I believe in the resurrection of the Body, and the life everlasting. (2023)

1 On the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark. She saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. 2 So she went running to Simon Peter and to the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said to them, “They’ve taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they’ve put him!” 3 At that, Peter and the other disciple went out, heading for the tomb. 4 The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and got to the tomb first. 5 Stooping down, he saw the linen cloths lying there, but he did not go in. 6 Then, following him, Simon Peter also came. He entered the tomb and saw the linen cloths lying there. 7 The wrapping that had been on his head was not lying with the linen cloths but was folded up in a separate place by itself. 8 The other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, then also went in, saw, and believed. 9 For they did not yet understand the Scripture that he must rise from the dead. 10 Then the disciples returned to the place where they were staying. 11 But Mary stood outside the tomb, crying. As she was crying, she stooped to look into the tomb. 12 She saw two angels in white sitting where Jesus’s body had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. 13 They said to her, “Woman, why are you crying?” “Because they’ve taken away my Lord,” she told them, “and I don’t know where they’ve put him.” 14 Having said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know it was Jesus. 15 “Woman,” Jesus said to her, “why are you crying? Who is it that you’re seeking?” Supposing he was the gardener, she replied, “Sir, if you’ve carried him away, tell me where you’ve put him, and I will take him away.” 16 Jesus said to her, “Mary.” Turning around, she said to him in Aramaic, “Rabboni!”—which means “Teacher.” 17 “Don’t cling to me,” Jesus told her, “since I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and tell them that I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” 18 Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them what he had said to her. 19 When it was evening on that first day of the week, the disciples were gathered together with the doors locked because they feared the Jews. Jesus came, stood among them, and said to them, “Peace be with you.” 20 Having said this, he showed them his hands and his side. So the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21 Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, I also send you.” 22 After saying this, he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” 24 But Thomas (called “Twin”), one of the Twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples were telling him, “We’ve seen the Lord!” But he said to them, “If I don’t see the mark of the nails in his hands, put my finger into the mark of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will never believe.” 26 A week later his disciples were indoors again, and Thomas was with them. Even though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and look at my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Don’t be faithless, but believe.” 28 Thomas responded to him, “My Lord and my God!” 29 Jesus said, “Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”

I believe in The resurrection of the body and the life everlasting

As Christians we believe in the resurrection of the dead. It is one of the fundamental truths of Christianity. We believe that because Jesus died on the cross for our sins, and because he rose again three days later our lives are worth living.

Jesus’ resurrection means something for us today.

So I want to explore this idea of believing in the resurrection of the body from a few different angles this morning.

Firstly this is a belief which has a robust intellectual foundations.

Robustly intellectual

So firstly Robustly intellectual. If you asked people today about the resurrection of the dead, they would say something like - dead people don’t come back to life. Resurrection is scientifically impossible.

So since it is scientifically impossible you are a fool for belieivng it, because we know that what science says is right and true all the time.

That is the basic worldview of most people today.

Given that that is the basic worldview we work with, we need to be able to defend our position. But thankfully what we find is that believing in the resurrection of Jesus is an intellectually robust position. That is we have really good reasons why we can believe in the resurrection of Jesus. Good, solid, intellectually robust reasons for trusting that what the Bible says is true.

I will give you 3:

1: the empty tomb

The empty tomb is a real problem to deal with if Jesus did not in fact raise from the dead. Because here is the thing: The tomb had roman guards stationed there. These were battle hardned soldiers. They were not supersitious flakey people. They did not faint on the job. They didn’t have flights of fancy, and yet the tomb was empty.

How could the tomb have been emptied if they had these battle hardened soldiers protecting the tomb, unless something spectacular happened to chase these guards away.

Now if you were a guard that abandoned your post, you could be executed for negligence. This is not something the guards would have done.

And it takes a lot of faith to believe that the disciples, who abandoned Jesus at the crucifixion would suddenly turn around and attacked Roman soldiers.

No the most obvious solution to the problem is that Jesus did actually raise from the dead and that’s why his tomb was empty.

2: The post-resurrection appearances.

Let’s look first at the eyewitness accounts. If you’ve watched any sort of legal show or a police show you will know that one of the most potent elements in finding someone guilty of a crime would be the evidence of an eyewitness.

If you have someone who actually saw what happened, you’re well on your way to getting that conviction.

Now here is the thing. there are plenty of witnesses to make the case for the resurrection.

The first witnesses to the open tomb, according to Matthew 28, were two women. And John tells us that Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone covering it had been taken away.

She was also the first to see Jesus, according to John.

Now friends, What we have to understand, Is that if you wanted to start a religion, if you wanted to concoct a story, If you wanted to get people to believe you in the 1st century.

