The Resurrection (Part 1 of 2)

While it's hard to find anyone who would deny that Jesus was crucified and buried, there is still debate surrounding the reality of his resurrection. Today on Truth for Life Weekend, Alistair Begg investigates the bodily resurrection of Jesus from an historical perspective as he refutes the alternative explanations. Can I invite you to turn to Luke chapter 24? What I want to do this morning is, by way of introduction to what is essentially the subject of the resurrection, is to consider with you the resurrection from, if you like, an historical perspective—to ask two very simple questions and make two straightforward observations.

And the first question is simply this. Why did Christianity arise, and why did it take the shape that it did? Any student of history knows that a careful consideration of the events of the facts of history will call from the student a necessary investigation. Now, when we read our New Testaments, we need to be reminded that we're dealing here in the realm of history. We don't have in the Bible a series of atomized proof texts that have been thrown together in clusters so as to give us information that will help us to prop ourselves up as we're making our way through our lives. But no, we have been entrusted with material that reflects accurately the way in which these events unfolded. And so to ask the question, Why did Christianity arise?, is to ask a very necessary question, although one that we may not have considered. Some of us may never ever have asked the question, So convinced are we that it did arise and so familiar are we with the shape that it took that we never actually stood back long enough to say, How in the world did this even happen?

We're just so convinced that it happened. Well, in that respect, we're very, very different from the first disciples, aren't we? Because these early disciples, any hopes that they had, and surely they had some, had been obliterated by the crucifixion.

The events that we have just considered in chapter 23 had closed down all their hopes and their dreams. Verse 21 of chapter 24—and it's probably the only, maybe, one of two verses that I'm going to refer to this morning in this chapter—helps us to grapple with this, doesn't it? Jesus has come on the road to Emmaus, and he's linked up with this couple, a despondent pair, as they make their journey some seven miles from Jerusalem.

They don't realize who it is that has joined them, and they're surprised that he is asking the questions he's asking. And in the course of answering Jesus' questions, one of them says in verse 21, We had hoped—past tense—that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel. We had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel. The inference clearly being, of course, we know that he wasn't the one who was going to redeem Israel.

Now, again, you just need to look at the material, as it's provided for us in the various Gospels, and you will begin to put this together very clearly. John chapter 20, verse 19, John records on the evening of the first day of the week when the disciples were together, and then he says, With the doors locked for fear of the Jews… And what was this about? Well, all of their hopes and dreams had come to a dreadful end.

We had hoped that he was the one. There's been some news, they said, this morning that has come out with some of the women. They were—apparently, they are early in the morning at the tomb.

They are reporting that it was empty. Peter shot off. He came back completely confused as to what that might mean. And we left, the rest of them sitting chewing the cud in relationship to this, and the two of us just decided, Let's shoot off for Emmaus. But frankly, really, it is a dreadfully sad and hopeless story. Now, what we need to realize in this is that the expectations of the Jews for the messiahship of Jesus were actually more significant than that which many of us bring to the subject. When most of us, I think, if we're honest, consider the notion of Jesus as a messiah, we think of it in immediately personal terms. Jesus is a messiah for me. He's a messiah who can forgive sins.

He's a messiah who can come and live in me and give me a new kind of life—all of which, of course, is true. But if we'd been moving in the first century in these early days and talking with the Jewish people, who had messianic expectations, we would have discovered that their hopes were far grander than this. And essentially, if I might summarize them, they were expecting that a messiah would do for them three things—that he would defeat the pagans who held the sway over them, that he would rebuild the temple, and that he would establish God's just rule upon the earth.

Now, this, of course, is something that had run all the way through their history. And let me give you one Old Testament cross reference, and you may turn to it if you choose. In Psalm 42 and 43, we have what is an extended poem, and the psalmist is calling out to God, the God he has waited patiently for. He begins with familiar words that you have considered often, as the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God, my soul thirsts for God, for the living God. And he recounts how he used to enjoy going with the procession and the crouch to the house of God, but now he is cast down. He remembers how it used to be, and he is disappointed by the fact, in verse 9, that God, the rock, has apparently forgotten him, and he must go about mourning now, and he's oppressed by the enemy. Then he tries to take himself in check. He says, Why are you cast down, O my soul?

