Know God: No Body? Is the Resurrection Reasonable? with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life, that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

If you're new with us, my name's Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here at MetaCurch, and we are in a series called No God, where we are asking the big questions, having real conversations around the claims that Christianity makes.

Last week, our sermon was No God, Why Should I Believe at All?

We looked at the existence of God.

We made three arguments for theism.

Now, that is the belief in God, not necessarily the God of the Bible or the Christian God.

However, we could logically deduct some characteristics of that God as an immaterial, spaceless, timeless, all-powerful, personal, and perfectly moral being.

Today we are doing part two of that series, trying to really understand if the God of the Bible exists.

Now, in this series, there is a lot of content.

And so one of the things we're doing is I'm preaching on Sunday and then I'm streaming on Wednesday nights at seven.

We're calling it Overtime.

It's on the MetaCurch YouTube channel.

Make sure you're subscribed to that.

It's also showing on the MetaCurch Facebook page.

There is so much to say about this.

We could spend years going through these different arguments and evidences for a reason faith, and we get about 45 minutes on Sundays, and then we're breaking it down for a little while longer.

You can find all of this and get caught up on our website at metachurch.tv slash know God.

That's K-N-O-W-G-O-D.

MetaCurch.tv slash know God.

Now today we are turning a corner, and for the God that we argued does in fact exist to be the God of Christianity, it hinges on one specific event, which is the resurrection of Jesus.

The bedrock of Christianity is the resurrection.

And even the men who started the movement that we call church understand this.

The apostle Paul wrote to a church that he had planted in Corinth.

He said, This, if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ himself has been raised.

And if Christ has not been raised, here's the bottom line.

If the resurrection did not occur, then our proclamation is in vain, and so is your faith.

Notice what Paul didn't say.

He didn't say that if you don't get every single sentence of your doctrine right, he didn't say that if Christians eventually become judgmental throughout the years.

No, no, no.

He said it all hinges on one event, whether or not Jesus Christ really, in fact, did rise from the dead.

Today we are asking, nobody, is the resurrection reasonable?

Would you pray with me?

God, we love you, and we're coming to you today, and I thank you for a place like MetaCurch where everyone can come no matter where they are at on their faith journey.

And so, God, I pray that the content of this series fortifies those who already believe and are trying to live out their faith.

I pray for those who are on the fence, that they will have some real questions to contend with as they seek to wrestle and work out their faith.

And I pray for those who are skeptical, agnostic, even atheists, God, that they will be just open and humble enough to lay down any preconceived ideas and to take all things into consideration.

You have promised.

If we seek you, we will find you, and we're here seeking you today.

We love you.

And we pray these things in Jesus' name.

If you're ready to see if the resurrection is reasonable, say amen.

Amen.

Today we are looking at the resurrection, looking at that moment and what actually happened.

Is the resurrection of Jesus reasonable?

An author named Gary Habermass put together the most comprehensive look into what scholars and historians believe surrounding the resurrection.

Now, he looked at over 1,400 critical scholarly works across the ideological spectrum.

So some of the scholars he looked at are believers in Jesus.

They believe the claims of Christianity.

Some are skeptical about them, and many of the works he looked at are from atheistic worldviews that have no way for the supernatural to enter in, which means they don't believe Jesus rose from the dead.

And across all of those sources, what he found is a series of facts that people agree on historically.

They don't believe them by faith, they don't believe them theologically or philosophically.

These are seen by the vast, vast consensus of scholars and historians as facts surrounding the events of what we believe is the resurrection.

We're gonna go through those quickly and then come back at the end to look for a fact pattern.

Number one, they believe that Jesus died by Roman crucifixion.

There was a real guy named Jesus who was in the area of Galilee, who was 30 years as a carpenter, he did ministry for about three years and then died by Roman crucifixion.

Almost every credible scholar and historian believes that today.

Number two, he was buried, most likely, in a private tomb.

Number three, soon afterwards, the disciples were discouraged, bereaved, and despondent, having soon lost hope.

What that means is the disciples did not think Jesus was going to rise again.

We gotta get that picture out of our mind to understand what we're talking about today.

The disciples and followers of Jesus didn't gather around the tomb on Sunday and go, everyone ready?

Ten, nine, eight.

They did not think he was coming back to life.

They were despondent, bereaved, and they lost hope.

Number four, Jesus' tomb was found empty soon after his burial.

Number five, the disciples had experiences that they believed were actual appearances of the risen Jesus.

