Jehovah's Witnesses and The Resurrection of Christ

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Welcome to the Dividing Line this Saturday afternoon. I'm your host, James White, along with me, Rich Pierce, two rather tired gentlemen this week after a very long week of ministering.
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Those of you who are familiar with our ministry realize that for the past five days at least, we have been out at the
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Mormon Easter pageant in Mesa, where they're expecting 75 ,000 out there this year over the six nights of the
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Mormon Easter pageant, but I don't think they're going to get anywhere near that. But there have been quite a number of people out there, and so we've been there on the street corners around the
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Mormon temple, passing out literature, witnessing the people. We've spent, well, we've got ten people out there, and they spend five hours a night.
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That's about 50 hours a day. That's 250 hours so far just this week. That's pretty good.
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Talking with people, witnessing the people, lots of opportunities this week to share the gospel with folks, and we'll be out there again this evening if you happen to be going by, and you see a bunch of people staying on the street corners, surrounded by crowds of people, and somebody's talking and everybody's listening, or, well, it doesn't always work that way, does it?
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But anyways, we've been out at the Easter pageant, passing out thousands of tracts and witnessing the people, and it's been a great week.
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A great couple of months, actually, with the seminar, witnessing the Mormons last month, and we were up in Salt Lake at the general conference, and now at the
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Easter pageant, and we have the Jehovah's Witness seminar next month, and the district convention of Jehovah's Witnesses in June, and I keep saying,
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July comes, and I'm just going to pass out. That's all there is to it. But we're busy ministering and sharing the gospel with those involved in false religions and cults, and today, though, we are going to be addressing another issue, and that is the issue of the resurrection.
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We're going to be talking about a lot of issues relevant to the resurrection, because there are a lot of questions about the resurrection that people have, and we'd like to get you involved at 245 -0375, obviously.
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Tomorrow is Resurrection Sunday, unless, of course, you're a member of certain groups that deny the resurrection, or who believe that the resurrection took place on Saturday, or something like that.
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We'll be talking about some of those issues this afternoon. But we're going to be talking about the resurrection. Before we do that,
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I'd like to mention the fact that we're back on KXTG. Last week was our first week back, after about a month off, and we're back because of the kindness of Dr.
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Martin Galluz of the Black Canyon Chiropractic Center, helping to sponsor the program.
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WTC Consulting, people who can help you with your software needs, your computer needs for business or home, they've chipped in to help.
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Some people have helped to put the program back on the air, but obviously we need more sponsorship beyond that.
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So we want to say thank you to those folks, and encourage you Christian business people, if you are interested in helping to support a program like this, or if you're just a plain old
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Christian person who would like to be able to support us, we do need that help to be able to continue. We'll continue talking about the subjects that we're addressing here on the dividing line.
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Now, this afternoon we're talking about the resurrection. I was on the way driving in going, what in the world am
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I going to start off with? Because there are so many issues to address. There's the issue that is very common these days of what day was the crucifixion, how long was
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Jesus in the tomb, at what time did the resurrection take place? And we will address those things.
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Then there's the issue of, for example, what Jehovah's Witnesses believe, that Jesus Christ was raised only spiritually from the grave, that he was not raised physically whatsoever.
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There's the Muslim claim that Jesus did not really die on the cross. All these things that we're going to try to get around to addressing, depending on the phone calls and how many people call and which direction they're taking the conversation.
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But one of the first things I figure we had to address right off the bat was the fact that of all the claims of Christianity, the resurrection is the one that mankind has seemingly dedicated the most time to trying to figure out a theory to explain away the miraculousness of the resurrection.
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Now, of course, there are some people who don't even believe that Jesus Christ ever existed. They don't believe that he ever lived.
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But they are, fortunately, in the vast minority these days, because there's plenty of evidence that he did indeed live.
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Even the Jewish people accept that he lived, that he was a teacher, and that the stories we have from him are at least generally accurate in what they have to say.
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But, given that Jesus lived, then you come up with basically a humanistic attitude toward the resurrection.
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That is, obviously, there's no way, if one rejects the fact that miracles exist and that miracles could happen, there's no way for the resurrection to have taken place.
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There must be some naturalistic explanation for the resurrection. And a number of theories have been put forward.
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Undoubtedly, one of the most popular theories is the swoon theory. Ever heard of the swoon theory?
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Yes, as a matter of fact, I have. You've heard of the swoon theory. There's a big difference between death and swoon.
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Yes, a very big difference between that. So people can understand what the swoon theory is.
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The swoon theory is basically that Jesus Christ did not die on the cross, but he swooned. He simply passed out.
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And the guards, whoever was mistaken, they thought he was dead.
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He wasn't. They took him down, and in the coolness of the tomb, he revived and came out of the tomb and convinced his disciples he was alive.
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And then, generally, as people would say, sometime later, who knows, when he was 60, 70 years old, he died a natural death, and that was it.
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And this was the beginning of Christianity. Well, the swoon theory has so many holes in it, it's almost unbelievable, just to start off with, what the swoon theory has to say.
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First of all, you've got a person who was crucified, and the gospel narratives tell us what happened, relevant to the whipping, the scourging, the loss of blood, the nailing of the hands and feet to the cross, the piercing of the spear into Jesus' side, the fact that the
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Roman guards standing there could tell the difference between a person who had passed out and a person who was dead.
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They were trained to know that. If they messed up, it would be their life, so they obviously knew what was going on.
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So that doesn't obviously jive with the swoon theory whatsoever. Then you have Jesus being wrapped in a burial cloth, laid in a cold tomb.
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How that's supposed to revive someone, I'm not sure. It's sort of hard to breathe when you're wrapped in a burial cloth.
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You do not have any medical attention being given to him whatsoever, so it would be much more likely that he would die rather than simply revive from some coolness of a tomb.