Why are you so disturbed within me? Now, this is the kind of material that we tend to turn to when we've had a flat tire, or when we find that our pay rise was not just what we hoped it might be, or when some difficulty has come into our lives—not that it is insignificant but that it is decidedly trivial in contrast to the thought forms of the psalmist here. And you will notice, into Psalm 43, that he cries to God for vindication. Plead my cause, he says, against an ungodly nation. Rescue me from deceitful and wicked men.

Now, let me just pause with you here for a moment and try and bring this into a context that is understandable. Imagine that Dad is now tucking his children into bed. And as he tucks his children into bed, he says to them, Now, kids, what we're going to do is we're going to read one of the Psalms tonight. And he reads with them, Vindicate me, O God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation, and rescue me from deceitful and wicked men. And when his children say to him, Why is it that the Romans are so obnoxious? Why is it that they overrule us and press upon us? He says, Well, God is our stronghold. It does seem that he has rejected us.

It does seem that we're going about mourning, that we are oppressed by the enemy. So, children, let's, before we fall asleep, ask God. Here's our prayer tonight. Send forth your light and your truth. Let them guide me. Let them bring me to your holy mountain, to the place where you dwell. Then I will go to the altar of God, my joy and my delight.

Then I will praise you with the harp, O God my God. Now, what were they holding out for? What was their hope? Well, their hope was messianic. Their hope was that the Messiah would come and would vindicate his people. And they expected that when the Messiah came, he would do all of this and more.

And with the arrival of this Galilean carpenter, with the miracles he was performing, the stories he was telling, the things that he was doing, this had all built to a great crescendo of expectation. Admittedly, there were opposing forces, but they might have anticipated that. There was confusion even within the ranks of Judaism. The secular authorities joined ranks with others in seeking to bring this Messiah—at least the apparent Messiah—down. And just when they thought that he was the one to redeem the people of Israel, just when they thought that he might stand up and defeat the pagans and rebuild the temple and establish justice, they walked past Calvary and saw a sorry sight—all their messianic hopes hanging up on a Roman gibbet.

And when he cried out, Tetelestai, it is finished! Many of them must have said, Absolutely, it is finished. Because, you see, the crucifixion of a Messiah did not say to a first-century Jew that he was the Messiah or that the kingdom had come. In fact, it said exactly the opposite. It said to the Jewish mind, He is not the Messiah, and the kingdom has not come. Now, let me paint this in the clearest of terms.

Remember our question? Why did Christianity arise, and why did it take the shape it did? Because after all, crucifixion was the final, complete devastation of their hopes, therefore begging the question. In light of that, why then did this first-century group of Jews, whose messianic hopes had come to a crashing halt buried in a Palestinian tomb—why did this little group not only continue to believe that Jesus was the Messiah but actually to hit the streets in an unashamed declaration of the same?

Why did they do this? Well, the answer which comes—and it comes reverberating through the pages of the New Testament, the united chorus of the disciples is this—the reason they did what they did was the fact of the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Not the notion that somehow or another Jesus had been transmuted to heaven.

Not the idea of a resuscitation. Not the idea of a spiritual renaissance. But the actual expectation of a re-embodied, resurrected Christ with a body that was both physical and transphysical, with a frame that could be seen and handled and touched and yet possessed capacities to do what his pre-resurrected body had not done.

It was this which struck them. Because if the body of Jesus had remained in the tomb, there is absolutely no explanation as to why anyone would have taken seriously his claims to messiahship. And there is no form of early Christianity that we are introduced to that does, apart from a few inventions that I'll mention later. But no serious explication of New Testament Christianity is absent the affirmation at its heart that after Jesus' shameful death, God raised him to life again. And what we're going to look at in Luke 24 is simply Luke's provision, his record, provided for these early believers so that they might have the information to encourage and bolster their faith—a faith in a resurrected Christ. Now, I'm not going to turn there, but I commend 1 Corinthians 15 to you.

