"Touching Lives with the Love of God"

Hi there, this is Lon Solomon and I'd like to welcome you to our program today. You know it's a tremendous honor that God has given us to be on stations all around the nation bringing the truth of God's word as it is uncompromising and straightforward. And I'm so glad you've tuned in to listen and be part of that.

Thanks again for your support and your generosity that keeps us on the radio. And now let's get to the word of God. You know, while Jesus was here on earth, he was constantly telling people that he was going to rise from the dead. He said this to his enemies, Matthew Chapter 12.

He said, For as Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights, so the Son of Man, meaning himself, will be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights. Jesus told his disciples and his friends that he was going to rise from the dead. Matthew 16. From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and be killed and be raised to life again on the third day. Jesus said this to the crowds that followed him.

John Chapter two. Jesus said, Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up. Then the crowd said, It's taken forty six years to build this temple and you're going to raise it up in three days. But the Bible says Jesus was speaking of the temple of his body. And then it's interesting that even as Jesus hung on the cross suffering, his enemies taunted him with this claim. They said, Matthew 27, You who are going to destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, come down from the cross and we will believe in you. Folks, everybody in Israel knew about Jesus's claim. In fact, when the rabbis went to Pilate to get soldiers to seal his tomb, they said to Pilate, We remember, sir, that when he was still alive, this deceiver said, After three days, I will rise again.

My point is that Jesus's claim that he was going to rise from the dead was front page news all throughout Israel. But the real question is, did he do it? Well, I believe that he did. And I'd like to present to you four pieces. Wait a minute. Four pieces of compelling evidence that goes along with saying why I believe it.

So here we go. The compelling piece of evidence number one is the evidence of the Roman soldiers. Matthew 27. Remember the Jewish leaders went to Pilate and they said, Sir, we remember that when he was still alive, this deceiver said, After three days, I will rise again. So they said to Pilate, Please command that his tomb be made secure until the third day, lest his disciples come by night and steal the body and say to the people, He's risen from the dead.

And then this last deception will be worse than the first. So Pilate said to them, Take a squad of Roman soldiers and make the tomb as secure as you know how. So they went and made the tomb secure by putting a wax seal on the stone and posting the guard. Now, a Roman security team like this in the time of Christ would have consisted of 15 enlisted men and one officer. And they would have had a deeply vested interest in making sure that no one stole the body of Jesus out of that tomb because a Roman soldier, if he lost his prisoner, even his dead prisoner, he lost his life.

A great example of this comes out of the book of Acts Chapter 16. Paul and Silas had been thrown in jail in Philippi, a city in northern Greece. And around midnight, the Bible says they were singing when all of a sudden this angel shows up and blows the doors of the prison open and blows all the chains off all the prisoners, not just Paul and Silas.

And here's what happened. Acts 16, 27, the jailer, who happened to be a Roman soldier, awoke and seeing the prison doors open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, supposing for sure that the prisoners had escaped. Now, why was this Roman soldier going to kill himself?

Well, we just read it. He was sure the prisoners had run away, and he knew that if that had happened, his superiors were going to kill him anyway. So he figured he'd save them the trouble and kill himself. And this is why Paul cried out and said, Don't hurt yourself, for we are all here. The point I want us to see is that this idea that if you lost your prisoner as a Roman soldier, you were executed, this was not an antiquated law that nobody ever practiced anymore.

This was real. This happened in the days of Christ. And so in light of this, do we really think that a group of unarmed women and fishermen could have gotten past these battle hardened Roman soldiers who knew that their life was on the line when it came to guarding the body of Jesus? Do we really think that these women and fishermen could have stolen his body from under the nose of this Roman guard? Impossible. Preposterous.

