Last night my wife and I finished a T.V. series called the Mentalist. Years ago we started watching the series, but with life, we got too busy and never finished it. Recently we were given the opportunity to go back, so we did. The main story throughout the show was that Patrick Jane was a Sherlock Holmes type of character, except before the show begins, he acted as a psychic. He was so good at fooling people to believe that he was a psychic that his hubris led to his wife and daughter being killed at the hands of a serial killer named Red John. The show picks up several years later and spends the next five and half seasons working that story out. Spoilers, eventually they take down the guy and the show shifts to Jane working for the FBI. In the final three episodes, again spoiler, a new serial killer comes on the scene. This killer is looking to communicate with the dead, is calling himself Lazarus, and captures Jane who had put on his old psychic persona to coax the killer out.
What I find interesting about the final three episodes is that it hits on this idea that permeates throughout cultures. That idea is the afterlife. What happens when we die? Where will we go? Is it like the naturalist say, and we’ll just be dust? Or is there something beyond this mortal veil?
It’s this idea of addressing the hereafter that brings us back to our series of four arguments for the existence of God. Where we’ll be concluding our series by beginning in 1st Corinthians 15.
And as we open up to 1st Corinthians 15, let’s quickly go over the last three weeks. In our first week we talked about a cosmological argument for the existence of God called the Kalam argument. That argument holds three premises: Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. The universe has a cause. From those three premises, we concluded that the cause of the universe has to be separate from it, so the cause must be spaceless, timeless, and immaterial. All things that the God of the Bible claims.
However, we also talked about how the cause must be intelligent, which led us into our second argument which was the Fine-Tuning of the Universe. Which basically is understood as, the universe is so perfect for life to happen, that it appears to be created. We shared several quotes by atheists who affirmed this perceived fine-tuning, that if just one aspect of this universe was changed, life as we know it could not happen. Our conclusion was that the God of the Bible also claims to be the one who created this universe with the purpose of filling it with a creation he could interact with.
Then last week, Pastor Tony shared with us the Moral Argument. In this argument we talked about, not if something was right or wrong, but rather, where does our foundation for morals come from. It was shown that without God to give us an objective moral standard, the standard falls to us, and becomes relative to our own desires. But in that scenario, any common morals that we might share, have at their core an ever shifting self-centeredness that has no true objective foundation on which to rest. The conclusion was that the God of the Bible claims to be the foundation of goodness, and by his standard do we can have an objective view of what is moral.
At the beginning of this series, I stated that each of these arguments, left on their own, merely point us to a god in the general sense. But what we also showed each week, was that the God of the Bible claims to be the Creator of the universe, that he is the Creator of a fined tuned universe, and that the God of the Bible claims to be the source from which all morality has it’s foundation.
It is here that we’re going to shift our focus from the general arguments of the existence of God, to the more specific, argument for the Christian God. And we’re going to do this through the resurrection of Jesus. Because it’s in the resurrection of Jesus that the whole of the Christian message rests. Now there are other arguments for the Christian God, like the argument from history and prophecy, but it’s the resurrection which is at the core of the Christian faith. So it’s one argument that we need to be able to make.
It is here where we pick up Paul’s words in 1st Corinthians 15, starting in verse 3.
3 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. 6 After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8 and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.
9 For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. 10 But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. 11 Whether, then, it is I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.
12 But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13 If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. 14 And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. 15 More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. 16 For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. 17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. 19 If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
Paul binds the credibility and the future of Christianity to the moment in time where Jesus rose from the dead. So this is the premise of the argument. If the resurrection happened, then every argument we have made is true. If the resurrection didn’t happen, then either the God of the Bible isn’t the true God, or there is no God at all.
So for the Argument of the Resurrection, I’m going to give you five points that go into building this argument for the existence of the Christian God:
First, Jesus is a real historical person. This is the foundation of the argument because there are people that don’t believe Jesus even existed. But in his article, “An Atheist Historian Examines the Evidence for Jesus,” Tim O’Neill argues that, “Scholars who specialize in the origins of Christianity agree on very little, but they do generally agree that it is most likely that a historical preacher, on whom the Christian figure ‘Jesus Christ’ is based, did exist. The numbers of professional scholars, out of the many thousands in this and related fields, who don't accept this consensus, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Many may be more cautious about using the term ‘historical fact’ about this idea, since as with many things in ancient history it is not quite as certain as that. But it is generally regarded as the best and most parsimonious explanation of the evidence and therefore the most likely conclusion that can be drawn (https://strangenotions.com/an-atheist-historian-examines-the-evidence-for-jesus-part-1-of-2/).”
