Several years ago, I took a group of kids to a church camp. Now there were lots of great things about summer church camp.
We had swimming and boating and hiking – and those were wonderful. But those weren’t the most memorable things of church camp.
We had crafts and cookouts -- and those were wonderful. But those weren’t the most memorable things of church camp.
We had Bible Study! But even wasn’t the most memorable thing of church camp.
Practical jokes – that was the most memorable thing of our week at camp.
Now, the camp we went to was near Savannah, Georgia. There was an old church next to the camp property, and like a lot of old, country churches, there was a graveyard.
And on the last night of the camp, I took several of the campers into the graveyard.
Nighttime is a good time to take a walk in the graveyard. Not only is it cold, and dark, with lots of shadows and strange animal sounds – but there is a practical reason why nighttime is a good time to visit a graveyard.
In an old graveyard, the gravestones are often worn and difficult to read. But at night, if you hold a flashlight against the grave stone – not directing the light at the stone, but running the light along the side of the stone, the shadows of ancient letters begins to show forth and you can read the old lettering.
So we went from stone to stone to read these interesting old graves. Some died young, others lived to be very old. Some fought in the Civil War, others in the Revolutionary War.
Each young camper took a turn holding the flashlight.
And then we came to the last one. A very old stone. Very difficult to read. The young camper held the light against the stone and put his face right at the stone trying to get a sense of what the gravestone had said.
And just as he was about to give up, A HAND REACHED UP OUT OF THE GROUND AND GRABBED THE KID BY THE TROAT!
The kid broke free and took off running! We had to stay up late that night until we finally found him!
The poor kid was terrified.
Of course, we were all laughing.
Because what the kid hadn’t noticed was that there were a lot of leaves on the ground around that last grave.
The hand that hadn’t come out of the ground, but out of the pile of leaves, and belonged to one of the other campers. We’d taken that camper out there early, covered him with leaves, and he had been waiting for that special moment when he could terrify this other camper.
There is nothing more frightening than when something that is dead and buried comes back to life!
We make movies about that! The Mummy. The Mummy Returns. The Revenge of the Mummy. Night of the Living Dead. Day of the Living Dead.
Nothing scares us more than something that is dead coming back to life!
We don’t expect what’s dead, to come back to life.
In the New Testament, when Jesus came back to life, that was a frightening thing.
When Mark ends his Gospel he does so with a jolt.
The women see the stone has been rolled away and they see an angel, who says, “Don’t be afraid.”
And that doesn’t help anything, because they are terrified.
But the angel keeps talking and tells them that Jesus has risen from the dead and that they are to go and tell his disciples.
But Mark says, “Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.”
Now, we often think of Easter as a one-day event. At Sunrise Jesus rises from the dead and by sunset he has ascended into heaven.
But that is not true.
The Bible tells us that after Jesus comes back to life, he remained with his disciples for 40 days.
That is a long time. Long enough for the fears to subside.
What did he do during that time?
Our NT reading says, “After his suffering, he showed himself to men and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.”
Today we begin a study on the Book of Acts. Will Dietrich and I will be preaching through this New Testament book for the next several weeks.
As the book opens with chapter 1, Jesus has risen from the dead and during the 40 days between his resurrection and his ascension into heaven, he is giving proof that he is alive and well.
The Book of Acts is a history of the early church, and it begins here – with the truth of the resurrection.
If the resurrection is not true, then the history of the early church is not worth telling.
If the resurrection is not true, then our worshipping together here right now, is not worth doing.
If the resurrection is not true, your faith is meaningless.
But the Book of Acts begins by affirming that the Resurrection of Christ is an historic event.
It is the most logical place to begin to tell the history of the church. Because ALL of what we as a church believes, and ALL that we have done and will continue to do as a church, stands or falls on this single event – the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
St. Paul says pretty much the same thing in the New Testament letter to the Corinthians, when he wrote, “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless.” (1 Cor 15:17)
Long before his crucifixion, Jesus was asked by a group of religious leaders of his day for absolute proof that he was the Messiah, the Son of God. In reply Jesus said, “Just as Jonah was in the belly of the sea monster for three days and three nights, so shall the Son of Man be in the grave three days and three nights.” (Matthew 12:39-40).
The Resurrection was the proof that everything else about Jesus was true and valid.
Now if the Resurrection is so central to everything we are as Christians, if the Resurrection is proof positive that Jesus is who he said he was, then how can we trust and know that the Resurrection is indeed true?
The resurrection of our Lord Jesus is one of the best substantiated facts of human history...indeed by "many trustworthy proofs".
In a court of law, one of the things that people on the jury like to see and hear is the testimony of an eye-witness.
The O.J. Simpson case would have turned out very differently if someone had stepped forward and said, “I saw with my own eyes O.J. Simpson commit murder.”
In the Columbine tragedy, there were scores of eye-witnesses who left no doubt about the identity of the killers.
As it happens, there were eye-witnesses of the Risen Christ.
On Easter Sunday, the first witnesses were the guards themselves. This is the single tragedy of Easter, that the first witnesses never came to believe in Christ as Lord, even though they knew beyond doubt that the Resurrection had occurred.
In Matthew’s Gospel, after Jesus has died on the cross, he is buried in a tomb. And immediately the chief priests and Pharisees began to worry. (Matthew 27:62-28:20)
They go to Pilate and say, “Sir, we remember that while he was still alive (this man) said, ’After three days I will rise again.’”
As the Pharisees told Pilate, “give the order for the tomb to be made secure until the third day. Otherwise, his disciples may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead.”
So Pilate agrees to this plan. He says, “Take a guard and go. Make the tomb as secure as you know how.”
