Reality With Which to Reckon: The Lord of Hearts and History

How’s it going guys? As Pastor Glenn mentioned, my name is Caleb Eissler. Just to give you a little bit picture of my background, I’m currently working for an architecture firm in Kansas City, Missouri, pursuing my Master’s of Divinity at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and I help lead the college ministry at my home church.

Thank Pastor Glen and the church

Before I go any further, I want to express my thanks to you all, particularly Pastor Glenn, for the opportunity to open the Word of God with you all. It’s an immense privilege for a pastor to share his pulpit with someone and it is not one I take lightly. This has been an occasion many months in the making. I have been praying for you all constantly for 8 or 9 months now. I couldn’t be more delighted to spend the next week with you, all giving praise to God.

Scripture Intro

To begin our time together, I want to start off by reading a couple passages of Scripture.

First, let’s read Acts 2:23-24-

“this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.”

Next, I want to turn to 1 Peter 3:15 which says,

“but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect,”

What connection do these two passages and me, this random, young, unknown evangelist, have? And what about my connection to these passages do I think is so important for you to hear that I would start off our time together talking about it?

In order to answer those questions, I’m going to tell you a little more about my life and testimony.

Crisis of Faith Testimony

I was raised in an incredible and loving Christian home with amazing parents and grandparents. They loved the Lord and from an early age they taught me the Gospel and showed me the love of Jesus. This is a kind blessing from God that I’ll never quite be able to understand. I couldn’t be more grateful to have the family I do.

It wasn’t just that my family members were Christians, but their friends were Christians too. Most of the close friends I had growing up were Christians too. Of course I had non-Christians friends too but the vast majority of my close friends were Christian.

This is predominantly a good thing, but there would be some side effects to this that would rise to the surface later on.

Because I was essentially raised in a holy huddle, as loving as this was, I never really encountered any real, legitimate objections to Christianity. I would encounter lame ones here and there in high school, but I mostly just blew them off and threw out some one liners from The Case for Christ.

But when I entered into my freshman year at the University of Missouri, or Mizzou as we like to call it, things radically changed.

I quickly got plugged into a good church, college group, small group, and accountability group and was even serving with a local youth ministry, but I encountered something else that I had never come in contact with before. I encountered non-Christian people who really, deeply loved me, that began to gently and respectfully pose serious objections to the Christianity that I so dearly knew and loved.

They began to ask questions like, “Do you really think that there is an infinite and transcendent being who created the entire universe?”or “Can there really be a good and loving God out there with all of the egregious pain and suffering that we see in the world? or “How could one man really die for the sins of the entire world?”

These questions haunted me. I couldn’t shake them and I had no idea how to seriously answer them.

Soon, doubt began to set in and I began to enter a crisis of faith that would ultimately be the most spiritually dark and exhausting time in my life so far. I finally hit a point of such despair that I remember crying out to God and saying, “God, if you’re there, show me.”

I wanted to know the truth. I didn’t want to believe in a fairy tale. If Christianity wasn’t true, I was prepared to step away.

I began furiously researching the major worldviews of the world, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Mormonism, Hinduism, Buddhism, New Age Spirituality, atheism, and so on, to see if any of them was actually true. I read dozens and dozens of books, hundreds of academic articles and journals, and listened to thousands of sermons, lectures, and debates.

At one point in the midst of all of that, I actually stepped away from Christianity for a short time. But God drew me back to Himself.

As I continued to research and research it became abundantly clear that all of the evidence pointed to the truth of Christianity. I came out on the other side of that journey with a renewed faith that was stronger and more joyful than ever. I came out wonderstruck by God in a way I never knew was possible. Anyone that knows me well will say that I’m a different person because of that journey.

Amidst all of the various things I learned as I delved into the depths of the major worldviews of the world, two unspeakably important facts struck me.

For one, there is no one like Jesus.

No worldview, none, has any figure that can touch Jesus. Jesus defies everything that all of the leaders and figures of other religions represent.

Jesus is so important to history that other worldviews even try to get a piece of him. Islam, Judaism, Jehovah’s Witness, and other worldviews have places for him as a good moral teacher or a prophet, but none of them have the real thing, the real Jesus. Only Christianity can truly claim the real Jesus.

The other thing that struck me was not just that Jesus was important to history, but that he was and is historical.

To be clear, there is a difference.

