Apologetics Session 11 - Christ's Resurrection

Talk about the resurrection and some of the things that, some facts, you know, some fantasy and things that people think about it. It's actually the basis of our faith, the whole basis of our faith is the belief of Christ resurrecting from the dead.

And that kind of closes the loop for the appreciation that Jesus had to do on the cross for believers in Christ. So if you don't believe the resurrection, you actually are not a Christian. And that's sometimes a hard thing for people to understand.

That's really the glue that puts us where we are, okay? The other thing I want to do is pass this around. Each one, take one. And just as a reminder of what Jesus did on the cross for us. And sometimes we don't understand it, but what, and those are just, right, those nails are really long.

Right, so I'll try to go through this fairly quickly. There's a lot of information and I hope you get at least something out of it. Putting this together was kind of tough because there was a lot of pushback.

This really is, in the world, there's a lot of pushback. And I make a mention of why that is in the Hebrew language called Eretz, which is called lander of the dead. And I'm going to touch on that. So let's start with prayer.

Father, we thank you so much for our brothers here. Lord, we thank you so much for the opportunity that we can be together and worship you. We thank you, Lord, for your presence in our hearts. That the Holy Spirit opens our minds.

Let's just see what really the sacrifice you did on the cross. We don't want to be dumbed down when it comes to salvation. We don't want to be those who just take it for granted that you died on the cross for us, Lord, and that you rose on the third day and you are living and breathing and will come back to get us bright, this church.

And we thank you, Lord, that we can present things that people can use in defending why we believe what we believe. So bless us tonight. This is for your glory, Lord. We ask this in your name, Jesus' name.

Amen. So to start off with, Flavius Josephus, if you don't know about him, he is really the scholar that, from a non-biblical viewpoint, really talked about what had happened with Jesus. And it's a proof point that we bring in to today that Jesus was alive when he was resurrected.

So I'm going to read this. It says, About this time lived Jesus, a wise man. If indeed one ought to call him a man, for he was an achiever of extraordinary deeds, and was a teacher of those who accepted truth gladly.

He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. And when he was indicted by the principal men among us, and pilot condemned them to be crucified, those who had come to love him originally did not cease to do so.

For he appeared to them on the third day, restored to life as the prophets of the deity had foretold, and countless other marvelous things about him. And the tribe of the Christians so named after him has not disappeared to this day.

Now what's amazing about this being said is he's not a believer. He's a historian. That's just stating the obvious. Yes. So some historical facts there. His greatest works are the Jewish antiquities. He unveiled them in Hebrew history.

And actually a lot of the Judaism that's happening today has grabbed a lot of this historical facts from his writings, too, as part of what the Jews believe. But they do not believe in the resurrection per se.

They still are not believing in the Messiah King. Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian championed Josephus in Rome to write these historical references, which they kept in their archives about the Jewish people and their history as part of the Roman historical records.

So when we think about what the Jews were doing at that time and what Rome was trying to do, Rome was gathering and aggregating all this information for their own education, basically. And they were using this also against the Jews.

So the more they learned about the Jews, the more they knew how to go ahead and take over and try to do this, try to take over their land. So I won't go through all this, but this is another reference to Jesus having such a character, rash and daring.

And it really talks about what had happened during that time when James was being persecuted, the brother of Jesus. And it talks about how Annas was also being persecuted. And it was more proof points that Jesus was alive and came from the dead.

So there's facts about the resurrection that we really need to know. It's like, if Jesus wasn't raised from the dead, then Christianity isn't true. And we just talked about that. The gospel writers included embarrassing facts about the apostles, which is another proof point.

The gospels were just an open book in the sense of just being transparent about what it is, the good, the bad, and the ugly. It's a lesson that we should be carrying ourselves as brothers. No matter what happens, we love each other.

And it's something that is part of the creed of being in Christ. The marble tablets known as the Nazareth Inscriptions points to Rome's concern about the upheaval caused by Jesus' resurrection in the first century.

This inscription really was something that was talking about Caiaphas, who was planning to do the undermining of Rome as well as the undermining of Jesus, because he did not want to have Jesus politically take over.

And his death, while tragic, it was a political fight that he ended up being in, because Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate were at odds with what's going to happen, and they thought there was going to be an upheaval within that.

