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April, 2026 (Vol.60-No.4) |
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Preached by Dr. Gene Scott on May 3, 1987 For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. Matthew 12:40 WHEN YOU TALK ABOUT CHRISTIANITY, you are talking about a faith that is based upon an alleged historical fact. That is what makes Christianity unique among the world’s religions. Historical facts can be examined to determine, relatively, their authenticity. Christianity is based on the fundamental claim that Jesus rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, and is coming back again. Jesus’ returning is actually the easiest one of the three to believe, because anyone can see that it is harder to go up than it is to come down. It would be very attention-getting indeed if someone were to rise from the dead and ascend into heaven with a promise to return. I don’t know of anyone else who is identified with such a claim. But if the One who did all these things is the same One who made claims about Himself that only God could make, that would elevate Him to an even more important position. I don’t need a fancy definition of God. If I can encounter Someone in whom all authority is seated, who is perfect, who has experienced heaven from the inside, and who is the center of the religious universe, then that is all the definition of God that I need. Jesus made religion simple: this unique Person said that allegiance to Him is the criterion of eternal life. He claimed to remove the barrier that had existed between every person and God by giving His life as a ransom. When these claims are coupled with the fact of the Resurrection, I can build my life upon a relationship with Him. If all authority is seated in Jesus, then His opinion on any subject is most likely to be the best; it is certainly better than any fundamentalist preacher’s opinion! If Jesus is the center of the religious universe, then I ought to study everything I can find to get acquainted with Him, including spending as much time as I can with those who claimed to know Him best. If Jesus knew heaven from the inside, then His representation of heaven is the most accurate I will find anywhere. And considering His knowledge and authority, His plan for getting to heaven is the surest way to get there. I don’t need much convincing to know that there is something wrong with me. I can believe that my sins created a barrier between me and God. But if this Person who rose and ascended also claimed that His death removed that barrier, this is such good news that I want to grab hold of it. I can now come to God and start anew on that basis. That is the context of the Resurrection: it gives credibility to all of Jesus’ other claims. The apostle Paul preached to a group of Greek philosophers on Mars’ Hill in Athens. Paul observed that the men of Athens worshipped so many gods that they had even dedicated an altar “to the unknown God,” just in case they had left one out. Paul said, “I will tell you who He is,” and he preached Christ whose claims were confirmed by the Resurrection. Paul also wrote to the Corinthian church, “And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ.” Paul taught that the Christian faith points to an eternal life. He called Jesus the “firstfruits” of a future resurrection of all mankind, either to hell or to heaven eternal. It is the Resurrection that makes eternal life credible. When I was in university, I came to the conclusion that the world was trying to make me accept a substitute Christ of their own creation, and that is still going on today. The world still wants to create a Christ that doesn’t bother them, and then force the church to bend its image of Christ to the world’s view of Him. That is what my professors tried to do to me. It was okay for me to believe that Jesus was merely a “good and wise” teacher. But I would have had my intellectual wings clipped if I had declared that Jesus was the supernatural Son of God who rose from the dead and that He was expected to come again as the Judge of the world. In my professors’ view, I would have embraced a “primitive” belief if I had said that Jesus was joint heir with the Father because He has obtained from Him a kingdom above every kingdom that would last throughout eternity. You cannot create a Christ that never existed in history. This man went around making claims about Himself that, if true, are the starting point of a definition of God that you can build your life upon. And if His claims were not true, then He was a fake who knew His claims were false and who had the ability to deceive people into believing them, or He was a crazy person who believed the impossible about Himself. In either case, Jesus would not deserve one more day of respect. You must curse Him for being a fraud, sympathize with Him for being a lunatic, or accept His claims. The world does not have the guts to do that. People can act very tough when they have someone under their foot, but there are relatively few people with real courage in this modern world. No wonder God will take