Then you would have come up with a plan that didn’t involve the witness of women.

For you see women were viewed as so unreliable that their evidence was inadmissible in court!

By effectively putting these ladies in the witness stand, the Gospel writers really proved that they had no ulterior motive – they simply recorded the truth of what had happened.

But Scripture also gives us some other witnesses: Jesus’ disciples. Now if you were a sceptic or an unbeliever you might say that their evidence could be tainted too, for they had something to gain – they were after all members of His inner circle.

But friends, these are not the only witnesses Scripture provides – there is in fact a multitude of them, for Jesus appeared to more than 500 people, as 1 Cor 15 tells us.

Now you may be able to get together a small number of people to come along with you for a hoax, not 500?

And quite importantly, Paul adds that most of these witnesses are still living – so he’s putting the challenge out there: go on, go check them out, don’t just take my word for it, go check them out.

Again, this isn’t quite the way you would act if you knew it was just a hoax, or a lie. But wait, there’s more there is another witness, one who wasn’t a disciple, who wasn’t a family member, who wasn’t even a friend!

Instead, he was an enemy of the followers of Christ, delighting in persecuting them and hunting them down and having them imprisoned.

and last of all He appeared to me also, Paul says

This is the former enemy of those who follow Christ, who now passionately speaks about the resurrection.

Whose life has so radically turned around, That he himself was willing to die for his faith.

So we have the empty tomb,. and we have the eye witness accounts that all report that Jesus raised from the dead.

3. The radically changed life of the disciples

Think about the disciples for a moment. They were a group of hopeless men, who deserted Jesus when Jesus was imprisoned and put on trail. They all, even his closest friends abandon him in fear.

But after the resurrection, these same yellowbellied cowards, all of a sudden are willing to die for their faith.

That would be impossible unless they really beleived Jesus rose again from teh tomb.

I mean let’s image for a second, that Jesus didn’t raise from the dead. That his disciples had snatched Jesus’ body from the tomb. And that tehy started preaching that he rose from the dead, even though they knew that was a lie.

What motive would they have for sticking to a story, they knew, could eventually cost them their lives?

People will die for their beliefs if they sincerely believe they are true, but they won’t die for their religious beliefs if they know them to be false.

The scholar JP Moreland puts it this way:

These disciples “often went without food,

slept exposed to the elements,

were ridiculed

, beaten,

imprisoned.

And finally most of them were executed in torturous ways…

and when you have eleven credible people,

with no ulterior motives,

with nothing to gain,

and a lot to lose,

who all agree

thy observed [the resurrection] with their own eyes

– [well] now you’ve got

some difficulty explaining THAT away”

I find the radically changed lives of the disciples to be a one of the most compelling evidences of the resurrection.

So you have the empty tomb which could only have happened had Jesus really risen.

You have the post resurrection appearances and eye witness accounts, which you couldn’t realisitically fake.

You have the radically changed lives of the disciples, which seem impossible if Jesus didn’t really rise from the dead.

Taken together you have a really robust intellectual argument for believing in the resurrection.

And in fact this evidence is so compelling that it convinced a criminal defence laywer, Sir lionel Luckhoo, who is considered to be one of the greatest lawyers and legal minds in history that Christianty was true. He was an atheist, and he was once challenged to prove atheism was true, and so he started looking at the evidence of Jesus’ resurrection.

After investigating and reviewing the evidence, this giant of the courtroom, this colossus of the legal system said the following: After investigating and reviewing the evidence, this giant of the courtroom, this colossus of the legal system said the following:

I humbly add I have spent more than 42 years as a defence trial lawyer appearing in many parts of the world

and am still in active practice.

I have been fortunate to secure a number of successes in jury trials and I say unequivocally the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is so

overwhelming that it compels acceptance by proof which leaves absolutely no room for doubt.

And if minds far greater than ours are compelled by the evidence of Jesus’ resurrection, we can be happy with the intellectual robustness of the resurrection account.

So if you believe in teh resurrection of the dead, you are no fool. In fact, given the overwhelming evidence, only some fo which we looked at today, you would be correct at saying: It would take more faith to believe the resurrection wasn’t true, than to believe it was.

So the Resurrection is robustly intellectual.

But it is also Really applicable to our lives.

Really applicable to our lives

I believe in the resurrection of hte body and the life everlasting.

If the resurrection is true, it means we can take Jesus at his word.

The Apostle Paul wrote, "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead" (1 Corinthians 15:17-20).