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How he managed to get out of the burial cloth, the gospels tell us, one of the gospels tells us that the burial cloth that was wrapped around him just basically collapsed, that it hadn't been unwound and then wound back up, but just basically collapsed itself.
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Now was that burial cloth similar to mummification, Jim? Well, there's a lot of questions about that, and of course if you believe that the
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Shroud of Turin is correct, then that wouldn't make a whole lot of sense because the gospels tell us that there was a wrapping around the face that was taken off and laid aside, but there would seem to have been a wrapping, same with Lazarus.
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Lazarus had, he said, release him from those burial clothes, that he was just some loose thing, he was bound by them.
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If he was just some loose thing that was just sort of laying on him, he could have loosed himself from it, but obviously there needed to be something more than that.
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That's one of the reasons I don't accept the Shroud of Turin as being the actual burial cloth of Jesus because it doesn't really jive with what the gospels themselves say concerning him.
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But anyhow, how he managed to extract himself with hands, wrists that would have been basically obliterated by the nails, how he managed to stand up on feet that had just been recently nailed to a cross, then, in his weakened condition, managed to roll away a very heavy stone from the entrance of the tomb, fight off the
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Roman guards who obviously would have attempted to keep him in there, or sneak by them or something like that, if they're
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Roman guards. There are some who feel that they are temple guards, but even the temple guards themselves were under the same strictures that the
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Roman guards were. In the Mishnah, we read that the temple guards, if they ever were to fall asleep, would receive a whipping and their garments would be burned.
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And so obviously they would not try to fall asleep either. But whoever the guards were, and they're most probably
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Roman guards from what Matthew has to say about it, managed to slip by them or fight them off or something like that, walk the determined distance into Jerusalem to find the disciples, and then have completely healed scars to show to the disciples, somehow managed to show up inside of a locked room.
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I mean, I think we've made it pretty obvious so far that the swoon theory just doesn't hold any water whatsoever.
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It has no way of jiving with the facts that we have them. About the oldest theory that has been put forth to explain the resurrection away is the theft theory, and that is the disciples stole the body of Jesus and then to have a job,
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I guess, after the death of Jesus, they started preaching the resurrection and started their own church. Well, this one, of course, we were even given the origins of this one by Matthew.
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Because Matthew tells the Jewish leaders, approached the guards and gave them money and said, this is what you're to say, and if it comes to the governor's ears, we will intercede for you.
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Well, the reason that they had to say this was that if the guards admitted to having fallen asleep, if they were
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Roman guards, they were subject to the penalty of death. And so, obviously, the Jewish leaders would have had to have interceded on their behalf to keep them from dying.
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And since this is found even in the New Testament, it's not too surprising to find it common today. It has been brought up numerous times.
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Refuting it is rather interesting because, first of all, just on a very psychological basis, this band of disciples, as we see them presented, and, of course, someone who believes in this would say, well, that's their writings.
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They must be saying it that way. Well, Luke wasn't one of them. And you'd have to assume that all of them are lying.
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This band of disciples, from all the evidence we have, were a very downtrodden, downcast group of people who were not out to go stealing bodies, fight off Roman guards, or anything of the kind.
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These were not trained soldiers who'd slip past Roman guards and rob tombs.
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They had no reason to do it. They were not inclined to deceiving people in the first place.
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There's no evidence that they were. There is no way to explain the fervor with which they proclaimed the gospel by saying that they themselves were well aware of the fact they were lying to people.
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The Jews themselves did not react in such a way as to accuse them of having stolen the body.
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They circulated the story, but whenever Paul or Peter or these others actually confronted the
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Jews, the Jews were not recorded as having accused them of doing that because it would have been folly for them to have done that.
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There were over 500 people that had seen Jesus alive after his resurrection alive at that time.
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So the theft theory dies for lack of support. It's just simply some way of getting around the clear evidences presented in the
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New Testament about the resurrection. There's nothing in the New Testament that would support it. There's not even anything really within the secular time period that would say, yes, the disciples were this great
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A -team group of individuals that came running in with their M -16s and stole the body.
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What they did with it, of course, is not known. The Jews later on in later history would accuse them of that after the witnesses were dead.
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But when the witnesses were alive themselves, we don't have any evidence that they talked about that. So the theft theory, that's a very difficult word to say.
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Theft theory simply does not jive with the facts as we have them.
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The next one that has been listed, and I'll just briefly mention what it is, and we'll take a break and come back, and we'd like to hear your comments at 2450375.
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Concerning the resurrection, what you think about the resurrection, what your feelings are at this Resurrection Sunday season that we are about to celebrate tomorrow.
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You've probably already begun the celebration with the Good Friday yesterday and the
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Resurrection Sunday services tomorrow. We'd like to hear what you have to say at 2450375.
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But very briefly, I'd just like to point out that another theory that has been given is the hallucination theory, that the appearances of Jesus Christ were mass hallucinations, and we'll be looking a little bit at what that has to say after we take this break and take your phone calls at 2450375.
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We'll be right back. Welcome back to Dividing Line. This afternoon as we discuss the subject of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we're going to go to Phoenix, and one of our faithful callers is standing in a phone booth.
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Hello, Edwina. Hello, Edwina, can you hear me? Hello, Edwina, can you hear me?
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Okay, you're on the air. Oh, hi. Can you hear me all right? Yes. I just want to ask a question about in Luke 24, verse 13, where Jesus was walking with those two men along the road, and it said that they couldn't recognize him.
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Uh -huh. Why was it that they couldn't recognize him? Okay, I just happened to have my
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Bible open to that passage. On the road to Emmaus, Jesus encountered two disciples, and he walked with them, and it says in verse 16, but they were kept from recognizing him.
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And later on, it's in verse 31, it says, then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight.
