I have always loved the Easter story and the time of year to celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. My family and I have done this for years, despite the secularisation and commercialisation of the holy days. The Resurrection of Christ is the one of the most important beliefs of the Christian faith. It has been called ‘the grand event of the ages’; the single event towards which all previous history moved, and in which all subsequent history finds its meaning. The story of it has plowed through the centuries, and changed the face of the earth and affected the lives of millions of people.
But, did Jesus Christ really rise from the dead? If He did not, what became of His body? If enemies stole it, they surely would have produced it, for they stopped short of nothing to discredit the story, even murdering those who told it. If friends stole it, they would then have known that they were believing in a lie, but men do not become martyrs for what they know to be false.
One thing is certain – those who first published the story that Jesus had risen from the dead believed it to be a fact. They rested their faith, not only on the empty tomb, but on the fact that they themselves had actually seen Jesus alive after His burial, not once, not twice, but at least ten recorded times, and not alone either, but in groups of two, seven, ten, eleven, five hundred.
Could it possibly have been a hallucination? Could it not have been a dream? Could it not simply have been the result of an excited imagination? Perhaps it was an apparition. But different groups of people do not keep on seeing the same hallucination. 500 people in a crowd would not all dream the same dream at the same time.
In fact, a number of folk, even followers of Christ, considered the account of the resurrection to be an “idle tale” at first (Luke 24:11) and they did not believe it until they had to. Many have tried to argue that Jesus was not actually dead but in a state of unconsciousness when they buried Him, and that He regained consciousness again.
In that case, weak, wounded and exhausted, He could scarcely have removed the heavy stone door and gotten out of the tomb and done the many things He is reported to have done. Besides, He had new powers that He had never manifested before – to appear and disappear through locked doors. The eleven, in a group, personally saw Him slowly rise from the earth and disappear behind the clouds at the Ascension.
Others have claimed that the records were likely tampered with. Could it not be that the resurrection was a later addition to the story of Christ, invented years later to glorify a dead hero? It is known, from historical records outside the Scriptures, that the sect known as Christians came into existence in the reign of Tiberius, and that the very thing that brought them into existence was their belief that Jesus had risen from the dead.
The resurrection was not a later addition to the Christian faith, but the very cause and start of it. They rested their faith, not on records, but on what they had seen with their own eyes. The records were the result of their faith, not the cause of it. If there had been no resurrection, there would have been no New Testament Scripture, and no Church. What a crown of glory this simple belief sheds on human life. Our hope of resurrection and life everlasting is based, not on a philosophic guess about immortality, but on historical fact.
A Prayer:
Father God, I thank you for the undisputable fact of the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead. Help us all to walk by faith in the Power of the Resurrection by your Holy Spirit.
Amen.
