The words to the hymn go, “I serve a Living Savior, He’s in the world today. He lives, He lives, Christ Jesus lives today.” Do you really believe these words? I mean, do you REALLY believe these words? Are these words a part of your life every day and not just on this particular Sunday?
Is it really necessary to believe in these words in order to truly call yourself a Christian? Or, as some theological scholars are telling us today, is it possible to be a Christian and deny the physical, bodily resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ?
Well, let’s go to the Apostle Paul and hear what he has to say in his scripture writings about this subject. Keep in mind, as we hear his words, that prior to his encounter with the Living Christ on the road to Damascus, Paul was known as Saul. Saul was one of the biggest persecutors of Christians and their faith that the world has ever known. In fact, he was on his way to Damascus with a letter giving him authority to round up and kill, if necessary, every Christian man, woman and child in the area, if they would not denounce their belief in Christ Jesus! He had been present at the stoning to death of Stephen and was on his way to cause more suffering and death when Jesus Himself appeared to him and changed Saul’s life for all eternity.
Saul, now Paul, knew the reality, the truth and the importance of Christ’s resurrection to the survival of the Christian faith, and more importantly, to the eternal reality of all Christian souls. Hear his words: Read 1 Corinthians 15:12-19.
In these passages, the Apostle Paul is saying that if Jesus Christ has not been raised from the dead, if the resurrection that we celebrate today never happened, then we may as well pack up and go home right now, put a “For Sale” sign up on this church property. We can then spend our Sundays mowing grass, washing cars or anything other than coming to church, because our worship would then be in vain. Even worse than that, we would have been committing the sin of bearing false witness to others about God. We would have been witnessing to people that God had indeed raised Jesus from the dead and God would also raise us from the dead to live with Him in Heaven. Paul is telling us that the Resurrection is, in fact, the cornerstone of the Christian faith, and if it never happened, then our faith falls like a house of cards! There you have it.
Are we wasting our time here in this place on Sundays? Are we, as Paul says, “to be pitied more than all other men” because we have placed our faith and hope in an event that has never taken place? Are we, again as Paul says, “still dead in our sins”? Or is it all true? Was there really an “empty tomb” on that first Easter morning? What really happened to the body? Did Jesus truly, bodily rise from the dead? Let’s examine the evidence. (Yes, for all of you skeptics out there, there was, and is, evidence.)
Question #1 – Was the tomb empty? We need to begin here, for if the tomb was occupied by the dead body of Christ when the women got there early on the first Easter morning, then we need go no further.
Why were the women going to the tomb in the first place? Well, it has to do with the Jewish burial rites and customs. In those days the Egyptians embalmed and mummified their dead. The Romans and Greeks cremated their dead. But the Jews did neither of these. Instead, they would carefully wrap the dead body in strips of linen, within which there would be about a hundred pounds of dried, perfumed spices and a glue-like mixture of myrrh and other spices. They would wrap the body from the feet to the top of the shoulders with these strips. The head would be wrapped separately with a special cloth that went under the chin and over the top of the head, in order to keep the jaws closed. Finally, the head would be wrapped in a turban-like cloth with the face left exposed.
John explains in chapter 19, verses 38-42, that Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus began that process. But because it was so close to sundown on the Sabbath, they did not have time to complete the task. So the women were headed to the tomb on the morning after the Sabbath day to finish the job. However, when they arrived at the tomb, they found the large 2,000 pound stone rolled away and the tomb empty! Jesus was gone! It is here that we need to fully understand something very, very important. It is this; the fact that the tomb was found to be empty was never even once disputed at the time of the event! No one tried to say that Jesus’ body was still there in the tomb when the women arrived there. He was indeed gone!
Secondly, it would be hard to mistake the place where Jesus had been laid, since His tomb was the one surrounded by Roman guards.
Thirdly, if they were indeed at the wrong tomb and began starting rumors that Jesus had risen from the dead, all the Jewish leaders would have had to do would have been to take people to the correct tomb and show them that Jesus’ body was still there. Since this did not happen, we are left with the undeniable fact that the tomb was indeed, empty!
Okay, the tomb was empty. But what happened to Jesus’ body? Well, the angel told the women, “He is not here. He is risen, just as He said!” For over 2,000 years now, many people have tried and tried to prove that statement false. Several theories have been put forth through the years to explain the disappearance of Jesus from the tomb. The following are the only even remotely possible explanations of what happened. The possibilities are:
“The Roman elite guard fell asleep and the disciples stole the body.” This is actually the very first explanation that came about immediately after the Jewish religious leaders learned of the disappearance of Jesus from the tomb. (Please note that some people in later times, and still today, argued that the guards were never there in the first place. In reality, that fact was never disputed at the time of the event. Immediately after the disappearance of the body, the argument was never whether or not the guards were present at the tomb. The argument was whether or not they had fallen asleep.)
It is very important to understand that these elite Roman guards took their work extremely seriously. They were very, very good at what they did. There would have been about 16 guards at the tomb, set up in four groups of four. Each guard was personally responsible to see that the tomb remained sealed and the body stayed where it was placed. (As a matter of fact, the women would have had a very difficult time gaining entrance into the tomb to finish the burial preparation, had it been necessary to do so.) For each of the Roman guards to fail at his assigned task would mean facing execution by crucifixion for dereliction of duty. That being the case, can you really believe that all 16 of these crack troops fell asleep on duty? Even if that had indeed happened, then can you really believe that not one of them woke up at the sound of a stone, weighing almost 2,000 pounds, being rolled up a ramp in order to open the tomb entrance?
I find that it takes more “faith” to believe that, than it does to believe Matthew’s account in his Gospel (chapter 28, verses 12-16). He tells us that the chief priests paid the soldiers to “say that they had fallen asleep”. Thereby the religious authorities would “satisfy the governor” if the story of their dereliction of duty got back to him, so that the soldiers would not get into trouble.
