What's The Deal with the Resurrection?

January, and the thought behind this has been to try to help the church be a better place for people to bring their hard questions. Sometimes you can come into a place like this and feel like it's a one way conversation, or that questions aren't allowed, or that it's not okay to voice your doubts and frustrations and objections to the Christian faith. So that's what we've been doing all this winter.

Over the next couple of weeks, we'll continue with this and finish up at the end of this month. We're going to talk about whether the cross is cosmic child abuse, and whether faith can include doubt. Next week, why is the church so jacked up? Why is it so messed up? Today we're going to look at this question: What's the deal with the Resurrection?

And if you would, as is our practice, we're going to join and read God's Word aloud together. We're going to be in 1 Corinthians 15:12-19. It's on the screen behind me. It's also in your worship folder, if you want to join your voices with me.

Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say, there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain and so is your faith. Moreover, we are found to be false witnesses about God because we have testified wrongly about God that he raised up Christ, whom he did not raise up, if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless. You are still in your sins. Those then who have fallen asleep in Christ have also perished. If we put our hope in Christ for this life only, we should be pitied more than anyone. — 1 Corinthians 15:12-19

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

You know, a friend of mine shared with me an obituary that's from 2013 about a woman from Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. And this obituary is so remarkable for its wit and also for its punch. It was actually reproduced in The London Times and The New York Times. I want to invite you to listen.

Waffle House lost a loyal customer on 04/30/2013. Antonio W. Tony Legru died after a battle with multiple illnesses: lupus, rickets, scurvy, and feline leukemia. That's a joke. There's a lot of jokes in this, okay? She had previously conquered polio as a child, contributing to her unusually petite ankles and the nickname "polio legs" given to her by her ex-husband. It should not be difficult to imagine the multiple reasons for the divorce thirty-five plus years ago.

Toni previously served on the board of Hancock County Library Foundation. Ironically, the only correspondence she has received from the library since her resignation has been overdue notices for several overdue books—a true statement. Between her treatments, she selfishly refused to make time to return them, and her last words were, "Tell them the check is in the mail."

Her favorite activity was sipping hot tea on her back porch with friends seated around her porch ensemble from the Dollar General store. Again, not kidding. This will be sold to the highest bidder at a garage estate sale. Any gifts in her honor should be made to the Hancock County Library Foundation Overdue Book Fund.

On a last but serious note, the woman who loved life and taught her children to laugh at the days to come is now safely in the arms of Jesus and dancing at the wedding feast of the lamb. She will be missed as a mother, friend, and grandmother. Anyone wearing black will not be admitted to her memorial. She is not dead. She is alive.

Now that's a great piece of prose. Whoever wrote that—the son and daughter of Tony LaRue—did a great job with that. But it begs a question: Is she? Is she alive with Jesus right now?

Today's question, "What's the deal with the resurrection?" is really a very poignant question for every person, for Tony LaRue, everybody else who's died claiming faith in Jesus. In other words, is this for real? Is this stuff about eternal life for real?

And as we picked up this passage this morning from 1 Corinthians 15, Paul really validates that question. I don't know if you could tell, it's kind of a hard text to read out loud because everything is said in a negative term. And it's hard to read because Paul is actually saying, what if all this is just made up or wishful thinking or not true? He validates the doubts and the wrestling that probably every honest Christian has had about this whole thing. Is this for real?

So today I have a two-point sermon for you, and it goes like this: He is risen, and then he is risen indeed. Or if you want different kind of notes, the what and the so what of the resurrection.

Let's put this together. Did it happen? I want you to imagine you're sitting in a boat on a very calm lake, no wind. One of those days where you can see almost the reflection of a mirror in the lake.

And suddenly waves hit the lake and your boat starts rocking. And what do you deduce? Something happened. Something big happened that caused these big waves suddenly to come up out of nowhere. And that's really the picture of what happened in thirty-three A.D. You could say, I don't know what happened, but something happened. Something happened that sent waves that rocked all around the world. And it's either something real that happened in Jerusalem thirty-three AD or something that was a hoax, but something happened. Really, there are only two explanations for this: Either Jesus was truly raised from the dead or he wasn't.

So I want to look this morning first at what are the alternate explanations for the resurrection? How do we know that this isn't a hoax? There's four of them.

The Stolen Body Hypothesis

First one goes like this: the stolen body hypothesis. That someone—a disciple or someone else—stole the body of Jesus away from his tomb. And this is actually the oldest of these four different hypotheses. This one came out, you can read it, in Matthew 28. Right after the resurrection, Pilate and the Roman authorities made up this story: someone stole the body.