We met him with the first witnesses to see Jesus at the resurrection, and we know about that. And every one of the apostles died a martyr's death. Why would they do that? Why would the apostles die like they did?

Of course, they had a reason to, because they saw the Christ come back from the resurrection. This gives a picture of what the tomb was that he was in, and what was wrong with him. The marble tablet you said up there, was that a physical tablet?

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it was a physical tablet. So we have a picture of the tomb, and it's where it was rolled in, it was sealed. What I had found out was there's another tomb that they kind of use as a tourist attraction, and they really don't go to this one as much.

They kind of use this very carefully. But, yeah, this is what it was. It rolled in there. The written testimony of Jesus' resurrection dates back within approximately 20 years of the event. Highly unlikely the Roman guards would have slept through a theft of Jesus' body, and what we think happened and what actually happened was when the guards saw the angel come, they were frightened to death.

They had no idea what was going on. And they ran for their lives. They knew at the time, and this is interesting, that the guards, if they left, they would have been killed anyway. But when they saw the angel come, they started to flee.

They didn't know what to do, and they didn't care at that point. The remarkable transformation of the disciples' testimony of the resurrection of Jesus, and he was buried in their own tomb, and respected historians Josephus acknowledged the history of Jesus and his execution at the hand of Pontius Pilate.

So that kind of gives you a broad view of what happened there. But there were key events that did something. There were many eyewitnesses of Jesus' death, including family disciples, hostile accusers.

They experienced three hours of darkness and a mighty earthquake that split rocks, opened graves. Jesus' followers had some deep sorrow. There was no doubt that Jesus was dead in the mind of Pilate or the Roman centurions or the two members of the ruling Jewish administration.

And Joseph of Arimathea asked Pilate to release the body of Jesus for burial, and Pilate summoned the centurions for the confirmation of Jesus' death. All this is leading to the point of what Jesus had promised in terms of him dying and him coming back.

He had to die. The chief priest that met with Pilate demanded the guards. So we're seeing the political events starting to take place. And there's a lot of scholarship to say that they knew he was the Messiah, and they knew he was going to come back, but they wanted to stop it as best they can to stop the political uprising they thought was going to happen.

And female relatives and followers of Jesus were convinced he was dead, and the saints were raised from the dead in physical life. And this is an amazing piece, because this is a promise that he said would happen.

At the time of Jesus' death, he was resurrected a few days later. These saints traveled into Jerusalem, and many of the relatives and friends now became eyewitnesses, these previously dead righteous servants of God.

So you have Jesus being resurrected a couple days later, but you have these saints that are resurrected now. So the forethought is that the believership that you would have is, we know that Christ is coming after seeing what was happening with where these people were coming out of the graves.

There was an earthquake, and an angel descended to move the stone door. The women decided to set from home. The angel spoke to the women. Before sunrise, the women arrived and were surprised that the stone had been moved, and angels confirmed Jesus' resurrection, that he was going to Galilee, as he had said days before.

The disciples did not believe the women who passed on the angel's message. And Peter and John ran to the tomb to see for themselves. John was apparently convinced by what he saw, while Peter wondered about it all.

And that's interesting, the dynamics that was going on. The resurrection of Christ appeared first to Mary Magdalene, near the tomb, and later to more women disciples. Paul omits mentioning these appearances in 1 Corinthians, perhaps because he wanted to refer to the testimony of men appointed by Christ as official witnesses.

Part of that was Paul's affirmation of apostleship that was happening within the disciples, because the apostles had to have seen Christ to be apostles, and that was one of Paul's declarations. The disciples did not believe Mary when she told them that Jesus appeared to her.

The garb was bribed with large sums of money from the chief priests, and we'll talk about that later, and elders, the Sanhedrin, and I'll give a little dossier on who they were, to say that the disciples came and took Jesus' body.

So more and more, as we're looking through this, we're seeing that while Jesus came to Jerusalem to do what he needed to do, he was used somewhat as a pawn for the political fight that was happening within the Pharisees and the Sanhedrin and the Romans.

And that was plus, you know, you have Satan over the overlord, looking over all this. So it's all coming together now, and coming to an apex as a climax. And then Jesus appears to two disciples on the road to Emmaus, one is named Cleopas, but by expounding the prophecies about the Messiah from the Holy Scriptures and sharing a meal with them.