people to heaven who have faith, which is 90 percent courage. You will not get to heaven if you don’t have courage; there are no cowards in heaven. Someone will argue, “But I thought Jesus died to save sinners.” He did, but not all of them will be saved. You might say, “But that makes me afraid.” King David was called “a man after God’s own heart,” and he said, “What time I am afraid, I will trust in the Lord.” Courage has no meaning apart from an arena of fear! I have no respect for anyone’s supposed courage if they have never been afraid, because their courage has never been tested. A man or woman of courage grabs their churning guts, reaches up in the midst of confusion, and declares, “God said it and I will grab hold of it!” I said that faith is 90 percent courage, but faith has to have content. The faith that saves has Christ and His word as its content. God did not leave us without a basis for faith. He sent His Son into the world, as Paul said, to vindicate His claims. When certain scribes and Pharisees came to Jesus saying, “Show us a sign,” Jesus said there would not be any sign but the sign of Jonah, which He then interpreted as His own death and Resurrection. Jesus said in Matthew 12:40, “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” I believe that God in His mercy has in fact given numerous undeserved signs to His people. But Jesus said that if you never get another sign or basis for faith from now on, the Resurrection is the one sign that God has deigned to give to everyone. If you will take the trouble to look, you will find there is a basis for faith. A few things have been happening lately that I don’t like. I cry out to God, “Where are You?” If I might dare to speak to God, I can imagine Him responding, “I am right where I was when I raised up Christ from the dead. Fool, who said that you have to receive another sign? The only sign that is guaranteed is the Resurrection!” That is why every year I preach on the Resurrection of Jesus Christ to lay this foundation for our faith. I said in a previous message that if we are going to discuss the Resurrection, we must first assume certain other facts. We must assume that Jesus lived, that He was crucified by the hands of the Romans at the instigation of certain Jewish leaders, that He was considered to be dead, that He was buried in a known, accessible tomb, and that the disciples preached a three-part message: Jesus rose, ascended, and the tomb was empty. We must assume that the Jewish leaders were more concerned about disproving the preaching than we could ever be 2,000 years later, and that every one of the disciples was persecuted because they preached this message. Lastly, we must assume that the tomb was in fact empty. All these facts are much easier to prove than the Resurrection, because there are no miraculous elements in these facts. These facts become a basis for discussing the Resurrection. If we will not assume these facts, any discussion will break down into fuzzyheaded thinking that goes nowhere. You don’t have to believe them, but I ask that you assume them, because there is no sense in arguing about the Resurrection unless each of these facts is assumed. Because of the power of the Resurrection message, all kinds of theories have been proposed to explain it away. But as always, in order to make the theories work, they must caricature the known elements of the story. Most of the theories only try to explain why the disciples preached that Jesus rose from the dead or why the tomb was empty, but they don’t explain all three elements of the tri-part message that Jesus rose, ascended, and that the tomb was empty. We discussed the various theories in a previous message: the disciples stole the body, the women went to the wrong tomb, Jesus resuscitated, the disciples hallucinated, the disciples lied, or the disciples honestly reported what they had seen and experienced. Now, let’s do some hardheaded thinking for a moment. If our facts are taken for granted, then there are really only two possible theories. If you study any subject long enough, you will inevitably form an opinion. Any of these theories might appear to be plausible at first, until you dig awhile. But if our facts are assumed, then the only possible explanation is that the disciples either lied or they honestly reported what they saw and experienced. The first theory is the disciples stole the body. That means the disciples lied. The next theory, that the Romans took the body, is untenable on its face. If you assume that the Jewish leaders had more of a reason to disprove the Resurrection than we could ever have, and you acknowledge that their position of influence over the Romans was sufficient to get the Romans to conduct the crucifixion, then they could have destroyed the disciples’ preaching in a moment by simply going back to their cohorts and asking, “Did you take the body?” The Romans would have simply replied, “Yes,” and the preaching would have been finished. But even if it were tenable, it only explains the empty tomb. It does not explain the testimonies about a risen Savior who cooked