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It's very clear that a power was acting upon them to keep them from recognizing him.
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It was not that he was unrecognizable, but that there was a power, God's power working on them to keep them from recognizing him until the purpose that he wished to work in their lives was accomplished.
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So it wasn't that Jesus was some different person or was appearing in different forms and things like that and confusing people, but it was the fact that Jesus himself was exercising a power to keep them from recognizing him.
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They were kept from recognizing him by the power of God itself. Oh, okay.
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Okay? All right, thanks. Okay, thanks a lot, Edwina. Bye -bye. Bye. 245 -0375, 245 -0375 is the phone number for your questions and comments, and we'd like to talk to you today about the resurrection of Jesus Christ and what it means in your life at this time of the year, this season.
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And just before Edwina's phone call, we had been talking about another one of the theories that is put forth to explain away the resurrection, and that is the hallucination theory, and that is that all the appearances of Jesus Christ as we have them recorded in the
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New Testament were due to mass hallucination. The disciples so much wanted him to be alive that they all hallucinated that he had risen from the dead.
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Now, that's rather interesting, obviously, considering the fact that Jesus had to repeatedly appear to the disciples just to convince them of the reality of the resurrection.
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Those who are wishing for something so strong that they create hallucinations aren't going to be sitting there going,
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Well, I'm really not sure. You know, sort of like Thomas. It was called Doubting Thomas because he did not believe in the resurrection until he had bodily proof standing in front of him.
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People who would suggest this have to assume that all the disciples were under the same mental state, that they are all subject to hallucinations, and not all people are subject to hallucinations, that somehow this hallucination could be agreed upon by a large number of people.
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This type of thing just doesn't occur very often at all. 500 people don't normally have the same hallucination at different times, in different circumstances, in different surroundings.
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Hallucinations normally take place when a person is encountered with a familiar situation that reminds them of something.
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You don't have 500 people who would be using the same context and the same situation to remember something like that.
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It's obviously a very broad attack upon the very credibility of the disciples themselves.
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The disciples were a very variegated group of people. They did not come from the same backgrounds.
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They did not have the same type of mental makeup. Matthew was as different from Simon the
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Zealot as you could have. Obviously, people who are that different don't tend to have the exact same hallucination at the exact same time, in the exact same detail.
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Obviously, these people were in different states of mind. John the Beloved was one who would be more willing to allow for the miraculous to take place.
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Thomas wasn't. Mary was weeping. Some were afraid.
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When you look at the very mental states they were in, they weren't even in the same mental states. You have different people, different contexts, different mental states that simply do not allow for any type of mass hallucination to be taking place.
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Finally, the last theory that we'll look at, we'll at least give any credence to anyhow, is the wrong tomb theory.
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This one is one of my favorites. The women and John and Peter went to the wrong tomb.
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Now, of course, the scriptures tell us that Mary and the women followed after and saw the place where they laid
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Jesus. But these people would say, well, they may have seen it, but then in the darkness of the Sunday morning they went to the wrong tomb, and it was empty, and there was nobody there, and maybe they had visions of angels and ran off and started the whole thing, and this is how it happened.
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This can be dealt with so quickly. It's rather well done when I heard someone first do this.
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And that is, if it's just the wrong tomb, if Jesus died and his body was in the tomb and they went to the wrong tomb, it would have been so easy for the
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Jewish leaders to have wiped out Christianity. As soon as Peter and John and the others started preaching, they could have just gone to the right tomb, rolled away the stone, taken the dead body out, stuck it on a cart, carted it through downtown
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Jerusalem, put it back in, and that would have been the end of Christianity. Obviously they did not do that.
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I'm sure if they had been able to do that, they would have done that, but they didn't. And so obviously the idea that the women went to the wrong tomb was contradicted by the fact that they were there when
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Jesus' body was laid in the tomb. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, who we were told are involved in laying him there, they would have known, and as soon as someone told them about the resurrection, they would have gone to the tomb and found it sealed, the guard there, the body inside, and they would have put a kibosh on it.
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But none of those things happened. And so obviously the idea that the wrong tomb was gone too and this is how the whole thing started ignores the vast majority of the evidence and the context of which we're speaking.
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And so those are some of the theories that have been raised by folks concerning the resurrection and how to explain away the resurrection.
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Most people who are coming, for example, from an atheistic viewpoint, not just atheist but anti -theist, there's a bit of a difference there.
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An atheist just simply says there is no God and anti -theist is militant in his denunciation of those who believe that there is a
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God. And I've encountered a few of those in my lifetime. These people probably aren't going to get too much into these theories because they're going to go farther back than that and attempt to deny
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Jesus even existed. In fact, during this week on a secular radio station I heard a program where a guy called in and said that the
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Dead Sea Scrolls show that Jesus is completely different than the
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New Testament presents him, that Jesus actually did write things. There's a Joshua mentioned in the
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Dead Sea Scrolls and these people think that that's Jesus and this Joshua wrote things, they identify him as a teacher of righteousness, all these other wonderful things.
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And this is sort of some of the areas that more of the anti -theists are going into than these theories, which were very, very common back in the last century.
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In the rationalist German viewpoint that came out that time, people had to come up with a rationalistic explanation of all miracles.
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For example, when Jesus walked in the water, you know what that really was? There was a sandbar there. And the disciples were confused and they thought he was actually walking in the water when actually he was walking in the sandbar.
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And maybe when Peter got out of the boat, he was also in the sandbar, but then he stepped off the sandbar and started to sink and Jesus reached down and picked him up and they got in the boat.
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And this is how people are trying to explain away all the miracles that occur in the
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Bible. That's quite convenient, you know, a storm's just blown over and all this is going on.
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Jesus just happens to know where that sandbar is and takes him all the way from shore right out to where they are.