No way that could have happened. Which leads me to my second piece of compelling evidence, and that is the evidence of Jesus's enemies. You know, when the message that Jesus had risen from the dead began to spread through Jerusalem, the rabbis were determined to stop it at any cost. It all started this effort of theirs to stop the the message of the resurrection. It all started the very day Jesus rose from the dead. Matthew 28 says, Then the rabbis gave the soldiers that is the ones who were guarding the tomb a great sum of money and said, Tell people that his disciples came at night and stole his body away while you were sleeping. You say, Well, I thought if that happened, they'd all get killed. Well, look, the rabbis go on to say, And if word gets back to Pilate, we will satisfy him, we'll bribe him or something, and we will keep you out of trouble.

But it didn't stop there. Even after Jesus had ascended back into heaven, Acts Chapter four, verse one, the Bible says, As Peter and John were speaking to the crowd, the rabbis were greatly disturbed because they, Peter and John, were preaching Jesus and his resurrection from the dead. So they arrested Peter and John twice, and they beat Peter and John twice, and they commanded Peter and John twice, never to mention the resurrection again.

Of course, Peter and John didn't pay any attention to them. But I asked myself the question, Why did these rabbis have to spend all this money with the Roman soldiers? Why did they have to go through all this political headache with the followers of Jesus? Why didn't they just go to Jesus's tomb, roll away the rock, pull his decaying dead body out of the tomb, put it on a cart, and roll it through the streets of Jerusalem for everybody to see? If they did that, finito.

It's over. There's no resurrection to preach. So why didn't they do it? Folks, the answer is there was no body in that tomb for them to go get and put on a cart and roll through the city. And we've already agreed, right, that no human being could have gotten into that tomb past those Roman soldiers. So if no human stole the body, but there was no body, then how in the world can we explain that other than the resurrection? Compete of compelling evidence number three is the compelling evidence of the eyewitnesses who saw the risen Christ with their own eyes. Listen to what Paul says, 1 Corinthians 15.

He says, For I delivered to you the message that I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised again on the third day according to the Scriptures. Watch. And that he was, what's the next word? Oh, come on. That was so weak.

Come on. And that he was seen, thank you, by Peter. And then by the 12 apostles. And after that, he was seen by over 500 brethren at once, most of whom are still alive. Hey, it's almost as though Paul is saying, look, if you don't believe me, go ask one of these 500 people that saw him, and they'll tell you the same thing. Why in the world would Paul issue a challenge like that if not all 500 people had seen Christ? But Paul doesn't stop there.

He keeps going. He says, and after that, he, the risen Christ, was seen by James, then by all the apostles, and last of all, he was seen by me. You know, this week I spent some time going through some books on evidence that are used in law schools around the country today. And there were a lot of interesting stuff in there, but I was particularly interested in their comments about eyewitness testimony. And what I found is that there's a growing trend to minimize eyewitness testimony today for two reasons. Number one, because it's often contradictory, and number two, because DNA testing has overruled eyewitness testimony in a number of cases. But I did notice this, that in all of these books, they were talking about one, two, three, four eyewitnesses whose testimony disagreed with one another to start with.

Never in those books did they ever talk about more than 500 eyewitnesses whose testimonies all agreed with one another. I don't know if you ever heard of Bayes' Theorem. It's a mathematical formula that calculates how likely it is, what the probability is, that an event really happened. I want to put the formula up on the screen for you.

There it is. And T in this formula, the letter T, stands for the number of eyewitness accounts that agree with one another. And as I'm sure you can easily see from the formula, the higher T is, the greater the probability that the event really happened. Do you catch that from the formula? No? Well, I don't either. But that's what they say.

All right. Now, Dr. John Depoe of Western Michigan University, he understands this formula, though. He wrote an article entitled, and I got to take a deep breath. Here's his article, A Bayesian Analysis of the Cumulative Effects of Independent Eyewitness Testimony for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. And in this article, Dr. Depoe says, and I quote, from the New Testament, one can count as many as 520 eyewitnesses to the Resurrection. He goes on to say, given such a number of independent witnesses testifying that an event occurred, the probability that this event did indeed happen goes up exponentially and becomes, say the next three words with me, close to certain.