So, some people say that, okay, he came back, but he was divine, he wasn't human. But right here, he came back, he ate a meal, he was definitely a human that was back here, fully human. The Emmaus disciples spoke to the eleven, explained to them what they saw, and Jesus appeared, and they touched him, and then after eight days, Jesus appeared again.

So we have here a situation where Jesus was coming, he's a human, but he's also divine, and he is doing, basically going around, touching people's lives, and to reveal who he was. You know, he travels to Galilee, he catches the fishermen's attention while waiting to show himself, Peter and six others decide to go to work, right, more than 500 brethren saw Christ in Galilee, most of whom were still alive, and disbelieving James and Jude initially, Jesus' brothers did not believe he was the Christ, although not directly recorded in the gospels.

Paul tells us that Jesus appeared to his half-brother James, and by the time the conference recorded in Acts 15 took place, James was the pastor of the congregation of Jerusalem, which is interesting because there was a conversion that happened with James after the resurrection, and he ends up being a follower of Jesus and ends up being a martyr too.

Additional disciples saw Christ, as mentioned by Paul, and during the upper room of the Pentecost, we see that between that 500 had witnesses there, and the apostles returned to Jerusalem, continued to be instructed by Christ until 40 days were finished, Acts 1 -8, and told them not to leave Jerusalem until they had received the Holy Spirit which happened at Pentecost.

The vicious enemy became the defenders, Paul gave his own name as the final witness, and as the zealous Pharisee, he had finally persecuted Christians. And there is something to be said about his fury at that point, again, we're talking about the apex of Jesus' coming, and Paul, Saul, at the time, knew somewhere he was the Christ, but he could not make that turn yet, and he was willing to defend himself to the death as a Pharisee to do that.

And then there's numerous reliable texts, many documents, manuscripts, fragments from the Bible, old and new, a lot of secular sources, the Dead Sea Scrolls, they all go back to the resurrection, they all go back to Christ's living.

And the biblical commentators there from biblical records believe the Synoptic Gospels, which is Matthew, Mark, Luke, which was written about 20 -30 years, Paul's first letters to the congregation in Corinth can be dated about 25 years after Jesus' resurrection.

So I ran through all this fairly quickly, and I'm going to send this out so you can look at it further, but basically what we're looking at is not only do we have pagan historical records, but we're looking at biblical records, and they're connecting, there's a connection that's actually happening now.

And so the many witnesses in the Gospel of Acts and Paul, it's evident that the people were alive, who could have disputed the facts provided by the New Testament writers if the details were wrong. Instead, there was agreement and consistency, like I'm saying, between the stories, former persecutors and detractors like Paul, previously Saul, did not dispute the records.

And those believers were willing to live and to die under this. So it was proving that Jesus was not a fraud or charlatan or a magician or anything like that. So all that to say is, if you don't believe in the resurrection, there's no Christianity.

And 1 Corinthians 15 -14 says, and if Christ had not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God because we testified about God that He raised Christ, whom He did not raise, if it was true that the dead are not raised.

So we know that the linchpin, what puts it together, is the resurrection. That is what Christianity is, the belief in that, that Jesus Christ became. So if Christ had not been raised, then our preaching is in vain.

We are even found to be misrepresenting God by saying this never happened. And the new Adam completed what the old Adam could not, Jesus' fulfilling propitiation to satisfy the elect. So from here I want to talk about the Sanhedrin.

It's not really talked about much in churches, but they were the ones who really decided to have Him die, even though they didn't have the law on their side, they could not convict somebody like this.

In general, the ancient court system was called the Sanhedrin. The Sanhedrin was a supreme religious body in the land of Israel. There were smaller religious Sanhedrins in every town. That's why when Jesus was going around, there was always somebody from the Pharisee to the Sanhedrin that was following Him and trying to trip Him up all the time.

Sanhedrin is listed in the abolishment of the rabbinic patriotic in about 425, and the earliest record of Sanhedrin is by Josephus, who wrote the political Sanhedrin convened by the Romans. So the Romans and Sanhedrin hated each other.

