If Jesus Is Dead
Waking the Dead, part 1
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
April 18, 2009
I got a startling email from a friend of mine not long ago. None of you would know this person, and that’s why I’m going to share this. Still I’m going to change his name and call him Tom. Before I read to you a portion of this email, I want to give you a little background. Tom was raised in the church, as was I. Like me, Tom grew up asking a lot of questions, and doubting a lot of what he was told at various times. Like me, Tom is still hungry for truth and asking hard questions. Like me, Tom went through a crisis of faith where he questioned everything he had grown up believing, and shuffled off most of it. Unlike me, Tom never returned to God. Whereas my questions and my journey ultimately led me back to God, Tom’s – for now – have led him away.
Now I want to read you a snippet of this email Tom sent me a while back. He and I were trying to wrestle honestly with what it means to believe what we believe. I had shared some things with him about what it means to choose to believe in God, and he was working through some of what it means not to. Before I read, please realize how precious it is to find someone willing to be honest about the implications of what they believe, especially when they lead to where Tom’s beliefs have led him. Tom is that rare individual willing to take faith seriously, even though right now he can’t find a way to appropriate it for himself. My hope tonight is to treat his words and struggles with respect, and to not take them out of context. But I want to open a window for you on his concerns because in this snippet he addresses the question, What if there’s no God. What if all this is just something people made up? What if Jesus isn’t raised but still rotting in the ground somewhere? Well, what if? Here’s what he wrote to me. He writes:
I have personally struggled with the extremes of the meaningless of life on one end and "if this is all there is then I need to really grab hold" on the other - which is as you say exactly what happens when someone gets to a place where I am. I have read and read and read...philosophy, science, Bible, (also Lee Strobel’s books)....and I’m not confident in my assertion that God is not personal… if people like me (who have serious doubts about the book of Genesis) think that there was no original sin and no chosen people (Israelites) where the Messiah would arise then it leads to substantial doubts about the divinity of Jesus...and the need for Jesus. And then when someone like me starts to think that while Jesus was a good man but not the Son of God...well, it’s a slippery path to start questioning and doubting everything....eternity, etc. And I think you are exactly right...mankind is aware of our impending death and yet we all seem to have this inkling that there must be something more.
Again, I really enjoyed your responses...and appreciate the time you took to reply....if I really want to make my head explode I will contemplate whether it was a coincidence that I was able to get into a discussion thread with you and that thread discussed the nature of God…or if it was something beyond coincidence which is what my friend [who is] an associate pastor…said would happen when I told him that I no longer believed in a personal God last year.
Another email in that same conversation, Tom told me “I don’t know what to tell my children about why they are here.” Now there’s some honesty for you.
What is the Christian’s story? Daddy, why am I here? The Christian can say to their children, “Because God created you. God knew you before time began. Once upon a time, God knit you together inside of your mommy. God knows everything about you and takes joy in the fact that you are alive and that you are mine.” I can say to my teenagers, “Don’t forget who you are, girls. You are far more than you seem! You are a divinely created spiritual being, with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe. You are never going to die – not ever. You are immortal.”
What is the atheist’s story, if he were to just blurt it out honestly? Daddy, why am I here? “Well sweetheart, you are an accident. Not just an accident between me and your mom – I mean an accident in every sense of the word. There is no meaning to your life, except for the love you bring to your mom and me and your siblings and friends. You, and me, and your mommy are all random collections of atoms and molecules. One day I will die and you will never see me again. And then one day you will die too, and that will be the end of you.”
That is the atheist, naturalist, materialist story. That there is no God, and Jesus was just another guy (like Tom said), and that somebody venturing into his tomb 50 years after his death would have found his bones – or at least been able to find them somewhere, if not in the tomb. Ultimately there is no hope. Tom was honest enough to admit that.
