Myths of the Resurrection of Jesus

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, but we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth, and today we are going to do a variety of things that I find biblical, provocative, and in that order.

Biblical Fidelity, the Sufficiency of God's Word, and the Person of Christ

By the way, when I say No Compromise Radio ministry, we are striving to not compromise when it comes to biblical fidelity, biblical faithfulness, making sure we understand the sufficiency and or authority of God's word.

Now, I will readily admit that I compromise, but I don't want to. So it's the same thing. You know, I'm a hypocrite. I just don't want to be. That's what allows me to still be in gospel ministry. But I preach, and I point to the one who's never compromised.

And so that person is Jesus Christ, the God-man. I don't know why. I feel like I have asthma today, breathing in and out. And so if you hear my breath, take my breath away. Take my breath away. I'd start singing that if I could, but I've got asthma.

So we point to one who never has compromised. And I think too often in the world, we see before our very eyes compromise, which leads to more compromise. And we don't want to do that. That's why we want to focus on the person and work of Christ.

His active obedience, everything he did on earth, obeying the law perfectly, honoring the Father, honoring his earthly Father, which is part of the law, and then also his passive obedience, his substitutionary death.

He paid the penalty that we deserved on Calvary and was raised from the dead. So we point to the one who has never compromised. Before I get into my subject today, I have something that I find very fascinating.

It's a piece of paper here today. And I just got a phone call from someone in Wisconsin. And I think she said from Wisconsin. And she wanted to know about tater tot casseroles. I've only been to Wisconsin one time.

I guess I've been in the airport, Milwaukee. But driving, I was 21 and I left Chicago trying to go to Nebraska. The next thing I know, I see a sign and it says, welcome to Wisconsin. So I obviously wasn't paying attention and pulled off the side of the interstate, got a piece of cheese, turned around and went back home, back to Chicago, back to Nebraska.

So there's my Wisconsin story for you. But speaking of food, do you know what I have in front of me that's very fascinating? You will realize that I'm a true Kool-Aid drinker and somehow that I'm in the John MacArthur cult.

I have a cookbook and the cookbook is MacArthur Family Favorites. I am not kidding. John MacArthur Family Favorites. And he has a lemon cream pie that's his favorite. And I love that lemon cream pie. So I call it the MacArthur Cream Pie.

And I'm gonna give that to you right now before we start our topic in No Compromise Radio. And so you wanna write this down. I'm gonna do it very quickly. You'll have to rewind if you're on iTunes. Here's a lemon cream pie that you're going to love.

And if you have a slice of it, you're going to be better when it comes to it. It's gonna be better when it comes to Lordship Salvation. If you're a pastor, I'd like you to have two pieces of this pie because you're going to be a better expository preacher.

The lemon cream pie that you're going to love. Orthodox lemon cream pie. One cup sugar. Three tablespoons cornstarch. One fourth cup butter. One tablespoon grated lemon peel. One quarter cup lemon juice.

Three egg yolks. One cup milk. One cup dairy sour cream. One nine inch baked pie shell. So I'm not gonna repeat it. Combine sugar and cornstarch in saucepan. Add butter, lemon peel, juice, and egg yolks.

Stir in milk. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until thickened. Cool. Folk in sour cream. That should be fold in. Maybe that's why it's such a special MacArthur thing because it's folk in. It's fold in sour cream.

Spoon mixture into pie shell. Chill at least two hours. Top with whipped cream before serving with the new slave book by John MacArthur. I'm telling you, that is worth it. It is good. I don't like to eat a lot of sugar during the week, but if I have one of those pieces of the charismatic chaos lemon cream pie, that is good.

That's what I call good. Wisconsin doesn't know such goodness. Today I'd like to briefly discuss the resurrection. Why is it important for the resurrection? If you're a gospel evangelist and you would like to tell people the good news, you must remember the resurrection.

The Resurrection as the Heart of the Gospel

Speaking of MacArthur, I remember someone who used to do large crusades, open-air crusades. And they asked John if he would critique their gospel message at one of these crusades in Southern California.

And story goes, I haven't heard this directly from John, but through people who know John, the person said, well, how'd I do? And John said, well, you talked about sin, substitutionary atonement, the need of repentance, and all that was good, but you didn't preach the gospel.

And the man, I don't know if he thought it was a joke or what, I actually like the guy, so I won't tell you his name. And MacArthur said to this person, well, you didn't preach the gospel because you forgot the resurrection.

Jesus was raised from the dead. And so that is the linchpin in Christianity. Yes, we have many truths when it comes to the doctrines of grace and the doctrines of Christianity. You have to have the resurrection.

