The Essential Resurrection

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Hello, welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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This is a daily conversation about scripture, culture and media from a Reformed perspective.
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Get your Bible and coffee ready and prepare to engage today's topic.
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Here's your host, Pastor Keith Foskey.
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Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.
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Today is Tuesday, March 30th, 2021 and we are in the second day of our building up of Holy Week.
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As I mentioned on yesterday's program, Holy Week actually begins on Palm Sunday.
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So I guess that's what would make it our third day because we have Palm Sunday through Resurrection Sunday, which we celebrate Jesus going into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey on Palm Sunday.
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Then we look forward to the night that He had the Last Supper, which is Maundy Thursday, and then we have Good Friday, which is the celebration of Jesus' work on the cross, His finished and final work in the crucifixion.
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And then of course we have the Sunday, this coming Sunday, is Resurrection Sunday and we say, as I said yesterday, this is the most, this is one of the most special times of year for many Christian churches and many believers because this is the time where we're celebrating the actual foundation for our faith.
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If you don't believe in the Resurrection, you are not a Christian.
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I know there are many people who say they're Christians, who say that you can be a Christian without believing in the Resurrection, but on today's program I want to go to the Apostle Paul as the authority on this subject and ask him what he has to say about such things.
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Now I mentioned this on the program yesterday, but I actually want to do a little bit of an analysis on the passage because this passage is so important for Resurrection Week.
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I won't be preaching this passage this week, so I thought it would be important to talk about it today on the program.
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First Corinthians 15 is the resurrection chapter.
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This starts with the resurrection of Christ and it moves to the resurrection of believers.
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If you've ever been curious about why resurrection is important and what our resurrection is going to be like, I would always say start with 1 Corinthians 15.
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It tells so much in this one chapter and it really is a wealth of knowledge for people who are willing to do a little bit of reading and a little bit of study.
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It's a very, very important passage.
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It begins with the Apostle Paul saying, Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved.
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If you hold fast to the word I preached to you, unless you believed in vain.
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For I delivered to you, as of first importance, what I also received, that Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day, in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then the twelve.
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Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.
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Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.
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Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.
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This is the Apostle Paul speaking and he's talking about the resurrection and he's actually giving somewhat of an apologetic or evidence as a defense of a belief in the resurrection.
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He first says, I want to remind you of the gospel.
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And that's interesting because when we ask people what is the gospel, oftentimes people are very clueless as to what that means.
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They've heard the word gospel, they've heard the phrase gospel truth, or things like that, but the definition of the gospel is sometimes lost on people.
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And the word gospel means good news.
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And when the Apostle Paul refers to the gospel in this chapter, he looks at the gospel as containing three essential elements.
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The first element is that Jesus died for our sins.
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Now is there more to the gospel than the death of Jesus? Yes, but there's certainly not less.
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The death of Jesus is the good news because Jesus came to die.
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He came to receive in himself the wrath of God for our sins.
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He came to die for our sins.
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So his death is part of the good news.
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And then the burial, which may seem like almost an incidental side note, the burial is important because had Jesus simply died and then resurrected immediately, one might think, well, maybe he didn't really die.
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But the burial is, in a sense, verification of the fact that he died.
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You don't bury living people, as I said on the program yesterday.
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So the burial of Jesus is testifying that everybody who saw him believed that he was dead.
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Even the Roman soldiers who were, well, let's just say they were experts at killing people.
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They knew how to take a life.
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They were experts at taking life.
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And so when they buried someone, they buried dead people because they knew how to do it.
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And then it says that he was raised according to the scriptures, or in accordance with the scriptures.
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And it says he was raised on the third day.
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So we have here a testimony to Jesus' death, which is where God's wrath is satisfied.
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The propitiation of God's wrath took place on the cross.
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Christ paid the penalty for our sin, so we receive redemption and propitiation, reconciliation with God.
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We can talk about all the things of the atonement, maybe we will on a later program this week, the various aspects of the atonement that we need to understand.
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But all of this happens in the death.
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Then he is buried, verifying that he is, in fact, dead.
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And then he was raised, and the Bible says he's raised for our justification.
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And the word justification there is not referring necessarily to the justification of sin, but rather the justification of belief.
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It is the vindication of our faith.
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When Jesus is raised, it proves that everything he said was true.
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In fact, it is this very thing that causes so many people to attack the resurrection of Jesus.
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If you want to strike at the root of the tree, or excuse me, if you want the tree to fall, you strike at the root of the tree.
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And if you want to strike the root of the tree of Christianity, you strike the resurrection.
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And most unbelievers know that.
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In fact, I just this morning was going through and looking at an article from Scientific American where it tried to point out that ultimately there's no reason to believe in the resurrection because there's just not enough evidence.