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But there has to be a rationalistic explanation if you deny the miraculous, if you deny the supernatural, there must be a rationalistic explanation.
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One scholar responds to the resurrections that Jesus performed of Lazarus and the widow of Nain's son as rescues from an early grave.
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These people weren't dead, Jesus just resuscitated them, and all things like this.
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So anyways, that's where a lot of these theories came from. They're a little bit out of vogue these days because people are now getting to the point where they're simply denying that Jesus ever existed and go from that way, that you don't have to deal with the resurrection, you don't have to deal with the
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New Testament, just throw the whole thing out the window and start from scratch. So that's how they're dealing with that.
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2450375, 30 minutes past the hour, 2450375 is the phone number for you to call and get involved.
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We'd like to hear from you about what you believe about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. What do you feel at this time of year?
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Do you feel that the resurrection season has been commercialized?
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Do you feel that most Christians are missing the message of the resurrection? What do you think about it?
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Call us at 2450375. Another aspect of the resurrection that we're going to address this afternoon is the fact that there are some groups that deny the resurrection by saying that Jesus Christ rose only spiritually from the grave.
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One of the major groups that does this is the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society or Jehovah's Witnesses.
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Jehovah's Witnesses believe that Jesus Christ died on a stake.
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They believe that Jesus did not have a spirit, that no men have spirits actually, but that Jesus was a man who died on a stake.
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He was buried and as one early Watchtower Society publication put it, the man
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Jesus is dead, forever dead, that he was not resurrected physically from the grave, but that he was recreated as a spirit being.
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Now in Watchtower theology, they are teaching that Jesus was created as Michael the archangel, that he then became a man,
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Michael the archangel is a spirit, then he became a man, Jesus Christ, and then when we come to the quote unquote resurrection, then we have
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Jesus being recreated as Michael the archangel. This is the Jehovah's Witnesses position relative to the resurrection.
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What does the Bible say about the resurrection of Jesus Christ? Was it spiritual or was it physical? We're going to address that subject right after we talk to Dell and Glendale.
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Dell, can you hear me? Dell, you're on the air. Oh, hi Jim. Hi. I'm glad you're back on.
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We're glad to be here. I missed you. I want to ask you something.
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I guess I'll tell you something and ask you. As I was studying about the resurrection, you know, over the last about 15 years or so, it began to dawn on me how real it was.
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And what helped me to realize that was to realize how
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Christ had to lead the apostles who were right there with him all the time, step by step, through his telling them he was going to die and his actual death and then his burial and then his resurrection and then revealing himself to them and crowning it with Thomas, you know, doubting
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Thomas. Did you get that impression? It was like step by step, even though he told them they didn't understand until he showed them what happened?
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Oh, yes, indeed. In fact, the disciples, as the Bible presents it, were very confused, very flustered.
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All through the gospel narratives, the writers tell us that the disciples did not understand that the
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Messiah must suffer and die. Common Jewish expectation at that time was that the
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Messiah who would come would be a human conqueror, a military leader. In fact, as I was listening this week to a program where a
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Jewish person was on discussing his views of Jesus, that was one of the reasons he rejects Jesus, is that Jesus died.
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I think I heard the same program. Yes, in fact, a friend of mine was on that program. I had arranged for him to be on that program,
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Chuck Hoppus. But anyways, this is what they were expecting. They were expecting a military leader, not a suffering servant.
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And so, by far, Jesus had to, as Luke puts it, by many convincing proofs, prove to the disciples that he was indeed alive from the dead and that he had indeed been resurrected.
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Indeed. Oh, yes, I noticed it, and it's very clearly presented in the
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New Testament that Jesus had to prove his resurrection even to his disciples.
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They did not understand it until after the resurrection itself. Oh, you just verified the same thing to me.
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Thank you very much. God bless you. Thank you. Bye -bye. 2450375 is the phone number for you to call, 2450375, as we look at the subject of the resurrection this
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Saturday afternoon. Briefly, before we take our break, I was mentioning that the Jehovah's Witnesses deny the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ.
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They believe that he was resurrected as a spirit being, Michael the archangel, and go around proclaiming this in their books, in their literature.
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At this time of year, they would probably bring this up if you were talking to Jehovah's Witnesses. But what does the Bible say about the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ?
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Well, for example, in John 2, verses 19 -21, Jesus, when talking about the temple, said, destroy this temple, and in three days
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I'll raise it up, when talking to the Jews and they asked for a sign. And they didn't understand what he was talking about.
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John goes on to say he spoke of the temple of his body, and the fact is very clear that Jesus said that in three days he would raise up his body, the body being the body that he was crucified in.
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And so right after we take this next break, I'm going to talk about the fact of what is a resurrection?
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What is resurrection? What does resurrection mean? Does resurrection mean recreation, or does it mean arising again of that which died?
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Relevant to what Jehovah's Witnesses were saying right beforehand, we want to define what a resurrection is.
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The Greek term anastasis, which is resurrection, means a standing again. And to qualify as a true resurrection, that which died must come back to life again.
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Now, in the Jehovah's Witness position, they do not have a resurrection. There is no resurrection, really, in Jehovah's Witness theology.
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Because that which died was a human being, Jesus. That which was raised was a spirit being,
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Michael the Archangel. That is not a resurrection. And hence the society, if it were to be honest with itself, would have to say that they believe in the recreation of Jesus Christ as a new being,
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Michael the Archangel. But that is not what the Bible presents. The Bible presents the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
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Physical man died. A human body died on the cross, and a human body was raised from the dead.
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Now, that human body was glorified and is far beyond what we can understand, as 1
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Corinthians 15 says, but it was still the physical body that died on the cross of Calvary.
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Now, this can be seen from many ways. The Jehovah's Witnesses believe that the physical appearances of Jesus Christ after his resurrection were simply the materialization of physical bodies to convince the disciples of the resurrection.