And so they did that. They even put a seal on the tomb so they would know whether or not it was opened. And they posted a guard.
But then, on Easter Sunday, at daybreak, two women arrive at the tomb and right as they get there, there is a violent earthquake. These two women and the guard see an angel come down from heaven and roll back the stone that covered the entrance of the tomb.
Then the angel announces that Jesus “has risen, just as he said.”
Now the women are terrified. And they run and tell the disciples.
And the guards are terrified. And they run and tell the chief priests.
The chief priests in turn pay off the guards with a large sum of money and instruct them to spread the rumor that the disciples stole the body.
Good plan, except for the fact that as Christianity spreads, all the chief priests would have had to have done was to produce the body.
It’s another thing that goes well in the court of law. A dead body has been found and identified. There has been an autopsy. Evidence! Proof that murder was committed!
Jesus died, but there is no body. We will never discover the bones of Jesus. He is risen from the dead and he remains alive and at the right hand of God.
IF Jesus had died and remained dead…
IF the disciples had stolen the body…
Then how do you explain what happened to the disciples over the next ten, 20, 30 years?
With the exception of the Apostle John who lives to be an old man and dies of natural causes, all of the other disciples died horrible deaths for their faith.
The Apostle James was killed by a sword at the order of Herod. He is, in fact the only Apostle whose death was recorded in the book of Acts (12:2).
Bartholomew reportedly went to India, where he was flayed alive, and then crucified.
Peter was crucified upside down.
Andrew was also crucified, but on an X-shaped cross.
James, the son of Alphaeus, was stoned to death and then had his head literally cracked open when someone hit him with a heavy club.
Now, if any of these disciples had stolen the body, don’t you think that at some point one of them would have said – “Wait a minute. If you are serious about nailing me to a cross, let me tell you how me and my buddies REALLY spent that first Easter Sunday.”
And it only would have taken one of them.
Just one who would say, “We stole the body and hid it.”
But no.
Instead they suffered death. Most were not quick, but painful.
They were willing to die, not for a lie, but for the truth.
And the truth was that the Resurrection really happened.
You cannot doubt that.
You have to believe, because the people who were there believed to the point of death and torture.
And these were not the only eye-witnesses.
The Apostle Paul wrote in the New Testament book of I Corinthians (15:3-9), that Christ died and rose again and Paul gives a roll call of eye-witnesses.
Christ appeared to Peter.
Then to the other apostles.
Then to more than 500.
Not only that, but at the time that Paul was writing, most of those 500 were still alive.
So at the time that Paul was preaching about the Resurrection of Christ, he was basically saying, “Don’t believe me? Ask one of these 500 plus people!”
In fact, not only did the friends of Jesus experience his Resurrection, so did the enemies of Christ.
In the early years of the church, Christianity had no bigger enemy that Paul.
Paul was a Jewish leader, very strong in his faith and very well educated in the Jewish Law. He witnessed the death of the first martyr of the Christian Church, St. Stephen.
Not only had he witnessed this. He had in some way approved it and seems to have been a participant.
It was after seeing Stephen’s death that Paul then embarked on a campaign designed to suppress and destroy the Christian Church. Paul himself related in the New Testament book of Galatians that he “persecuted the church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it.”
But Paul was also an eye-witness of the Resurrection.
At the height of Paul’s campaign against the church, he was confronted on the road to Damascus by the risen Christ. In that instant, Paul’s life was turned upside down and was reoriented.
Paul no longer persecuted the church. He joined the church and led the church.
He believed in the Resurrection because he had personally seen and met the resurrected Christ.
So you not only have the friends and followers affirming the truth of the Resurrection, even the enemies of Christ acknowledged the truth of the Resurrection.
Frank Morrison, who was an agnostic journalist, and he tried to write a book disproving the resurrection of Christ. After much investigation, his opinion changed and he became a believer in Jesus Christ.
In his book “Who Moved the Stone,” Morrison said that Christ was put in the tomb on Friday, but on Sunday morning the body was missing. If He did not rise from the dead, then someone took the body. There are three interest groups that could possibly have taken the body: the Romans, the Jews, or the disciples.
The Romans would have had no reason to steal the body, since they wanted to keep the peace in Palestine. The idea was to keep the provinces as quiet as possible, and stealing the body of Christ would not accomplish this objective.
The Jews would not have taken the body, because the last thing they wanted was a proclamation of the resurrection. They are the ones who asked for the guard, according to Matthew 27.
The disciples of Jesus had no reason to steal the body, and if they did, they later died for something they knew to be untrue.
The other reasonable explanation is that Christ has risen, and the eyewitnesses make it plain this is the case. The disciples of Jesus may not have been as sophisticated as twentieth century man in the realm of scientific knowledge, but they surely knew the difference between someone who was dead and someone who wasn’t.
As Simon Peter said, “We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” (2 Pet 1:16)
Now what about you?
Do you believe, really believe that Jesus rose from the dead and is at this moment alive and well and seated at the right hand of God?
Or do you believe that the Resurrection is a cleverly invented story?
It has to be one or the other.
Many people come to church and they are marginally committed. They believe in God, but they are not committed to the reality of the Resurrection.
It’s too fantastic.
It’s too strange.
It is too much like a hand reaching out of a grave and grabbing you by the throat.
It’s frightening, it’s scary, it’s too wild to be true. It can’t really be true.
But this is the single doctrine on which everything else in the church stands, or falls.
And you have to decide if you believe in the historical truth of the Risen Lord.
Reject the Resurrection of Christ, and you are just going through the motions of pretending to believe the Gospel.
But embrace the Resurrection of Christ, and you embrace the one single doctrine that holds everything else in the church together.
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Written by Maynard Pittendreigh
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