So when you evangelize, it's not good news unless you include the resurrection. When you preach the gospel to yourself, and if you look at Romans chapter six, you'll see even as a Christian who needs the gospel, the resurrection is a critical component.

And we know here at our church, especially with the young men and older men that I disciple, if you get up at a funeral and if you teach Sunday school, you give the gospel at the Iwana, Grand Prix, Pinewood Derby.

I'm more of a Pinewood Derby guy than the Grand Prix because I think that's just what I grew up with. If you don't include the resurrection, you didn't preach the gospel. Now, I'm glad you preached the other things and God will, to his good pleasure, bring along someone to give them the resurrection, but you need to include the resurrection if you preach.

And so if the resurrection is important, if it is in fact the hinge of Christianity, no wonder we have so many claims against the literal bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. And in the days we live in, days of coverups, I've still got this asthma.

Watergate, Whitewatergate. Do you remember? Are you old enough? Billygate, Billy Goat Gruffgate. My son Luke said, you know, Dad, you just laugh at your own jokes. I said, well, they're funny. You know, it's one thing if I'm in here with Steve and we're laughing at each other's jokes, but I am in here by myself.

Nobody else is even in this building and here I am just laughing at my own jokes. You've got Nannygate, all kinds of things. You know, you've got, remember the old Enron paper shredding issue. There are all kinds of hoaxes out there, coverups, crop circle things.

And if we're not careful, we could buy into crop circle Christianity. And that is, there's a hoax and that hoax is Jesus wasn't literally raised from the dead in his literal body. And so today at No Compromise Radio Ministry, by the way, you can write me at info at nocompromiseradio .com.

I'm getting tons of emails, slew of email, bunches, gaggles of emails. And so just keep asking me the questions and we'll have the guys that I've got helping me write answers to those questions. We want to help you understand Christianity.

And this isn't like Wretched Radio where that's their full-time job. I'd like to have the updated website. I'd like to have this, that, and the other, but this is a hobby probably more than anything else.

I mean, it's a ministry, but I do have a daytime job, so I can only do what I can do. Resurrection. There are false claims against the resurrection. H .G. Wells said, when I think of the resurrection, I am always reminded of the happy endings that editors and actors are accustomed to impose on essentially tragic plays and novels.

And so, you know, Jesus, he got caught up in the whole Messiah complex deal, Romans, et cetera. And he tragically died. And so to make it happily ever after, you've got to have the resurrection. You know, one thing back in the old days, the movies, it seemed like, and the books, they did have a happy ending.

And now that's part of film culture and novels where you have to have the tragic ending because life is a tragedy and life is vain and life has no meaning, et cetera. H .G. Wells, I think, knows differently now because he's stood in the presence of Almighty God and is awaiting final judgment before this risen Savior.

I found a few weird kind of theories that people use to explain this. And my purpose today is really to show you the lengths that people will go to deny certain Bible teaching truths because they have sinful lives and they would like to engage in those sinful lives.

And then you say to yourself, you know what? No Jesus, no resurrection. I do what I want. I don't feel as bad when I sleep with my girlfriend. The same reason people like evolution is the same reason they come up with these, frankly, idiotic, stupid theories.

The Swoon Theory

So the first theory is what we'll call and has been called the swoon theory, S-W-O-O-N, the swoon theory. And you can look up swoon. What does swoon mean? And basically Jesus didn't really die. He was only, he only swooned.

This sounds weird, doesn't it? He only swooned. Of course, he died on a cross. No, they don't say that. He never died to begin with. He was in fact nailed to a cross. And of course, there was all kinds of suffering that Jesus would suffer.

And it was so bad that he went into shock and he lost some blood. So he passed out. And instead of dying, he only fainted. He only passed out. That's what swoon means. He was exhausted. He was in shock.

He had some blood that was coming out. And he was in extreme trauma. Maybe he was in some kind of coma. For those of you in New England, he's in a coma. And he was alive. The disciples thought he was dead.

The Roman soldiers thought he was dead. And they buried him, essentially, alive. And do you know what? The wonder of wonders. Sounds like a George Beverly Shays song, doesn't it? The wonder of wonders.

The cool tomb. The kind of humidity down there. The spices. The aromatic spices. It kind of, you know, it was like smelling salts. A little bit of myrrh. And all of a sudden, woke up. Yeah, he got beat up and had lost a lot of blood.

Lost some more blood on the cross. Spear in the side, lost some more blood. Hadn't had food or water for a few days in the tomb. Didn't have any medicine. But moreover, he got some cool, refreshing kind of tomb breeze.

And he woke up. And you know, he had so much power in that swooned body that he just overpowered the guards after he moved that big stone all by himself. And with feet pierced and hand pierced, he walked seven miles to Emmaus.