Now remember, these are scholars all the way across the spectrum, and these are the facts they agree on.

And so they're not saying Jesus rose again, but the consensus of scholars do believe that the tomb was found empty.

They don't all believe that people actually had experiences of Jesus, but they almost all believe that people believed they had experiences of Jesus.

Number six, due to these experiences, the disciples' lives were thoroughly transformed.

They even died for their belief.

Number seven, the proclamation of the resurrection took place very early from the beginning of church history.

Right after Jesus walked out of the grave, the stories of his resurrection began circulating and spreading like wildfire.

It didn't develop hundreds of years later like a legend or a myth.

Number eight, the early public testimony and preaching of the resurrection took place in the city of Jerusalem, where Jesus had been crucified and buried just shortly before.

Number nine, the gospel message centered on the preaching of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

And number 10, James, the brother of Jesus, and Paul, who persecuted the Christians, came to belief in Jesus after experiencing or believing they had experienced an appearance of him.

These are the ten facts that the vast majority of scholars agree on actually happened and took place historically around what we believe to be the resurrection of Jesus.

And the question is, what makes the most sense of this fact pattern?

Given this list and these very unimaginable circumstances, what actually happened to make all of this come true?

I become convinced the best answer is that Jesus really did resurrect.

He really did rise again from the dead.

And I'd like to lay out my argument based on the most, the three most compelling facts of this list.

And what I want to do, because look, we're gonna barely scratch the surface.

We could talk about this stuff for years, but I want to pick the things that are most meaningful and have the biggest impact, and I want you to be able to remember them.

So for these three facts, every fact is gonna get one word and one illustration.

And I hope that that will be something to strengthen or challenge your faith.

The three words are missing, meetings, and movement.

Missing, meetings, and movement.

And you know every preacher has to have an alliteration.

The first one started with them, the rest have to begin with M.

It's fine.

Missing, meetings and movement.

Those are the three facts that we're gonna look at to try and understand exactly what happened 2,000 years ago.

The first thing we have to talk about is that the consensus of scholars and historians is that there was an empty tomb shortly after Jesus was buried.

This is a startling fact of history, and everything hinges on the missing body.

All right.

Do you know what this is?

It's a box.

Guys, this is not the Baptist church you grew up in.

We just gave you mimosas.

You can speak back to me.

What is this?

It's a box.

Not any box.

This is an Amazon box.

Woo! The shopaholics in the room just got excited.

Amazon's amazing.

Overnight delivery.

I don't know if y'all ever ordered things in the early days of the internet.

If you ordered your favorite player's jersey, by the time it processed shifting, got to your house, they were retired.

Like overnight, not only is this a box, not only is this an Amazon box, this is an empty Amazon box.

Now it wasn't always empty.

I ordered something for this box in particular.

I ordered three reams of hammer mill computer paper.

20 pounds of paper because I'd be writing some long sermons, alright?

This came to my house, all boxed up.

I picked it up nice and heavy, 20 pounds, took it into the office, opened it up, saw my computer paper there, left it in the office, it was all fine.

A couple days later, I need to print.

I didn't have any paper.

I went back to the box, and the box was empty.

What that means is don't blame it on my wife.

It's Mother's Day.

What's wrong with y'all?

I mean, probably, but it's Mother's Day.

When something's missing, it demands an explanation.

I didn't see an empty box and go, I'll just order some more.

No.

It demands an explanation.

When something is missing, you put on your little detective hat and you gather the best evidence you can so you can start your search for whatever is missing.

Every day you walk in the house, keys go in the basket, keys go in the basket, keys go in the basket.

The one time you're in a hurry and you need to leave, keys aren't in the basket, right?

When something is missing, it demands an explanation.

And so you put on your detective hat and you start looking through the best evidence available so you can start your searching.

And then somewhere along the way, you ask someone, you say, Hey, my paper's missing or my keys are missing.

And here's what kills me, man.

I don't know why this is so funny to me, but when you tell someone that something is missing, everybody has the exact same response.

You can bet your life savings on it.

They're gonna all ask the same question.

You already know it's the dumbest question on earth.

They're gonna say, Well, where's the last place you saw it?

The last place I saw it is the first place I looked.

That's how I know it's missing.

Hey, uh empty box.

I don't know if uh if you've seen the paper.

Well, where's the last place you saw it?

In the box.

That's how I know.

When the women came to the empty tomb, they didn't show up to the disciples, like the the tomb's empty, Jesus is missing.