Here’s what it comes down to, from my perspective as a Christ-follower. If Christ is still dead, the universe doesn’t make sense. If there is no God, if Jesus is dead, and the atheist, materialist, naturalist story is true, then life is a contradiction. I’m going to show you that, but to show you that I need to take you on a bit of a journey, intellectually. I won’t get too complicated or too boring, and I promise you that if you’ll stay with me, you’ll be rewarded greatly by the insights you’ll receive on the journey. I want you to get a fuller picture of why Christians believe that if Jesus is dead the world doesn’t make sense. The Apostle Paul understood this years ago when he wrote:
1 Corinthians 15:12-20 (MSG)
12 Now, let me ask you something profound yet troubling. If you became believers because you trusted the proclamation that Christ is alive, risen from the dead, how can you let people say that there is no such thing as a resurrection?
13 If there’s no resurrection, there’s no living Christ.
14 And face it—if there’s no resurrection for Christ, everything we’ve told you is smoke and mirrors, and everything you’ve staked your life on is smoke and mirrors.
15 Not only that, but we would be guilty of telling a string of barefaced lies about God, all these affidavits we passed on to you verifying that God raised up Christ—sheer fabrications, if there’s no resurrection.
16 If corpses can’t be raised, then Christ wasn’t, because he was indeed dead.
17 And if Christ wasn’t raised, then all you’re doing is wandering about in the dark, as lost as ever.
18 It’s even worse for those who died hoping in Christ and resurrection, because they’re already in their graves.
19 If all we get out of Christ is a little inspiration for a few short years, we’re a pretty sorry lot.
20 But the truth is that Christ has been raised up, the first in a long legacy of those who are going to leave the cemeteries.
1 Corinthians 15:30-32 (MSG)
30 And why do you think I keep risking my neck in this dangerous work?
31 I look death in the face practically every day I live. Do you think I’d do this if I wasn’t convinced of your resurrection and mine as guaranteed by the resurrected Messiah Jesus?
32 Do you think I was just trying to act heroic when I fought the wild beasts at Ephesus, hoping it wouldn’t be the end of me? Not on your life! It’s resurrection, resurrection, always resurrection, that undergirds what I do and say, the way I live. If there’s no resurrection, "We eat, we drink, the next day we die," and that’s all there is to it.
Indeed he is right. If there’s no resurrection, we eat, we drink, and we die. There is no meaning to life – it doesn’t make sense.
Everyone wants the universe, and their lives, to make sense. Psychologists tell us that as people get older they begin to kind of mentally write out a narrative of their lives. In other words we try to piece our lives into a story that makes sense. We have a deep need to make sense of things – to know why we are here and what our lives were for. This need grows stronger as we age and accumulate experiences that become more pieces we need to somehow keep fitting into the larger whole. Now when I say everyone wants their lives to make sense, I don’t just mean Christians. I mean literally almost everyone. The desire for life to matter runs deep in human society. Indeed, science itself is an attempt to make sense out of the universe. The problem is that science says, “We’ve reached a point where we have realized that the universe is random. It happened by chance – by accident – so there is no purpose behind it.” Science, which originally started out to make sense of the universe around us, has concluded that the universe itself does not make sense. They have concluded this, but of course any conclusion – even the conclusion that the universe doesn’t make sense –can only be reached confidently if the universe DOES make sense. Because experiments and logic and mathematics (the tools science uses to make conclusions) can only work and be reliable in a universe that makes sense. To use the tools of order and logic and sense to conclude that the universe is chaotic and disorderly and senseless defies logic! So how do intelligent scientists come up with this? We’ll look at that in a second, but first let’s look at what Christians believe about Jesus, because in the Christian understanding, when we are talking about logic and reason, we are talking about Christ.
Col 1:15-20 (The Message)
15We look at this Son and see the God who cannot be seen. We look at this Son and see God’s original purpose in everything created. 16For everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible, rank after rank after rank of angels—everything got started in him and finds its purpose in him. 17He was there before any of it came into existence and holds it all together right up to this moment…From beginning to end he’s there, towering far above everything, everyone. 19So spacious is he, so roomy, that everything of God finds its proper place in him without crowding. 20Not only that, but all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe—people and things, animals and atoms—get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the cross.
Ac 17:28 (NIV)
28‘For in him we live and move and have our being…’
Col 2:9 (The Message)
… You don’t need a telescope, a microscope, or a horoscope to realize the fullness of Christ, and the emptiness of the universe without him.
