Why should I believe in Christ's resurrection? - GotQuestions.org Podcast Episode 1

Welcome to the GotQuestions podcast. Here we are with episode one. We just finished Holy Week and a lot of people think that Christmas time would be the busiest time of the year for GotQuestions. And while it is pretty busy, actually our busiest time of the year is from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday, with Good Friday and Easter Sunday almost always being our two busiest days of the year.

It was really cool to see on both Good Friday and Easter Sunday, we had over 400 ,000 visitors to the site on both of those pages with a lot of people searching for what is the meaning of the death of Christ?

The Apologetics Case for the Resurrection

Why should I believe in Christ's resurrection? Why is resurrection important? So it's great even with all the distractions of Easter eggs and Easter bunnies that our culture seems to be so interested in.

So a lot of people who know what Easter is truly all about and are asking questions about it. So I thought for our first episode, we would discuss the importance of Jesus' resurrection just from some of the questions we've been seeing over the past few weeks.

Several different ways we can look at it. We can look at it from a theological perspective of why is the resurrection important? Why did Jesus need to come back from the dead? How is it related to his death in terms of providing for the forgiveness of our sins?

Or from a more apologetics perspective of why should I believe? Did it really happen? Can it be proven? And then also from a practical perspective of why does it matter? I mean, what does the resurrection of Christ have to do with me in my daily life?

So today I've got Jeff and Kevin with me to answer some of those questions, and both got questions employees. Jeff is the manager of our Bible Ref Commentary site, and Kevin is our managing editor. He helps everything that we say sound a little better than it sounded the first time we said it.

So both very valuable employees, great friends with a lot of good insights. So let's dive in. So Jeff, what's an interesting maybe question from the apologetics perspective you noticed in the last week?

A lot of people when we get into the.

Resurrection, people are looking for things like evidence and proof. They want to know what's a good reason to believe that this is something that actually happened. How do we know the resurrection actually occurred?

And typically when somebody's asking that, what they're asking is why should I believe in the resurrection other than what's contained in the Bible? Obviously the Bible says that this happened, and for Christians that's meaningful.

But for people who aren't sure what they believe about the resurrection, that's not quite as compelling. And in general, we can tell people that we have historical evidence that raises questions. We have a lot of historical evidence that tells us that somewhere around 32 or 33 AD, a lot of people all of a sudden started insisting that they had seen Jesus Christ crucified and then resurrected.

And those people were willing to hold on to those beliefs even when they were threatened with persecution and death. They really didn't have anything to gain financially or socially, but they were willing to endure those things.

Now we make a point a lot of times in the modern era that being a martyr does not mean necessarily that what you believe is true. And that's logical. That's correct. You can believe something sincerely and be wrong.

But what we see with the resurrection is the same people who were in a position, in a place, in a time where they could have known for sure whether or not this was true or false. Where all of the information that you could use to debunk it was right there.

So that leads to all these other questions. Why did they believe this? Why were they so insistent on it? Why would they have those attitudes? And that leads us into alternative theories. Basically, there's either the truth that Jesus was resurrected or that people were sincerely wrong.

And for them to be sincerely wrong, we have all sorts of strange theories that Jesus didn't really die, that there was a secret twin. My personal favorite is the one that suggests that the apostles and disciples and followers of Jesus were all hallucinating.

And this was just some sort of bizarre mushroom acid trip that they came up with. But really, when you get down to that level, that tells you something about the amount of historical and logical evidence that you have.

When you have to suggest things like it was an imposter or they were high, that tells you that there's a lot of really good historical evidence behind it. So for people who don't necessarily accept scripture as accurate, that's our answer to why should I believe in the resurrection from the very first is the change and the witness of the people who were there, even in the face of opportunities to debunk it and risk of their own death.

So that's one of the more common things that we see when it comes to Easter in this time of year is questions like that.

I definitely notice that a lot. And people over the more recent years have been asking these questions more and more people being skeptical about the claims of Christianity. So it's important for us to be able to respond with, no, there's actually really good and compelling evidence that something happened.

Right. And that's an important aspect also of the.

Christian faith is that those questions are not shied away from. The Bible and our Christian faith says, yes, test this. It's okay to look for that information. We're not supposed to have something that's just blind.

We're supposed to have reasonable belief.

The Resurrection’s Practical Comfort and Assurance

Yeah, absolutely. So Kevin, what's a question that maybe caught your eye this past week?

Oh, well, just the idea of what difference does the resurrection actually make? I mean, how does that change our lives kind of thing? And the answer really is the resurrection of Christ makes all the difference in the world and it should affect our day-to-day living on some very deep levels.