Matthew 28

But there are several problems with this. First is a lack of motive. What motive would the disciples have to steal the body? It's very clear on Easter morning they were as surprised as everyone else. They weren't expecting a resurrection. They weren't expecting him to come back.

Second, lack of drive. It's hard to overstate how completely despondent and in despair these followers of Jesus were at the death, the failure of Jesus on the cross. With what energy would they have orchestrated some plan and come up with an explanation and sold this to everybody and convinced everyone?

The theory doesn't explain the hundreds of resurrection appearances of Jesus. And the disciples would go on to face hardship, ridicule, hostility, even martyrs' deaths for their faith. They could never have sustained that if they knew that what they were preaching was a lie, a hoax.

The Wrong Tomb Hypothesis

Second is the wrong tomb hypothesis. Somehow the people mistook which place Jesus was actually buried. There are several problems with that one too.

First is the women. They had been to the tomb to see where Jesus was buried and they were coming back that Sunday morning with spices to prepare the body. They knew where he was.

Second, Peter and John show up at the tomb. They run there and they see the linen cloths lying folded up.

Third, Joseph of Arimathea was a very wealthy prominent member of the Sanhedrin. His tomb would have been a place that had been prepared, had been paid for, had been set apart. People would have known exactly where that was. That's not a hidden spot. That would have been a publicly known spot.

And finally, if they had just gone to the wrong tomb, surely the Jews, surely the Romans would have just then shown them the right tomb and said, here it is. You guys were in the wrong place. That's why you thought it was empty.

The Hallucinations Hypothesis

Third hypothesis: the hallucinations hypothesis. Maybe there was this kind of collective hallucination that all the disciples experienced, either from a vision or something else. Maybe there was this collective dream that they had, and that they began to speak of him in such active words as to say, well, surely maybe he is really alive, and then they began to turn that into, well, he was actually raised back from the dead.

But again, some problems. Collective hallucination is not really a thing. It's really been disproven in sociology—that people can actually experience the same thing.

And second, people didn't just claim to see Jesus one time or from far away. People claimed in the gospels that they ate with Jesus. They sat with Jesus. They hugged Jesus. That Jesus took a walk with them. That Jesus spent time teaching them over and over again over a period of weeks after his resurrection.

And people at Jesus' day, they had categories for hallucination. They had categories for ghosts. They would say it was a person's angel if somebody thought they had seen somebody come back from the dead. They'd say that person—that's that person's spirit, that person's angel. But they did not have a category for "that's his body resurrected."

The Swoon Hypothesis

Last one: the swoon hypothesis. Now this one takes a little more explanation. The swoon hypothesis is that somehow Jesus wasn't really dead, that he had fainted and he just looked dead.

Now this is the easiest one to disprove because the Romans were really, really good at death. They're famously good at killing people.

Also, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, they handled Jesus' physical body after his resurrection. They touched him. They could feel his skin, whether it was warm or cold. Presumably Jesus' body was cold, like a dead body. A half dead, broken, beat up Jesus would not be able to roll back a stone, beat up some Roman guards, and reappear.

A half dead, broken, beat up Jesus would never be able to convince the disciples that he was the Lord of life. They might have seen a half dead, broken, beat up Jesus and say, I guess he's resuscitated, but not worship him. He has conquered death.

See, all these alternative explanations fail to give an account that's really helpful. So why do we believe this? Why do we believe this as history, as fact? Six pieces of evidence.

Evidence for the Resurrection

Really simply, the tomb was empty. Actually, nobody disputes that fact. Nobody disputes the fact that his body wasn't there. There are alternate explanations for that, but nobody says it didn't happen. Rome said so, Pilate said so.

Second, the eyewitnesses. The risen Jesus was seen by hundreds, if not thousands, of people in the flesh after his crucifixion. This account that we read this morning, First Corinthians 15, this is the earliest of the writings about Jesus' resurrection. Actually, the Gospels were written after this. This is the earliest place where we read of the resurrection of Jesus. And in doing so, Paul is in effect saying to anybody who was around, hey, if you have contrary evidence, bring it. You can actually go and talk to the eyewitnesses. You can go talk to me and to other people who've seen Jesus raised from the dead. There's an invitation in that.

Number three, nobody was expecting the resurrection. Nobody. We don't think about this because we live in an era where people come up with ploys to try to earn money or prestige. And so in our mind it's easy to think of the disciples or people coming up with some means of making money off of this. But nobody thought about this at the time.