Well, where's the last place that you saw Jesus?

We saw him in the tomb, we were all there.

You gotta go find it because when something's missing, it demands an explanation.

And the body of Jesus historically, this is agreed upon, the body of Jesus was missing.

So, what is the best explanation?

We have good reason to believe that the body was missing.

We're gonna be in 1 Corinthians 15 for all three of our points, and here's why.

Because Paul is writing to a church in Corinth, this really wild city, and what he's doing in 1 Corinthians 15 is he is reciting what had become a creed of the first church.

A creed just means you take your statements of faith and you summarize so you can memorize.

You summarize so you can memorize.

It's like what we do with a lot of our songs.

We make them really easy and melodic so that you can summarize our beliefs and memorize our beliefs.

That's what he's doing in 1 Corinthians 15.

And many scholars believe that this creed developed within 18 months of the resurrection.

Like this came about fast.

In 18 months, everyone was on the same page with these beliefs.

1 Corinthians 15, verse 3 says, For I passed on to you as most important what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures.

1 Corinthians 15:3

Now, when he says scriptures, he doesn't mean the New Testament, the Christian scriptures that we read.

He means it's affirming prophecy from hundreds of years earlier in the Old Testament Jewish scriptures.

Verse 4, that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures.

Now, not only is the empty tomb found in letters like this that Paul and other apostles wrote back to the churches that they started that we have in the New Testament, it's also attested to in the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which are the historical accounts of Jesus' life.

And it is attested by extra-biblical or non-biblical sources that were not Christian sources and therefore were unbiased.

There are actually many ancient uh things that point to, documents that point to this, the most famous of which was written by Josephus, who was the preeminent Jewish scholar and lived right around the time of Jesus and in the early church.

Josephus said this: In the time of Pilate, there was a wise man who was called Jesus.

His conduct was good and was known to be virtuous.

And many people from among the Jews and the other nations became his disciples.

Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die, but those who had become his disciples did not abandon his discipleship.

And here's why.

Because they reported that he had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion and that he was alive.

Josephus doesn't believe that Jesus resurrected, but as an accurate historian, he is recording what was told historically about this man, Jesus.

All of this to say there's extremely early accounts of the empty tomb.

There's eyewitness account of the empty tomb.

And the other thing that people point at is that this is probably just a myth or a legend, you know.

The followers of Jesus, they had a lot invested in this, a lot of sunk costs.

They were a little bit embarrassed because the guy leading their movement ended up on a cross and they needed to save face, or maybe they wanted power.

People have all kinds of ideas about why this took place, but they say they just made it up, you know?

Like they just out of whole cloth created this legend, this myth, this fabrication.

The problem is when you compare the gospels that give the account of the resurrection to all of the other ancient writing that we have uh documentation of, what you find is it's not written as myth.

Legends took on a very, very similar literary form.

The documents around the resurrection are written just like all of the other historical documents are written.

And we could point at so, so many facts to back that up.

But the one that I think is most significant is the testimony of the women.

Now we've got to really step outside of our context and culture to understand that this was 2,000 years ago on the other side of the world.

And at that place and at that time, women were less than second-class citizens.

They were more akin to property.

And yet, in the gospel stories that tell of the resurrection of Jesus, it is the women who are the first on the scene and who actually discover the empty tomb.

Now, this is a big problem for anyone who wants to say that the gospels were written by followers of Jesus who were just trying to invent a legend.

Here's why.

Not only were women second-class citizens, but their testimony was not able to be introduced in the legal system or in the social system.

Josephus, the non-Christian historian, lets us know that women's testimony was not even admissible in a court of law.

If you were going to invent a legend to try and say face and gain power about this guy, Jesus, who everyone knows died, you want people to actually believe that he came back to life.

The most important element of that story is finding an empty tomb.

And no one, no one, no one in the ancient world would hinge their entire story on the witness from the lips of women.

It is the very, very last thing they would do.

And odds are, as uncomfortable as this makes us, that even the gospel writers were quite embarrassed by the fact that they had to report that it was women who were the first witnesses to the empty tomb.

And the only thing, the only thing that could explain them leaving in that fact in the story, is that these were people who were doing everything they could to report the events as accurately as they possibly could.

They weren't making something up or fabricating a story in order to push forward propaganda.

They were strictly and obediently recording real events that really took place.

If they weren't willing to lie about the women finding him first, odds are they were trying their best to not lie about anything else.

