From God comes…
From God comes the resurrection.
When the women went to the tomb of Jesus to anoint his dead body with spices, they were surprised to find that He had risen from the dead. (Mark 16:1) When they told the disciples, the disciples had a hard time believing it. Peter went back to the tomb to check for himself. (Matthew 24:8-12) Although, Jesus had told them this would happen, it was still hard to believe. (John 20:9) But now Christ’s words rang true!
Belief in the resurrection is an integral part of the Christian faith. Jesus tells us in John 11:25-26, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.”
Some doubt the resurrection of Christ happened. It was the same in Jesus’s time. Rumors spread. It was said that the disciples stole the body to make it look like Jesus had risen. (Matthew 28:13) Or the Roman authorities removed the body. Or eye witnesses who actually saw Jesus were hallucinating. Even when the more than 500 saw Christ at the same time, some surmised that they were all caught up in a “mass ecstasy.”
However, the disciples believed and some even died because of it. They would not have been willing to die for a lie. Realistically, the Romans would have gladly produced Jesus’s body if they had it to debunk Christianity. It’s doubtful that all the eyewitnesses would have hallucinated the same thing. And “mass ecstasy” sounds like a feeble attempt to find anything to support a losing battle.
When Paul spoke to the philosophers in Athens, the intellectual center of the world, he preached Jesus and His resurrection. (Acts 17:18) This message was so remarkable and amazing that it turned the world upside down. (Acts 17:6) God has given assurance to all men because He raised Jesus from the dead. (Acts 17:31)
Critics don’t deny that Jesus lived. There is too much evidence to the contrary. But it wasn’t Christ’s life that led to the spread of Christianity; it was His death and resurrection. The late German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch said, “It wasn’t the morality of the Sermon on the Mount which enabled Christianity to conquer Roman Paganism, but the belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead.”
Without Christ’s resurrection, Christian faith is in vain. (1 Corinthians 15:17) In other words, the resurrection declares that Christ is Lord. Without it, He would be just another moral teacher or dead prophet.
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“Whatever is good and perfect is a gift coming down to us from God…”
~James 1:17 (NLT)
