Why I Believe - Why I Believe in the Resurrection, Part 2

What if Jesus didn't really die?

What if He was simply unconscious or able to achieve some catatonic state? Does it really matter? Can we know for sure?

Well, that's today. We're grateful you've joined us as we pick up where we left off in our series, Why I Believe. Last time Chip tackled the question, did Jesus actually rise from the dead? By walking us through the historical evidence of His life and ministry. So if you missed that broadcast or any other part of our series, catch up anytime through the Chip Ingram app. As Chip begins the second half of his talk, he reminds us why Jesus' literal physical death is a crucial piece of evidence for His resurrection.

Let's dive in. Did Jesus really die? Maybe He took, you know, I've heard people say, maybe He took some special herbs and He got His heart rate to go way, way, way slow and it only appeared as though He died. See, if Jesus didn't die, then He wasn't resurrected. And if He's not resurrected, atheists and the Apostle Paul would agree, nothing works. Everything rises and falls on the resurrection. And so let's look and ask ourselves, did in fact He really die? At the time of His death, both friend and foe thought He had died.

Why? The Roman guards were the most formidable group of soldiers in the world. Think Navy SEALs in our day.

They were professional executors. There was a reason why they didn't break His legs because He was already dead. But to make sure, they took a spear and they put it in His side.

And if any of you doctors are here or, you know, people into biology, you know that around the heart, it's called the pericardial sac. There's a fluid around the heart and it says when that spear went in, both water and blood comes out. Putting a spear right through someone's heart is a pretty high indication that He actually was killed. And it goes beyond that, beyond the medical evidence, He has a burial in which about 70 pounds of spices and linen are wrapped around Him. It's absolutely incredible to think that He didn't die. His burial was secure. Well, then the next line of argument is, okay, if I assume He's a good man, if I really believe He did those miracles and if I believe He really died, maybe the disciples actually went to the wrong tomb.

Maybe it's just a really big mistake. Well, His tomb was very public and it was very secure. A man named Joseph of Arimathea, who's a wealthy, high-profile member of the Sanhedrin. The Roman guards, they put a seal on this burial spot. Everyone knew where it was, the size of the tomb. I wish you could have been there.

I wish you could see it. I've actually been to Israel and watched right there at the garden tomb. And the tomb is, we tend to think of graves like we have. It's more like a cave. And there was an opening in the cave and then there was this long, kind of like a ditch about this deep, and a huge stone that weighed tons.

It took four or five men and then it would drop in. And so it was then had a Roman seal around it. And so that burial grave was absolutely secure. Some say it would take up to 25 people to move that stone. And so as we go through the line of thinking, His death was undisputed. His burial was public and secure. And I think at this point, then you get where you start to weigh this evidence.

And I love what someone has done. What is the evidence? Is there any convincing evidence?

In other words, if we took all that we could know in history, and all that we know from the New Testament documents, and all that we know from extra biblical resources, and we could just sort of weigh them like a lawyer weighs evidence, is there enough evidence to convict Jesus of being raised from the dead? Now this is really interesting because I don't know why but it seems like lawyers find themselves doing this and then something amazing happens to their life. There was a lawyer named Simon Greenleaf. He actually was one of the founders of Harvard Law School. He was an atheist. And one of his students who was an evangelical believer questioned him and said, You should dig into all the evidence and weigh it just like you would in a trial and see what happens. Well, he ends up becoming a Christian. A man named Frank Morris, in an earlier time, same thing, was an atheist, and he decided he is going to check it out and he'll destroy this whole story. And he became the author of a book called Who Moved the Stone?

Josh McDowell did the same thing. In our day, a guy named Lee Strobel, he was a journalist, and he decided, you know, his wife had come to know Christ, and he thought, Oh my gosh, I have such a great wife, but she's off on this religious tangent. And he shares in his book, The Case for Christ, he says, you know, her life was so winsome, so loving, it had such an impact that she began to follow Jesus that he said, I had to explore it for myself. I had to disprove it to show her that this is just a fairy tale.

So what I want to do is I want to walk through some very specific evidence that legal minds have gone through to ask and answer the question, Could this possibly be true? And this is what I went through with my friend. And again, the way I went through it was not like, you ought, you should.