1 Co 1:30 (The Message)
30Everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ. (emphasis Dave’s)
Jn 1:1-5 (NASB95)
1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was in the beginning with God. 3All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. 4In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. 5The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.
Years ago I preached on what John was saying here when he referred to Jesus as the “Word.” That English word “Word,” is translated from the Greek logos. Logos does not simply mean a word that is spoken, but it refers to the underlying reason and logic that allows us to make sense of words! It refers to the fabric of logic itself. And it is by logic that we have the power to think and understand. Now if you set out to think, but you do so cut off from the one who is truth, who is logic, who is understanding, then what conclusions will you come to? Ones that are false, that defy logic, that lack understanding. That’s how science can tell us, using the tools of logic and meaning that are their trade, that there is no logic and no meaning to our lives or to the universe. They are reasoning apart from the reason. Seeking truth apart from him who is the truth. Seeking to understand while separated from him who holds all things together, created all things, in whose hands are the keys to understanding and wisdom, and in whom we live, and move, and have our being.
1 Co 1:20-21 (The Message)
20So where can you find someone truly wise, truly educated, truly intelligent in this day and age? Hasn’t God exposed it all as pretentious nonsense? 21Since the world in all its fancy wisdom never had a clue when it came to knowing God, God in his wisdom took delight in using what the world considered dumb—preaching, of all things!—to bring those who trust him into the way of salvation.
And so what if Jesus is dead? Well, it’s easy to imagine that what-if, because essentially that is what science says. Science, by and large, tells us the naturalist, materialist story, and this is the story that is being increasingly adopted throughout the entire Western world. And those who believe God is dead live in a world where God is dead. And when they tuck their children into bed at night, they can’t think of what to say to them to tell them how special they are – because according to their own belief system, they’re not that special at all. There are just neurons firing and chemicals oozing in our brains that make us love them more than anyone else, but that’s all prescribed for us by the laws of nature. Is it not a great evil that we could bring ourselves into a belief system that forces us to deny what is so obvious – that our children are remarkable, that they are gifts, that they are wonderful, and that their specialness goes infinitely beyond what they happen to mean or not mean to their parents and friends?
Of course a godless world cannot admit this. Once we admit that children are precious and special because they carry in them the breath of God, that might force us to reconsider our opinions on what it’s permissible to do to them before they are born. The materialist story allows us to be lords of life – both ours and the ones we bring into this world. In reality, we are lords of neither. Jesus is Lord. But only if he’s still living.
1 Co 6:19-20 (NIV)
19Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.
Remember earlier I said that without the resurrection the world doesn’t make sense? Remember how I told you earlier that my friend Tom said, “I don’t know what to tell my kids about why they are here.” Isn’t this precisely what we can expect to have happen if Jesus is the reason and the logic behind all things, and we suddenly pull that rug out and reject him and reject God and insist on a system of reason we have created with our own hands? Then of course it will force us into contradiction. We either cannot tell our kids they are special at all, or else we are being inconsistent with our own belief system if we do. Then we have to take these incredibly deep, life-giving, life-sustaining impulses we have and write them off to evolution. They’re just social constructs that we’ve internalized so that the species is advanced. My friends, when we do that in an effort to advance our own freedom without God, have we not taken a step down – demoted ourselves from the beloved of God down into random collections of atoms and molecules? Have we not spit upon our own nature as bearers of the divine image of God and become like foolish puppets who, desiring to be Kings, now lie pitifully crippled after cutting our own strings?
Now some would say, “I don’t believe in the resurrection literally, but it provides hope and inspiration.” Hope for what? That we can fool ourselves indefinitely into believing there’s something beyond death when there’s really not? It takes a theological acrobat to twist around the message of the New Testament into this new age thing about inspiration and man’s higher purposes. Phooey. That kind of talk is like my agnostic friend trying to tell his daughter what her life is for. It’s missing everything that matters. If all Jesus wanted to do was inspire us, he could have written a good novel, or fought in a brave battle, and spared himself the agony of the cross. The cross was about redemption. Redemption is when good wins over evil. And if Jesus is still dead, evil won. And Paul understood two thousand years ago that if that’s the case, we’re all fools.
