As a Jesus disciple and a Kingdom of God revolutionary, our faith is grounded in the resurrection of Christ.
Throughout church history, there has been this strong belief that the cornerstone of the Christian faith is the resurrection of Christ.
Even in the first century, Paul, in describing to the Corinthians what he believed were key elements of faith that would cause the disciple to grow, he came to the resurrection.
Here's what he says in 1 Corinthians 15,
So this is like the first thing.
This is so important as we grow as kingdom revolutionaries and disciples of Christ.
First of all, that which I also received, so in other words, he had been taught this himself, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.
And then he goes on to say, and that he was buried, he rose again on the third day according to the Scriptures.
So twice he's talking about the Bible being the basis of the resurrection of Christ.
He was seen of Peter and then of the twelve, and after that he was seen by over 500 people at once, of whom the greater part remain into this present, but some are fallen asleep.
Now what's interesting is a few verses later, Paul continues by saying this,
And if Christ be not risen, then all of our preaching is in vain, and your faith is also in vain.
So as we're growing in Christ, as we're learning to be a kingdom revolutionary, to be a disciple of Christ,
it's so important that we understand that our faith is solidly grounded in the third day resurrection of Christ.
He died on the cross, he died for our sins, he was buried, and on the third day he rose again from the grave.
So what I want to do today is talk about the resurrection of Christ.
And let me give you three reasons why I think the resurrection of Christ is so important.
First of all, only a sinless son, a sinless son of God could have risen from the grave.
In other words, the power of sin, though he was tempted, never caused Christ to succumb.
And so the power of his sinless life and death was the key to him rising from the grave.
Because we also know in 1 Corinthians 15 that the power of the devil, the power of Satan is death.
And all of us are going to physically die unless the Lord comes back in our lifetime or we're raptured out of here.
The reality is, is that we're all going to die.
But Christ, who was sinless, didn't need to die.
And so he rose again because he lived a sinless life.
Secondly, the resurrection confirms that Jesus had power over Satan and demons.
In 1 Corinthians 25 we read,
For he, meaning Christ, must reign until he has put all enemies under his feet.
The last enemy that will be destroyed is death.
So the resurrection is proof of the power of Christ to have authority over Satan and demons.
And we believe from both Revelation as well as other passages that during the three days,
it's believed even in the Nicene Creed that Christ actually went in to hell and took away the keys of death away from Satan.
And then thirdly, and this is really, really important, is that again in 1 Corinthians 15,
Paul talks about that he is the first fruits of the resurrection.
So in other words, because Christ rose from the grave,
you as a disciple of Christ are also going to rise from your physical death into immortality.
So immortality is ours because of the first fruits, the first person that went ahead of us, which is Jesus Christ.
So what I want to do in our talk today is look at eight historical facts about the resurrection
that solidly ground us in the historicity and the veracity of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The reality is there's no other historical event that has been so studied and so scrutinized through the centuries
and found to be so well documented than the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Simon Greenleaf, former dean of the Greenleaf School of Law says,
quote, It passes the bounds of credibility that the early Christians would have manufactured such a tale
and then preached it among those who might easily have refuted it simply
by reproducing the body of Christ.
In other words, to base their entire faith on something that was false, that the authorities
that were opposed to the Christians, opposed to the way, could have brought forth a dead
body is, by all means of credibility, the greatest proof that it was true.
Paul Atheas, former professor, University of Erlangen, Germany, writes,
The resurrection could not have been maintained for a single day, for a single hour, if the
emptiness of the tomb had not been maintained as a fact for all concerned.
Paul Mayer, one of the great historians of our time, in the 20th century and 21st century,
wrote, If all the evidence is weighed carefully and fairly, it is indeed justifiable, according
to the canons of historical research, to conclude that the tomb in which Jesus was
buried was actually empty on the first century.
And no shred of evidence has yet been discovered in literary sources, epigraphy, or archaeology
that would disprove this statement.