a fish for the disciples on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, and it doesn’t even begin to address the issue of Christ’s Ascension. Even if this theory explained the empty tomb, the disciples still made up the rest of the story, so they would still be a bunch of liars. What about the theory that the Jewish leaders took the body? Again, their concern was much greater than ours could ever be because their image, livelihood, position of religious leadership, and possibly even their very lives were at stake. They had called Jesus a blasphemer. They might have wished they had taken the body. Then they would have been the first to say, “Wait a minute! We took it!” and the preaching would have ended right there. This theory, by the way, overlooks the fact that the only record we have on the subject says that a great stone was rolled in place to seal the tomb, and guards were posted there. Why would the Jewish leaders take the body and then have guards posted at the empty tomb? The theory that the Jewish leaders took the body is not plausible; but even if they did take it, it still only explains the empty tomb. It does not explain the stories of the disciples having personal encounters with the risen Lord, nor does it explain their preaching that Christ ascended. So the disciples would still be lying. The next theory is that the women went to the wrong tomb. They were full of grief and their eyes were swollen with tears. They stumbled around in the dim light in an unfamiliar place, they came upon an empty tomb, and in the excitement of the moment, they cried, “This is the tomb, and Jesus has risen!” They went running back to tell the story, and this whole tomfoolery sprang from that one misunderstanding. This theory hardly embraces the records in the Gospels about the women encountering an angel or angels at the tomb, so the disciples had to invent that story. And the theory also fails if we assume the Jewish leaders’ concern and their influence over the Romans. The only record we have says that Jesus had testified He would rise from the dead, so a guard was posted to avoid a possible riot if someone were to actually steal the body and claim that He had risen. Don’t you think these Jewish leaders could have simply gone to the right tomb, rolled the stone away, and said, “Here is the dead body?” It is not plausible, friend. But again, if it were true, it still does not explain the testimony concerning the angels, nor does it explain the testimony of Christ’s ascending. Therefore, the disciples would still be lying. They either made up the story from whole cloth or they added to it to the point where their lies outweighed the original piece of cloth. Next is the resuscitation theory. According to this theory, Jesus was not really dead, and in the coolness of the tomb He resuscitated. This theory is also untenable: people did not “resuscitate” from Roman crucifixions!” No one in history ever did. But even it if were true, how did this resuscitated man unwrap himself? There are some contemporary writers who suggest that Jesus staged His own crucifixion. That theory would involve introducing a number of other assumptions that are very hard to support. For example, we would have to assume that Jesus was crucified in a place where there was no audience who could get close enough to clearly see, and that He was buried in a tomb no one had access to so He could stage a trance and then a awaken from it. According to this same theory, Jesus supposedly practiced on Lazarus first. I suppose it is possible for someone to practice putting a man into a trance, wrapping him up, and then unwrapping him and waking him up. But whatever Jesus might have practiced on Lazarus, it left out the crucifixion, which is something the contemporary theorists fail to point out. Those authors would have us believe that Jesus yielded Himself to the crucifixion because He had learned how to recover from it. If Jesus were that crafty, He would have found someone else to crucify first so He could practice that too! Some of these crazy theories are harder to believe than the Resurrection itself. Even though no one has ever resuscitated from a Roman crucifixion, let’s assume it was possible. The disciples didn’t preach about an emaciated, wounded, resuscitated Christ. They preached about an encounter with a vital, living Savior. The resuscitation theory does not explain the other testimonials and it certainly does not explain the preaching about the Ascension. So the disciples would still be lying. The resuscitation theory is so implausible that it is laughable. What about the theory that all the witnesses had hallucinations? This theory at least gives credibility to the preachers: they thought they saw Jesus. Hallucinations are a phenomenon that requires a certain kind of mindset, but every record has these disciples in the opposite kind of mindset. But that notwithstanding, if you assume the facts, if the Jewish leaders were concerned for their livelihood, their position, and their lives, and if they had the chance to go to the tomb and produce the body, they