1 Corinthians 15:16-17 (MSG)
…if Christ wasn’t raised, then all you’re doing is wandering about in the dark, as lost as ever.
We can point to inspiration and good feelings and the nobility of mankind and we can create hallmark cards that show the dimly lit stable where he was born and the baby in the manger. But a village of infants was slaughtered when Jesus was born because he was born into a world twisted up in sin and choking on its wretchedness and desperately in need of grace. And grace came, but not just a feeling of grace. I mean real grace, with all the rough edges. Grace that costs something – grace that makes it hard for you to look the grace-giver in the eye because you know you don’t deserve it. It’s not just feeling good. In fact, the road to grace is paved with feeling terrible, because when we have received grace we know we weren’t worthy and when we suddenly know we aren’t worthy we come face to face with our sin and we find it necessary to say the words, “I’m sorry.” So the road to grace is paved with feeling terrible and the kind of feeling terrible I’m talking about is a special kind of feeling terrible that we call “repentance.” And that’s a kind of terrible that leads to feeling amazing because when we have repented we have let go of our past lives and embraced a new life. We have died to who we once were and have taken up new life with Jesus, who endured the agony of the cross and rose into new life – never to die again.
Without God, indeed without the risen Christ that brings to us the true story of redemption, all we have is either confusion and contradiction about who we are, or shabby and sloppy sentiment that speaks Hallmark-ese and is not sufficient to account for the complexity and depth of human experience. The Christian story, including and perhaps especially the resurrection story, gives us that vocabulary. As long as we don’t sentimentalize it and reduce it to a mere story designed to inspire. Inspiration is completely without value if it is false. Something false that inspires you has simply played on your heart strings.
1 Corinthians 15:19 (NIV)
19 If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.
In other words, if your faith is not real, but just a story that inspires you to live better now, it’s a shame. Braveheart will do that. The Brothers Karamazov will do that. Heck, science can maybe even do that. But science can’t help you explain to your kids why they’re here and why they matter. Science can’t tell us why we should sacrifice to stay married to a difficult spouse, or why we should keep a child alive who is severely handicapped, or why we should do our duty to our friends. Science cannot tell us why we need not fear, or that our suffering will one day be redeemed. Science cannot offer us realistic hope for our future without simultaneously creating greater potential for evil. Science cannot explain evil, and it cannot explain goodness. It can’t explain love, though it has names for chemicals in our brains. Science cannot tell us why we long to do better and be better and to leave an impact in the world. It can tell us some of what happened to get us here, but it will never be able to tell us why. These are the questions and issues that define us as people. And unless we point to Spirit as the source of truth behind these questions, there is nothing to point to. And how does evolution account for the persistence of questions for which there are no answers? It can’t. Science can create fun things for us to talk about, but I don’t know anyone who ever went to counseling because they couldn’t figure out the truth about quarks or black holes. Science cannot answer the deep and real questions we ache for in our lives, nor can science suggest where we will find answers.
If Jesus is dead, the universe does not make sense. If Jesus is dead, then Christian faith is just empty sentiment and not worth the paper the Bible is printed on. If Jesus is dead, then evil ultimately wins over good. If Jesus is dead, we can’t explain to our children why they are here or what really matters about them. If Jesus is dead, we cannot sufficiently account for the depth of human experience. If Jesus is dead, then the hopes of millions of people of faith are in vain. If Jesus is dead, then we have to live by grabbing anything we can find to make us feel good, because there ultimately isn’t that much to feel good about. Now I realize what some people might think. “Just because I don’t believe in the resurrection doesn’t mean I’m not spiritual. I have spiritual hope, just not in Christ.” I don’t have time to address that in this message, but I will just say, “Stay on the journey. Every road doesn’t lead to God, but there’s no road Jesus won’t take to reach you.”
At the end of his email, my buddy Tom wrote:
…if I really want to make my head explode I will contemplate whether it was a coincidence that I was able to get into a discussion thread with you and that thread discussed the nature of God…or if it was something beyond coincidence which is what my friend [who is] an associate pastor…said would happen when I told him that I no longer believed in a personal God last year.
If Jesus is dead, then this WAS this just a coincidence. What do you think? Will you pray with me?