There was early testimony.

Within 18 months, we have a full creed about what the early church believed.

There was eyewitness testimony, accurate reporting, including from non-Christian sources.

And that has convinced the vast majority of the scholarly world that there was, in fact, an empty tomb.

And when something goes missing, it demands it demands an explanation.

And that moves us on to our next line of evidence.

We talked about missing, and now we have to talk about meetings.

Here's what's so incredible about the resurrection narrative is when you lose your keys, you've got to go looking for them.

When everyone lost Jesus, he came looking for them.

Jesus appeared to many, many, many people.

And a lot of the credibility of this lands on the credibility of those appearance claims.

The vast majority of scholars agree on that many people believe that they saw Jesus in real life.

And yet, can we believe those witnesses?

Back in 1 Corinthians 15, for I passed on to you is most important what I received.

Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried and raised again on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas.

Now that's the formal name for Peter, who is one of Jesus' disciples.

And as the people in Corinth are hearing this, they're thinking, Oh, so he appeared to one guy, you know?

And the one guy happened to be Peter, who just didn't exactly have the highest IQ out of all of the disciples, you know?

Like Peter was always screwing up, always getting things wrong.

So so maybe, you know, Peter put a couple of odd mushrooms in his salad that day and really thought he saw Jesus.

But the letter continues.

He appeared to Cephas, that's Peter, then to the 12.

The Twelve is like the Avengers, you know?

It's an official title for Jesus' closest disciples.

That's something to pay attention to.

In a court of law in the ancient world, you had to have three witnesses in order to verify one testimony.

Peter alone didn't meet that criteria.

But now we've gone from the three that you need to almost a dozen.

All of the disciples all at one time, yeah.

And they all saw the same thing, yeah.

They all experienced this.

That is worth taking note of.

He has the Corinthians' attention, and he's nowhere close to being done.

In verse 6, he says, Then he appeared to over five hundred brothers and sisters, not separately, one-on-one, where it can be unverified.

500 people all at one time.

Most of them are still alive, he says, but some have fallen asleep, which just means that they have passed away.

You have to ask yourself, is this someone building a myth?

Is this someone creating a legend, or is this someone trying to report reality?

You see, what you're what you have to do if you want to push forward a myth or a legend is you have to create great distance or create great time in between you and the events.

So you don't write a legend about something that happened 10 years ago, because people can just get in a boat in Corinth, go one day across the Mediterranean Sea, and land in Jerusalem to fact-check you.

You either need to separate it by time, hundreds of years later, legends develop, or by distance.

Instead of saying Jesus appeared to 500 people all at one time in Jerusalem, right across the Mediterranean Sea from where we are right now, most of them, he says, are still alive.

You know what Paul's saying?

Fact check me, bro.

You can walk back over to Jerusalem and meet people, hundreds of people, who saw Jesus after he had died.

If you want to create a legend, you have to say something like Jesus appeared.

After he died, Jesus appeared.

In Antarctica.

I wish you could have been there, man.

The polar bears were so impressed.

You gotta set it up where your legend can't be fact-checked because legends are not facts.

Two of our facts that we looked at that scholars have had agreed on are worth mentioning again.

Fact number seven is that the proclamation of the resurrection took place very early from the beginning of church history.

This didn't grow as a legend over time.

Fact eight is that the early public testimony and preaching of the resurrection took place in the city of Jerusalem where Jesus had been crucified and buried.

You probably know this, but the early church immediately came under persecution in Jerusalem, where Jesus was buried.

If it was all legend and it was all myth, all the religious leaders or all Rome had to do to snuff out this new little cult called Christianity is go roll away the stone themselves and present the body of Jesus.

Hundreds of people experienced appearances of Jesus, and the most common explanation nowadays, because these facts are a difficult fact pattern for people who don't believe in anything supernatural.

And so what they'll say is it was just hallucinations.

These people were distressed, they were sad, they were grieving, the appearances of Jesus weren't actual appearances, they were just hallucinations.

This is probably the most common theory that people put forward today, but here's the problem that theory can't be verified scientifically, and here's why.

Hallucinations are a neurological occurrence that happens locally inside one person at a time.

Jesus was showing up to 12 people at a time.

They were all seeing and experiencing the same thing.

Even in the unbelievably rare event that two people have similar hallucinations around a similar time frame, what they hear, see, and experience are different because hallucinations are held within an individual.