The Greeks, the people of the Roman Empire in his day were Greek thinking people. The Greek mind thought of the body as bad and the spirit as good. That's what they celebrated. That's what the Stoics and the Epicureans both wanted. So this idea that someone could lose their body and be spirit, that was preferable. Nobody would want to get back into a body again. It was unthinkable to the Greek mind.

It was also unthinkable to the Jewish mind. The Messiah wasn't supposed to die, let alone be raised from the dead. According to the Jews, they expected a notion of resurrection, but it went like this: Hey, at the end of history, God will raise up people. The righteous will be raised up to life, and God will deal with all that is wrong in the world and bring justice. That was their idea of resurrection. But the idea that one person could be raised up in the middle of history while death, sin, injustice continue on, didn't make any sense. Unthinkable. No one was expecting this kind of thing.

Number four: A brand new worldview appeared overnight that was unthinkable before this. Now, it's related to the last point, but it goes like this. After the death of Jesus, the entire Christian community changed overnight. In a weekend, in a matter of a couple of days, these Jewish believers who believed there was one God and only one God that you worshiped began to worship a human being and said he also was God. Then they changed the way that they worshiped. They moved their Sabbath day from Saturday to a Sunday. Why? Because Jesus was raised on a Sunday morning. It changed everything about how they practiced their faith overnight.

Build up time? No time to develop this into a working hypothesis that we all share. The disciples also had nothing to gain, nothing to gain by starting a new religion. These men were Jewish theists. For them to think about teaching something that was opposed to Jewish teaching would have meant they would have put their very souls at the risk of hell. To say that there is another God beside God who's the son of God, Jesus—worship him too. He's raised from the dead. He's God eternal. Worship him. They could have made him some prestige and money for a few years, but they're putting their very souls at stake for this. And to do so, come up with this idea over a weekend? Preposterous.

Number five, the fifth reason that this is credible: The Gospels are just preposterous. They're too silly to be made up. If you were trying to write a convincing story about this God man, Jesus, come back from the dead, this is not the way you would have written it. You would have made the ministry leaders who took Jesus' message after him into some kind of heroes. You would have demonstrated that they were men of faith. Instead, you get men who abandoned Jesus, his disciples, men who didn't stay up praying with him, that at his crucifixion fled, they betrayed him. Over and over the heroes of the early church are portrayed as foolish. It does nothing to give credit to Jesus' resurrection. It can only be true if it's true.

Finally, the transformation of the disciples.

This scared, frightened band of men who, over the years, had followed Jesus throughout Galilee, in a moment were ready to abandon all of that and go back to their trades as shepherds and fishermen and peasants. Suddenly, though, they change overnight into an incredible mission force—convinced, so convinced, of the resurrection of the dead that they're willing to put their lives at stake for it.

Virtually all the apostles, all the early church leaders moved on from this moment in their life to martyrdom. Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and philosopher, said of these men and their transformation: "I believe the witnesses who get their throats cut." And these men went on to lay down their lives for the sake of this message: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. And that's the evidence.

This is why Christians all over the world gather together on a Sunday morning, every Sunday every year, and celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, the coming undead. These six things—the empty tomb, the eyewitnesses, the explanation that nobody was expecting, a brand new worldview, the weaknesses of the Gospels we've discussed, and the transformation of the disciples—I want you to walk out of this place this morning and say, "Yeah, that's true. He is risen. That's history. That's the what of the resurrection."

And yet if you miss the next part, you sort of miss the whole thing. Because I want you to not only understand the what of the resurrection, but the so what. Why does this matter to us? It's one thing to believe it, it's another thing for it to get into you and to transform you from the inside out.

The So What: Why It Matters

To do so, I want to read a testimony. In 2008, a woman named Anjali Savan came to faith in Jesus out of what first had been her upbringing in the Hindu faith and then five years in the Baha'i religion. She came to faith in Massachusetts, and in her church at her testimony for her baptism, this is what she said about what it meant to become a Christian.

She writes: "Christians claim that Jesus was God, was the Son of God, and all this stuff about a Trinity, which really I had no idea what they were talking about. They claimed this resurrection, which made no sense to me—not that I didn't believe Jesus could rise from the dead if he were God, but I just didn't understand what possible relevance it could have. I wasn't even interested in the resurrection because I never understood what importance it was to me. No Christians ever explain that to me. They just say crazy stuff like, 'I've been washed in the blood of the lamb and now I'm saved. Jesus died for your sins. Don't you want to be saved?' Then they paint portraits of hell, all of which made zero sense to me. It's just as though someone said, 'My red balloon just popped and then candy canes fell out of the sky. Your rabbit is winking at me. Doesn't all this make you want to buy a new Nissan?'"