would have done it. There was no body in the tomb. Hallucinations require the staging of a tomb robbery, because an empty tomb was a necessary precondition to the hallucinations. The factual setting disallows the possibility that there was a body in the tomb. This theory requires that the tomb be emptied as a result of a conspiracy of Jesus’ followers, in order that they might then stage the preaching of the Resurrection, Ascension, and empty tomb. Therefore, this theory is not based on hallucinations; it is based on a conspiracy to tell a lie. What purpose would the conspirators have had for moving the body from the tomb at risk of life? If you give credibility to the hallucination theory, whoever had the hallucinations could not have been a party to emptying the tomb, because they would have known that the body had been stolen; they would have helped remove it. Would you have me believe that someone drugged the guards, rolled away the stone, and stole Jesus’ body to set the stage for other people to have hallucinations that have no equivalent anywhere in recorded history? If this theory were true, then the disciples’ hallucinations would have included their encountering Jesus cooking fish on the shore, their partaking of food with Him inside a room, and Thomas, the doubting one, touching Jesus. The hallucination theory is the most untenable of all the theories, and yet it is the easiest one to assert. It is easy for people to believe that the disciples were honest but had hallucinations; it is a worldly insult because it implies that the followers of Christ are mentally a little less than all there. But in order to make this theory work, you must introduce some unknown conspirators who conveniently overrode the guard, moved the rock away, and stole the body so the stage could be set for another group of people to hallucinate. It is simply not tenable. That is why Frank Morison titled his book Who Moved the Stone? Most people who conspire have a purpose. What would have been the disciples’ motivation? Did they expect to surfboard on someone else’s hallucinations to establish the church? They would still be lying. The analysis of all these theories ultimately drives you into a corner. The whole Christian faith is based upon the Resurrection, and Ascension of Christ, and the empty tomb. The tomb was lost to history because there was no body in it. This forces anyone who looks at the facts to make a choice about the veracity of the witnesses. Either they were lying and knew that they were lying when they told all or part of their story, or they were honest reporters of what they had seen and heard. If these facts are assumed, none of the theories allow you to escape this second startling alternative. In a previous message, we looked at the startling alternative about the only Christ who lived: he was either a fool, a fake, or who He claimed to be. Likewise, if you assume these facts, analysis of the theories drives you to the startling alternative that the whole message of the Resurrection is built upon lying witnesses or honest witnesses. To state it differently, the basis of the Christian faith is centered on this question: Did Jesus rise from the dead and ascend? That question can only be answered by facing the next question: Was the story of Jesus’ Resurrection perpetrated by lying witnesses who knew they were lying, or was it simply communicated by honest men and women reporting what they had actually experienced? Now we come to the issue of faith. The evidence that these disciples were not lying falls into four basic categories. The first is that the records show that the disciples underwent a cataclysmic personality change for the better after some event occurred. Woven into the Gospels are personality sketches of Peter, James, John, and Thomas. Peter was not perfect, that is obvious; he was always depicted as unstable and impetuous. Peter slept on the Mount of Transfiguration. When Jesus spoke of His cross, Peter said, “Be if far from thee,” and Jesus had to rebuke him. Peter boldly claimed, “Though they slay me, I won’t deny You,” yet he went out and denied his Lord three times. After the Resurrection, Peter still had his problems, but he was no longer unstable in his acceptance of Christ’s message. Peter had a problem with broadening the gospel’s application to people other than the Jews, but he was a changed man for the better in subtle ways, not overdone the way a liar would overdo it. Peter became a stable leader of the church, and he willingly gave his life as a martyr. James and John were hotheaded and selfish; they wanted to call down fire from heaven upon their enemies. They were called “sons of thunder.” Something changed John and he became known as the apostle of love, and his brother James was martyred. Thomas was consistently portrayed as a doubter. When Jesus faced a dangerous journey, Thomas said, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” Thomas expected Jesus would be killed by human hands. He didn’t understand Jesus’ saying, “No man taketh My life from Me; the Shepherd lays it down willingly.” When Jesus