Jesus Wins—Resurrection Renewal

Jesus Wins—The Renewal of Resurrection Expectation

Gods Word for us on this Day of Resurrection comes from Acts 10, where the apostle Peter says: "We are witnesses of all that [Jesus] did both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him on the third day and made him to appear, not to all the people, but to us who had been chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead." This is the Word of the Lord.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is our confidence; it is the foundation of the holy Christian Church. As the apostle Paul put it in 1^st Corinthians, "If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith…if Christ has not been raised, you are still in your sins. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead…" This message makes the Christian faith absolutely unique, and that is precisely why skeptics and false teachers of every era have aimed their biggest guns at Jesus' resurrection—they figure that if they can destroy the credibility of Jesus' rising from the tomb, then they have effectively destroyed Christianity. The thing of it is, they're right, as Paul reminds us. "If Christ has not been raised…your faith is useless."

And so the Church has endured attack after attack on the reality of the resurrection, and I'm not going to honor those viewpoints today by getting into specifics. But the bottom line is this: if the anti-Christian scholars and other world religions and cult groups are right, then the Biblical account of the resurrection is the biggest hoax of all time. If, on the other hand, Christianity is factually reliable, the resurrection is the greatest single event the world has ever seen.

So is the resurrection of Jesus factually reliable? Or do we just have to "take it on faith?" To help answer these questions, I'd like for you consider the change that took place in the followers of Jesus. What happened in the wake of Jesus' resurrection is unprecedented in human history. In the span of a few hundred years, a small band of seemingly insignificant people succeeded in turning an entire empire upside down. As a poet once wrote, "they faced the tyrant's brandished steel, the lion's gory mane, and the fire of a thousand deaths." Why? Why did they do it? Because they were utterly convinced that they, like their Master, would one day rise from the grave. As Peter reports, they ate and drank and spent time with someone who had died and come back to life. Because of Jesus, they lost their fear of death.

Now here's a key question. Does anyone think that the disciples of Jesus would have faced torture, persecution, and cruel death for what they knew to be a lie?

Dr. Simon Greenleaf didn't think so. Dr. Greenleaf was a Professor of Law at Harvard, and was considered the greatest American authority on common law evidence of the 19^th century. Examining the evidence for the resurrection, he wrote: "As one [apostle] after another was put to a miserable death, the survivors only prosecuted their work with increased vigor and resolution. The annals of military warfare afford scarcely an example of such heroic constancy, patience, and unblemished courage. They had every possible motive to carefully review the grounds of their faith, and the evidences of the great facts and truths which they asserted were pressed upon their attention with terrific frequency. It was therefore impossible that they could have persisted in affirming the truths they had narrated, had Jesus not actually risen from the dead, and had they not known this fact as certainly as they knew any other fact."

As Professor Greenleaf says, the disciples of Jesus were thoroughly transformed by the resurrection. No one is a better example of this than Peter. Good old shoot-first-ask-questions-later Peter; old open-mouth-insert-foot Peter, old jump-out-of-the-boat-get-scared-and-start-to-sink Peter. The same man who once was afraid of being exposed as a follower of Jesus and who denied it vehemently was transformed after the resurrection into a bold leader and preacher, and would go before the same council that had put Jesus to death and say, "I cannot help but speak about what I have seen and heard." Church historians tell us Peter went on to suffer a martyr's death. It was Peter who stood up and delivered the message we heard in our first reading today; a message that we recognize twenty centuries later as the saving gospel of Jesus Christ. Here's what he said, "We are witnesses of all that [Jesus] did both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him on the third day and made him to appear, not to all the people but to us who had been chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. And he commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one appointed by God to be the judge of the living and the dead. To him all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name." (Acts 10: 39—43)

What are we to make of this? Peter was totally changed, and every other witness of Jesus' resurrection appearances was totally changed. They had seen life come out of death, and so had no fear of death any longer. Their one concern was to spread the news of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection to anyone who would listen. They had nothing to gain, from the world's perspective. By sticking to this message, they risked losing their lives. And that was the entire point. They had seen with their own eyes a new kind of life—life that death cannot touch—and they went for that life with every ounce of their being, no matter what the world threw at them—the life found only in Jesus.

Because Jesus rose, He still lives; and because Jesus lives, His new kind of life is still available to you. Pursue this new kind of life that death cannot touch with every ounce of your being. The resurrection of Jesus is still changing the world; let it change you. Let it change the way you handle death; let it change the way you look at life. Let it overwhelm you with the truth: that your forever life with God has already begun.

Jesus lives! And now is death/But the gate of life immortal; This shall calm my trembling breath/When I pass its gloomy portal./Faith shall cry, as fails each sense,/Jesus is my confidence! Amen. (TLH # 201, st. 5)