Easter 2020

And so I'm going to wish you a very happy Easter on this resurrection Sunday.

Normally, if we were all gathered together, uh we would uh shout an acclamation, and I would like you still to do it.

I'd like you still to do it where you are.

So, what I'm gonna say is Christ is risen and you're gonna respond with He is risen indeed, hallelujah, alleluia.

Okay?

I'm gonna say Christ has risen, you're gonna say he is risen indeed, hallelujah, hallelujah.

Don't care if you're in your bed, don't care if you're in the bathroom, we're all gonna say it together, okay?

After three, one, two, three, nice and loud.

Christ is risen.

He is risen indeed.

Alleluia.

Alleluia.

Well done.

Uh uh, why don't I pray as uh we come to God's word, uh, not least of all uh for uh for the internet connection.

Let's pray.

Father, we do thank you uh that on this day uh that we remember you raised the Lord Jesus from the dead and that he lives, he reigns now with you at your side.

We pray uh that we would have our hope and our faith renewed in him today.

We pray now that as we come to consider the resurrection and its significance for our lives, that you would meet us, that by your spirit you would uh teach us.

We pray these things in Jesus' name.

Often when we're uh together as a church, uh one of the things that I encourage people who perhaps are skeptical about Christianity to do is to investigate the resurrection.

Uh, people like to think and have a conversation about uh creation versus evolution and things like that, but actually the thing that Christianity rises or falls on is whether or not today is true, whether or not the resurrection actually happened.

Because Christians uh who believe the Bible believe that the resurrection is not just a metaphor uh or a fairy story, that it really happened in history, that we believe that Jesus was raised bodily from the dead and that he is alive and reigns now.

I have encouraged people to look at that, but I have never actually taught on it.

I've never actually gone through what some of the evidences are for the resurrection, and so why not do it on this day?

And so that's what we're going to think about.

We're going to think about two things.

First of all, we're going to think about this the uh the evidences for the resurrection, and then we will think uh finally at the end about the significance of the resurrection, because it's one to believe the historical fact, but it's quite a different thing to understand what that means for our life.

So we're going to look at the evidences and then the significance, and as per, as long as the connection holds up, we will do a uh we'll do a Q ⁇ A and so you can be posting your questions in the feed as we go along.

So thinking about the evidences, uh, in thinking about this event, the resurrection of Jesus, uh there are uh there are three statements that everyone, regardless of whether or not you're you're aone who's looked into this agrees on, that every serious historian and scholar are in agreement on.

And the three statements are this one, on the third day after Jesus' crucifixion, the tomb that he was buried in was empty.

This is not in dispute.

What is in dispute is how it came to be empty.

We'll think about that in a second.

Second statement that everyone agrees on the disciples had real experiences of the one who they sincerely believed to be the risen Jesus.

We'll think about that.

And secondly, as a result, or sorry, thirdly, as a result of these experiences, they preached about the death and resurrection of Jesus, and this resulted in the birth and growth of the Christian church.

So the empty tomb, the resurrection or post-mortem experiences, the after-death experiences of Jesus, and then the resulting effect of those experiences as the birth of the church.

So, first, let's consider the empty tomb.

First, the first thing that we need to note is that the disciples, that's you know, Peter, James, John, Thaddeus, Both One, Matthew, etc., the disciples began preaching about the resurrection in Jerusalem, where Jesus was crucified.

They didn't go off uh to some distant land where nobody had ever heard of Jerusalem and uh or of Jesus and make up this story of let me tell you about this guy uh that rose from the dead.

No, no, no, they started talking about it in Jerusalem, the place that he was crucified.

What that means is that if the tomb was not empty, it's very easy to refute it.

It's very easy to go up to the tomb and go, no, no, that he's there.

There he is.

But they began preaching in Jerusalem.

Second, the earliest attempts to refute the resurrection by the Jewish leaders of the day, and in fact, you can read about that in Matthew 28.

Uh, let me read it for you now.

Uh, so Matthew 28, verses uh 11 to 15.

This is just after the reading that um that Ben read at the start of one of our live streams.

It says this, it says, and while they were going, behold, some of the guard went into the city to the chief priests, uh, and told the chief priests all that had taken place.

And when they had assembled with the elders and taken counsel, they gave a sufficient sum of money to the soldiers and said, Tell people his disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.

And if it comes to the governor's ears, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.

So they took the money and did as they were directed.

And this story has been spread to this day.

And so the uh the attempts to refute the resurrection by the Jewish leaders was not to say that the tomb wasn't empty.

They conceded that in fact the tomb was empty.

And their explanation for that is to say that the disciples stole the body, which we'll think about in just a second.