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In other words, Jesus had to fool them into believing he had risen from the dead. That is actually deceptive on Jesus' part, but that is what
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Jehovah's Witnesses are saying. I recall going over to California once, and we had gone over with some friends over to Disneyland.
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It wasn't open yet. We were driving around in the area there, and we saw these two gentlemen standing out on a street corner about 8 o 'clock in the morning on a
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Saturday morning, all alone. Nobody was around them. They were standing there holding these magazines out.
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We're talking this place is dead. There's nobody there. There's these two guys holding these magazines. I sort of peered through the window, and I recognized them as Watchtower and Awake magazines.
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So we had a radical change in driving plans and hung a Yui in the middle of the street. I and one of the people that was with me got out of the van and grabbed our
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Bibles and spent about an hour talking to these two Jehovah's Witnesses on the sidewalk. We eventually started talking about the resurrection of Christ.
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That's what they're saying. We've got to realize that angels can materialize bodies. Since Jesus was resurrected as Michael the archangel, he materialized a body to prove his resurrection.
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That proves nothing. That's deceptive because if that body had not actually risen from the dead, that's not a resurrection.
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But that, of course, is what they were saying. They were very adamant on that point. We tried to point at them to Luke 24, beginning in verse 36, where it says,
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While they were still talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, Peace be with you. They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost or a spirit.
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He said to them, Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet.
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It is I myself. Touch me and see. A ghost does not have flesh and bones, you see,
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I have. When he had said this, he showed them his hands and feet. And while they still did not believe it because of joy and amazement, he asked them,
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Do you have anything here to eat? They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it in their presence.
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Now, you can't get much more straightforward than what Jesus did for the disciples in this situation.
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They thought they had seen a spirit. They thought they had seen a ghost. Now this is what
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Jehovah's Witnesses are actually saying that they saw was that Jesus was raised as a spirit and not as a physical being.
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But Jesus said, Why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your mind? He thought of that as a doubt and not as a true faith at all.
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And the word actually is spirit in the Greek New Testament. The NIV translation is a little unfortunate there that they thought they saw a spirit.
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And he says, No, you're confused. Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself.
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Touch me and see. A spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have. And so he has flesh and bones, and he's saying,
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Hey, a spirit does not have flesh and bones. He shows them his hands and his feet. He invites them to examine him.
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And this, of course, is a classic refutation of what the Jehovah's Witnesses teach about Jesus actually being a spirit when he was raised from the dead.
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Another passage that is very clear on this is John chapter 20, where we have an even fuller exposition of the resurrection and Jesus' interaction with the disciples, especially relevant to Thomas himself.
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Thomas, who did not exercise faith in the resurrection when he was told by the others, himself said,
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Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were and put my hand to his side,
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I will not believe it, in John chapter 20. So in verse 26, a week later, on the next
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Sunday, his disciples were in the house again. Thomas was with them this time. And though the doors were locked,
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Jesus came and stood among them and said, Peace be with you. Then he said to Thomas, Put your finger here. See my hands.
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Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe. Now Jesus knew exactly what
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Thomas had said, even though he was not there a week before him. And Thomas says unto him,
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My Lord and my God, obviously a passage it gives me, that the Jehovah's Witnesses are in a lot of trouble because they deny the deity of Christ.
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And Jesus told him, Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.
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And Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. Jesus had many resurrection appearances where he interacted with the disciples.
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We are not told a whole lot about exactly what was said during that time, but we know that Jesus opened their minds to the scriptures so they could understand that what happened to Jesus was what was necessary to fulfill the
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Old Testament scriptures themselves. So the Jehovah's Witness position that Jesus was raised spiritually and not physically, you might ask the question, what happened to his physical body if he was not raised physically?
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Well, the publication, The Time is at Hand, this is an older, much older publication, page 129, said,
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Whether it, that is Christ's body, was dissolved into gases or whether it is still preserved somewhere as the grand memorial of God's love of Christ's obedience and of our redemption, no one knows.
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So here you're given two possibilities. It was dissolved into gases, and notice there's no scriptural reference there because it's sort of hard to find one because the
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Bible never says anything like that, or possibly it's on display somewhere as a great memorial of God's love, which is just as absurd from a biblical viewpoint.
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This is about all they can say about the resurrection, about the physical body itself. Here we have one of those examples where mankind has got to have a man -made answer for everything.
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And Jesus went throughout the land using physical examples to teach spiritual truth, and there are many people, even in that day and even in our day, who can't handle those spiritual truths, so they've got to have an understanding of their own comprehension to explain away what occurred.
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And I'm reminded, I can't find it, I was looking for it a minute ago, of the time when the people in Acts had asked, you know, what shall we do?
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And Jesus, or I believe it was Peter, said believe in the Lord, that God raised him up from the dead, you know, and that's the whole miracle of the situation.
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The resurrection was the central aspect of the preaching of the early churches found in Acts. In fact,
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Paul almost got laughed off of Mars Hill for bringing up the resurrection of the
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Greeks because the Greeks, of course, rejected the very idea that there could be anything of a resurrection because they did not believe that the physical body was good.
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They were dualists. They felt the physical body was evil. But in the book of Colossians, chapter 2, verse 9, we read, for in Christ, all the fullness of the deity lives in bodily form.
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This was written after the resurrection. This is a passage that most Christians don't utilize when talking about the resurrection.
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But after the resurrection, Paul can say, in Christ, all the fullness of the deity lives or dwells, present tense, in bodily form.
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Jesus Christ, you know, frequently we have Mormons say to us, well, what happened to Jesus' body?
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And I say, well, Jesus has a glorified resurrection body. Well, that proves God has a body. No, it doesn't prove
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God has a body. The gospel is not that men can become gods, but that God became a man. That's a unique situation, one time, where God took on the human nature in Jesus Christ to provide for our redemption.
