Listen, it really happened.

Steve Brown:
Listen, it really happened. Let’s talk about it on the Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
Welcome to Key Life. Our host and teacher is Steve Brown. He’s no guru, but he does have honest answers to honest questions about the Bible. God’s grace changes everything, how we love, work, live, lead, marry, parent, evangelize, purchase and worship. So here’s, Steve with street smart Bible teaching for real life.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. We, all this week, Holy Week, we’ve been talking about the cross and the people that were involved that day, when Jesus was crucified, but you can’t, you can’t ignore what happened after that, it’s called the resurrection. And, it’s the reason for the party, Luke 24.

But on the first day of the week, at early Dawn, they went to the tomb, taking this spices which they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but they went in and didn’t find the body. While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel. And as they were frightened and bowed down their faces to the ground, the men said to them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead? Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be delivered in the hands of sinful men and be crucified. And on the third day rise.” And they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb they told all of this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene and. Johanna and Mary the mother of James and the other women with them who told this to the apostles, but these words seemed to them to be an idle tale, and they didn’t believe them.

So, and you got to read the rest of the story and I don’t have time to do it, but they did eventually, because when the dead man shows up at your dinner party, you know, that’ll wake you up. I mean, that’ll mess with your mind. And Jesus had many appearances, and you know why he did that, because he was going to be with the father and he was going to send his spirit, and he wanted his disciples to get used to the idea of Jesus showing at the most surprising times, and in the most surprising places. I mean, they would meet taking a walk to Emmaus, having dinner, sitting around complaining about they’re, what had happened. Peter said, I’m going fishing. And then in those instances, Jesus shows, not an ethereal ghostly Jesus, but a Jesus who had holes in his hands you could feel and a slash in his side you could touch and food that he ate. This is real. This really happened. And the important thing about it is, that he said this,

Because I live, you will live also.

And the question then is, yeah, but how do you know what really happened? And they didn’t just make it up. Well, generally during the Holy Week broadcast of Key Life, I spend a little bit of time and I could spend weeks on this, but I spend a little bit of time looking very quickly at some of the evidence for the resurrection of Christ. In I Corinthians, the apostle Paul says, he talks about the dead rising. And then he said,

If Christ be not raised from the dead, we are above all people the most to be pitied.

That’s true. I mean, if the resurrection didn’t happen, we have a nice leader, like Buddha who was dead and buried. We have a religious leader who said nice things about God, but that’s all we’ve got because he’s dead. But if that dead man got up and walked, if he said we could too, if he talked about forgiveness and love and redemption, we’ve got the most amazing and exciting story that has ever been told. But the question and I moved the previous question is how, how do we know it happened? Well, some things, if Jesus remained dead, how do you explain the testimony of the disciples. If you had lived in the first century and then taken the time to look, you would’ve seen tears, the tears of the disciples at the crucifixion, everything they believed in and had given their lives to was now in ashes at their feet. If Jesus had not come back from the dead, Matthew would have gone back to the tax tables, Peter back to his fishing, the disciples would have been sadder, but wiser men. Later on gathering in the upper room, they were scared. If they did it to Jesus, they knew that the leaders could do it to them too. And then something happened and there’s no explanation for it, except the resurrection. Let me ask you a question. If you’d made up a lie and you knew that every time you told that lie, you were driving a nail into your own coffin, would you insist on that lie? Are you crazy? No, you wouldn’t. You’d say, Hey guys, it was a joke, we made it up, that’s what happened to the disciples. You know, they all died, except John, and he, he would have preferred death to being on that Island where he was in prison as an old man. I mean, Bartholomew was run through with a sword. Another disciple was hacked to pieces. Peter was crucified upside down. And all they had to say was, it didn’t happen. You know, we liked Jesus a lot and we wanted to keep his memory alive. So we. So we got together and we, it didn’t happen, so just leave us alone. Not one, not one single disciple denied it. You know why they didn’t deny it, because they had seen a dead man walking. That’s why they didn’t deny it. They had actually been with Jesus. They had touched him. They had eaten with him. They had talked to him. He had taught them. They knew, and they were willing to face their own deaths. And in some cases horrible deaths, because they knew they had seen Jesus. And frankly, you cannot explain that, except with the resurrection. What about the teaching of the disciples, that it was check able. We’re very provincial in our time. We think that we’re the only culture that ever had doubts, that the other primitive cultures, like ancient Biblical culture, there were doubts and, you know, they believed a lot of silly things that we more sophisticated and educated don’t believe anymore. Nonsense. Listen, nobody, I don’t care when they lived would talk much about a dead man getting out of a grave, if, and, and it had to be verifiable. In one case in Corinthians, Paul says there were a 500 people who saw Jesus after his death. Not one denied it. I mean, they also, now look, if one person comes into your house and says, I was down at the graveyard and I saw a dead man got out of the grave, you’re going to say, listen, drink a lot of water, get over the hang over you’re going to have, cause you’re drunk as a skunk, but, but if two come, you’re going to think they’re doing a joke. If ten tell you that, it’s a conspiracy. If 500 come, you’ll at least make the journey to the graveyard to check it out. And they did that in the first century too. I mean, the facts were examined and the testimony of those who had seen him held up in court, the court of popular, that’s why the church grew so very fast, so early, because it really happened. And then you’ve got another problem, you know, never did the death of anybody in the history of humankind, cause as much trouble for leaders than the death of Jesus. They finally had settled this stuff, this Jesus stuff with all the people following him, they had killed him and he was dead and they wanted to make sure that he stayed that way. And, they had vested interests, the religious leaders. And in fact, the governmental leaders had vested interest in making sure that people knew they had won and Jesus had lost, that Jesus was in the tomb, and they were walking around. And they had a very simple way to prove that, you know, all they had to do was go down to the graveyard and dig him up, then produce the corpse and say, just shut up. You don’t, you know, he’s dead as a door nail. All they had to do was to go to the tomb, get the body and let people see the body, and the argument would have been settled, but they didn’t. They didn’t produce a corpse, why do you suspect they didn’t produce a corpse? Cause there wasn’t one, that’s why. If there had been one, they would have produced one. Jesus got up from the dead and he was no longer a corpse. And the resurrection, when you look at the evidence, is so clear that it blows you away. You know, I could go on and on. A lot has been written on this. But there’s more evidence for the resurrection of Christ than there is for the life of Julius Caesar. I mean, God did that for us. He said, I’m going to give you one thing you can stand on, an anchor, something that is provable and understandable and real and not a myth. It’s a story. A story that became reality, when a dead man really got out of the grave. And there’s one other argument, and that would be you. And that would be me. There is no explanation for the Christian Church, that would be your faith and my faith in the risen Christ, who has become our brother and our friend. So, Happy Easter. He’s risen. He’s risen indeed. Key Life as a listener supported production of Key Life Network.