This might not be proof of the resurrection per se, but it is further evidence that those who had no stake in the resurrection conceded that the tomb was in fact empty.

Third, Mark's gospel is the earliest gospel, it is the earliest of the four biographies of Jesus that we have, writing about 50 AD.

So at the latest, 20 years after the events.

But we also know that Mark was using sources uh dated within seven years of the event.

The point of that, why I mention it, the point of that being that not enough time had passed in order to make this up as legend.

Moreover, uh Luke in his gospel mentions Joseph of Arimathea.

Uh, he was an extremely well-known and well-respected member of society.

He was one of the uh the Jewish ruling council of 70, and so he was extraordinarily well known.

And so you couldn't simply use his name and make it up without it being refuted.

Fourth, the first witnesses to the empty tomb that we have recorded are women.

Because, and this is evidence for the resurrection because uh of the prejudices of the day.

If you were wanting to make up a story, you wouldn't have women as the first eyewitnesses, because in that day the testimony of a woman wasn't considered trustworthy.

It didn't hold up in court.

And so if you were trying to convince people that something uh happened that didn't happen, uh if you were just making it up, you would have had you would have had Peter going to the tomb, one of the one of the men, one of the twelve.

No, the more likely explanation, therefore, is that the gospel writers are simply recounting what happened.

Let's consider then uh this idea that the disciples stole the body.

What motive did they have to make it up?

Because as a result of this message, the message of the resurrection, each of them was beaten and killed at different points, and some in the most sadistic ways.

Uh John, one of the disciples, was uh was boiled in oil and still didn't die, and so they exiled him on the island of Patmos.

And yet not once did one of the disciples deny it.

All of them went to their graves uh and met rather bloody ends, still maintaining this story, still maintaining the truthfulness of the resurrection, even when it meant them ending their lives or their lives being ended.

So, the tomb was empty, everyone agrees on that.

The resurrection was proclaimed in Jerusalem where it could have been refuted.

Mark is using early eyewitness testimony.

If you were making it up, uh you wouldn't have had the women as the first witnesses, you would have had a man go to see the tomb first because of the prejudices of the day.

And the disciples uh are unlikely to have stolen the body, not least of all because there was a guard posted of Roman Roman centurions.

But they went on to live their lives maintaining that this was true, even when it meant their death.

Let's consider uh, secondly, then uh the experiences, those post-mortem experiences of Jesus.

Paul, who was converted to Christianity about three years after the resurrection of Jesus, he is somebody who hated Christians, who was converted.

He then goes on to write 27 letters of the New Testament.

And in his letter to the Corinthians, he quotes a very early Christian creed.

A creed is just a statement of belief.

He quotes an early Christian creed, and it talks about the experiences of Jesus that people had after his death.

Let me read to you from that first letter to the Corinthians chapter 15, verses 1 to 3.

Paul writes, For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he appeared to Kephas.

Kephas is the Aramaic name for Peter, and then to the twelve.

After that he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, many of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep, that is, some have died.

There are three possible explanations for the post-mortem experiences of Jesus.

One, the disciples and the five hundred, everyone was lying.

It was a mass conspiracy.

Two, everyone was hallucinating.

They thought they saw Jesus, sincerely thought they saw Jesus, but were mistaken.

Three, they really saw the risen Christ.

Let's consider that they were lying.

Again, we come back to the issues that the disciples were willing to martyr themselves for something that they knew not to be true.

You think back uh in uh recent American history, say in the last uh 50 years, you had the Watergate scandal.

The Watergate scandal where uh the president of the time was uh was uh indicted and uh nearly impeached, though he resigned, uh because of uh his uh his complicity in uh sending people to spy on the Democrats.

There's a massive scandal that involved primarily four men, and they could not keep their story straight for two weeks.

They all began to contradict one another, and none of them maintained the lie.

What we are having to believe when we say, Well, no, the disciples and whoever else, you know, the 500 or whatever, in maintaining that they were lying, you have to say that they all maintained that lie for their entire life, and even when that meant their death.

So you say, okay, well, they sincerely believed it was true, but that doesn't make it true.

And so we get into the idea of maybe they were hallucinating.

So they sincerely believed that they had experiences of Jesus, perhaps because of their uh their grief.

They uh felt that he was present with them, that they were hallucinating.

The problem with the hallucination theory is that hallucinations are highly individualistic.

What we're saying here is that at least twelve, Paul says many more, but at least twelve all had the same hallucination.

As far as we can tell, hallucinations don't work that way.

I don't tend to uh to come to to you or to go to my wife and uh and say, wasn't that a great dream that we had?

They don't tend to be shared things.

Hallucinations between at least uh twelve people or ten people rather speaking with Jesus, eating with them, to say nothing of the uh the five hundred other people, but then you consider Paul himself.