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We do not become gods, but God became a man to provide redemption for us. there are a number of passages that would very clearly refute the idea that Jesus was simply raised on a spiritual level.
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The angel said, this is where he was, he is not here, he is risen. The very word resurrection means that which died being raised to life again.
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And it's very clear that Jesus Christ was raised bodily from the dead, according to the teachings of the scriptures.
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2450375 is the phone number for you to get involved in our discussion this afternoon. 2450375
38:14
Even if you just simply agree with us, we'd be more than glad to have you give us a call and to express your faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and what the risen
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Lord means to you, the importance he has in your life. 2450375 is the phone number for you to call with your questions and comments on the dividing line on this
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Saturday afternoon. I guess I might as well mention what we're going to be looking at when we come into the second hour today.
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And that is we're going to tackle a subject that for a long time I didn't even know it existed.
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And sometimes I sort of wish it still did. Actually, I sometimes think that people get way too excited about the whole thing.
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But there are many groups today, even Christian groups, they're teaching all sorts of interesting things relevant to the time of the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
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Now you have some cults involved with this. The Worldwide Church of God, Armstrongism, publishes some little pamphlets.
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I brought some with me today. Here's a pamphlet published by the Worldwide Church of God called
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The Resurrection Was Not on Sunday. And they're basically saying that the resurrection took place on Saturday, the day before Sunday.
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What day was the resurrection? On page 8 from the Worldwide Church For example, I'm looking at this, that Jesus was already risen on that sunrise
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Sunday morning. Of course he was. He rose from the grave in the late afternoon near sunset on Saturday itself.
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And so they say that Jesus was buried late Wednesday afternoon. They place the time of the crucifixion as Wednesday.
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And they are literalists and that is that they believe that Jesus had to be in the grave 72 hours.
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72 hours exactly. And so if he was placed in the grave late afternoon
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Wednesday, Wednesday to Thursday, Thursday to Friday, Friday to Saturday, he would have had to have been raised on Saturday afternoon.
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It's interesting that there are a number of Christian groups that also push the idea of a Wednesday crucifixion.
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But they still worship on Sunday. They still call Sunday the
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Lord's Day and they still say he rose early Sunday morning but that would have placed the time beyond 72 hours in the tomb for the
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Lord Jesus. And I was a little bit surprised a couple weeks ago to get the
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April edition, April 1987 edition of The Evangelist, The Voice of the
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Jimmy Swaggart Ministries. And on page 11 of this, under the caption,
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Brother Swaggart, here's my question, we read the question, it says, did Jesus really die on a
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Friday, which we now call Good Friday? If that is the case, how could it have been possible for him to have been in the grave for three full days and nights?
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And his answer says, no, Jesus was not crucified on a Friday, he was actually crucified on a Wednesday.
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He was put in the grave Wednesday, just before sunset, and was resurrected Saturday at sunset.
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The reason, I suppose, the Church has mistaken Friday as the day of crucifixion is because the Scripture mentions the
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Sabbath, and people just assume that it was speaking of the regular Jewish Sabbath. There is no indication in the
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Bible that he was buried Friday at sunset. And then he goes on to basically present the same idea that was presented by Herbert W.
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Armstrong and the Worldwide Church of God and some other cultic and neo -cultic groups irrelevant to this idea that Jesus was buried on Wednesday afternoon.
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And during the next hour we'd like to take calls from folks who believe that that's true. Maybe you'd like to present it a little more clearly from your viewpoint at 245 -0375.
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But we're going to be examining this idea of when did the crucifixion take place, when did the resurrection take place, and suggesting some resources that you might look into to discuss this idea of the
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Wednesday to Saturday resurrection or the Friday to Sunday resurrection that most
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Christians believe in. But a rather vocal group of people are beginning to talk about these days the idea of a
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Wednesday to Saturday resurrection. I'm not sure how they deal with the idea of the fact that we now worship on Sunday, because that sort of takes any support out of doing that.
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Maybe some worship on Saturday. I don't know. I guess that would be up to them. This afternoon we are discussing the subject of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, a rather fitting topic obviously, for this time of year, as tomorrow is
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Resurrection Sunday. Let me mention that Alpha and Omega Ministries sponsors 24 -hour recorded phone lines.
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Here in the Valley of the Sun, currently we have two phone lines operating, and one phone line is accessible to you at 266 -2LDS.
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That is a message for Mormons. This week is talking about the fact that during this whole week we have been ministering the
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Word of God and sharing the Gospel with the thousands of people swarming on to the
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Temple grounds of the Mesa Temple, over in Mesa obviously, as they've been attending the
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Mormon Easter pageant over there. We've been there to distribute tracts and to witness to people, and that's what our message is about this week on the 266 -2LDS phone line.
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And on our other phone line, 266 -2JWS, you can hear a message relevant to Jehovah's mission, with the various people who come by your door.
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Maybe on Saturday morning distributing Watchtowers and Awakes, you can at least ask them to call 266 -2JWS.
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It's a number that sticks in the mind real easily, and if they won't take the number from you, if you'll just mention it to them once or twice, they probably remember it and be able to call it, 266 -2JWS, and when the missionaries come by, invite them to call 266 -2LDS.
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A number of them do that already, and we'd like to have all of them calling each week. That's a way that we can minister to people that sometimes wouldn't talk to us directly one -on -one, but they might listen to what we have to say over the telephone line pretty soon.
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We'll be talking more about that as that phone line develops. We'd like to mention, if you'd like to contact us at Alpha and Omega Ministries, you can do so by writing to Alpha and Omega Ministries at Post Office Box 47041,
44:51
Phoenix, Arizona, 85068. That's Post Office Box 47041,
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Phoenix, Arizona, 85068. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ. We've been talking about it for about an hour.