In other words, Tim O’Neill is saying that the vast majority of scholars, from all backgrounds, including atheists, agnostics, and Jewish, conclude that there was a Jesus in the first century on which the Christian religion is based.
This is important, because there are a lot of internet blogs, YouTubers, and writings out there that say that Jesus wasn’t even a historical figure. But the evidence is not on their side, because the vast majority of all scholars that specialize in early Christianity, agree that Jesus was a real historical figure.
Second, Jesus was crucified. As believers, we can take for granted the knowledge that Jesus was crucified, but there are people that do not believe this. But in his book, The Resurrection of Christ, atheist scholar Gerd Ludemann, wrote, “Jesus’ death as a consequence of crucifixion is indisputable.”
Another New Testament scholar named John Dominic Crossan was part of the group called the Jesus Seminar. That group’s sole mission was to separate the miraculous Jesus from the historical one. Crossan wrote, “Jesus’ death by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate is as sure as anything historical event can ever be. For if no follower of Jesus had written anything for one hundred years after his crucifixion we would still know about him from two authors not among his supporters. Their names are Flavius Josephus and Cornelius Tacitus.”
Jesus’ death on the cross is agreed upon as one of the most attested to and historically accurate events in all of human history. Even great moments such as Julias Caesar crossing the Rubicon River, or the life of the military leader Hannibal, do not have the same historical clout of Jesus’ crucification.
Third, the tomb was historically empty. Skeptic D. H. Van Daalen states, in one of his last articles entitled, “Resurrection of Jesus - the great mystery, leading people to believe in the Easter message today.” writes “…it is extremely difficult to object to the empty tomb on historical grounds; those who deny it do so on the basis of theological or philosophical assumptions…From the differing and in part unharmonizable, even contradictory, data about the discovery of the empty tomb it can at most be inferred that the tomb on Easter morning was probably empty, but nothing more.”
Daalen is saying that at the very least we know that the tomb was empty. But that’s where he stops. In other words, even skeptics who deny that Jesus raised from the dead, agree that the tomb in which he was put in after his crucifixion was empty. So as far as historians are concerned, the tomb was empty when the disciples looked upon it on that first Easter morning.
Fourth, there were eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ resurrection. Again Gerd Ludemann the atheist German scholar, wrote, “It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ (What Really Happened to Jesus?).” But it wasn’t just to his disciples the Jesus appeared. James, Jesus’ half-brother who was a skeptic, and Paul the persecutor of Jesus’ disciples, who were both adverse to Jesus, but both confirmed that they saw Jesus’ resurrected.
C.S. Lewis wrote this, “The first fact in the history of Christendom is a number of people who say they have seen the Resurrection (Joyful Christian).”
These eyewitness accounts are what Paul in 1st Corinthians 15:5-9 references. And it is verses 3 and 4 that we get the earliest creedal mention of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Atheist scholars Gerd Ludemaan (The Resurrection of Jesus, trans. by Bowden [Fortress, 1994], 171-72.) and Michael Goulder (“The Baseless Fabric of a Vision,” in Gavin D’Costa, editor, Resurrection Reconsidered [Oneworld, 1996], 48.), and Non-Christian scholars Robert Funk (Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Acts of Jesus, 466.) and A.J.M. Wedderburn (Beyond Resurrection [Hendrickson, 1999], 113-114.), all agree that what Paul is referencing here is a creed that was developed within the first two years of the Christian faith. The early Christians believed they saw Jesus resurrected and they shared it everywhere.
Finally, the response of the disciples. The resurrection event radically changed the lives of the early disciples. New Testament scholar and former priest Luke Johnson, wrote in his book, The Real Jesus, “Some sort of powerful, transformative experience is required to generate the sort of movement earliest Christianity was." This is why other New Testament scholars like N.T. Wright, though not an atheist nor a skeptic, end up concluding, “That is why, as a historian, I cannot explain the rise of early Christianity unless Jesus rose again, leaving an empty tomb behind him ("The New Unimproved Jesus," Christianity Today).”