It was, hey, what do you think about this? I mean, this is strong evidence. First and foremost, his death and resurrection were predicted by the prophets, foretold hundreds of years before it happened, very specifically. Jesus actually openly predicted his own death numerous times and his future resurrection. We know there's eyewitness accounts of over 500 witnesses in 12 different locations. The transformation of the disciples, unexplainable.

I mean, these are guys that were scared to death and now they boldly proclaim this. The transformation of the Roman Empire. I mean, the transformation, I wish, I'm reading a book right now by Jeremiah Johnson called Unimaginable. And what he does, it's the best research I've ever read about what it was actually like in the first century. And he talks about the poverty and the slavery and the suffering and the early deaths and talks about just how difficult it was for people and how marginalized women were. And then he talks about the power that the gospel of these ordinary people. In fact, the early disciples were uneducated. We hear in the Book of Acts that these uneducated and untrained men, we know that they were with Jesus because despite their lack of education, this bold, loving, winsome faith literally turned the world upside down. By 313 AD, Rodney Stark in his excellent book, The Rise of Christianity and later, The Triumph of Christianity talks about the Roman Empire being transformed by this man named Jesus and his followers who risked all their life and staked all their life on one thing and this was their message. He was dead and now he's alive and we are eyewitnesses. We have seen him, we have touched him, we have eaten with him. For 40 days, he talked to us about the kingdom of God and this resurrection power that raised him from the dead dwells in us now.

It dwells in every single believer and now that power is in us to live this radical new kind of life. And as they did, the world changed. Women were treated like human beings. Slavery and some of the worst things that were happening in the Roman world little by little began to change. The conversion of Saul of Tarsus. I mean, think of the worst leader in the world. Think of the head of North Korea and hearing that he just became a Christian. That's how radical it was, Saul of Tarsus to the Apostle Paul. I mean, he was a great intellect. He was zealous and what we know in our day is when very zealous religious people are convinced of something, they can do radical things and he was going through and killing Christian after Christian after Christian. Christians were public enemy number one and he's going to get rid of them and he thought he was on the right track and bam!

He meets who? The resurrected Jesus. And the world changed.

13 of those 27 books in the New Testament are written. So we have this amazing transformation of the Roman Empire. All this evidence piled one upon another. The best legal minds have weighed the evidence and say it's conclusive. It is conclusive. Jesus rose from the dead.

If you have an open heart and an open mind and you actually look at the facts, these brilliant minds from every era have said it's true. And what I can tell you is something that's very experiential, but it's really important to me. I don't have the best legal mind, but I can tell you he changed my life. I grew up in a home where I had a dad that really loved me but went through a very painful war and they didn't talk about PTSD and became a full-blown alcoholic. And I can tell you about a life that gets changed and marrying a woman whose father was an alcoholic and how God can stop what's happened in your past and break addictions and bring two people together and create a family that's completely different. My mind was changed, my life was changed, my values have changed, my morals have changed. God has given me a love for people that I'll tell you what I didn't even care about and some of them I hated. And there is no explanation except the resurrected Christ.

Are you ready? He lives inside of me in the person of the Holy Spirit. These seven reasons are why I'm still a Christian.

That's what I shared with my friend. I said I'm still a Christian because when I had my moment of doubt and doubts are okay. Doubts drive us to find the truth. But this is why I'm still a Christian, but it's not why I became a Christian. I became a Christian because of one single word.

You ready? Here's the word. Punky. That's the name of my sister. You see the most powerful apologetic is not lots of reasons, lots of history and lots of smart lawyers. I appreciate all of that. I needed to hear all that. My sister Punky in high school had a friend named Tammy and unbeknownst to me or my family, Tammy came from a strong Christian family and my sister came to know the Lord in high school.

Here's what I can tell you. My sister is the kindest, most loving, most wonderful person I had ever known and ever met. And if any of you have been in a family with addiction and any know what's it like to live in an alcoholic family and you walk on eggshells and dad might blow up and mom's enabling and there's a lot of junk going on, my sister Punky was like, wow.

I would come in with my friends, my basketball buddies and hey, can I get you guys a sandwich? I grew up in an area where drugs were everywhere and I didn't, I never took a drug but I didn't not take drugs because I believed in God. I didn't take drugs because I thought it would hurt me.

I didn't take drugs because I thought to myself Punky would be so disappointed and all I knew was some day, some way, I wanted to be like my sister. You see, the most powerful apologetic, people didn't come to Jesus because he had all the answers even though he had all the answers. They came to Jesus because he was so approachable, he was so loving, he was so kind. There was a winsomeness and a holiness to his life and when he takes up residence and people surrender their life, this becomes how they live.