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We've looked at some of the modern theories that men have made up to explain away the Resurrection of Christ.
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We've looked at what Jehovah's Witnesses believe about the Resurrection, or they actually don't have a real resurrection. They have a recreation of Jesus Christ as Michael the
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Archangel. But now we're getting a little closer to home because I know a number of Christian people who are putting forward the idea that Jesus Christ was crucified on Wednesday afternoon, and then raised on Saturday afternoon, and then appeared for the first time on Sunday.
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There are a number of reasons why people do this. First of all, the main reason that I understand is that they feel that it would be wrong to not hold to a literal 72 -hour period.
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Jesus said that as Jonah was in the belly of the whale for three days and three nights, even so must the
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Son of Man be in the belly of the earth for three days and three nights. And the literalistic interpretation would mean that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, with no questions whatsoever,
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Jesus had to be in there at exact 72 hours. In fact, I'd imagine that they'd have to believe that if he was laid in the tomb at 4 .02
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p .m., that he burst free from the grave at 4 .02 p .m. exactly as well.
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This is the main driving reason behind the many theories that have been given to support this idea of a
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Wednesday -to -Saturday crucifixion scheme. We're going to look a little bit more at that as we take some of our callers and listen to what they have to say.
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We're going to go to Glendale, and we're having a little bit of a problem with the phone figuring out exactly how it's supposed to work.
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We're not in the normal studios we were when we did the program before, so I'm going to try talking to Ken in Glendale.
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Ken, are you there? And you can hear me? Okay. Something for both of us here, if you bear with me for a minute.
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I'm no expert. We've talked before, and I'm a regular contributor. The situation you're talking about this three days now,
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I can't give you the verse. I think one of them has to do with Jonah and the whale.
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There are at least twice where Jesus says three days and three nights.
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Now, twice, three days, and three nights, you have to give that credence.
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You have to say, if he twice specified three days and three nights, then you've got to think about it.
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The second thing is, as you may or may not know, I investigated quite substantially in the
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World Wide Church of God, and thanks to the literature you provided me, I got away from it.
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I think, though, that when people like Jimmy Swaggart, and Fred Price, and Dan Schaefer, and Jerry Falwell, and some of the better -known
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Pentecostal preachers, which I know you don't think a lot of, they're going more and more to this three -day thing, because it literally makes sense when you look at the entire picture.
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I'm talking, I sent you a column about a year and a half ago, and even though you may not care for the minister in which this article appeared, biblically and scripturally, it made total sense to me.
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And this has to do, again, I'm no bigot, I'm not a bigot, but I don't care.
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I don't care about the Pentecostal preachers, I don't care about the preachers, I don't care about the preachers,
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I don't care don't care Pentecostal preachers, I don't care about Pentecostal preachers,
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I don't care Pentecostal preachers, I Bible student preachers who are going toward this
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Wednesday crucifixion with a late Saturday resurrection.
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Well, let me point out a couple things, Ken, on this point. I was about to get to that, in fact, while you were on hold.
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I'm assuming you can't hear me on hold? I can hear you right now. Well, okay, but when you were on hold, you didn't hear that I had just brought up the idea of the 72 hours.
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Yeah, you were kind of test, you know, you were ridiculing the fact, well, exactly 72 hours.
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No, I was just pointing out that this is one of the main reasons that this theory has developed. And part of the support that is mentioned of this is the idea that the
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Passover that year, that the Passover celebration was called a
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Sabbath in the Old Testament. And that this Passover occurred on Thursday in the year that Jesus died.
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And hence, when the New Testament says that he was crucified on the preparation day, the day of preparation, that that could be the preparation day for this other
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Sabbath, which happened on a Thursday. Hence, this is a Wednesday. Two Sabbaths. Okay, so now let me point out a few things about that.
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First of all, that has to assume that we know the exact year in which Jesus was crucified.
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And the fact is, nobody does. Well, okay, all
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I want to say about that is that that may be a clue as to what the exact year was.
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If you reason from that direction. See, my line of logic in that point,
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I think, is as good as yours. That may be a basis on which we can determine the year.
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But we can't do that, though. There's no way to figure back that way. Because, as you know, the calendar was messed up somewhat.
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I mean, Jesus was born anywhere from 3 to 6 B .C. And 4 to 5 is probably the most accurate range.
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Actually, the most recent is 7 years. It's 7 years off. Okay, well, you know, but we're not totally sure of that.
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And it's the same way in attempting to determine the exact date of any time back then.
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We don't know how long Jesus' ministry was. Some people would opt for a 2 -year ministry, most for a 3, some even for as long as a 4 -year ministry.
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And so even if you take, okay, 30 years after his birth is when he began his ministry, we don't know what year that was.
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We don't know how long the ministry itself was. Jim, don't we have Hebrew Scripture back at that time that identifies the
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Hebrew calendar of which we can reconcile with the current calendar? I mean, they kept meticulous records of these things.
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Up until A .D. 70, they did. And certainly the Jewish scribes know when the
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Jewish holidays would fall at any given period all the way back to Adam and Eve probably.
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Well, I'm not so sure about that at all. Okay, let's say Noah, Abraham, how far still?
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You know, B .C. No, I'd have to disagree with that. Because if they were that meticulous with dates, they would be just as meticulous with genealogies.
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Okay, how about Isaiah? And yet, for example, when the people returned from the captivity, there were certain people who could not become priests because they could not prove their genealogy.
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And then, of course, after A .D. 70 and the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, all the records were destroyed.
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And there was no way for anyone to prove what their genealogy was after that. And obviously, the record -keeping, you could no longer force that issue.
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Then came the Dead Sea Scrolls. Yeah, well, still. Would you believe Isaiah 53?
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And would you believe the actual dates? I'm not trying to give you too many. All I'm saying,
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Jim, is that I don't think that this is a doctrine that you can take a substantial stand on.
