Forty Days With the Risen Jesus
Bob Marcaurelle
Sermon 1
THE FACT AND THE IMPORTANCE
Yahoo to homeorchurchbiblestudy.com bob marcaurelle
Email: freesermons@homeorchurchbiblestudy.com
Luke 24:3-6
“They found the stone rolled away from the door and when they went in they did not find the body. They were perplexed about this (and one of the angels) said, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?
Acts 1:4-5
“After His sufferings He showed Himself to these men and gave many convincing proofs that He was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days.”
1 Corinthians 15:17, TEV
“If Christ has not been raised then your faith is a delusion and you are still lost in your sins.”
A cab driver taking a missionary to his hotel, asked him. “With so many religions and religious leaders, how can we know which one is true?” The missionary said, “Christians are the only ones who follow the only religious Leader who claimed to be God and proved it by rising from the dead.” The graves of all religious leaders are famous for what they contain. The grave of Jesus is famous for what it does not contain. The Bible makes this central to our faith. When some Christians at Corinth adopted the Greek idea that our souls live on after death, but not our bodies, Paul told them without the bodily resurrection there is no Christian Faith and no forgiveness. Paul made it a part of the gospel, saying that to be saved we must “believe in our hearts that God raised Jesus from the dead.’ (Rom. 10)
A. THE FINALITY OF DEATH
The Death
Resurrection (to stand again) applies to the body and to have a resurrection you must have a soon to decay, lifeless corpse. One thing the Romans knew how to do was to kill people. Not even our strongest critics doubt that Jesus lived and died during the reign of Pilate. God saw to it that Jesus’ death was witnessed openly and publicly and made known to the thousands of pilgrims who had come from all over the world for Passover. His death was certified by the Roman government and verified to the Jewish Supreme Court.
The Burial
God saw to it that the body of Jesus was buried by two of the most influential men in Jerusalem, members of the Supreme Court. The burial, like the death was certified by the Jewish and Roman authorities who sealed the tomb and put soldiers there to guard it. The dead Jesus was buried.
Think what death did to Jesus - physically! It took Him away. That mighty life was gone as gentle friends took His pale body down, drained of life and stained with His own blood. Those strong, tender hands that built plows, hugged children and cleansed lepers were now limp, scarred and still. Those feet that helped Him stand tall to aid His friends and face up to all the howling winds of temptation, were limp and bloody. His kingly head hung low and was scarred by thorns. His gentle side was ripped open by Roman steel. His piercing eyes, full of compassion, warming the soul were now glazed and blind. His matchless voice, fountain of the Father’s thoughts, was stilled, to speak no more. Death, as we know, is final and brutal.
B. THE CERTAINTY OF RESURRECTION
Jesus was gone but the resurrection gave him back. He was the same Jesus they knew and loved - different, yes - but still the same. The same facial features, the same stance and walk, the same certain look, the same handshake, the same unmistakable voice, the same everything! Jesus was back! Jesus was alive and well!
Death could not hold its prey
He tore the bars away
The resurrection of Jesus’ body and His continued life on earth for forty days is as verifiable as any other historical event of that day. The 27 historical documents of our New Testament all put His resurrection to the forefront. The affirmations of early church members that they had seen him, is recorded by Jewish and Roman historians Adolph Harnack, the well respected secular historian, did NOT believe in the resurrection. But he said that to be true to history he had to admit that the first Christians did. He said,
“The firm confidence of the disciples of Jesus was rooted in the belief that He did not abide in death, but was raised by God. That Christ was risen was, as sure as the fact as His death, and became the main article of their preaching about Him”.
(History of Dogma, Chapter 2)
1. The Church’s Change
As evidence we have the Christian Church built not upon His teachings, but upon His life, death, resurrection, ascension, presence with us, and promise to receive us when we die. We have the change of the day of worship from Saturday to Sunday, something unthinkable to a Jew. The number one evidence, however, was the almost immediate transformation of the disciples from cowards (John 20:19) to heroes (Acts 5:29), ready to die for Jesus (Acts 1-5).
In the hours and days after Jesus died we see a dead church. When Jesus died the church and Christianity died with Him. The one word that characterized His followers was FEAR. Even the Apostles, afraid they were next on the Jewish leaders’ hit list, were hiding behind locked doors like timid rabbits (20:19). The deeper fear and despair, was that their hopes and dreams had died with Jesus. The break¬down was complete. Now all they could do was go home and go back to the old life. These were beaten, disillusioned, dispirited and frightened people.
But something happened that changed all this. The dead church became a dynamic church. Cowards were instantly filled with new courage. A dead group of people became a dynamic group. Peter and the others taking up the torch of Jesus, charged the Jewish people (Acts 2) and the Jewish court (Acts 3-4) with the murder of their own Messiah. Like John the Baptizer and Jesus, they told men and women to repent - to turn or burn. And they preached forgiveness only at the feet of Jesus.
When faced with the prospect of imprisonment or death they were fearless. Peter and the rest of the Apostles were ordered by the same court that killed Jesus to stop preaching. Their answer was: “We must obey God and not men. The God of our Fathers raised the Jesus you killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him.. to give repentance and the forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses to these things.” (Acts 5:29-32). Added to the change of the church is:
2. The Church’s Converts
The Conversions In the first five chapters of Acts thousands stood up publicly to accept Jesus, to be baptized and to learn at the feet of the Apostles in their homes and places of worship. Think of the thousands of people Jesus had healed; add in their families and friends and you can see that the harvest field had already been plowed by Jesus to receive the gospel seed. So many people were converted that the Jewish leaders said they were turning the world upside down (Acts 17:6). Vance Havner said they didn’t turn it upside down they turned it “right side up”.