They were constantly fighting and bickering. Sanhedrin would always bring up problems to the Romans, that they wanted the Romans to stop. Basically, their attitude was, if you're going to go ahead and oversee us, you're going to have to fix everything that's happening within there.

And there was a lot of infighting of what's going on in power, and the Romans and Pilate were in that position where he had to try to fix the political climate there. So the great Sanhedrin met daily during the daytime.

Their meetings were very interesting because they met in sort of a temple, but they would go out of the temple and walk among the people and pointing out different things that were going wrong and then complain to Rome about it.

The Sanhedrins were led by the president called the Nasi, or prince, and a vice-president called Abidin, father of the court. And we can go around 69 sages forming these circles, and if you read anything about them, again, these sages would go around and they were almost like tattletales.

They would go and see what was wrong and then coming back to them and telling them to judge them. But anything that was being done, there was a minimum of two witnesses to convict a subject, or suspect, I should say.

But of course, there were no attorneys. Accusing witnesses stated offense in the presence of the accused, and the accused could call witnesses on their own behalf. So the great Sanhedrin dealt with religious and ritualistic temple matters, criminal matters appertaining to the secular court proceeds, the connection of the discovery of a corpse, trials of adulterous wives, tithes, preparation of the Torah scrolls for the king, and the temple drawing up the calendar and solving the difficulties relating to ritual law.

All that to say is that they would convene from judging people, from walking around, from looking at different things, and then the final judgment would end up going to Rome to make, more times than not, it usually was death they would do.

So this great Sanhedrin lost their authorities to inflict capital punishment and they left that to Rome to do that. And it's very interesting because when Jesus Christ was with Pilate and he was trying to explain, well he actually didn't say anything, and Pilate says what is truth, and he explains who he is, the people there, most of them were the Sanhedrin and the Pharisee that wanted him dead, and they knew that Rome would do it if there was enough people to open up their mouths to have that happen.

And I won't go through all this, it just talks about what had happened, but when this goes out I would suggest you read through this to understand that they were just a very destructive group of people.

Now for a little fun. So we have the Shroud of Turan, and the Shroud of Turan is very interesting, if you look at it, Rich, I know Rich, we've talked about this a few times. Right. What's interesting about this is in the Bible it talks about how Jesus was on the cross, he was beaten and put together.

So when they investigated the Shroud, it went into much more detail that's very, very troubling about what Jesus took for us, what he accepted for us. So the Shroud of Turan is an ancient linen cloth measuring about 14 by 3 .5 feet, a faint image of a crucified man that millions believe is Jesus Christ.

The Shroud of Turan is the most analyzed artifact in the world, yet it remains a mystery, and the cloth is made of hand-spun flax. Historians have determined that the weave of the Shroud of Turan is woven three over one herringbone pattern, which was very common in that time, in that area.

The Shroud resided in Turan's Italy since 1578, thus they named the Shroud. It's been a great enigma, faint front, back, full body image, it's like they were saying, it has been scrutinized beyond what we can possibly think that can happen.

It's characterized by long hair, full beard, patterns of blood stains that are capable with torturous wounds afflicted upon Jesus, as recorded for the New Testaments. And here we get into some of the details.

Over 100 whip marks on every portion of his body, left by scourging from the Roman flagra, and consistent with ancient Roman whips used at the time. The blood stains that formed a circle around the top of his head are consistent with the crown of thorns.

Severely bruised knees that could have been caused by falling on the way to the crucifixion. Blood stains around the holes in the man's wrists and feet that would be consistent with the aftermath of large spikes, the marks of crucifixion.

And blood stains around the large wound that would have been consistent with the injury sustained by the spear in his side. So, in the man, the Shroud did not have a broken leg, which is compatible with the Biblical account.

The legs of both thieves, crucified on either side of Jesus, were broken. To speed asphyxia and death, Jesus was already dead, as the Romans did not need to break his legs. The image of the man does not penetrate the cloth as it would be of any artistic substance that would be used to create the man's image.

In fact, the best chemistry regarding the image is that it's simply a discoloration of the cloth as a result of something having caused an accelerated dehydration, oxidation, cellulose, linen, fibers.

But only in those areas immediately surrounding the body. Now, there's other scholarship that says that part of revealing was the Shekinah glory that comes from Him. And so, there's no machinery or technology or chemistry that actually can understand that.