spoke of going away and preparing mansions, He said, “Whither I go you know, and the way you know.” Thomas interrupted Him and said, “We don’t know where You are going! How can we know the way?” When Thomsas was told that Jesus had risen, he said, “I will not believe unless I can put my hand into the print of the nails.” Jesus said to Thomas, “Behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side.” Suddenly Thomas changed. Every early tradition agrees that it was Thomas who went on to challenge the most difficult mission field, taking the gospel to India, never again to waver in his faith. These are only pieces of a broad cloth, but as you study the lives of these men, their personality sketches portray a dramatic change in their personalities for the better. I believe that telling a lie can change someone, but seldom does a lie change someone for the better. These disciples became self-sacrificing proclaimers of the good news and identified with their Master’s message of love. Seldom would a lie effect such a change, and significantly these changes coincided with the preaching of this message. They all changed for the better as a result of telling their story. Second, there are many internal evidences of honesty among the reporters. If you were telling a lie and you were scattered abroad, you wouldn’t know that the world would pick up your story and treat it as canonized Scripture. You would not have had a master plan. The disciples were scattered far abroad without communication. None of them could have known what was happening to the others. When people begin to lie, it usually tends to capture them; they like to embellish their story. Yet these disciples didn’t try to shade the truth even when the truth made them look bad or hurt their own story. They give you the impression of being honest reporters. Let’s start with Mark. Mark is quoted by the writers of the other Synoptic Gospels, and they quote from him faithfully without twisting his words. Scholars agree that Mark’s primary source of information was his mentor, Peter. Mark was devoted to Peter, yet Mark recorded Peter’s failures and mistakes in more detail than any of the other writers of the Synoptic Gospels. If Peter and Mark were part of a band of liars, based on what we know about human nature, they would not have worked so hard to make sure that Peter’s failures were recorded in such detail. Mark honestly stayed true to the record as it was given. If these three men were liars, I can easily imagine Peter saying to Mark, “Hey, Mark, once is enough. Let’s change the story a little. Can’t we leave out the part where I draw my sword and prove what a poor swordsman I am? I know you are trying to be dramatic, but can’t we communicate our lie without all this garbage about me?” Scholars agree that Mark wrote his Gospel to the Gentiles, not to Jews. The expression “the Son of man” to a Gentile simply means “a son of a man.” If you were writing to Gentiles and you wanted to prove that Jesus is the Son of God, why make it hard on yourself by having Jesus refer to Himself as “the Son of man?” Mark wrote to the Gentiles to demonstrate that Jesus the Christ is the Son of God; but when he quotes Jesus, he has Jesus refer to Himself as “the Son of man.” It would be self-defeating, if it were not true. If you were a dishonest reporter and you were making up a lie, and you were smart enough to include thumbnail personality sketches and then suddenly show their change, don’t you think Mark and Peter could have figured out how to protect themselves? If they were liars, they would have had no vision of the future formation of a great church. If you knew you were a fraud and you were trying to perpetuate your own leadership, you probably would not expect that people will still be reading your writings 2,000 years later. Most likely you would have only tried to build up your own little kingdom and get a few people to believe your story. Don’t you think that the other disciples could have told Peter and Mark, “Can’t you change your story a little? If you are trying to prove that Jesus is the Son of God, can’t you just have Him say that He is?” Why would Jesus use the expression “the Son of man?” He came on a scene where the most popular Scriptures were the apocalyptic literature, including the book of Daniel and the apocryphal book of Enoch. The Jewish believers were well aware that the expression “the Son of man” was used in apocalyptic literature to describe the Messiah coming on clouds of glory. If you were a Jew living in that day and you heard Jesus refer to Himself as “the Son of man,” you would have instantly seen that Jesus was identifying Himself as the fulfillment of the Jewish dream of a Deliverer who would deliver His people from Roman rule and establish His kingdom on earth. They would have known that Jesus was identifying Himself with divinity or at least as the expected Messiah. But if Mark and Peter were lying, there would have been no reason for them to have written that Jesus referred to Himself as “the Son of man.” Alternatively, they could easily have added an explanation