Paul himself, when he was converted to Christianity, was converted at a point when he hated Christians, when he, with murderous intent, was going to capture other Christians.

He wasn't overcome with the grief that Jesus had died.

When he saw Jesus, he had no vested interest in making that up or indeed desiring that hallucination.

No, we must conclude that the most likely explanation for the post-mortem experiences of Jesus is that the disciples really saw the risen Christ.

Finally, in this section, we will think about the birth of Christianity.

So we've thought about the empty tomb, the post-mortem experiences of Jesus, and then the birth of Christianity itself.

Because the fact that the Christian Church exists is itself an evidence for the resurrection.

Because if the resurrection had not happened, then the disciples had no motive to preach about something that could be so demonstrably disproved and would get them killed, and yet they did.

Paul's conversion from somebody opposed to Christianity makes no sense if the resurrection did not happen.

Some have tried to say that the resurrection was a later addition, that Christianity borrowed it from other religions.

If you read other religious accounts, you read of other gods and demigods who experience a kind of death and rebirth.

And yet, a closer look into those uh particular things, so that Mithras or uh or Osiris or somewhere like that, or Horus, what you uh see in further study is that the sources that talk about those apparent parallels originated and are dated after Christianity, not before.

And so if there is any borrowing going on in those legends, it is going the other way.

So, the resurrection of Jesus is, in my mind, too easily disproved to be a hoax.

The source material that we have is too early simply to be myth and legend.

The most plausible explanation for the postmortem experiences is that the people weren't lying, that they weren't hallucinating, that they actually saw Jesus.

And note, all of those three things, what I said at the start is true, all of those three things are statements that uh even those who don't trust Jesus uh concede.

The tomb was empty, they really saw Jesus, and as a result, Christianity was born.

I'm not asking you at that point or this point in the message to put your faith in Jesus.

I'm not even asking you to buy uh any of the central uh precepts of Christianity.

What I am asking you to think about is to have an account for those three things.

How did the tomb get empty?

How do you account for the post-mortem experiences?

And how do you explain the explosive birth of Christianity across the known world at that time?

The person who disagrees needs to offer a viable alternative then to say that Jesus rose bodily from the dead in history.

We all, I'm sure, want to follow the evidence where it leads.

Just a quick note.

Somebody might turn and say, yes, but dead people don't come back to life.

Miracles don't happen.

Because dead person coming back to life, that's fairly miraculous, right?

Well, in a in an atheistic worldview, that is that is true.

In the the view that says that our cosmos is a closed system, that is true.

But if there is a God who made the laws of nature and who has both the power and the prerogative to change and to tinker with those laws, then miracles happen.

Because what is a miracle?

It is a tinkering with the laws of nature.

If God exists, then we believe that He is a God who has both the power and prerogative to do just that.

But let us think now about the significance of the resurrection.

Excuse me.

Having considered the evidences for it, let's consider the significance of it.

There are many things that we can say here, but I'm gonna offer you three at this point, three reasons why.

Why the resurrection matters for you, perhaps particularly in this season that we find ourselves in.

First, it offers us assurance.

The resurrection offers us assurance.

Because Jesus rose from the dead, we can now be confident that what he said about himself and what he did for us was true.

What did he say about himself?

Well, let's make no mistake.

Jesus claimed to be God.

He did this in various places as recounted in the Gospels.

He did it through his claim to forgive sin in Mark chapter 2, when the religious leaders asked the question, who can forgive sin but God alone?

Mark 2 · chapter mention

He did this in John's Gospel, in John chapter 5, when the religious leaders again understand that he is claiming equality with God his Father.

John 5 · chapter mention

And then he goes on in John chapter 10 to say that he and his father are one.

John 10 · chapter mention

Jesus claimed to be God.

When he's questioned by the high priest in John's Gospel, he is asked, Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?

And he says, I am.

The resurrection assures us that Jesus is who he says he is.

But the resurrection also assures us that what he did for us on the cross was really effective.

And this is where we cast our minds back to Friday and to the death of Jesus, because what we looked at there is that the death of Jesus was a death for sin.

It was a death to remove sin from us and to clothe us, spiritually speaking, in Jesus' perfections.

If he remained dead, we would have no way of knowing that those things had been finally achieved.

How would we know that we now have a Father in heaven who loves us and who will never forsake us, who regards us in the same way that he regards his son?

But the resurrection is proof of just that.

The resurrection is proof that Jesus' work on the cross was effective, that we now no longer need to work to achieve a life with God, that we no longer need to try and pull ourselves up by our moral bootstraps, that Christ really has done it all, that when he said on the cross, it is finished, the resurrection shows that that was true.