What he is basically saying is that if Jesus did not rise from teh dead then we are in a terrible position because our lives are meaningless. If the resurrection wans’t real, then we would be wasting our time trying to live as Jesus showed us, as he commanded us to live.

If the resurrection wasn’t real, then we should just go out and try and live for ourselves. Do whatever made us happy. Abandon the idea that serving others is important. Abandon the idea it is better to give than to recieve. We should stop giving our money away, and instead just enjoy the good stuff our money can buy. Stop caring for others and just look after ourselves.

After all if the resurrection wasn’t real, then this is really all there is. And so our task in life would become trying to get as much meaning and enjoyment ouf of this life as we can.

But that’s the hwole point. Actually the resurrection is real, and since it is real, our lives look radically different.

Because the resurrection is real, the things of this world lose their appeal.

Because the resurrection is real, we don’t devote ourselves to ourselves.

Because the resurrection is real, we realise that their is more to life than jyst trying to live our “best life now”.

We can sacrifice, and serve, and live for the best of outhers, even pray for and support peoplk whou could be considered our enemies - why?

Precicely because this world is not all tehre is. This world is but a pit stop to our eternal life. We aren’t home, this is just a stop alogn the way. Our home is eternal life with Jesus who overcame death.

The resurrection really does change our perspective on this life and turns this world’s priorities upside down.

So the resurrection changes our perspective on this life,

But it also changes our perspective on the next life.

Reorienting our eternal hope

The resurrection is a belief that reorients our hope

Because of Christ's resurrection, we have hope that extends beyond this life.

We know that death is not the end, but rather a transition to eternal life with God.

Now we have to do a bit of work here, so be with me.

We have to realise that hte ressurrection is the single most imporant event in Jesus’ life. It is the cornerstone and foundation of our salvation.

Yes the crucifixion was critical, in the crucufixion Jesus took ur sins on himself and died in our place.

But without the resurrection we would not know whether that actually worked or not.

The resurrection, is crucially important to our faith.

for without it, our faith is futile and we are still in our sin!

You can’t get more important than that – without the resurrection, our faith would be futile because Christ would not have overcome death and there would be no forgiveness of sin.

The resurrection gives us up for the furuter because the fact that God raised Jesus from the dead, proves that God accepted the sacrifice Jesus made on the cross.

God has accepted Jesus’ atonement for our sin. The resurrection proves that God was pleased to raise Jesus from teh dead, and so our sins were actually and truly paid for on the cross.

The resurrection shows us that we again have a relationship with God if we trust and believe in Jesus,

Not only does the resurrection prove that our sins are forgivine, the resurrection also points to our future.

The resurrection takes the spotlight and points it at death and says, look, death is no longer the consequence for believers.

We know we will live again, because Jesus has been raised as the first fruits, as the sign for us, that we will rise again.

If Jesus had stayed dead then death and sin would have been the victors.

Sin would have kept its death-grip on us.

But Christ rose from the dead because death could no longer hold Him.

We can say with absolute certainty:

O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.

But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our

Lord Jesus Christ.

Death is no longer an enemy because we do not have to fear the

punishment that comes after death.

Death is not the end of the story,

it is how the rest of the story begins to unfold.

You see for us as Christians, death is but a doorway to our Lord.

Jesus is the first-fruit of those who will be following Him, following Him into eternal life!

What a remarkable, joyous, amazing prospect, what an assurance that because of the resurrection, we will be following our Lord and Saviour into eternal life!

So the resurrection proves that God accepted Jesus’ sacrifice, and the resurrection proves that Death has been overcome for the Christian.

So where does that leave us today friends?

I think that leaves us with great assurance that we can live our lives in confidence as Christians.

Firstly we have really solid reliable and intellectually robust evidence for the resurrection. We can hold our heads up high and with confidence say to those who call us fools - it takes more faith to believe that the resurrection didn’t happen, than to believe it did.

Because the resurrection is true, we can be assured that we don’t have to worry about dedicating this life to JEsus. That we are perfectly justified in living a life of sacrifice for our king, when the whole world around us says live for yourself. We can do this because we know the resurrection is a pointer to the fact that this life is not all there is. That true life comes from living Jesus’ way, not the world’s way.

And finally we can live in full assurance that whatever happens to us in this life, in the long run doesnt matter. Jesus has paid for the sins of all who believe, his resurrection assures us that we will be with him eternally. That no matter how poorly our lives go, and even if we are to be killed for our faith in him, we are still in a privileged position.

Death does not worry us, because we know, in Christ we will live again.

So friends, come, to the tomb, see that it is empty.

Look at all the evidence, and believe that Jesus rose from the dead.

And then live, live a full life, knowing that because Jesus rose from the dead, you have a full life.