You're familiar with it. It is the classic chapter, certainly in Pauline writing, on the resurrection. And the one thing I want you to note, if you read it for your homework later on, is that you can't go far into chapter 15 without recognizing that the resurrection is woven thoroughly into all of Paul's understanding and his practice, and that if you remove the resurrection, then his whole tapestry of life and faith completely unravels. In other words, the resurrection is not for Saul of Tarsus, now Paul. The resurrection is not for him like a U-Haul trailer that he has now hitched onto the back of the car of his faith—which may be unhitched without any real detriment, at least to forward progress. You could take it with you, or you can leave it behind you.

It doesn't really matter. No, the resurrection for Paul is absolutely interwoven into the totality of every conviction and fiber of his being concerning his proclamation regarding Jesus. And if you take that away, then you take it all away. Now, you will also notice when you do your homework that Paul is quick to say that what he had received he passed on, that Christ died for sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried and that he was raised again on the third day according to the Scriptures. In other words, says Paul, when you take the whole sweep of the Bible and try and make sense of it, you cannot do so without this essential piece of the puzzle—namely, the resurrection itself. Now, we'll get to this in Luke 24, because these guys could not make sense of it, could they? We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. We thought that he was going to do something here, that our lives and everything would be radically changed.

But apparently not. And then Jesus says to them, You're very slow, aren't you, to believe all that the prophets have written? What does he mean by that? He means, you know, you haven't really been reading your Bibles. If you'd been reading your Bible properly, and then he began to show them, and he says… Luke says, and beginning at that very place, he began with Moses and the prophets, and he explained to them everything in the Scriptures concerning himself—a sermon that all of us would love to have heard. And then in the breaking of bread, it says that their eyes were opened, and they recognized him. And then they said, Didn't our hearts burn within us as he talked with us on the way and as he opened the Scriptures to us? It was only in the recognition of his risen presence that the story of the Bible made sense.

It is quite staggering to me to discover how many clergymen do not believe in the resurrection and yet stand Sunday by Sunday in front of a congregation giving them bits and pieces out of the Bible. Why bother? Why bother? Well, that's the first question. If we haven't exhausted it, I think you'd agree—some of you don't even understand what I said.

Why did Christianity arise, and why did it take the shape it did? Think about it. Second question, but aren't there alternative explanations? Someone says, Well, I hear what you're saying, but I was having a conversation with somebody the other day, and they've got a completely different spin on it altogether. Well, yes, there are alternative explanations. The question of Jesus' resurrection is perennially fascinating. I mean, there's hardly a year passes without somebody who doesn't do something in terms of a book, the tomb of God, or whatever it might be—an amalgamation of gnostic notions and bits and pieces of the Bible—all jumbled together enough to confuse people. The very fact that two thousand years on, people are still writing books to refute the resurrection says something in itself, doesn't it? You would think that after two thousand years, we could have put that to bed. Said, Goodness gracious, nobody cares about that anymore. That's old news. But no, it just won't go away, somehow or another. Well, when you look at these things, and you can find them all over the place, you discover that the attempts to disprove the resurrection haven't changed a great deal over the years.

There's nothing unique about it. So at the risk of being condemned for stating the obvious, let me just remind you. Alternative explanations. Number one, the idea that Jesus didn't die, that he wasn't a dead Christ, and therefore, there was no need for resurrection, that he just was resuscitated. One of the most recent spins on this is done by a lady called Barbara Thirring, who suggested that not only did Jesus not die, but neither did the other two men on either side of him die, and that one of them was a fellow called Simon Magus, who was actually a doctor, and despite the fact that he and his buddy had their legs broken, he somehow or another in the tomb managed to come up with some medicine which he passed on to Jesus—enough for Jesus to get reorientated and put together so that he could go out and resume his career. Now, you smile at this, but this is the kind of nonsense that our friends and neighbors swallow with their orange juice, while at the same time saying, How ridiculous to believe in a resurrection!