And so, they have a problem struggling with trying to get to the bottom of how this all happened. But, as believers, we should be consistent that the Shekinah glory had something to do with this. So, the mysterious image is the result of dehydration, oxidation.

This is their scientific analysis. And there is no known artistic process used in the Middle Ages that can account for the... Or today. Yeah, or today. Right, exactly, or today. So, unlike the bloodstains of the shroud, do fully penetrate the cloth from front to back.

The bloodstains appear on the cloth first, followed by the image of the man. There's no image under the blood. So, it kind of proves the Shekinah exploding within that. And it's funny because if Jesus, at that time, came back, He was very thoughtful to fold the cloth and leave it like it is.

Like, you know, I'm back and here I do. I'm doing this. The dust and pollen found in the shroud was native to where, according to the Bible, Jesus lived. In the early 2nd century, Christians' persecutions in the 2nd century were supposedly the reason why the cloth was hidden inside a fortified wall.

Surrounded the city of Edessa. And in 525, they discovered, after a flood, the cloth was rediscovered when the walls, where the cloth had been hidden for over 400 years, still intact. As if nothing happened.

It's almost impossible for something to hold itself together for that long of a time. Usually there is, you know, just general decomposition of what was happening with the cloth. But it was still intact to what was happening there.

The cloth became known as the image of Edessa, later called the true likeness of Christ, not made by human hands. And so this talks about now, talks about what is happening today. Satan still continues today.

If Christ did not resurrect from the cross, would Satan still continue in this world? And that's a question that we need to ask as believers. If Christ didn't do what he did, what happens to his earth?

What happens to people? But we know that Satan's minions are growing. The church is divided. As we know, people are looking for easy believism. Which is a hard thing to believe and understand. True believers, if they don't understand the wholeness of Christ's death and resurrection, it's very, very hard for them to capture the essence of what believership is.

And so they look at idols more than they look at Jesus' death and resurrection on the cross. And we know that today's spiritual warfare is more open than ever. And we see it every single day. We see it personally.

And it affects all of us. And we pray for this church, and we pray for each other here, that as we go into this battle, we have to know that while Christ is in us, that there is a war going on. Really, truly, a war happening.

So the proof about Jesus' crucifixion and subsequent resurrection were planned, foreknown by God. It's all for God's glory and for his relationship with the image of man, and to make that relationship work.

Jesus is God, making it impossible for death to keep him dead. And that's a really logical point. Jesus created, well I should say, God created life. And God created us in that image. And for him, death is not something that would be continued.

It would always come back to life. David's thousand plus years before predicted in Psalms that Jesus would rise from the dead. And God made an oath and promise that Jesus would one day assume David's throne.

Meaning that Jesus could not stay dead. The early church was made up of eyewitnesses who testified that Jesus rose from the dead. And the Holy Spirit bears witness in the believer's heart, as I mentioned before, that Jesus was crucified, resurrected, and that he ascended to God's right hand.

And he will be coming back for justice this time. And people over and over are convicted, repent, and believe, and are baptized when they hear the truth that Jesus was raised. And that's the key piece there in terms of believership about our Lord and Savior.

So who owns death? And that's a big question. Why did this happen? So in the Hebrew, Eretz is what the Hebrew call the land of the dead. So we learn something about the devil here. He has the power of death.

But what does it mean? And the wording takes us back to the Garden of Eden. The serpent of Eden, actually the divine being called Satan, was cursed and cast down to the ground, metaphorically to eating dust.

And the Hebrew word for ground in Isaiah is Eretz. The word also refers to the underworld in Old Testament theology and the realm of the dead. Instead of being like the Most High, God punished Satan by making him the Lord of the dead.

The Most Low. Yeah, the lowest point you ever can make. And that's key because there's no halfway with Satan and demonic forces. They want us dead. Period. And to think about that, there's a margin that we have in...

How can I say this? We've all seen spiritual warfare. We all see it and we say to ourselves, okay, the Lord was there, it worked out well, you know, things are going to get better and all that stuff. But you have to understand, it's a zero-sum game.

They want us dead and they're going to go back to continue to attack us no matter what. And the more your readiness is there, the more you're going to be better to protect yourself from that that's happening.