Well, as you see, under close examination, that explanation of the “missing” body doesn’t hold water. So some people came up with another explanation that says, “The Roman authorities or the Jewish religious leaders removed Jesus’ body from the tomb.”
Again, this is easily dismissed due to the lack of any viable purpose in either instance. The Romans could not have cared less about Jesus. But the Jews stealing the body would have done nothing but stir up the exact trouble they had been trying to avoid from the beginning. They could have done it for a cruel joke, I guess. But as soon as the Disciples would have begun to stir up people with the story of Jesus’ Resurrection, the Jewish leaders would have produced His body and shut things down. Again, we know that this did not happen. The Jewish leaders did not produce Jesus’ body, because the Jewish Leaders did not have Jesus’ body to produce. And so, explanation number two falls by the wayside under its own weight.
Let’s look now at the third possibility from the mind of man. “Jesus was not dead when He was taken down from the cross.” Of all of the “possible and reasonable” explanations of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ that man has come up with, this one is the easiest to refute. It goes like this: “Jesus was not dead as He hung there on the cross. He had just fainted. After He had been taken down from the cross and placed in the tomb, the cool night air revived Him and He let Himself out of the tomb. Thus He was able to fake being resurrected from the dead.”
Let’s look at the facts. We have a man who had been tortured and severely beaten for several hours in the middle of the night. Then He was flogged within an inch of His life with a whip interwoven with sharp stones and metal that literally ripped flesh from His bones with each stroke. Next, He was nailed to a ragged, wooden cross and hung there in the hot sun for about six hours. Finally, in order to make sure that He was indeed dead, a Roman soldier pierced Jesus’ side with a spear that most certainly went through His already still heart. The Roman elite soldiers knew how to kill and, according to John’s Gospel, when the soldier pierced Jesus’ side with his spear a mixture of “blood and water flowed from Jesus’ wound.”
Friends, John was a fisherman, not a doctor. But even if he had been a doctor, the knowledge did not exist at that time to explain what John described as “blood and water” flowing from Jesus’ side. When we die, our blood begins to separate into the dark plasma and the lighter, clearer serum. That is what John saw pour out from the wound in the side of the already dead Jesus. It is, in fact, irrefutable medical proof that Jesus was in fact dead at that time! He was dead. Not swooning. Not fainted. Dead!
Even if Jesus had somehow survived all of the torture, the crucifixion, and the spear thrust, He would have been in horrible condition. How could He have then gotten free from about 100 pounds of cloth interwoven with spices and then rolled that pesky 1,000 to 2,000 pound stone back up the slanted ramp to let Himself out?
And if He somehow accomplished that much, how did He get past those Roman guards who were charged, under the penalty of their own suffering and death, with the responsibility of making sure He stayed where He had been placed? (Oh yes, I forgot. They had fallen asleep.) And if He had managed everything we have said up to that point, would He have left His clothing behind? Please! This explanation may be the most ludicrous of them all.
This brings us to the last (and I believe the most plausible) explanation of them all, i.e., “Jesus rose from the dead, just as He said He would, in fulfillment of prophecy as the Messiah, God the Son.” Yes, I believe that Jesus Christ is exactly Who He says He is, and did exactly what He said He would do.
We have looked at the four most possible explanations of the empty tomb, and I believe that after careful examination of each of the explanations, there is only one that makes sense at all. Three of the explanations are simply not believable. They cannot hold up against close scrutiny. The only one conclusion that makes sense is that Jesus rose from the dead on the third day, exactly as he said He would, and He is alive and reigning with God the Father in Heaven today.
We may not be able to understand how it all happened, but nonetheless, it is true. Jesus says, “I AM the Resurrection and the Life.” Unfortunately, there are still many people who do not wish to believe the truth. They are still trying to come up with a different explanation for the Resurrection of our Lord. They even go so far as to say that the disciples got together and “cooked up” this resurrection story in order to start their own religion. The question to ask people like that is this: “What did the disciples expect to gain from starting a fake religion, knowing they would be tortured, suffer and most probably die for it?” Folks, people may suffer and die for a lie that they believe. We see it happening around the world today, with all of the suicide-bombings, with the hijackers of the planes of September 11, 2001, and with those who are killing others simply because of their Jewish or Christian beliefs. But there are very, very few who will die for a lie that they know to be a lie.
If the disciples had made up the whole story, then somewhere down the line of suffering, someone would surely have admitted the lie in order to save their own life. Yet all of the Disciples except John, who was left to die on the desolate island of Patmos, died horrible, agonizing deaths.
The evidence is overwhelming. The cornerstone of our faith, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, is truly beyond doubt.
Earlier I read to you part of Paul’s letter to the Corinthian Church on the matter. Hear now the rest of the scripture passage: Read 1 Corinthians 15:20-27a.
The hymn says, “He lives! He lives! Christ Jesus lives today!” In His death and Resurrection lies the future for all who believe on Him, and for all who do not. For you see, Christianity is either for everyone, or it is for no one! For over 2,000 years now, people have been trying to explain away the cross and the empty tomb. They have not. They can not. They will not. The truth is, the Truth is!
I submit to you now that I believe that the empty tomb and the empty cross are not completely empty. For you see, in the “empty” tomb, Jesus left evidence that He had once been there, dead. But He defeated death and left the tomb forever.
Now, I want you to visualize the cross that Jesus hung upon. If you look closely enough:
I want to end with the words of the song that Dave and I did a short while ago. Listen and hear: “He is risen! He is risen! Our Lord is risen today! There are linens with bloodstains, that is all that remains. There’s nobody left in that grave!” Amen!