Doesn't that seem kind of dumb? Seems dumb to me. You know, all those linens that they would wrap you up, mummy-like, that stuff's all sticky. How do you get rid of that? Tenny said, aromatic spices, often a gummy consistency, of a gummy consistency, were placed between the wrappings or folds.

They serve partially as a preservative and partially as a cement to glue the cloth wrappings into a solid covering. So here's Jesus. He didn't really die. He kind of walked the seven miles to get to Emmaus, and that's where we got the original Boris Karloff, the mummy.

That is more, requires more faith than the literal bodily resurrection. How about another theory about Jesus's resurrection so people can disprove it, so they can live in sin and they can say, you know what, my Christianity consists of baptism, communion, giving up something for Lent, putting some ashes on my forehead on a Wednesday, and we're good to go.

I'm not a Muslim. I'm not a Hindu. I'm not a Buddhist. But this whole born-again thing, you've got to be crazy. There's another way people do this, and that is the hallucination theory. First the swoon theory, now the hallucination theory.

You can imagine what this theory holds. Mary Magdalene was delirious, and she, maybe I don't know if she was chewing on some peyote, none of the books say that, but maybe that could be a possibility. Maybe she was out in some kind of Indian tent and it was one of these peyote deals.

She was, after all, possessed, they say, by seven demons. And in her state, in her state of sadness, in her state of deliriousness, in her state of post-demonic depression, oppression, she just imagined it.

She hallucinated. And she saw some kind of phantasm. I remember when I was a kid, probably 1977, 75, the movie Phantasm, one of those horror movies kind of like Freddy Krueger, that was wild. Here, Mary, she just saw some phantasm.

And every time that Jesus appeared after his alleged resurrection, wasn't really real, just kind of looked real, and everybody else had hallucinations too. Well, they didn't have seven demons, they didn't have Mary Magdalene's past, but they saw an image that they wanted to see.

The disciples so wanted to see Jesus, John and Mary and Peter and the 500 and the whole list there in 1 Corinthians 15. They wanted to see Jesus so bad, they were so excited, that their excitement turned into hallucination.

It turned into some kind of, they saw things that weren't really there. I don't know about you, but I've been excited about a lot of things in my life, but never to the point that it made me hallucinate.

I've taken a lot of drugs and those made me hallucinate, but excitement and hope never made me hallucinate. Machen said, the great J. Gresham Machen, quote, it means that if there had been a good neurologist for Peter and others to consult, there never would have been a Christian church, end quote.

Machen is right. The lion of Protestant reformed faith hit the nail on the head. How could so many people have hallucinations? Can you imagine? This is some kind of Benny Hinn deal almost. 500 hallucinations at once.

By the way, type into YouTube, Benny Hinn, Sith Lord, and you'll have fun. Just take my word for it. Benny Hinn, Sith Lord hit play, you'll have fun. 500 at one time. That's a mass hallucination, I'll tell you that.

Every one of those post-resurrection appearances had a different set of conditions over time, different places, different people. This theory is not going to hold up. This theory is a hallucination. First Corinthians chapter 15, verse six.

After that, he appeared to more than 500 brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep. Jesus was really killed. It was a real substitutionary death. The wages of sin is death.

He never sinned. Why did he die? He was bearing our sins on his body on the tree. First Peter chapter two. Let me give you another theory. My name's Mike Abendroth. This is no-compromise radio ministry.

No-co ministry, no-co every day, keeps confusion away, as Ray Johnson says. Or no-cowards, I guess it could be for no-co. Who knows what it could mean, but I think it's quite an effective title to sell airspace.

Where's my Diet Mountain Dew? There's Pepsi, one of our sponsors. We only have sponsors that start with P. Pete's Coffee and Pepsi. That's all we have around here. Here's another theory for the resurrection.

And again, I'm telling you these things, so if you ever hear them, you'll realize how stupid they are, and you'll realize a fool has said in his heart, Psalm 14, there's no God. It's not because people are stupid, but because they realize that they're sinners.

They realize the depths of their depravity, the guilt that they have, and they try to figure out how to relieve the guilt. And so they'll go, you know what? The world wasn't really made in six days, et cetera, et cetera.

And so they're hiding, they're running. The sinner likes to hide. Who can live underneath the one day true, final, omniscient judgment of a holy God? Who wants to live with that in mind? That is bad. So the third thing that people do, in no particular order, the impersonation theory.

This is a case of mistaken identity. And this was an actor and someone who, you know, today you can get facelifts and you can make yourself look like someone else, take your face off. I think that was a Nicolas Cage, John Travolta movie, face off or something.

I think I saw that last night at Redbox, you know, advertised. I didn't see it last night, but I saw the advertisement, where you can kind of manipulate faces. And you know, it's kind of like the whole North Korean dictator where who's the real guy and we don't know who's real.