I'm not exaggerating. This nutshell gospel message makes absolutely no sense to a non-Christian. You just have no idea what they're excited about. So Jesus rose from the dead. Big whoop. So what? Good for him, but so what?

I don't know if you can identify with that. I think there are lots of people who've been exposed to parts of the Christian message who are like, "Yeah, my red balloon just popped and candy canes fell out of the sky. Your rabbit is winking at me. Don't you want to buy a Nissan?" It makes no sense. So what does that all mean?

Let's connect the dots really simply. His resurrection, your resurrection. What happened to Jesus will happen to you. That's it. That's the main point.

Let me read the whole passage backwards. This will make a little bit more sense than the way we read it before.

If there's a resurrection from the dead, then Christ has been raised. If Christ has been raised, then our proclamation is validated, and so is your faith. Moreover, we're found to be true witnesses about God because we have testified about God that he raised up Christ, whom he raised up, if in fact the dead are raised. For if the dead are raised, then Christ has been raised. If Christ has been raised, your faith is worth everything. You are not dead in your sins. Those then who have fallen asleep in Christ have not perished. If we have put our hope in Christ, we should be envied more than anyone.

In other words, resurrection is coming for you. What happened for Jesus will happen for you if you trust in him.

Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming is famous for its geysers. You know, the big shoot of water comes up out of the ground, especially Old Faithful. Now Old Faithful is not either the biggest geyser there nor is it the most reliable, but it's the biggest, most reliable geyser in Yellowstone. That's why it's famous. It shoots up 90 to 184 feet every 35 to 120 minutes, and it lasts about a minute and a half to five minutes. Maybe some of you have seen it.

But there's another geyser that's lesser known but much bigger. It's lesser known because it's much less reliable. You can't predict very well by itself what time the Beehive Geyser is going to go off. It goes up 150 to 200 feet in the air and lasts for forty-five minutes every time. But here's how they figured out when Beehive is going to go off.

There's a little geyser next to Beehive that's called an indicator geyser. It's a little geyser that sends up a six to fifteen foot shot of water in the air about fifteen minutes before Beehive will go off. So the National Park Service parks a volunteer right beside the indicator with a little radio. And as soon as the indicator goes off, the volunteer radios back to the ranger station and says, "Beehive is going off in fifteen minutes." They make a big announcement: "Everybody run out to go see Beehive. It's about to go off." Why? Because we know because the indicator went off.

The Resurrection as the Indicator

Here is what we celebrate today. Yes, that the resurrection is real. He is risen. You got that by now. But that Jesus' resurrection is the indicator. It's the indicator. One resurrection went off two thousand years ago in Jerusalem, and it sent shockwaves all around the world, and it's an indicator. It's the indicator that what happened to him, if your faith is in Christ, will happen to you—that your resurrection is to come.

If you know Christ, this is the hope. Right? Not just heaven or soul sleep, but true resurrection, bodily resurrection from the dead, eternal life in a real body with one another, with the Lord. No pain, no tears, no sickness, no death, no fear. This is the great hope we have. One went off two thousand years ago, the indicator. Because of that, we can know the big one's coming.

If you don't know Christ this morning, here's my invitation for you. I want to invite you to come to him. Yes, I've made this case. He is risen. But it's up to you to respond to that, to say with your life, "He is risen indeed," and that's my hope. I've been inviting you this morning to put your trust, either for the first time or the one millionth time, that the resurrection is really true, that this good news isn't too good to be true.

But even my preaching on this, our singing about this—we're just scratching the surface. We're just getting a little taste of what's really to come. Listen.

Because he was raised, you will be raised. Because death couldn't hold him, it won't hold you. Because he was raised, death does not have the final say in your life. Because he was raised, your story does not have an ending. Because he was raised, your sins, they aren't the final word. Because he was raised, this world isn't all there is. Because he was raised, sickness will be gone. Because he was raised, death will soon be over. Because he was raised, you also, like Tony Garoux, can laugh at the days to come.

Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again.

Would you pray with me? Father, we thank you that the indicator has gone off. We pray, Father, Lord, that you would overflow our hearts with the hope, the sure and steady conviction that what has happened to Jesus will happen to us. Lord, we praise you and give you thanks, Father, for this day, for all the pomp and circumstance of this day, but we know it's just a foretaste of what's to come. We pray, Father, to enter into your joy today as your people, and we pray this all in Christ's name. Amen.

Would you stand and respond to God's word in song together?