I preached at a funeral just about a week and a half ago and praise the Lord, this particular individual was born again, knew Jesus as Savior. And so I was able to bring some real hope and comfort to the family because as born again believers, we know that we will see this person again.

And that right now, this person is safe in the arms of Jesus, the risen Lord. And that's what the Bible teaches very clearly that we sorrow at physical death, but we do not sorrow as those who have no hope.

We always have hope in Christ because He has conquered the problem of sin. He has conquered death itself. And this brings comfort on a day-to-day basis for the bereaved and we all face those types of losses.

But we also, we live our lives in expectation of a reward because Jesus lives, He's coming again. He's not abandoned us to this world, but He's promised to come again. And 1 Corinthians 15, for example, is a wonderful chapter that talks about the resurrection in detail.

Then the very end of that chapter, verse 58, Paul says, therefore, my beloved brethren be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.

Jesus is coming. He's going to bring His reward with Him. And we labor for His sake, knowing that He is just. He's keeping track. He's going to be bringing the perfect reward with Him when He comes. And we look forward to that.

Scripture says, He is our blessed hope. And we wait for Him and we in holiness. We try to live holy lives. We do good works as we wait for Him. So that's another practical way that the resurrection affects us.

It affects how we live. We want to live in a way that's pleasing to the Lord. Also in light of Jesus' resurrection, we have confidence in our salvation. I love the simplicity of Jesus' words on the night that He was arrested.

He's speaking to His disciples and He says to them, because I live, you will live also. It's just so simple. Our life, our eternal life, is based on the resurrected life of Christ. He lives, so we, His followers, will live as well.

He will see to that. So the resurrection of Christ gives us great assurance in our salvation, in our home in heaven. I mean, just every day we praise and thank the Lord for rising from the dead. And it affects us on many levels as we engage in this world and as.

We look forward to the world to come. Absolutely. It's very similar to some of the questions that I was receiving that I noticed in the system. So people are wondering what difference does this make to me practically?

And Kevin, those are some excellent points. From a theological perspective, I saw a couple of interesting ones. The first was, why does it matter? And why did Jesus need to come back from the dead? And I remember the story of a famous evangelist who had a student of his whom he let preach at a certain outreach event.

And the student gave a great presentation and explained the meaning of the death of Christ, but didn't mention the resurrection at all. And supposedly this preacher came up and said, look, you cannot share the gospel without mentioning the resurrection.

So the question I noticed this week was, well, why? Why is the resurrection so important? And the answer is 1 Corinthians 15, as you mentioned earlier, talks about how if Christ was not raised, then neither will we be raised.

And if Christ is not raised, we above all people are most miserable. So the resurrection of Christ is what, two things. One, promises that we will spend eternity with our Savior in heaven, that we too will be resurrected to glorified bodies and we'll enjoy eternity with God.

But also the resurrection demonstrates that Jesus' sacrifice, his death on the cross, was sufficient to pay for the penalty of sins of the entire world. And so were he not resurrected, that would have demonstrated that Christ's death was not sufficient.

And so a question I got this week that I thought was really interesting is, what would have happened if Jesus had died for our sins, had not been resurrected? It was like, well, according to 1 Corinthians 15, it's a pretty miserable state.

So while the Bible doesn't explicitly answer the question, I'm guessing that if Christ had died for our sins and not come back to life, the result would be we would still spend eternity separated from God because our sins would not have been forgiven.

It's a possibility some people think that if Jesus had died and not been resurrected, we would have stayed in the eternal state of sleep. Well, I suppose that's better, but it's still not the answer that the Bible presents.

It's not the glorious life that God has promised us. After death, we will spend eternity with him. So the resurrection is crucially important, not just from an apologetics perspective or practically, there's great theological importance.

And we can't forget that, that the resurrection, the death of Christ are two sides of the same coin. They go hand in hand. You can't have one without the other.

Without the resurrection, we're left with Jesus Christ superstar. If you've seen that musical, Jesus dies at the end, and then that's the end. All the actors get on the bus and leave, and that's the end of the movie.

What a letdown. You have to have the resurrection because that.

Is the gospel. Absolutely.

The Resurrection as Prophecy Fulfilled and Evidence of Truth

We see in that that for a lot of different reasons. One is that the role that Jesus had was predicted to include resurrection. So part of what we see in the prophecies about Messiah was that he was supposed to come back.

So his resurrection was meant to fulfill those prophecies. It was something that was predicted that was going to happen. For me, I also see from that apologetic standpoint, there's an evidential aspect to it.

If God had wanted to, he could have not predicted that the Messiah would come back. He could have just chosen to use a sacrifice that didn't involve resurrection, I suppose, if he wanted to do things that way.

That's not how he did it. The fact that Jesus was resurrected not only fulfills those prophecies, proves everything that he said was true, and all that stuff, but the other thing that it does is it provides us with evidence.