Is that really Fidel Castro or not? It was an actor, it was fake. When I grew up, Rich Little was the king of impersonators. This is way before Jim Carrey or anyone else. Who was that other guy who was on Saturday Night Live?

I don't know, I can't remember. Jesus wasn't really Jesus. It was someone impersonating Jesus. Because remember, they didn't recognize him. Oh, when Jesus first appeared post-resurrection until he let them recognize him, they didn't recognize him.

So maybe it was just some kind of impersonator. He was fake. Well, this is a ludicrous, asinine theory, not a case of mistaken identity. People don't want to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead because Acts chapter 17 makes it clear.

Since Jesus has been raised from the dead, that is proof. God is now declaring, Acts 17 30, to men that all people everywhere should repent. Why? Because he has fixed a day, and that day is judgment day, in which he will judge the world in righteousness through a man whom he has appointed, having furnished proof to all men.

You want to know there's going to be judgment day, listeners? There's proof for you. Here's the proof. By raising him from the dead. Since Jesus has been raised from the dead, that proves there's going to be a judgment day.

Judgment day is coming. So you see the logic. Get rid of resurrection, bodily, physical resurrection. Jesus didn't die, wasn't raised from the dead. By the way, if Jesus died, and was not raised from the dead, that would have meant he would have paid for his own sins.

The wages of sin is death. He died. It wouldn't have been God, and he could not give his righteousness to all those who would believe. No, but he was the divine God. That means the same thing. The divine man.

That's what I wanted to say. Well, there's another theory of the resurrection that people like to hide behind. The spiritual resurrection theory. His resurrection was only spiritual in nature, and not really real and physical.

So, you know, the Bible has some truths, Esau's fables, and there's a spiritual truth behind this. And the truth that he was really raised from the dead, that's not important. It's the spiritual thing behind that.

That's really what's important. Jesus wasn't really raised from the dead. His body was in the grave, but he spiritually was risen. Okay, that's just one more of those false theories. Let me give you another one that's very, very popular.

The theft theory. False theories that contribute to increased sin. Because if you get the right theory, you'll realize that God is going to judge one day, and he judged sins on Jesus, and there's going to be a day of reckoning.

The theft theory. Disciples stole the body and then said, Jesus was raised from the dead, pass it on. Now, the Body Snatchers movie that I saw in 1955, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, is excellent. I think you can watch that on YouTube as well.

And then they had a redo. Leonard Nimoy was in that, Donald Sutherland. I think that was, maybe Donald Pleasant as well. I'm guessing 70s. And then they've recently done one too. I don't know what it's called.

Invasion or something like that, Nicole Kidman. But here we have the original. This is pre -1955, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, except it's only one body that they snatched. They snatched up Jesus's body.

Oops, he's raised from the dead. Where is he? Can't find him. So this is Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the prequel. The unknown tomb theory. The disciples, here's another one, number six. The disciples didn't know where the tomb was, and they went to a wrong tomb.

They couldn't find it. There's so many rich men's tombs named Joseph of Arimathea that they went to one. There was no body there. It was really the wrong one, but there's no body. So Jesus, hence, is raised from the dead.

Jesus really got thrown into a common pit and wasn't allowed to be buried because he was such a horrible false teacher. And the women went to the wrong tomb, and then the disciples followed. They went to the wrong tomb too.

The Telepathy Theory and the Seance Theory

Oh, this is my favorite. Two more to go. The telepathy theory. God was sending some kind of mental images into the minds of Christ's followers. One man called this telegrams from heaven. I call this mental email from heaven.

And lastly, drum roll here, the seance theory. Some medium conjured up the spirit of the deceased Jesus through a cult, witchly, Harry Potter-like witchcraft. And this was the real ghost of resurrection past.

Well, all these lead to one thing. They lead to people who don't want to believe the facts, will not believe what the scriptures say. And they cut and paste into unbelief because moral, this is a moral problem.

All belief is a moral problem. And people want to have the Alexander Haig theory. I'm in charge now. I'm the king of my life. And they want to have, it's my party and I'll sin if I want to. And so you've got to get rid of the resurrection.

There is going to be a day of accounting for your actions, for your thoughts, what you did and what you didn't do. And so don't fall into this idea where you live as you please. You're a creature and you've been made to worship the Lord God, Jesus Christ, with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

And as a manifestation of that love for God, you'll love other people as well. Jesus Christ is the God-man who bore sins and God raised him from the dead. The spirit raised him from the dead and the son himself raised himself from the dead.

You better believe it. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible-teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life-transforming power of God's word through verse-by-verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE in staff or management.