Doesn't mean they're perfect but they're different. They're holy, they're godly, they're caring. And so here's our conclusion. What we know is the evidence is overwhelming with regard to the resurrection. And here's what it means. It means it validates Jesus' claim that he's the way, the truth, and the life, that no one comes to the Father except through him.

Second, it gives us absolute hope for the future. You know, I travel a lot in China and I travel a lot in the Middle East and I'm not afraid to die but I'm not afraid to die because Jesus promised because I live, you will live also. But when you're gonna go preach at a pastors conference and a black SUV's in front of you and a police car is behind you and the guy has a machine gun who gets in where you're going because it's not very safe where you're gonna go, there are little quivers that go on inside. But I have to tell you now, I pray I live a long life and I get to see my grandchildren grow up but here's power. My future is absolutely secure.

I can tell you, I'm not afraid to die and that means you don't have to be afraid of what people think. That means you don't have to be afraid of all the political correctness. This means that you have the power within you, your future is secure and we live out of that. The third thing that it means is not only his claims are validated and we have absolute hope, it offers spiritual life right now. One of the things I like to do is write my name in verses.

You know, sort of personalize them and most all of you are followers of Christ and I think that's wonderful but maybe this will ring true or maybe some of you are thinking to yourself, I would really like to explore this but I don't know exactly what it looks like. Let me read for you one of the most famous verses in the Bible and then I'm gonna ask you to do the same. God so loved Chip that he gave his one and only son that if Chip believes in him, Chip shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his son into the world to condemn Chip but to save Chip through him.

We are living in a day where Christians are intimidated and afraid. We're living in a day when people need hope and deliverance from addictions and from struggles. I have lived in a world where I've watched people believe and receive the gift of eternal life through the resurrected Christ and I've watched them break addictions. I've watched them say no more to materialism. I've watched them come out of homosexual lifestyles. I've watched them decide to give their time and their energy and their money to help people that no one else cares about and it is the very life of Christ in them.

Here's the takeaway. If you believe that Jesus rose from the dead, you have all the power you need to be a Christian who lives like a Christian by his grace. And so Father, I ask that you help this to move from our heads to the very depths of our heart. Lord, that rather than whine or complain or see the problems in the world, may we grasp that everything we need we already have. Would you help us to love those who oppose us? Will you help us to live holy lives? Will you help us to be men and women with a resurrected power every moment of every day? In Jesus' name, amen. Before we go any farther, I want to ask you a very important question.

In fact, it's an eternal question. Have you accepted the evidence? Have you ever placed your faith in Jesus Christ to be your savior? Have you ever come to the point in your life where not religion, not morality, not just trying to be a good person, not hoping your good deeds will outweigh your bad deeds someday in some way, but have you ever recognized fully that apart from what Christ did on the cross, we have no opportunity to be with the Holy God forever and that Jesus died on the cross in your place and in my place to pay for our sins? The biblical word is to atone for. In other words, He covered our sins. All the punishment that I deserve for all the sins that I've ever thought, ever said, or ever done, Jesus took upon Himself and He received the just punishment of God and covered yours and covered mine. And then He says to you and He says to me, I want you to know it's a gift, for by grace you are saved through faith. That's not of yourselves. It's not a result of works. At least any man should boast.

It's a gift. Jesus would say as He was speaking in that first century, He said, to anyone who believes, if anyone receives Me, the Scripture is very clear, as many as receive Him, not just intellectually believe He lived, not try and follow His good moral teaching, but as many as receive Him, to them He gives the right or the authority to have eternal life. And what I want to ask you right now, have you ever done that? And if not, would you be willing, right where you're at, even if you're driving in your car, please don't shut your eyes, but the God of the universe knows your heart.

You can pray in your mind or out loud wherever you are and cry out to God and say, Lord, I need You. Of course I've sinned. I know I don't measure up.

Today I believe Christ died in my place for my sin and rose from the dead to prove it's true. And I'm asking you at this moment, will you forgive me? Will you come into my life? Right now, Father, make me Your son.