A point that I make to people is that the reason that when people went to see Jesus' tomb, that the stone was rolled away, was not so that Jesus could get out. Because we see Jesus going through locked doors to meet the disciples after he's been resurrected.

The tomb was empty, and we know that because the stone was rolled away. So the resurrection not only serves that theological function, it also serves that evidential function. It's just a capstone exclamation point of proving that what Jesus Christ said really was true.

So having that evidence and having that just absolute proof that what he said was true is important for how we go about giving people confidence that the gospel's real and that it's true. Jeff, we talked about.

This the other day, that people are ready and willing to accept the birth of Christ and celebrate it because a baby being born is not threatening. It's such a nice, sweet story, but there are a lot of attackers of the resurrection because, whoa, a person coming back from the dead after three days in the tomb, that's the big deal.

That has implications. That has something I need to respond to because if it's true, it changes the course of history. It changes everything.

I think that speaks to what Kevin was talking about where he was discussing how there's practical implications to who Jesus Christ is and what that means for our lives. Knowing that there's a guru out there, when the Dalai Lama says something, people can look at that and say, well, that's nice, but it's just a guy.

So I can decide whether I want to listen to that or not listen to that. People can look at the lives of people like Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi and any person you want to pick and just say, okay, I can choose whether or not I want to listen or whether I don't want to listen.

So Jesus Christ just being born in and of itself doesn't threaten people with some kind of implication. But when he actually comes back from the dead, the way he was predicted, fulfilling these prophecies and coming into this role, then yeah, that starts making some serious implications.

If he really did come back from the dead, that means that the things he said really are true and the things he said really do imply something about what we need to say and do. That's why people are going to resist those sorts of things because knowing that he lived doesn't really mean much for your life so much as knowing that he lives.

It's a very different thing. Amen.

Jesus’ Resurrection Sets Him Apart from Every Other Religious Founder

So I heard an interesting illustration of someone, I wish I could remember who shared it with me, but the gist of it was a person comes to a fork in the road and choice between two different religions.

I think in this case, it was between Christianity and Islam. And he made the decision to follow Christianity because, do I want to follow someone who's dead or do I want to follow someone who's alive?

And for him, the fact that Jesus is alive makes him different from every other religious founder. Every other religious founder is dead and is buried somewhere. Jesus is not. He lives eternally. He is the risen Savior sitting at the right hand of God in glory.

Amen.

I've been to a lot of different tombs. I've been to, well, just right here in my area, I've been to the tomb of Eisenhower and I've been to the tomb of Harry S. Truman. I've been to some of the national cemeteries and in all of these places, the tomb is significant because of who's there.

But in the case of Jesus Christ, the tomb is significant because of who's not there. Jesus' body is not there. He rose from the dead. And yep, that sets him apart. He's unique.

Yeah. What excites me about Easter is that it's the biggest church attendance day of the year. There's a term that was invented several years ago called Christers. It's the people who attend church on Christmas and Easter, but Easter is even way bigger than Christmas.

So even with the COVID pandemic and various stages of lockdown, there's still more people attending church this past Sunday than any other time of the year. And it's exciting to see afterwards, all the questions that people have about the resurrection.

So it's even continuing this week that they heard in the sermon, talk about Jesus came from the back of the dead. Did that really happen? Why does it matter? Why is it important? So it's exciting to see and our hope and prayers that people would continue to seek for answers to get to know this risen savior and what his claims mean on our lives.

And I think that with Kevin's experience as a pastor, especially, is that when people know that answers like that exist and that there's no sense of fear, there's no sense of shame, there's no sense of nervousness about our faith being able to support these things.

It provides the kind of confidence that we need. We can be confident in the way we live our lives. So the book of Hebrews talks a lot about that idea that one of the reasons we can be confident to do the things God wants us to do is because of the things that he's shown us and the things he's proven and done for us.

And it's comforting for a lot of people to have a faith that says you are allowed to ask, you are allowed to look because there really is reason and evidence and so on and so forth. And then once you've chosen to trust that and move on with it, it just keeps becoming reinforced in your lives that when you actually follow through with these things, you don't just have an intellectual moment and it's over.

It just continues and moves on. That's what I'm saying with Kevin's experience. He's going to have the opportunity to see people who go from skepticism and doubt to following faith and seeing the effect that it has on people's lives.

So it is an exciting part of the Easter season, knowing that there are people getting that opportunity to start that process that's going to begin, but it's just going to continue from there. It's not just going to stop with one realization.

All right. Well, Jeff, Kevin, thank you for joining me today. It's an exciting time. It's an exciting conversation because he has risen. He has risen indeed.

Amen. Amen.

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