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See, the mere fact that Jesus twice said three days and three nights has got to leave it open at most to question.
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At most to question, don't you see? That's my only point. Well, okay, but I think that there is much other data that demonstrates that that usage is a common usage, a common phraseology, especially by the usage of the word the preparation day.
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Now, I am unaware of any usage in secular or religious literature of the term preparation day for any day other than Friday.
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In fact, there was no word for Friday other than preparation day used in the
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New Testament. And in fact, as I understand, even in modern Greek, it's still the same word because of the way the
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New Testament uses it. And so we would have to assume, we would have to assume, A, that this was a high
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Sabbath day that landed on a Thursday. It could have been a Monday or a Sunday, either one. And we also must assume that the gospel writers, in the only time it ever appears, uses the technical term for Friday of a
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Wednesday, with no other supporting evidence that they ever did that at all, anywhere in the
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New Testament or any secular literature. But they didn't use the term preparation day for any day but Friday.
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That is a technical term. Okay, there are many, many, many ways of,
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I'm not trying to get away from them at all, but I think it's a misunderstanding to be so literalistic with three days and three nights as to mean that has to mean 72 hours.
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It didn't mean that to the Jews. Okay, now, I said let's don't pin this all on Herbert Armstrong and say that he has, you know, because he specified specifically 72 hours, the three days and three nights.
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Okay, I'm not. 68 or 70. I'm not. How about Jimmy Swagger? Is that better? Yeah, okay. Okay, because that's what he said.
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Yes, I have six Bibles, you know, the
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New American Standard and, well, all of them, every one that's made, including the
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Reader's Digest. You know, he even got that Bible. It's only 12 hours in the
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Reader's Digest, right? They condensed it down. But all I'm saying is, you know, I've been taught that if Jesus said it and if he said it twice, then, you know,
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I believe it. Now, he said this and he said it twice. You know, I'm not saying,
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Jim, change your mind. I'm saying, Jim, keep an open mind. I understand that. And I'm saying that when people that have studied this thing for years and years and years are now changing their view.
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And I'm also saying that periodically somebody comes up with a revelation, Jim, and I'm going to shut up and get off of here, that negates what people have thought.
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What do you mean a revelation? Careful how you use that term. I've been talking to Mormons all week.
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It's a new thought. Are there finding out things, going back to Scripture, you know, and every once in a while you read where, well,
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St. James, the, gosh, now you got me, not St. James, what's it,
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King James. Yes. There are lots of things in the
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King James Versions that have been changed by later editions, and you have said that, you know, many times yourself.
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You're talking about translations. Yeah, translations. You know, obviously,
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I guess one of the most better known is hell. And evidently hell is mistranslated all through the
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King James Version. Very frequently, yes. And yet they keep printing these things, but they don't change it.
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But, you see, all of the other ones, the New American Standard and New International Version, have picked it up and use it as Hades correctly, but the
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King James as well. The only point is that you have to be very careful about what you're dogmatic on.
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I agree. Okay. I've been taking up all your time. It's time for a commercial, but I just wanted to get that point across.
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Okay. Thanks a lot for the call. Bye -bye. 2450375, 2450375.
58:56
That, of course, brings up the topic very clearly for the discussion this hour that is relevant to when
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Jesus was crucified. Let me just begin answering the points brought up by Ken.
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I'm referencing a Harmony of the Gospels written by Dr. A .T.
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Robertson. Dr. A .T. Robertson was a Southern Baptist scholar, probably about the greatest Greek scholar that America has ever produced, and he addressed this point rather briefly, but I think fairly well, in his notes on special points at the back of his
59:28
Harmony. The Harmony, I think, is still available, and it might be good for you to read that. After dealing a great deal with the actual day of the crucifixion, the hour of the crucifixion, the time of the resurrection of Christ, he says the following things.
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Quite an effort is made in some quarters to show that Jesus remained in the tomb 72 hours, three full days and nights.
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The effort seems due to a desire to give full value to the expression three days and to vindicate Scripture.
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But a minutely literal interpretation of this phrase makes on the third day flatly erroneous.
01:00:00
A good deal of labor has been expended in the impossible attempt to make three and four equal each other. There are three sets of expressions used about the matter besides the express statements of the
01:00:10
Gospels about the days of the crucifixion and resurrection. Let us examine these lines of evidence. Number one,
01:00:17
Luke settles the matter pointedly by mentioning all the time between the crucifixion and the resurrection, Luke 23 .50
01:00:22
through 24 .3. The burial took place Friday afternoon just before the Sabbath drew on,
01:00:27
Luke 23 .54. The women rested on the Sabbath day, Saturday, Luke 23 .56,
01:00:33
and went to the sepulcher early Sunday morning, the first day of the week, Luke 24 .1. There is no escaping this piece of chronology.
01:00:40
This is all the time there was between the two events. Jesus then lay in the tomb from late in the afternoon of Friday till early
01:00:47
Sunday morning. The other Gospels agree with this reckoning of the time as we have already seen, and that's what he's referring to in what went before this, and that's why
01:00:55
I suggest you read the whole passage. Number two, but how about the prediction of Jesus repeatedly made and once illustrated by the case of Jonah that he would rise after three days?
01:01:04
Are two nights and a day and two pieces of days three days? Let us see. First of all, the well -known custom of the
01:01:11
Jews was to count a part of a day as a whole day of 24 hours. Hence, a part of a day or night would be counted as a whole day, the term day obviously having two sentences, as night and day, or day contrasted with night.
01:01:23
So then, the part of Friday would count as one day, Saturday another, and the part of Sunday the third day.
01:01:29
This method of reckoning gives no trouble to a Jew or to modern man, for that matter, in free vernacular we speak the same way today.