End of quote. You say, all right, Lon, but look, what if all these people were lying? I mean, what if they were all running a scam? Well, what if this was all just a big conspiracy?

Isn't that possible? Well, the answer is no, it's not, because of compelling piece of evidence number four, and that is the compelling evidence of the eyewitnesses martyrdom. I hope you know that not a single eyewitness of Jesus's resurrection ever recanted their testimony that Jesus had risen from the dead. As a matter of fact, most of them died as martyrs rather than recant their testimony. James was martyred by Herod, Acts Chapter 12. Stephen was martyred Acts Chapter 7. Thomas was martyred in India. John Mark was martyred in Egypt. Philip was martyred in Turkey. Matthew was martyred in Ethiopia. The apostle Paul was beheaded by Emperor Nero in Rome in 66 A.D. and Nero also crucified Peter upside down in Rome on the very same year. But it wasn't just the apostles. It was these other eyewitnesses that were just ordinary people like you and me.

Listen to what the Roman historian Tacitus says, writing about the history of Rome under Emperor Nero. And I quote, he said, Christians were crucified or set on fire so that when darkness came, they burned like torches in the night. End of quote. Now, folks, people do not do this for a scam.

People do not do this for a hoax. Sooner or later, self-preservation takes over and somebody breaks. Somebody squeals. Somebody cracks.

Somebody turns. I mean, hey, we've all seen Law and Order, right? You know how this works. But isn't it interesting that Peter and James and Matthew and Paul and hundreds of other early Christians refused to turn? They refused to crack because they weren't running a con. They were not making this up. They had really seen the risen Christ and they were willing to die rather than deny it. So let's summarize compelling evidence for the resurrection. Well, piece number one is the evidence of the Roman soldiers, which makes human tampering with Jesus's body impossible. Then number two, there's the evidence of Jesus's enemies who could have stopped Christianity dead in its tracks by simply producing Jesus's dead body.

But they didn't because they couldn't. Then at number three, there's the evidence of the eyewitnesses, hundreds of whom agreed they had seen the risen Christ. And finally, the evidence of their martyrdom and their willingness to die rather than recant their testimony that they had seen the risen Lord. Now, can I prove to you in a test tube that the resurrection of Jesus Christ took place? No, I can't. But can I give you such a preponderance of evidence that even Judge Judy would be convinced?

Yes, I can. And as a matter of fact, I just did. Praise the Lord. Amen. All right. Good. Now, let me take you back to the promise about the afterlife that Jesus made at the very beginning of this message. Remember what he said?

It's an awesome promise. He said he who believes in me shall live in the afterlife, even if he dies here on Earth. You say belong. I mean, there's lots of religions and lots of religious leaders that make great promises about the afterlife. I mean, Buddhism does. Islam does. Mormonism does. Scientology does. Hinduism does. So how do we know who's right?

Friends, the answer is real simple. Who rose from the dead and who didn't? Mohammed did not rise from the dead. Buddha did not rise from the dead. L. Ron Hubbard did not rise from the dead. Joseph Smith did not rise from the dead. Jesus rose from the dead.

Amen. And listen to what the Bible says about this. Acts 17, it says God has given us proof by raising him, Jesus, from the dead. Proof about what?

Well, proof to us who already believe in him that we are not following some kind of cleverly devised conspiracy and proof to those of us who are considering believing in him that Jesus is the right way to God and that he can back up every promise he made about the afterlife because he's alive in the afterlife to make sure those promises come true. Listen to me. Follow a dead savior and you'll end up just like him. We don't have a dead savior. Amen. We have a living savior. A living savior who said he who believes in me shall live in the afterlife even if they die here on earth because I'm alive in the afterlife to make sure it happens. Friends, follow a living savior and you'll end up just like him. Praise God for that.

Yeah? And this is what we want to give you the opportunity to do right here today. We want to give you the opportunity to switch from following a dead savior. I don't care who that savior is or what religion that savior started. And by the way, may I remind you our own human works, our own human effort, our own religious activity. Those are dead saviors too. They're not going anywhere.