even ate with Him (Luk 24:42-43; Jhn 21:12-13). Plus, these encounters
were not brief. He spent long periods with them explaining the Old Testament
Scriptures (Luk 24:27, 24:44-45; Act 1:3). They talked with Him, ate with Him,
and were taught by Him after His resurrection. They knew this was the same man they
had lived with for over three years and that had died on the cross just days
earlier.
For What Cause are
People Willing to Die?
People are willing
to die for what’s false when they believe it to be true. We’ve seen this with
cult members that have taken their own lives and with suicide bombers that are
typically Muslim terrorists. But people aren’t willing to die for what they
know to be false. The apostles were willing to die for the truth of the
resurrection but they didn’t just believe Christ rose from the dead—they
claimed to have seen Him. If they only held the resurrection as a belief, then
it could have been a false belief. Therefore, dying for it wouldn’t have demonstrated
much. But since they claimed to have seen Him and were willing to die for that
claim, then it wouldn’t have been a false claim because people don’t die for
things they know are false.
To believe
today that Christ truly rose from the dead in history, we need evidence—the
evidence is the eyewitness testimony of the apostles. They were the ones who
claimed to have seen Him and were willing to die for that claim. The question
now is how did the apostles, particularly Paul, influence and change the world in
which we live today? In other words, what can we point to today and say that if
the apostles had not done what they did, then this would not be here today?
What about
the New Testament itself? If Christ was not resurrected from the dead, then the
book of Acts wouldn’t have been written because the history it records never
would have happened. Paul wouldn’t have written his 13 epistles because Christ
would never have appeared to Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus. Saul wouldn’t
have even been persecuting Christians in the first place because there wouldn’t
have been any Christians to persecute. This holds for the other epistles in the
New Testament and the book of the Revelation of Jesus Christ because He wouldn’t
have been alive to have given it to John. At the very most someone might argue
that we would still have the four gospels short of their resurrection endings.
But even then we must ask ourselves why the disciples would have written four
accounts of the life of someone who died and stayed dead like everyone else?
And why they were willing to forsake everything to follow Him?
The apostles
were willing to die for the encounters they had with the resurrected Christ and
they evangelized the known world as a result of these encounters. They preached
to the world and established churches because He commanded them after His
resurrection (Mat 28:19-20; Mar 16:15). If He wasn’t raised, then this
commandment wouldn’t have been given and there wouldn’t have even been any
gospel message—the good news of His resurrection—to preach. Therefore, they
wouldn’t have evangelized the world and the New Testament wouldn’t have been
written. Why would they write about encounters with Him that never happened? And
if they never happened, then they wouldn’t have been willing to die for these
fabricated encounters? The fact that we hold the New Testament in our hands
today proves the resurrection happened.
Though many
don’t believe the New Testament is the word of God, its very existence affirms
that it is. Without the resurrection, we wouldn’t have it. But since we do have
it, then there was a resurrection.
What if the
Resurrection was a Hoax?
- People aren’t willing to die for what they know is
false
- The apostles were willing to die for what they wrote
- What they wrote were the encounters they experienced
with the resurrected Christ
- Therefore, what they wrote is true that Christ was
resurrected
The
underlying premise of this argument is that people aren’t willing to die for
something they know is false. But what if it can be shown that there have been
times where people died for things they knew were false? This would be an
attempt to bolster the claim that the resurrection was only a hoax perpetrated
by the apostles and that they did die for what they knew to be false. Supposing
this to be the case, it creates a progression of extremely unlikely scenarios throughout
the book of Acts. If the resurrection was only a deception perpetrated by the
apostles, then many of the events in the book of Acts couldn’t have reasonably
happened.
First of all,
the eleven disciples (excluding Judas Iscariot) would have had to conspire to
tell a false resurrection story with unanimous commitment and no dissenters
later. They would have also needed to steal the body right from under the eyes
of the Roman guards then permanently dispose of it without getting caught.
The events
following this get even more difficult and highly unlikely. How could the
miraculous outpouring on the Day of Pentecost have transpired without Christ
being alive? If the apostles were the only ones privy to the hoax, they would
have first had to deceive over 100 people (about 120 in the upper room
including the apostles themselves) into believing their resurrection claim.
This, of course, is not improbable but the big question is how would this group
of people have become instantly fluent in foreign languages they had never
learned? The unlikelihood of this becomes especially pronounced considering
they weren’t even privy to the “hoax.” How were 100 deceived people able to have
participated in such a miraculous event? They certainly weren’t trying to
deceive anyone else because they were, supposedly, deceived themselves.
After the
events that transpired on the Day of Pentecost, how were the apostles able to have
produced numerous miraculous acts of healing and raising of the dead that silenced
even their enemies (Act 4:16)? And what about the conversion of Saul of Tarsus
to Christianity? This man was a prominent Pharisee in the religion of the Jews
that was killing Christians because he disbelieved the resurrection (Act
26:4-11; Gal 1:13-14). How then were the apostles able to have talked him into
becoming a Christian and an apostle? How could they have convinced him to stop
murdering Christians and leave his powerful position as a Pharisee to become
beaten, flogged, stoned, and imprisoned for this lie (2Cor 11:23-27)? Moreover,
they would have had to have approached this hostile and violent man secretly, making
him privy to their hoax, getting him to forfeit his salvation that he had
always believed was through the Law of Moses, and then spending the rest of his
life suffering for what he believed was not even true! Half of the books of the
New Testament written by him testify that this ridiculous scenario couldn’t have
happened.
What if the Apostles
Only Believed the Resurrection Happened?
But what if
the apostles only believed this person they encountered several times was the
same man who had died on the Cross? We would then have to speculate about the
identity of that imposter and how he could have fooled all of them so
thoroughly. How was someone who looked and sounded just like Jesus able to have
put holes in his own hands, feet, and side and for those wounds to have healed
fast enough to not still be scabbed? In other words, how could he have known
well enough in advance that his look-alike was going to be crucified so that he
could inflict wounds on himself and have them heal in time to pull this off? Besides,
he also would have been burdened with the difficult task of stealing the body.
Now some have
claimed that it was someone else who was crucified rather than Jesus. Yet His
mother, His mother’s sister, and His closest disciple John were all standing
below the Cross while he hung there and spoke to them (Jhn 19:25-27). How could
a “double” have fooled them by looking and sounding just like Him? And even if
he could have, why would he want to? For what purpose would he subject himself
to such a cruel death? What was he getting out of this? And would anyone dare
claim that Jesus had a secret twin brother that nobody including His mother even
knew about? Or, maybe His mother was the real mastermind who hid His twin
brother in the manger in Bethlehem, raised him in secrecy, then convinced him
to subject himself to this brutal execution? And if someone else died in Jesus’
place so He could feign a resurrection, He still would have needed to have
stolen His imposter’s body, inflicted the wounds in His own body, and have them
healed ahead of time. Furthermore, how could He have hidden the holes in His
hands from his apostles for many months before His imposter’s crucifixion? And
how could He have ascended into heaven in front of their eyes (Act 1:9)? And
how could He have fooled the apostles into thinking they could work miracles
and then have them be able to? Many more ridiculous scenarios could also be
noted.
Conclusion
- People are not willing to die for what they know is
false
- The apostles were willing to die for what they wrote
- What they wrote were the encounters they experienced
with the resurrected Christ
- Therefore, what they wrote is true that Christ was
resurrected