There is a host of people who don’t believe that Jesus even existed, or if they believe He existed, they definitely don’t believe He was the son of God or that He rose from the grave.

But the evidence available to us tell us a different story.

The lynch pin for me in coming back from my wandering to the Lord I love was the incredible evidence we have that Jesus really did live, really was crucified, and really rose from the grave.

Importance of Apologetics and Seeking Truth

For the next few minutes, I want to take a second and share some of that evidence with you. Not only for you own knowledge, but also for your edification and encouragement.

We are not meant to have a purely blind faith, closing our eyes and ears to the truth that the Lord has given us in creation and in history.

If Christianity is false, we’re all wasting our times here this morning and there are a million better things that we could be doing that worship a non-existent hero in a fairy tale.

But if Christianity is true and Jesus is who He says He is and He did what He said He did, then it changes everything.

1 Peter 3:15 tells us, “but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect.”

We should be able to give a reason for the hope we have with in. We should be able to give reasons for why we believe that Jesus is the Savior of the world and Lord over all.

We should be able to give reasons why we believe that He rose from the dead the defeat death.

In 1 Corinthians 15:17-19, Paul tells us that,

“’But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

Paul is saying that If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead then this is all a sham and that we should be pitied. So it’s important for us to know that the Jesus we proclaim actually existed and that he did exactly what he said he did to prove that he is who he said he was. By learning some of this, I think you will find, like I did, that it can radically change how you view Jesus and it will help you love him more.

To be clear, I’m giving you the 30,000 foot view of the facts here. We could be here for days and days talking about the fullness of the wealth of evidence we have for Jesus existence and resurrection. But for our short time here today, I just share a few basic points. If you have questions and want to know more about the resources on the evidence we have, definitely come up and talk to me after the service and I’ll try to answer any questions you might have.

Context of the Evidence for the Historicity of Jesus/The Actual Evidence

So what is this great evidence that I speak of? Why is it so notable?

Before we can talk about the evidence, we have to make sure we understand the evidence in context.

There were no cameras or smartphones in the ancient world to take pictures and video. Al Gore hadn’t yet created the internet where we could immediately document things and post news updates.

In the ancient world, evidence is found in artifacts and through written testimony. But there’s something else we must consider as well.

We have no hard evidence of the existence of the extreme majority of all of the people of the ancient world. That’s hard for us to imagine in a world where everything so well and constantly documented in data or on social media. But it’s true.

Now that’s not to say that they didn’t exist, they surely did. But we have no evidence of them. Or if we do have evidence of them, it’s only a nameless artifact that belonged to a random person whose identity has been lost to the tides of time

If we have a source giving someone’s name, it usually means that they were of great significance in their culture and time. But even still, we usually will only have one source for such a person

If there are multiple written sources from antiquity of a particular individual, especially if those sources are independent, it’s like hitting gold. We can have great confidence of that person’s existence.

If there are 3-4 sources for a particular individual then our confidence of their existence sky rockets. Of course, having 3-4 sources referencing someone is rare and only the most notable figures in history have that many verified, independent sources.

many of the most notable individuals in history, whose existence we take for granted as fact, we only have 1-2 sources giving verification to their existence.

But what if we had 11 or more independent sources from antiquity claiming someone’s existence, the majority of whose authors have no relation to that person, and some of which are from enemies of that person?

If we were ever to be that lucky to find that much verification for a person, we could be utterly certain, with no doubts, of their existence and historicity.

So what if I told you that we have at least 11 independent sources from antiquity for Jesus? It’s true.

We have sources for Jesus from Romans, pagans, Jews, besides the many Christian sources we have.

We have more independent verification from antiquity for the existence of Jesus than we do for the extreme majority of all persons in ancient history.

If you refuse to believe in the historicity of Jesus, you must also refuse to believe that the majority of the figures you know of from ancient history ever existed. That would be a profoundly radical position to hold. It’s certainly not a position that any serious scholar of history worth anything holds.

We can have total confidence that Jesus actually existed. The sources we have for Jesus are phenomenal and they blow competing figures out the water.

For example, none of us question the existence of Alexander the Great. His existence seems to be a certain fact of history.

The closest sources and biographies we have to his lifetime, there are two of them, were written 300-400 years after he died.

Compare that to Jesus. We have a wealth of sources that come less than 100 years after he died, several of which are biographies. One of those sources, a creed that Paul quotes in 1 Corinthians 15, has even been dated by some scholars within just a few years of Jesus’ death. Some scholars have even dated it with 6 months of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Compare 300 years to just a few years or even a few months.