Particularly our church that's growing. It's going to be under attack if it's not already. And we have to be prepared as brothers to go ahead and defend it. With Jeff putting himself out there and all of us putting ourselves out there, we are going to get attacked.

And you have to understand that it's not to trip us up, it's really for they want to kill us. And it's a crazy thinking around that, but that's the world we live in. As the Lord of the dead, this is what's going to happen.

So all humanity inherited death because of the fall, we know this. And the soul of every human being was, in effect, under the power of Satan, who holds the power of death. And this theology is important for understanding two statements about Satan found elsewhere.

In Revelation 12 -9, it connects Satan with the serpent of Eden, describing him as thrown down to earth. And when Adam sinned, God imputed the guilt of it to all of us. And if you read Hebrews 7 -10, it talks about how all of us were born into this because of Adam's sin, and we are living in a world of the land of the dead, because Satan owns this world.

He wants to take over everything that's here, including us. So now the salvation, the power of the kingdom of God, and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accusers of our brothers have been thrown down, and who accuses us of them day and night before our God.

So that's really the essence of the war that we're in. And when Christ comes and brings us up from the church to his bride, then he will show his justice to what is happening in the world. And this is, they made an image of what Jesus can look like from the shroud.

And this is what the image came out to be looking like.

And it's interesting. It doesn't look like the Christ that was beat the way the Bible depicts it. Right, right.

Yeah, so this is, they're trying to make an impression, and this is how it worked. And it's interesting. You have a little bit of blood on top and everything there.

Yeah, the scars on the torso and the back aren't more obvious than this.

So I ran through this whole thing, and I want to talk a little bit about what is happening here, where we try to understand what's happening with the war that is among us right now. And it's very deceptive.

And Satan uses our cultural relevance through CRT and social media and all that. And we have to be grounded in what we're trying to do there and really understand that all these things are mentally just on a path away from the Lord.

And I'm not trying to be like, oh, you can't do this or do that. Just something in the back of your head that you need to just understand that it's not meant for uplifting or bringing us up. It is meant to push us away and bring us down.

And it's very, very subtle. And that's the way Satan works. And we have to be very, very careful about how we look at different things that are happening, especially from social media. There's so much disinformation out there that is happening.

Even when I was putting all this together and gathering all these different pieces, I could not believe how much information that was wrong about Jesus, the resurrection, his death, all this stuff. I like to say it's very new-agey that people are talking about Jesus.

He was a great prophet. And it's very attractive for people to understand. The overriding sentiment was that he was a person of love, and he just wanted love for everybody. So there's this feeling that God would never be a person of justice.

God would never be a person of looking at humanity as a whole and dividing them of believers and nonbelievers. It's hard from the material that I was looking at. One interesting fact that I saw, though, with good scholarship is that when Jesus was in the temple and he went after the people who were selling and making money off the sacrifices, and he called them a den of thieves and everything, that area was 30 acres.

It wasn't just a small thing. It was 30 acres wide. Think about a man who went there and was cleaning house over 30 acres to do that. Just absolutely amazing. And it really kind of pictures what Jesus meant in terms of what he thought about the temple, about what he thought about his allegiance to our God.

So I just want to bring that as a reminder for all of us of what it means. This is, like I said, a zero-sum game. Satan wants us dead. He does not want us to just go ahead and just run along. He wants us out and done, and he will try everything he can to try to take us out.

So that's what I have.

Matt, would you close out? Sure. Dear God, I just thank you for this day. I thank you for all these brothers who came out tonight. Lord, I just thank you for Ivan and his preparation. I thank you for sending your Son to die on the cross for us to provide a way to reconcile us back to you, Lord.

And thank you so much for the resurrection, Father, that actually is the foundation, the underpinnings of our faith, Lord. And I just pray, God, that we would have confidence in the evidence that is there for your resurrection, that we know that it is, in fact, reasonable to believe that there is evidence that proves that this actually did happen, Lord.

And I pray that we would just be encouraged by that, Lord. And I pray that you would give us all safety as we travel home. And I thank you so much for all the blessings and just ask that you would give us the strength to endure in this dark world.

And I pray, Lord, for all these things in your Son's name. Amen.