It is God's great yes and amen that Christ's cross work was effective.

And that gives us great assurance.

It means that God is our Father.

It means that the Spirit dwells within us.

It means that we can now come to God in prayer and call him our Father.

This is something that is perhaps in short supply in our world today.

The Bible makes grand, perhaps even outrageously good promises for those who trust God.

It promises us that God will be our Father, our Father who loves us, never to forsake us.

We're promise that even through our own suffering that we experience, that He will sustain us through, that He will carry us.

He promises us a new start, a changed heart.

He promises us that when we die, we will live with God, and that will finally culminate in a new creation where we will live with Him forever, where mourning and pain and crying and death will be no more.

This is pie in the sky wishful thinking if the resurrection did not happen.

But if the resurrection happened, then we really can be sure and certain of those things.

We really can have hope, and hope not in the way that we use it, in that kind of wishy-washy, I hope it doesn't rain today, or I hope I get to have steak for dinner, sort of hope.

No, it is a concrete take it to the bank sort of hope.

A hope that God will bring these things to pass, that He really will change your life.

It gives us a hope in these days that spurs us on.

It gives us a hope that God will finally bring justice for the oppressed.

Many of you watching this, I'm sure, have been wronged in ways that have never been righted.

What the resurrection offers you is hope that that sin will not go unanswered.

That God is committed to justice, that He sees, that He knows.

This is the hope that our hopeless world needs.

And so that is the final, the third thing that in thinking about the significance of the resurrection is that it sends us out on mission.

It might be a peculiar thing to think about in our lockdown, but how many of you, City Church, have been having new and renewed conversations with your friends, with your family, with your co-workers because of what's happening in our world at the minute.

And in having those conversations, you are being sent out as a people on mission.

And that's what the resurrection really does.

If Jesus is dead in a tomb, we have no motive to go and proclaim him.

But if he is alive and if he really is God, then he does offer forgiveness to the world.

He does offer life and hope.

If it is true, then the resurrection sends us out on mission to a world that needs to hear of him.

Whether that's on Zoom call or Facebook Live at the moment or Skype or YouTube, he sends us out.

This is what the disciples understood.

And indeed, we're told explicitly that Jesus sends them and tells them to go after he is risen.

The risen Jesus appears to them at the very end of the Matthew passage that uh that Ben read.

The very end of that chapter, we have Jesus meeting them on the mountain.

Let me read it for you.

Now the eleven disciples, because Judas had killed himself, the eleven disciples went to Galilee to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them, and when they saw him, they worshipped him, but some doubted.

Isn't that great, by the way?

Isn't that great that you can still see the risen Jesus and still have doubts?

And still have questions.

Be welcomed by him and sent out by him.

God does not want us to wallow in our doubts.

He wants us to move to a place of certainty.

Look at my feet.

Don't doubt.

Believe.

It's very real.

And Jesus, the risen Jesus, came to them and said to them, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all of the things that I have commanded you, and behold, I am with you always to the end of the age.

The risen Jesus sends out his disciples.

Where?

To all nations.

To give them what message?

To teach them all things, all that Jesus is and has done.

If we are people who are convinced that the resurrection is true, then that same commission is ours.

It is with convinced hearts that we share this news with our friends, that we go on mission to the world, whether to those places where Jesus is neither named nor known in order to make him known.

It is why we seek to plant churches.

Because we're convinced that the resurrection is true, and we are convinced that the risen Jesus is worthy of worshippers in Dublin.

Because we are convinced that this is the message that offers life and hope like no other.

It is why we exist.

And it is why when we finally gather together again, that we will lift our voices like never before, and we will sing, and we will be glad, and we will feast at the Lord's table again, knowing that He is alive, that He reigns, and that He is with us, and we will celebrate as our video so wonderfully told us.

And so let us not lose hope.

Let us move forward now with assurance that's not arrogance, but a humble confidence in what Jesus has done for us.

Let us go on mission to the world.

Let me pray for us, and then if you would like to post any questions, I will answer them, or at least attempt to.

Let's pray.

Our Father, we thank you that the Lord Jesus is alive, that by the power of the Holy Spirit you raised him to newness of life, never to die again, that he is incorruptible, and so our hope is set with him in heaven, never to be lost by changing circumstances or by suffering that comes our way.

Thank you that uh that what you ask us to believe is not blind leaps into the dark, that we can think about the uh the plausibility of the resurrection.

We think about the the evidences and the explanations and come to a conclusion that is rational, biblical.

Help us to come with clear minds and open eyes to these realities, so thrill our hearts that we cannot help but go and tell of the great love of the Savior for us.

We pray all of these things in the name of Jesus.

Amen.