There is no comparison. Jesus Christ was without a doubt a real, historical figure.

You may be here and may not be a Christian.

First off, I want to thank you for being here, and let you know that there’s no better place that you could be! We welcome you here with open arms.

But I also want to pose an important question to you. Maybe you don’t really believe that Jesus was even a real historical person. You worldview may tell you that, but the evidence certainly doesn’t. Are you willing to objectively face the facts? If not, why?

Realize that your objections may be far more emotional that objective and evidentiary and that’s important to realize.

Evidence For the Resurrection

But just because Jesus existed doesn’t mean that He was crucified or rose from the grave. What evidence do we have for those things?

When it comes to Jesus’ crucifixion, virtually every source we have from antiquity, Roman, pagan, Jewish, and Christian affirms that Jesus was crucified. No source from antiquity disputes that.

If we deny his crucifixion then we must deny virtually all of the historical events and facts that we know. The crucifixion of Jesus is one of the most attested to facts in antiquity.

But what about Jesus’ resurrection? Do we actually have good reason to believe that a man truly defeated death?

The beautiful and resounding answer is yes!

Before I lay any of the evidence out, I want to reiterate that we’re only getting a 30,000 foot view here. We could talk about the evidence and arguments for the historicity of the resurrection for hours and hours, but for our purposes here today, we can only skim the surface. So if you have any questions or want to know of more resources, definitely come and talk to me after service.

When it comes to the evidence for the resurrection, we must start from the common ground of accepted historical facts surrounding the resurrection itself. This may sound like an obvious thought, but I think you’ll soon see why I’m stressing it. To be clear, I don’t just mean the facts that Christian scholars agree on. If you use those facts, then the argument loses much of it’s apologetic weight. I mean the facts that the vast majority of both Christian and non-Christian scholars assent to.

So where would we go to figure out what these agreed upon facts are? We go to Gary Habermas, the leading resurrection scholar in the world.

Habermas has studied virtually every academic publication on the resurrection since 1975 written in English, French, and German.

This amounts to more than 3400 publications by over 1400 authors.

As he reads these articles, a great number of which are by strident unbelievers, he works through 140 questions about how the article or publication treats the resurrection and the facts surrounding it.

What Habermas has found in astonishing. He found that there were 5 facts that were essentially universally held to by all scholars, Christian or non-Christian, who had written on the resurrection.

He began calling these the “Minimal Facts”. The facts are as follows:

1. Jesus died by crucifixion.

2. His disciples believed that He rose from the dead and appeared to them.

3. The church persecutor Paul was suddenly changed.

4. The skeptic James, brother of Jesus, was suddenly changed.

5. The tomb was empty.

These are the very core facts that essentially no disputes.

In order to come to a conclusion as to what happened at the resurrection we must find what theory or view best makes sense of the facts at hand.

Today, there are 3 primary theories attempting to explain what happened. The first is the classic resurrection theory that Christians have held to for 2,000 years. The other two are the the Swoon theory and the Hallucination theory.

Swoon Theory

The Swoon theory posits that Jesus didn’t actually die on the cross.

Instead, the theory claims that Jesus fell out of consciousness and then woke up in the tomb, somehow in his almost mortally wounded state moved the massive stone, walked out of the tomb and then started a major religious movement. This theory has a number of fatal problems.

For starters, no one escaped crucifixion alive. The Romans had perfected this gruesome method of execution.

Additionally, Romans soldiers were punished severely, often by death, if any of the crucified were left alive. The soldiers would often break the knees or legs of those on the cross to speed up their deaths.

When you are crucified, you don’t die from being nailed on the cross, you die from asphyxiation. All of your weight would press against your lungs as you were hanging on the cross, so you would use whatever strength you had to try and push yourself upward to breathe. As time went on, the crucified would lose strength and lose the ability to push themselves up to breathe. By breaking their legs and/or knees, the soldiers sped up the process of asphyxiation by making it almost impossible for people to push themselves up to breathe.

With Jesus, they took even more dramatic measures. They plunged a spear into his heart.

There is no way Jesus made it out alive. The Romans wanted to be sure he was dead because they had been perceiving him as stirring up political strife as a revolutionary.

Plus, Jesus had been brutally scourged and flogged almost to the point of death before he even got nailed to the cross.