The Costs Becoming a Christian in that day was costly and dangerous. It could cost converts their families, their friends, their possessions and their lives, but they stood. To be willing to do something like this requires certainty. Common sense tells us they investigated the claims of the eye witnesses and found them true.
The enraged leaders did all they could to undermine this and stop it, but they couldn’t. The simple fact, however, is that to stop it, all they had to do was produce the body. Right in the middle of Peter’s sermon at Pentecost, they could have had a squad of soldiers carry the Lord’s body right into the service; lay it at Peter’s feet and Christianity would have died right then and there.
A church sign read, “Worship with Us This Easter Sunday”.
Some kids wrote under it, “Forget it, they found the
Body.” That is why we cannot forget it or escape it.
They didn’t find the body.
C. THE PRIORITY IN THE GOSPEL
1. The Importance (1 Cor. 15)
The first century church spread through the Empire like wildfire. Robert Baker says there were close to a million members in seventy years when the New Testament closed. And the amazing thing is the church was primarily Gentile and in just two hundred years Christianity became the highest and most powerful religion in the Empire. Jews despised non Jews (Gentiles) and compared them to dogs that ate garbage out on the streets. They detested them like ISIS detests you and me. Gentiles, like hated people will do, hated them in return. Paul called the Gospel the “power of God” (Rom. 1) and the word for power is where we get the word “dynamite” Only the resurrection could blast through such a wall of prejudice and hatred.
The story of Jesus with his claims and resurrection spoke to the needs of all kind of people all over the world. The most important fact was the cross- that Jesus (God on earth) loves each one of us enough to die for us so we can be forgiven. The king on the throne and the prostitute on the street could say with Paul, “He loved me and gave himself for me.” (Gal. 2) To say this about the God of the universe is unbelievable, but the resurrection gives it credibility. That is why the Book of Acts, a missionary writing, begins with it. That is why Paul said that if there is no resurrection our faith is a delusion and we are still un-forgiven.
2. The Ingredients
What was it about the resurrection that made it so powerful? For one thing it verified the claims of Jesus. Jesus taught almost nothing that the prophets and Jewish rabbis before Him had not already taught. The difference was that He preached Himself as the only way to God; as the Old Testament Messiah; as the Judge of the universe; as God on earth; and as the forgiver of sins. And He verified this by His rising from the grave. Romans 1:4 says, “He was declared with power to be the Son of God by His resurrection from the dead - Jesus Christ our Lord (the Old Testament term for God).”
The resurrection verified the fact of life after death. From the North American Indians with their burial mounds back to the Egyptian kings, with their pyramids, people have buried their dead with ceremonies that send them to the next life to live on. Jesus’ resurrection says we will.
A Christian was witnessing to someone and a passerby snarled, “You Christians are foolish. When you are dead you are dead. We human beings are nothing but elements like sulfur, magnesium, iron and water.” When the Christian ignored him he said, “Why don’t you say something. Why don’t you tell me why you belief something you cannot prove?” The Christian said, “I do have reasons for my faith but I didn’t answer you because I am not in the habit of talking to a pile of sulfur, magnesium, iron and water.”
Life is real, life is earnest
And the grave is not its goal
Dust you are, to dust returneth
Was not written for the soul
The resurrection verifies that good will triumph over evil. The events on Mount Calvary are a horrible snapshot of a moment in time of our cruel world of injustice, apathy, hate, pain, bloodshed and murder. That lovely body, bruised, beaten, shamed and bleeding – is now food for the worms? And the haunting question is why evil always seem to have the upper hand? Is Satan in charge? Or is God? Our reply is the empty tomb. Our reply is the risen Lord.
In the middle of the AD 300’s Emperor Julian tried to eradicate Christianity and go back to the Roman gods and goddesses. Riding through a battlefield he saw a wounded Christian about to be killed by a soldier. He mockingly said, “Where is your Carpenter now, Christian?” The dying Christian said, “He is driving nails in the coffin of the Roman Empire”. Two hundred years after than the Empire was gone and the lands were filled with barbarian tribes from the North.
Our reply is the heaven. The resurrection verifies that we will have resurrected bodies in a place called heaven. It is the the new heaven and the new earth where righteousness lives (2 Peter 3:10-12) and sin, suffering and evil is found no more (Revelation 22). Vance Havner said, “In the first two chapters of the Bible and in the last two chapters, you find no devil, no sin and no suffering. I love a book that does away with the devil.”
The idea of resurrection is vital to most of us. The Greeks believed in the immortality of the soul but laughed at the idea of bodies being resurrected (Acts 17). It is important for us to know that life after death does not mean we will be some kind of nebulous “spirit people” floating around in the “great somewhere”. Paul says our new bodies will be like His glorious body (Phil. 3:2). Our new bodies, raised when Jesus comes, will have some relationship with our old bodies, but Paul says is like comparing tiny acorn to the oak tree it produces (1 Cor. 15).
One question arises. What about the scars of Jesus. He appeared in the upper room still bearing the wounds of Calvary and still does in heaven (Revelation 5:6). A gospel song remind us that the only thing in heaven that is man-made are the scars on the body of Jesus. e Lord. This, to me, does not mean we will still have our scars and defects. It means that every day in heaven, for all eternity we will be reminded that:
“Jesus paid it all / All to Him I owe
Sin had left a crimson stain
He washed it white as snow.”