Jesus was showing up to 500 people who could all report the same words, the same actions, the same experiences.

Believing that 500 people could share a hallucination is simply just as miraculous as believing that somebody came back to life.

The hallucination theory falls on its face.

You see, we live in a world now of relativism.

I talked about that on this last week's overtime.

Everything's subjective.

We live in the world of postmodern thought.

And many people are beginning to say that anything that happened historically cannot actually be verified.

We can't actually know that George Washington was the first president.

We can't actually know that Abraham Lincoln was shot in Ford's Theater.

We can't actually know anything that has happened in the past because it's impossible to empirically verify.

Many people believe this now.

And that's a real problem for how we just actually live life.

It was eight years ago that the Spurs won their last championship against the Miami Heat, led by LeBron James.

You can say hallelujah for the first time if you want to, it's fine.

They won it in five games.

It's beautiful.

But, but, bad news.

I wasn't there.

And I hate to break hearts in church today, but I wasn't there, and so it didn't happen.

How could I know it happened?

I wasn't there.

Everyone might have been having the same hallucination.

Wasn't there, it didn't happen.

It's silly, but it's the way many people are looking at even near history and for sure are looking at ancient history.

And here's the truth.

I could have been certain and put my trust in the fact that the Spurs won a championship in 2014.

Even if there was no video, no cameras, no press clippings, I could have been certain because even though I wasn't there, Pastor Noel was there.

I wasn't there, but Noel was there.

I know Noel, and I trust Noel.

And I also need y'all to know, just kind of as a side lesson, that as your pastor, as a man of God, when I think about the fact that I wasn't there, but Noel was there, I'm nothing but happy for him, okay?

I mean, I know he grew up playing baseball and doesn't even care about basketball all that much, and I've been a lifelong Spurs fan, and all I did was play basketball growing up, and but when I think about it, I want you to know what doesn't happen is I don't boil over in a jealous rage, okay?

Just to make sure y'all know how I feel about it.

I trust Noel.

Noel was there.

Not only was Noel there, I knew many people who were there who all came back as eyewitnesses and said the same thing happened in the same way at the same time.

I have further proof.

A friend of mine who works here at Meta, he's our media director, Marco.

He also works media for the Spurs, which means when they won, he got one of these.

Oh, your boys' dreams are coming true.

Is it Father's Day?

What?

I told him it was so nice of him to give this to me today, forever.

So generous.

Y'all clap for him.

It's so nice of him.

This is a form of proof.

Eyewitness testimony and proof.

And so, what's Paul doing?

He's not saying, look, um, you know, Jesus, he came back, uh, but nobody really saw him.

I mean, a couple people saw him, they're all dead, though.

And uh, if you go to Jerusalem, no one really wants to talk about it, so don't go over there because he's not covering his tracks, he's exposing the truth.

He's saying, Look, you're a boat ride away from being able to verify this for yourself.

You know what's better proof than a ring?

A miracle.

There were people still walking the earth who had been miraculously healed by Jesus.

Go to Jerusalem.

There are hundreds of people who watched him die and then hung out with him later.

There are people who could not walk who will skip right up to you and tell you that they saw Jesus.

There are people who their whole family will attest, lived blind, and now will see your face and share the truth with you.

The body was missing.

There were hundreds of meetings, and the best proof for an appearance of Jesus we haven't even gotten to yet.

In verse six, it says he appeared to over 500 brothers and sisters at one time.

That's very impressive.

Most of them still alive, but some of them have fallen asleep.

In verse 7, then he appeared to James.

I think this might be the best proof for me anyway.

James was the younger brother of Jesus.

We know in scripture that James did not believe in Jesus.

He had heard the rumors, you know, the miracles, all these people showing out to watch his brother preach and everything else.

He also saw that there was some heat on his brother.

He did not believe.

And the day they hung Jesus on a cross, I'm sure it broke James' heart, but at some level he was going, What did you think was gonna happen?

You're standing up to Jerusalem and Rome, and we're supposed to be surprised that you ended up on a cross?

James did not believe until something, something happened.

Paul says that James saw Jesus risen from the dead.

Something happened.

And I'll ask you, those of you with brothers and sisters, if you have a sibling, what would it take for you to believe that they were God?

Not godly, not made in God's image, G-O-D.

I can tell you right now, I could right now teleport to my sister in Austin, walk through the wall, fill up the bathtub, walk on the water, turn water to wine.

She is not going to believe that I'm God.

