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apostles, Christ, church, disciples, evidences, faith, fulfillment, hope, Jesus, Messiah, prophecy, raised from the dead, resurrection, spiritual body, witnesses of the resurrection
Wow, I hadn’t realized how long it had been since I had posted to this blog. Sadly, summer and its crazy schedule of events (fun and work related) has had a negative effect on my writing. But now that fall is rapidly approaching, let’s get back into the swing of things.
My last posting was about the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus. It is the saddest section of the Bible; however, the happiest section of Scripture follows right on its heels, the resurrection of Jesus. And the resurrection is not the happiest section just because of the contrast to the saddest part—it really is really, really good news!
Despite the best efforts of Jewish religious leaders to keep Jesus’ tomb guarded (to prevent His disciples from stealing His body and claiming a resurrection), the tomb was nevertheless evacuated on the third day after His death on the cross. Not by a body-snatching burglary of well-meaning but misdirected disciples, but by the very power of God, against which no power on earth could guard a tomb. Jesus really and actually rose from the dead.
And by rise from the dead, we’re not talking about a “resuscitation” of a body that would die again, not a zombie-fied body, nor any other occult permutation of the living dead. This resurrection was what the apostle Paul later calls a spiritual body. Now, I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but what Paul was attempting to get across to us is that it was a real body, just not of the variety that we are familiar with. This one will never get sick, never grow old, never die. And the reason that it is such good news is that, as the apostle John (and others) put it, “Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2, NIV).
So, Jesus rose from the dead on the first day of the week, what we’d call Sunday. At first His closest disciples didn’t believe it. You’d think they would have, since Jesus had spoken about it from time to time; but of course, if the same thing happened to us, we’d also be a little skeptical. And in some ways that skepticism is something that we should pay attention to.
Jesus’ disciples weren’t a bunch of naive bumpkins who would believe anything. The apostle Thomas in fact was so full of doubt that despite the other apostles telling that they had witnessed Jesus alive, he still stood his skeptical ground and declared that he wouldn’t believe without putting his own finger where the nails had entered Jesus’ hands and put his own hand where the spear had pierced Jesus’ side. For me personally, that makes Thomas’ response to seeing Jesus so much more meaningful: John 20:28 “Thomas answered and said to Him, ‘My Lord and my God!’”
Jesus likewise appeared to many others (500 at once—1 Cor. 15) and even to a persecutor, Saul of Tarsus, who consequently turned from being a destroyer of Christianity to a zealous preacher of it.
Such a tangible proof of Jesus as Lord and the resurrection as real made the apostles and early disciples amazingly courageous and faithful in proclaiming the Gospel. Despite the persecution, the arrests and imprisonments, the beatings, and the executions, none of the apostles or other disciples who witnessed the resurrected Jesus ever recanted their testimony of the resurrected Jesus.
The combination of 1) the empty tomb (Jesus’ enemies never produced a body), 2) the initial skepticism of Jesus’ own disciples, and 3) the absolute refusal of these witnesses to recant their testimony even under the most extreme circumstances is a rock solid foundation for faith in Jesus as the Christ even today. Christianity is no blind faith, no wishful thinking. It is and always has been founded on better evidence than most of the ancient history that we accept as fact.
And it also became the solid foundation and launching pad of the Lord’s church—the beginning of which we can read about in the book of Acts.
And Acts is where we’ll pick up in our next post in this blog—the exciting story of the beginning of the church, the Kingdom of God.