So let me give you what I believe are eight historical facts for the resurrection and
why this is so important.
Fact number one, a broken Roman seal.
The seal over the tomb was a Roman seal.
It represented the authority of Rome.
It represented the emperor of Rome.
And all of the soldiers that were guarding the tomb knew that they were guarding a Roman
seal with their life.
And if that seal was broken by anyone other than the authorities, they would each be crucified
upside down.
So the fact that the Roman seal was broken is fact number one.
Fact number two, an empty tomb.
We must remember that the disciples did not go to Athens, Greece.
They did not go to the province of Galatia.
They didn't go to North Africa and preach about the resurrection of Christ.
They preached it in Jerusalem, just within 40 days of the actual event of when it occurred,
that the people who were actually witnesses of the crucifixion were there.
I mean, they're preaching to the people who saw Jesus die.
They saw him buried, and now they're hearing about him rising from the grave.
So if it was not true, any one of them could have gone to the authorities, produced a body,
and said, you're lying.
So the empty tomb remained empty and no body was ever found.
Number three, a large stone moved away.
So we believe it was a two-ton stone, somewhat round in the measure of that time, and it's
interesting that in the Gospel of Matthew, Matthew chapter 27, there's actually a preposition
used in the description of the resurrection that would indicate that the stone, which
was by average about two tons, it might have even been larger than that, had actually been
moved up an incline.
So something moved the stone.
Well, who moved the stone?
Soldiers who would die for breaking the Roman seal and allowing the tomb to be raided, if
that was the case, who would be crucified for that?
I don't think so.
The women, three women coming to the tomb or two women coming to the tomb, not a chance.
The disciples who were still so scared that they're hanging out in the upper room even
after the resurrection, no way.
So the only explanation under scrutiny that makes any sense is it was a supernatural work
of probably angels moving that stone, but God moved it.
Fact number four, Roman guard goes AWOL.
The guards weren't there.
They had fled.
Something so fantastic, something so frightening happened at the tomb that these elite special
forces, Roman guards, 16 in number, fled.
They ran for their lives.
What was that?
Fact number five, grave clothes tell a tale like the empty chrysalis of a caterpillar's
cocoon.
It appears from what we see in the descriptions in the gospels of the disciples seeing the
grave clothes of Christ, that it actually looked kind of like a cocoon of where the
body had been sort of collapsed in as if the body had just been supernaturally transposed
out of the grave clothes and from the grave site.
And so it says that John, when John...
John looked in, he saw this, and he believed.
So again, it wasn't that it was just unwrapped,
it was the fact that actually the body
had been supernaturally transposed
out of the grave clothes.
Fact number six, his appearance.
So in 1 Corinthians 15, I just read it earlier,
over 500 people saw Christ risen from the grave.
And what's interesting about the passage when I read it
is that Paul, in writing to the Corinthians,
said even some of these people who now sleep.
So in other words, most of the people,
most of the 500 people who saw Jesus risen from the grave
were still alive.
So he's preaching the gospel, he's writing what happened
knowing that the very people who had seen Jesus
risen from the grave were actually there.
So they were eyewitnesses.
And my son, one of my sons is a lawyer,
and he is a litigation lawyer, he's in trial all the time.
And he will be the first to tell you
that the key to winning any case
is who do you have as an eyewitness?
You need eyewitnesses.
And even in a court of law today,
in the 21st century, one eyewitness
is often all that you need to convict someone of a crime.
So here in scripture, over 500 people
saw Jesus risen from the grave.
Dr. Edwin Yamauchi, Associate Professor of History
at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, emphasizes, quote,
what gives a special authority to the list of witnesses
as historical evidence is the reference
to most of the 500 brethren being still alive.
St. Paul says in effect, if you don't believe me, ask them.
Such a statement is an admittedly genuine letter
written within 30 years of the event
is almost as strong an evidence as one could hope to get
for something that happened nearly 2,000 years ago.