So we have to be prepared to say to them, Well, which do you think is the most ridiculous? Because even if that were the case, we would then be forced to confront the issue that the disciples then went out to proclaim the truth on the basis of a gigantic lie—that knowing that he hadn't been resurrected, knowing that he had never died, they went out to proclaim this glorious truth that was founded on a false premise. Alternative explanation. The idea that the disciples stole the body—why they stole the body and what they did with the body and how they then went out and preached on the strength of a stolen bloodied body—is just really hard to imagine, isn't it?

It's hard to figure this amazing transformation in someone like Peter. Obviously, others, it wasn't the disciples. It was clearly the Jews that stole the body. Well, if the Jews stole the body, why did they not—as soon as the message of the resurrection was being proclaimed—did they not just go and produce the corpse? They couldn't!

They can't! Now, we can go through these, they're legion. Contemporary ideas that when the followers of Jesus went to the tomb, their minds were so full of light and hope that in the end it didn't really matter whether there was a body there or not. They were so jazzed.

Well, it doesn't fit the facts, does it? They weren't jazzed. They were hiding. They were despondent. Everything was broken.

They were done. But this is the nonsense that is proclaimed from pulpits all over the Chagrin Valley. This is what many a man in my place believes. And it allows them then still to use the phraseology of resurrection while not affirming the reality of the resurrection. Why did Christianity emerge?

Why did it take the shape it did? Because of the fact of the resurrection. Aren't there alternatives? Yes, there certainly are. Should we pay attention to them? Well, it's good to know them. Thirdly, if we're going to engage our friends and neighbors in this matter, there are a number of facts we need to keep in mind. We've mentioned one or two.

Let me just run through them for you. Fact number one, the empty tomb. Everyone has agreed that this tomb, somehow or another, was empty—that this stone had been rolled away. Even with all of the angelic stuff, and the women and so on, Colombo has to go and be confronted by the empty tomb.

You see him there with his raincoat and the little charout, and he's just looking, and he says, Yep, the tomb is empty. Right. We need an explanation for the empty tomb. Here is presenting evidence. This is a fact. This is not a fiction. We are all agreed empty tomb. Secondly, fact—the origin and existence of the church.

Now, this is simply to reiterate in brevity what we've just pointed out. Why was there a church? Why did these individuals who were sad, sorrowful, defeated, confused, fed up—why were they all of a sudden the products of joy and hope and power and animation? Why did they begin to gather with one another and to sing songs of praise to this Christ? Why did they begin to tell others about this Jesus? What are you going to do with that fact? There is solid evidence about the reality of the resurrection.

We're hearing it from Alistair Begg. You're listening to Truth for Life Weekend. We love sharing the gospel message here at Truth for Life.

That's our mission. And you're invited to come alongside us in this endeavor by praying that God will use this program to help convert unbelievers, to bring believers into a closer relationship with Jesus, and to build up local churches. While you're at it, take a minute this weekend and encourage your pastor as he teaches you from God's Word. Along with Alistair's messages, we choose books to offer with great care and with our mission in mind. The current book we're recommending is titled Read This First, a simple guide to getting the most from the Bible.

Sometimes in life it's best to take time to go back to the basics. The book Read This First can help you get back to the basics of studying the Bible. The author is Pastor Gary Millar. He begins his book by reminding us that although the Bible was written thousands of years ago, it was written to be understood by everyone.

That should be reassuring. We don't need some kind of special knowledge or an advanced education to understand what the Bible teaches. Instead, we simply need the desire to learn and the time to read. The book Read This First gives us insight into how to do this in a way that will maximize your learning as you study the Bible. Find out more about the book Read This First when you visit our website at truthforlife.org. I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for listening. Are you living a resurrected life? We'll find out what that means as you join us next weekend for part two of today's message. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.