of the expression “the Son of man” for their Gentile readers, but Mark didn’t do any such thing. He simply reported the facts in a way that hurt his own argument. This is further evidence that Mark’s Gospel was written by an honest reporter. There are innumerable such indicators of honestly woven into the records. A multitude followed Jesus into a wilderness place. The disciples told Jesus that the people were hungry. Jesus asked Philip, “Where can we buy bread, that these people may eat?” Why did Jesus ask Philip this question? Why didn’t He ask one of His other disciples? To answer the question, you have to refer to another Gospel to learn that the place where Jesus asked the question was Bethsaida. This other Gospel was written in another place at a different time and was originally circulated in another part of the world. And you have to go to yet another passage to learn that Philip was from Bethsaida, so he was the natural one to ask. We need to read all the records, written by different men in different places, to make the story fit together. Jesus asked Philip where they could buy bread simply because Philip was from Bethsaida. Why take the trouble to include these little details unless you are honestly trying to report events as they happened? Why did the disciples wait seven weeks after the Resurrection before publicly proclaiming on the day of Pentecost that Jesus rose from the dead? Critics say they needed the seven weeks to concoct their story. They needed seven weeks to figure out how to make sure the tomb was empty and how to engineer the hallucinations before they declared that Christ had risen from the dead. But if they were smart enough to concoct a lie, they also would have known that the seven-week wait hurt their credibility. The longer they waited, the less credible the story would be. But even if it were true that they waited because they needed the time, that theory fails to take into account that the disciples were preaching the Resurrection on the very day He arose. Honest men waited seven weeks because the One who amazed them by rising from the dead told them to wait in Jerusalem until they were “endued with power from on high.” These are the kinds of indicators that historians use as internal evidence to determine whether or not a writer is reporting accurately. The Gospels present a consistent internal picture of simple people who were incapable of concocting such a fraud. Before the Resurrection, they were not able to stand as a group. They failed their Lord. They hadn’t listened carefully to His preaching and they fled in fear; they were more shocked by the story of the Resurrection than the people they would proceed to proclaim it to. Their written record repeatedly shows honest attempts to tell the story as they saw and experienced it. Thus, they look not like liars but like truthful people. The third great proof of the honesty of the witnesses is the price that they paid: each of these reporters paid an inhuman price of suffering for the story they told. Now, I can believe that people will tell lies and stick with their lies for a while. But under torture, people usually break because few lies are worth dying for. Yet these disciples suffered an inhuman persecution, and all they would have had to do to end it was simply curse Christ and testify to their worship of the emperor. I am reminded of the Loyalty Oath in the days of McCarthyism, which professors were made to sign to declare that they were not members of the Communist Party. Of course, any Communist would immediately sign the oath without hesitation, because lying is their mode of operation. But many professors refused to sign it, regardless of the price they paid, because if they gave up their own academic freedom to prove their loyalty, the loss was greater than anything gained. People who don’t have character don’t care who or what they swear by. In the first persecutions, all the disciples had to do to escape persecution was stop preaching this Resurrection message. Peter boldly declared, “Do we obey God or man? You hanged Him on a tree and desired a murderer to be granted unto you, but God raised Him from the dead.” All they had to do was stop preaching this message and the persecution would stop. Yet every one of them kept preaching and suffered immeasurably. The fourth and greatest proof of the Resurrection is that they suffered and died alone. All of them, with the exception of John, suffered a martyr’s death. I would like for us to imagine that we are those disciples. I could imagine that if we were a dispirited band that had bet on the wrong horse and our leader was now dead, we could all agree that to save face we could concoct the story of Jesus’ Resurrection and steal the body. This scenario is so implausible I cannot really believe it could have happened, but let’s assume it did just as a mental exercise. Suppose we had decided to tell this story to give credibility to our newly invented faith and to give prominence to our position. I can believe that if we were assembled in one room as a group, we might withstand much persecution