Okay, before I go to fact number seven,
let me explain something.
So in graduate school, as a missiology major
at Fuller Theological Seminary,
one of the classes that we talked about
related to the Dead Sea Scrolls
and other evidence of parchments
and passages that have been found
through archeology over the centuries.
And one of the things we were talking about
is how do you know whether something
of an old parchment is authentic or fake?
Because if you saw Raiders of the Lost Ark
and movies like that that try to depict
sort of the archeological world,
one of the aspects of that movie that's really true
was all the fake stuff.
So it's true, one of my sons is partially an archeologist.
He's been on some digs in Israel
and it was a minor that he took when he was in university.
But there are ways in which you can discern
whether a particular parchment is fake or real.
And here's what's interesting.
What's interesting is that when you look at a document
that you're trying to find if it's verifiable,
authentic or not, you often look at the particular,
say, passage of scripture that we have today.
And if it's exactly the same, I mean,
if it's exactly the same as what we have,
then there's a high probability that it's a fake.
In other words, everything that we have
in the world of historical evidence
comes from a different angle.
So someone's viewpoint is gonna be
slightly different than another.
So in the Dead Sea Scrolls, we had Isaiah 53
is the most famous passage from the Dead Sea Scrolls,
which were found in the 1940s.
And one of the ways, one of many, not just,
I mean, there's also carbon dating and things like that.
But as far as the actual passage itself,
if there's slight differences,
and what I mean by differences might be,
there might be a word difference,
there might be a grammatical aspect
to between two words or between a paragraph
that's different from what we have now.
That's actually an indication that's authentic
because it's not perfectly copied.
And so the next point is really important.
And that is fact number seven on the resurrection of Christ
is the women saw Christ first.
Now, if I was in collusion with a group of people
2000 years ago, and I'm trying to just make up
out of the blue, this story that Jesus rose from the grave,
I'm not gonna use women as my first witnesses.
Because at that time, women weren't even allowed
in the courts.
of law, they were not considered a verifiable witness
because they were women.
That's just a patriarchal culture
that was Judaism at that time.
And that was also the culture of the Middle East.
So the fact that the writers speak
of the women testifying to the resurrection of Christ first
is actually what makes it authentic.
It's because it doesn't make sense
from a logical perspective.
It must be actually factually what happened.
So this is important.
Dr. Mayer observes the initial reaction
of the 11 disciples was understandably one
of suspicion and disbelief.
Again, if the resurrection accounts had been manufactured,
women would never have been included in the story.
So the fact that women were included
in the story is what makes it even more authentic.
And then lastly, and this is probably
the most important aspect in fact, number eight,
and that is that 11 of the 12 disciples gave their lives,
died martyr's death based on the truth
that Christ had risen from the grave.
Now we know in history, many people who have died for a lie,
but we don't have very much evidence
of people who have died for a lie
when they knew that it was a lie.
These men, virtually all of them,
John being the only one who died of old age,
who gave us a book of revelation from Patmos.
Other than John, all of them died martyr's deaths.
All of them were killed for their faith,
proclaiming that the foundation
of everything they believed in
was on the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
So as you're growing in Christ,
as you're becoming a kingdom of God revolutionary,
your faith is built on the cornerstone
of the resurrection of Christ.
And you can take that to the spiritual bank.
That's the most important part of the Christian life.
And so when you go through the book of Acts,
as you're reading the book of Acts,
as you're reading church history, Christian history,
you'll find again and again that the main element
of those who preach the gospel,
first in Jerusalem, then Judea, Samaria,
and the remotest parts of the earth,
all speak from the perspective of a Christ,
of Jesus rising from the grave.
And this is key to your faith.
So I challenge you to go to 1 Corinthians 15,
read the entire chapter,
underline some of the key parts.
But these eight historical facts,
I trust are gonna bolster your faith,
strengthen your faith,
and make you more confident in what you believe in.