James didn't believe either.

Until he saw his brother die and saw him risen from the dead.

Not only did James believe, James became an apostle.

He became the leader of the most persecuted church, the church in Jerusalem, and James, even the historian Josephus tells us that James ended up giving his life because he would not recant of his belief that his brother was God.

Something happened, and this fact pattern, the more that you investigate and look into it, certain and prod and look at the sources in scripture and out of scripture, and really just try to think about how we got to where we are today.

Something happened to account for the 10 facts that historians and scholars agree on.

I want to talk about one more fact.

It's one that we didn't really find in the list, but I can empirically verify it today.

We talked about missing and meetings.

Now I want to talk about movement.

For the last time in 1 Corinthians 15, he appeared to over 500 brothers and sisters at once, most of them still alive at that point, some had fallen asleep.

Then he appeared to James, and then to all the apostles, these are the people who started the movement that we call church.

And last of all, as to one born at the wrong time, Paul says, he also appeared to me.

Now, fact pattern 10 is that James, the brother of Jesus, who did not believe in him, began to believe after an appearance of Jesus and Paul.

Paul was a persecutor of Christianity.

He hated Jesus and he hated the movement that Jesus had started.

He spent all of his time and energy and attention rounding up believers in Jesus, persecuting them, imprisoning them, and even overseeing the death of Christians.

And then Paul experienced Jesus.

And he went from being the number one enemy of Christianity to being the greatest church planner in the history of the church.

I want to show you what to me, this is a very personal level, but what to me symbolizes the most significant proof that Jesus actually walked out of that grave 2,000 years ago.

To me, the most significant proof has to be seen in a mirror.

Every day I get up, I stand in front of you, I preach my best, I look out, and every time I look out, I feel like I'm looking at a miracle.

We're here today as a part of the same movement that started 2,000 years ago on the other side of the world.

Allow yourself to really, really try to comprehend that.

Compared to the world that Jesus lived in 2,000 years ago, this world today is more like an alien planet.

Our technology, the way that we commute and communicate, the way that we live, the length of our lives, everything is different.

It couldn't be more different.

And here we are, 2,000 years later.

Billions of people coming together every Sunday to lift high the name of a crucified carpenter from the middle of nowhere.

To me, everyone is looking for proof of a miracle, and what I think the church misses is you are the miracle.

Before Jesus died, he told his disciples, you will do the things that I've done in even greater things.

And they were like, Bro, you called Lazarus back from the dead.

I have trouble not snoozing my alarm ten times, you know, like greater things.

What Jesus knew is that what he started would be pushed forward by us, that there are strength in numbers, that this little movement of a few disciples and followers would span the entire globe and would not ever be defeated.

The movement of Jesus started, and the way that it started was instantly under persecution.

They were squeezed in between Jerusalem and Rome, and the harder they tried to eradicate it, the more the movement grew.

It's unlike anything the world has ever seen.

Christianity is not just another religion.

Here's how religion works: I write a book, it prescribes how you behave, I use fear and I force you to behave that way.

That's a religion.

That's not what Christianity was.

Christianity was God come to earth, died for our sins, walked out of a grave, and on the backside, people recorded it so we would never forget it.

In 1926, James Allen wrote a poem called One Solitary Life.

I'd like to read it for you.

He was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman.

He grew up in another obscure village where he worked in a carpenter shop until he was 30 years old.

He never wrote a book, he never held an office, he never went to college, he never visited a big city, he never traveled more than 200 miles from the place that he was born.

He did none of the things usually associated with greatness.

He had no credentials but himself.

He was only 33.

His friends ran away, one of them denied him.

He was turned over to his enemies and went through the mockery of a trial.

He was nailed to a cross between two thieves while dying.

His executioners gambled for his clothing, the only property on earth that he owned.

When he was dead, he laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend.

Now, twenty centuries have come and gone.

Twenty centuries have come and gone.

And today Jesus is the central figure of the human race and the leader of mankind's progress.

All the armies that have ever marched, all the navies that have ever sailed, all the parliaments that ever sat, all the kings that ever reigned, all of them put together, have not affected the life of mankind on earth as powerfully as that one solitary life.

Something happened between that grave and today.

See, one of the things we have to get over to really understand this movement that we're a part of is we have the rear view mirror fallacy.

We have 2,000 years of Christian history and tradition that we're looking back on, and so we don't understand the events of Easter at all.

Jesus died, and we call it Good Friday.