because no one wants to be the first one to break. But now separate us. One of us goes off to India, another goes off to Rome. Imagine that you are Peter in Rome, and I am Bartholomew in Armenia. You don’t know where I am; you cannot pick up a telephone like you can today. You have been telling this story everywhere you have traveled and you have gotten a lot of attention. The disciple who is over in India will be slain with a Brahman’s sword, according to the best traditions. I will be skinned alive with a whip, and you will be crucified in Rome. I cannot believe that if we were separated, alone, in a remote corner of the globe, and we knew we were lying, that one of us would not break under the pressure. We don’t even know if the others are alive. All you have to do to escape death is renege, and you don’t know whether the other disciples will ever find out. Most probably they will not, and if they do find out and you see them again, you can say, “That’s a lie,” because you are a liar anyway. You could meet me years later and say, “I never reneged.” All you have to do to save your life is simply say, “I made it up. I am sorry. I will swear allegiance to whomever you want. It was fun while it lasted. Please give me my punishment and let me go.” One of us would break. All you must do is curse Jesus, swear allegiance to the emperor, and you would be untied and released. You can catch the next boat out of town, and the others would never know you broke under pressure. It is psychologically impossible to believe that if this was a lie, one of the tellers of the lie would not break under pressure and confess that it was a lie. The fact that they suffered and died alone, and that you cannot find any record of one of them denying the story, defies any belief that they were lying. These disciples believed what they were saying. I still remember sharing these proofs with one of my professors and when we got to this point he said, “I’m convinced they believed what they were preaching. Therefore, one of your other facts must be wrong.” And I thought: “Fine, those facts are easy to prove alongside the claim of the Resurrection!” I remember the day when I was sitting at my desk in a peach cannery working as a state inspector in Oroville, California. I had spent three summers of my collegiate life wrestling with these issues and studying the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. I remember when I closed the last book I had been studying and I said, “There is only one explanation: Jesus came out of the tomb! These men were telling the truth.” Jesus had said that only one sign is guaranteed, the sign of the Resurrection. So I thought, “What is my next move?” I would start acting like the God who kept His word and raised up Christ from the dead will keep His word to me. I would start believing that the Christ who said He would rise and come again did rise and will come again. I would start acting like He will keep His word when He said, “I will never leave you, nor forsake you.” And I would stop expecting God to give me a new sign every day, but start acting like He is honest and will keep His word as demonstrated by the Resurrection. I would offer myself to Him in conformity with the truth of His word. Instead of putting God on trial, I would submit to His trial where it counts. I would start acting like the Lord is with me. Christianity is a hardheaded, courageous, tenacious life of acting in faith on the promises of God, based upon the fact of the Resurrection. The Resurrection was much harder for God to accomplish and much harder for me to believe than the promises God has given me. Consider the magnitude of what Jesus did on the basis of a promise from His Father. Jesus would empty Himself of His equality with the Father, step down from heaven’s throne, hang his body on God’s word, and let separation come between Himself and the Father as He became the recipient of God’s wrath for all of our sins. God had promised that if Jesus would do all those things, He would raise Him up and give Him a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee would bow. If the Lord of glory could risk all of that, I can certainly risk acting like God will keep His word to me. God has been keeping His word for enough years in my life that even when I grow impatient with what appear to be delays, I know that He can be counted on. Sometimes I foolishly complain in my spirit because it doesn’t look like God is on the corner I “told” Him to meet me on. But I have had enough experience with His faithfulness to know that when He is ready to reveal Himself, He will be there on time. I can imagine God saying, “You fool! I’ve been here all along! I wasn’t worried about your doubts; I just wanted your enemies to think I wasn’t here so they would all be surprised when I displayed Myself.” Jesus is coming back, friends! It’s not over yet! Praise God; we made it through the year! Reprinted with permission from Pastor Melissa Scott | Return Home | Current Wingspread | Wingspread Archives | Contact Us | |
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