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And we're going to talk about that in a minute, but that's the point of many articles.
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Well, we just don't have enough evidence to believe Jesus resurrected.
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And since we don't have enough evidence to believe Jesus resurrected, then there's really no reason to be a Christian.
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And so that's the attitude of many people.
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And so one might ask, well, what are the evidences for the resurrection? And we can answer first and foremost, well, the Bible tells us Jesus raised.
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And somebody says, oh, well, that's a circular argument because the Bible itself is what we're arguing about, so you can't use the argument of the Bible to prove the Bible.
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And my answer to that is, well, no, take a step back.
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And first of all, we have to say this, the Bible is not a book that just appeared out of the ether.
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The Bible is a reliable collection of historical documents that were written in the lifetime of eyewitnesses, by eyewitnesses, who were able to explain what happened.
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And in the midst of writing about all of these things that did happen, they tell of miraculous things that occurred.
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And again, there were people who had seen these things that could have and certainly would have challenged the things that were being written if these things, in fact, were not so.
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So we have in the Bible what we believe is God's Word.
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It is God's Word.
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The Bible itself claims it's God's Word, and it bears the evidences of authenticity and reliability.
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But even outside of that truth, we can say the Bible is a historical document.
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It gives narrative history of what happened in the first century.
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It was written in the first century, and by this I'm talking about the New Testament.
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The New Testament is written in the first century.
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It was written during the lifetime of eyewitnesses and able to be challenged by other eyewitnesses who were there.
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And one of the things in the Scientific American argument was, well, eyewitnesses are inherently unreliable.
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You can't trust them.
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What if they were incredulous? What if they were superstitious? What if they reported to seeing Jesus because they wanted to see him? And all of these things, when taken in sort of a shotgun approach, might seem a little overwhelming until you step back and say, wait a minute.
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First of all, the Apostle Paul in this passage, 1 Corinthians 15, says Jesus was seen by over 500 people.
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It's not as if there's a small group here of one or two or even 12 of his disciples.
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There were over 500 people who saw him alive.
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And many of these people would go on to found missions groups and churches and they would go out into the world and share what they had seen.
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This changed the world.
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In fact, we read about that in the book of Acts.
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It says the people who were preaching Jesus turned the world upside down.
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This was not something that had no basis in reality.
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This was something that for the people who saw it, this was the heart of reality for them.
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They had seen Jesus alive.
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And the most, I would say the most powerful of those people would be the writer of this passage, the Apostle Paul.
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He said in verse 8, last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.
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What does it mean to be untimely born? Why did Paul reference being untimely born? Well, what he's talking about there is the fact that he didn't follow Jesus while Jesus was alive.
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The Apostle Paul did not become a Christian until after the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
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And he became a Christian not out of a desire to follow Jesus, but rather out of a miraculous interception by the Lord Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus.
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Paul was going there for the purpose of attacking and imprisoning Christians, because Paul was a Jewish Pharisee.
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He was a leader among the Jews, and he hated this sect of Judaism, what they would have considered a cult within Judaism that had come up, this cult of Christianity, which they called The Way.
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And so Paul hated that.
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Paul wanted to see Christianity become no more, and instead he became the greatest champion of Christianity in his lifetime.
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How does a man go from hating the Lord Jesus Christ to wanting to serve him up to and into the face of death? Well, the answer is quite obvious, because the Apostle Paul saw the Lord Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus.
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The Apostle Paul saw the living and true Christ, and he believed in him, and he changed his life.
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And so this is the reminder today of what the Gospel is.
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The Gospel is the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
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It was seen by hundreds of witnesses, and it was testified even to the point of giving his entire life, the Apostle Paul, of one who hated Jesus, and then became his most devoted follower.
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Do we have reasons to believe the resurrection? You better believe we do.
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And there's a lot more reasons than just the ones I've mentioned today.
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But I just wanted to point out today what the text says about the Gospel.
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The Gospel is the death, the burial, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
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Is there more to the Gospel than that? Yes, absolutely.
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But there's never less.
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The Gospel is never anything less than the death, the burial, and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, of which we have every reason to believe.
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Thank you for listening today to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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My name is Keith Foskey, and I've been your Calvinist.
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May God bless you.
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Thank you for listening to today's episode of Coffee with a Calvinist.
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If you enjoyed the program, please take a moment to subscribe and provide us feedback.
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We love to receive your comments and questions and may even engage with them in a future episode.
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As you go about your day, remember this, Jesus Christ came to save sinners.
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All who come to Him in repentance and faith will find Him to be a perfect Savior.
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He is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through Him.
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May God be with you.