Make me Your daughter. I believe I trust fully in You. As you would declare that in your heart and then profess it with your mouth, the Bible is very clear. You shall be saved. Now, I know for many of you right now, you're in a crucible and you're feeling a lot of emotions and you feel this tug that says, yes, yes, yes, this is true. And there's something else inside your mind and heart that says, well, maybe I'll wait till later or, boy, the implications of this could be radical or what will my friends say or what will my family think?

And I can't really do this and I'm afraid. Jesus said, if you deny me before men, I will deny you before my Father in heaven. The Bible says today is the day of salvation. You know, we all are concerned about what other people think. We're all concerned about implications in the future. But we make decisions. And to not decide is a decision. It's to reject eternal life. So don't procrastinate.

He's a good God. If you've prayed to receive Christ, please contact us. We have some information to help you grow. It's absolutely free. It's on our website, livingontheedge.org or give us a call at 888-333-6003.

And there's someone there that would love to talk to you. God bless you and welcome to the family. Thanks, Chip.

And before we go on, let me take just a quick second and talk a bit more about the resource Chip just mentioned. It's called Starting Out Right, and it's absolutely free. This tool will help you gain a clear biblical understanding of what it means to put your faith in Jesus. And that's our whole mission here at Living on the Edge, helping Christians really live like Christians. So let us help you get started in your faith journey. You can request this resource by calling 888-333-6003 or by visiting livingonttheedge.org. Then clicking on the New Believers button.

That's livingontheedge.org or call 888-333-6003. Well, Chip's still with me in studio here, and Chip, you know, it's pretty obvious to me and I'm sure to our listeners too that you're really passionate about apologetics and helping Christians defend their faith. Now, why is this topic so important to you?

Here's the deal, Dave. Many Christians have been in church all their life, and they love God. They even read their Bible, they go to church, but they really have never stopped to answer some of these tough questions and be able to articulate not just what they believe, but why they believe it. And the world is changing all around them, and they're finding themselves with friends or kids or grandkids who are saying, hey, you know, I don't know that I believe this stuff, that you believe, and they really need to know why they believe and have a resource that will really help them.

And that is exactly what we've done at Living on the Edge. We want to give them straightforward, clear, winsome, and can I say kind of warm answers to answer some of these very tough questions. In fact, we got a letter recently from Michelle, and she talked about her experience that was so encouraging.

She goes, wow, I'm in the middle of watching the Why I Believe series. I'm doing this study on my own right now to better articulate what I believe for myself and get this, to teach my nine-month-old when the time comes and to share with others. I absolutely do not have to throw my brains in the trash to believe in Jesus Christ as my Savior. I've been raised in church, and I've been a growing Christian since middle school. I've attended church my whole life, but I've never seen a study like this. I love the facts and intelligent information, especially when it supports my beliefs.

Yes, our beliefs require faith, but it's so interesting to me to have so much factual, scientific information that God has given us. Here's the principle behind Michelle's comments. As a parent, it's your job to teach answers to these kind of questions to your children.

Now, I'll admit Michelle was really planning pretty far ahead, but I also want you to know that it's never too late to start to step in as a grandparent and take this series. It's simple. It's clear. I just got an email this morning from a man in Florida who's become a believer in the last few months who's gone through the Why I Believe series, and he's given the book to his 12-year-old granddaughter. And as they were talking, she said to him, I'm an atheist, but she really didn't know what the word meant.

And he gave her that book, and they're going through it together. Grandparents, this is the kind of thing that we need to do, and this is why we created this resource, the book and the small group series, to help you answer these kind of questions to your kids, your grandkids, and your close friends. The moral and spiritual health of America does not look promising, but the difference will be the Church, and the Church will only be strong if we know what we believe and why we believe it and pass it on to the next generation. Thanks, Chip. Well, to get your hands on the Why I Believe book or the small group study, visit LivingOnTheEdge.org or call 888-333-6003. These tools will not only help fortify your own convictions, but will help you pass them along to the next generation, too. And during this series, we've discounted Chip's book and the study guides, so take advantage now. Again, to order these resources, call 888-333-6003 or go to LivingOnTheEdge.org.

App listeners, tap Special Offers. Just before we close, would you stop for a minute and pray for Living on the Edge today? We've never seen a greater need for God's truth to go out than right now. And by God's grace, Living on the Edge has been able to provide encouragement, teaching, and personal discipleship resources to more people than ever before. So thank you to those who support us with your prayers. God is doing amazing things. Well, until next time, this is Dave Druey saying thanks for listening to this Edition of Living on the Edge.