Eleven of the Apostles died through martyrdom. The only apostle not to die this way was John, who got off with being boiled in oil and exiled. Not only these original disciples, but also both the skeptic James, and the persecutor turned disciple Paul, died as martyrs believing that they saw Jesus resurrected.
Walking through the evidence given in this argument, former L.A. cold case detective and former atheist J. Warner Wallace concluded, “In the end, I came to the conclusion that the gospels were reliable eyewitness accounts that delivered accurate information about Jesus, including His crucifixion and Resurrection. But that created a problem for me. If Jesus really was who He said He was, then Jesus was God Himself. If Jesus truly did what the gospel eyewitnesses recorded, then Jesus is still God Himself.”
This is what all of these arguments boil down to: is Jesus who he says he is? Is Jesus the one who claims to be the Creator? Is he the one who claims to be the source of Morality? If Jesus was truly resurrected, as seems to be the best explanation of the historical case, then the question we must ask ourselves is, am I not accepting Jesus as Savior because of the evidence, or because of what I would have to now change because of who Jesus is?
A while back I read an article from a pastor who was speaking to a man about this very issue. Listen to what the pastor wrote, “Recently, I spoke with a man who had heard the story of Jesus and the resurrection several times in his life. Yet, this man seemed deeply defensive, even hostile, to the idea of becoming a Christian himself. I pointed out to my friend that he seemed not merely to disagree with the Gospel message, but also prone to attack it. I asked him why this was so. After a quiet pause, he answered, ‘Okay, Scott, I’ll tell you the truth. I’ll tell you the real reason why I dislike Christianity. It’s not because the evidence is unconvincing to me. In fact, the opposite is true. But I still don’t ever want to become a Christian because if I do, Jesus will ask me to forgive my father for the ways that he hurt me (https://scottsauls.com/blog/2019/04/21/intelligentatheistschristians/).'”
And this is the real crux of the situation. No argument will ever make someone who is opposed to Christ accept him. The last four weeks was not given to you so that you can win debates, but that you can fulfill the mandate of 1 Peter 3:15, “… but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect …” The arguments of the Kalam, the Fine-Tuning of the universe, the foundation on which Morality rests, nor the historical reality of the Resurrection, will ever transform a person from death to life. They are merely there as a resource to use to break down barriers when questions are raised against the Gospel. However coming to Christ is not a merely mental exercise, it’s a heart laid down willing to Jesus. It’s someone coming to a point of conviction by the Holy Spirit over their need for a Savior. Arguments, like the ones given these past four weeks, push aside the excuses not to believe and make way for people to struggle against the real issue of unwillingness to trust Jesus. This is why we must live holy, loving lives, honoring Christ, being gentle and respectful as we point others to the Savior who Created the world, whom we get our morality and who gave himself as a sacrifice so that his creation may be redeemed.
Our jobs are to witness about Jesus, by giving answers, but usually the questions come as we live out Jesus’ holiness in front of other people. We must live loving God and loving people. That carries with it helping people when we won’t get anything in return. It means forgiving people when they slight us. It means not gossiping about others or tearing them down. And it means when we do not live up to the standard of Christ, we ask for fogginess of those we have sinned against; humbling ourselves to honor our Savior.
When our lives seek to honor Christ, conversations are easier to have, which gives us ability to share the arguments. These merely aid us in removing the mental road blocks that people use to keep from getting to their heart. When the those are removed and no excuses remain, the person now has to struggle with Jesus on the heart level, which is a more honest place to be.
Now I want to challenge you, on two fronts. First, if you do not believe in Jesus, what is holding you back? Is it that the arguments are not convincing, because we only covered four, and there are many more. Or is it that what Jesus desires from you just seems to be to high a price? We must wrestle with both, because if Jesus is who he says he is, then the decision we make to either follow him or not is an eternal decision. If you have questions or want more information Pastor Tony and myself are willing to sit with you and go deeper.
Second, if you do believe in Jesus, then I want to challenge you to research the historicity of the resurrection. Looking into the points we’ve made today. And then, at Jesus’ resurrected feet, fall down and worship him.
Because if Jesus is truly raised from the dead, then he is, as Napoleon stated, “no mere man.” Jesus is indeed the Good Creator God that left his throne to die on a cross for the sins that we commit. He has taken our place for the punishment of those sins, and now invites us into a relationship with him, where all is forgiven, and new life awaits, both now and into eternity. Amen
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