We celebrate it.

On Friday, when Jesus breathed his last, every last one of his followers quit.

They dropped out.

It was over.

No one was interested in following a Messiah who was killed at the hands of the foreign power that the Messiah was supposed to come and defeat.

We celebrate it.

We celebrate a man stripped of his clothing, publicly humiliated, tortured within an inch of his life, hung publicly on a cross.

We celebrate him suffocating on his own bodily fluids until he could no longer breathe.

We celebrate it.

For them, their life was over.

They quit.

Peter went back to fishing.

It's over.

We think that they knew that on Sunday, life was coming back, movement was starting, heaven had come to earth.

They didn't know.

They ran for their lives like cowards.

The same thing you would have done, the same thing I would have done.

And something happened between them and the same men becoming the most powerful, influential human beings to ever walk the earth, starting a movement that all the power of hell itself could not overcome the same movement, the same miracle that you are sitting in right now.

Something happened, and it shook the foundations of history forever.

Those same apostles would give their life for this movement and for their belief that Jesus really walked out of that grave and they really saw him.

They would give their lives tortured and killed.

People will fabricate a lie, but people will not die for a fabricated lie.

James, the brother of Jesus, was stoned to death because he would not renounce that his big brother was God.

Something happened and it changed the world forever.

Something happened that now we look at all gender, races, class, and we see them as equal.

And why?

They are equal.

This is the starting place.

Historically, they are equal because we believe God came down and died for them all equally.

That didn't exist before Jesus.

It wouldn't exist without Jesus.

He changed history forever.

This is what Paul said in 1 Corinthians.

I passed on to you what is most important that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he rose again according to the scriptures.

Let's look back at our fact pattern.

Jesus died by Roman crucifixion.

He was buried, most likely, in a private tomb.

Soon afterwards, the disciples were discouraged, bereaved, despondent.

They quit.

Number four, Jesus' tomb was found empty.

And when something goes missing, it requires an explanation.

Number five, the disciples had experiences they believed were actual appearances of the risen Jesus.

Due to these experiences, the disciples' lives were thoroughly transformed.

These cowards became the most courageous and even died for their beliefs.

Number seven, the proclamation of the resurrection took place very early.

They didn't wait to start a legend.

They reported the facts.

Number eight, the early public testimony and preaching of the resurrection.

Do you realize the stones it takes to stand 40 yards from the tomb of Jesus and claim out loud that he is God and He's risen from the dead?

They didn't run off to Siberia to preach it.

They stayed put in the same place they killed Jesus.

They said, You can kill me too, but I know what I have seen.

Number nine, the gospel message centered on the preaching of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

And 10, James and Paul, the least likely people on planet earth, not only believed in Jesus, but gave their lives for him.

What explains these widely agreed upon facts?

If you will really, with an open mind and open heart, search that evidence, I believe you will find that the only explanation is something beyond the natural, beyond the physical, that it is metaphysical, supernatural, that a miracle took place.

The same way it's a miracle that this universe came from nothing to the something we live in today.

It is a miracle that God came down to this earth, gave his life because of his great love for you, was put in a borrowed tomb, he only had to rent it because he wouldn't be there long.

And three days later, Jesus resurrected from the dead.

That is what we believe and what we stake our faith on.

The body was missing.

And when something's missing, it demands an explanation.

There were meetings, not with a few, with hundreds of people that must be explained.

And a movement beyond all odds began that you are still sitting in the midst of today.

I believe it's because Jesus came back to life and will live forever.

Would you pray with me?

God, we love you and we thank you.

We thank you for your word.

We thank you for your apostles who were willing to give their life for this belief, who were willing to go to the ends of the earth with your message.

I thank you for MetaCurch, this small local part of your movement that is 2,000 years old and bigger than anything we can imagine.

I pray, God, for those who are not so sure that a resurrection is reasonable, that they would approach it with open minds and open hearts.

Even now, in just a moment, as we begin to worship you, that they would lift their voice, that they would lift their hands, that they would be open to experiencing you.

God, we're not here to prove you, we're here to seek you and to allow you to prove yourself to us.

We love you.

And we pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

If this was helpful to you and you want to help us get the word out, you can subscribe to this podcast.

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If you want to get connected further with what MetaCurch is doing, you can go online to metachurch.tv.

There you can learn how to take next steps.

You can learn where our different venues are at if you ever wanted to visit, and you can also give financially to help push this movement forward.

Man, I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.