So already, the Swoon theory fails in a major way. But its failure continues.

How could a virtually mortally wounded man in Jesus’ condition move a massive stone that could have weighed over a thousand pounds? It would be incredibly difficult for a healthy man to do so, let alone a man who could die of blood loss and trauma at any moment.

But the theory fails even more. Even if Jesus, in his sorry state, was able to move the stone, he wouldn’t be able to start a religious movement. He would have been a bloody mess with his innards literally hanging out in places. He would hardly be able to walk, if at all. He would surely not be in his right mind as he flirted with death by blood loss and trauma.

You don’t stumble upon that person and assume they have conquered the grave. You assume they’re headed for it!

There is nothing majestic about a man in Jesus’ condition. 500+ people don’t start a religious movement and bow down to worship a man on the brink of bloody death like that.

Clearly the Swoon theory fails. So what about the Hallucination theory?

Hallucination Theory

The hallucination theory posits that rather than seeing the risen Christ, the disciples and the crowds said to have seen Jesus had powerful, mass hallucinations.

Let me briefly point out a few things with this theory. For one, it is true that there are people who so deeply miss and desire to see a deceased loved one that they have hallucinations of them. We have observed this.

But these are singular phenomenons involving one person.

Groups of people do not have the same hallucinations.

The odds of two people having the same hallucinations at the same place at the same time are unspeakably low. But for different people to have the same hallucinations at different times and in different places is even more unthinkable.

Now make those odds even worse. The Bible tells us that more than 500 people claimed to see the risen Christ in different places and at different times.

It’s important to note that this 500 number is most likely just including the men present.

In ancient times, women were not often counted in group numbers like this as women were not seen as valuable as men. As a quick aside, Jesus so radically fights this notion during his ministry as he honored and loved and cared for the women he saw.

But back to the Hallucination theory. If you were to include women and children, that 500 number probably jumps up to 1000 or 1500 or maybe even 2000 people.

For 2000 people to have the same hallucination at different places and different times, including many who had never encountered Jesus before and had no connection with him at all, the odds for this are literally mathematically impossible.

Some have posited that the odds are actually better for a man to rise from the dead than they are for this mass hallucination.

The Hallucination theory fails.

Nazareth Inscription

There’s one last piece of evidence we need to look at. It’s called the Nazareth Inscription.

This major archeological find comes straight from Nazareth (Jesus’ hometown).

The inscription is dated AD 41 and is a later rescript of an edict put out by the Roman Emperor Claudius.

The edict contained in the Nazareth Inscription lays out a warning from Claudius that anyone who removes a body from a tomb will be punished greatly (even possibly put to death).

Within ten years of the resurrection, we have a Roman emperor aware of the events surrounding resurrection and the events are serious enough, in his eyes, to warrant an edict calling for the death of people removing bodies from tombs. It doesn’t say that grave robbery involving valuables will be punished, but rather the actual taking of a body.

This is notable on multiple levels. For starters, the fact that this edict made it all the way out to Nazareth is striking on multiple accounts.

First, because Nazareth is in the middle of nowhere.

News did not travel fast in ancient times where there was no Internet, cell phones, or any other kind of modern communication technology.

This means that the edict would have had to been put out significantly earlier than AD 41. That means it came very close to the time of Christ’s resurrection.

Additionally, the fact that the edict made it out to Nazareth shows that the message is also targeted in some way.

Because Nazareth was this nobody town, not all major edicts would have always made it out to the town.

Therefore it means something that the Romans thought the edict was important enough for the people of Nazareth to see that it was delivered out there.

Something else to consider: as I mentioned earlier, the edict was just against grave robbers who stole jewelry or valuables. That was common.

Rather this edict was specifically against people taking bodies which was not common at all. The punishment is also noteworthy. The punishment wasn’t just a slap on the wrist, it was potentially death.

The Romans were not messing around. Something serious had caused them to issue this edict.

Maybe…like an empty tomb in Jerusalem…

The Resurrection is Real

So if the two major competing theories against the resurrection fail to make sense of the evidence, and we have an edict put out less than 10 years after the resurrection that made it out to Jesus’ hometown in the middle of nowhere, and the biblical resurrection narrative is the only one that truly accounts for the evidence agreed upon by virtually all critical scholars, where does that leave us?

It leaves us at a vital intersection.

The evidence, of which we barely scratched the surface of, points overwhelmingly to the truth of the resurrection, but some of us might still be resisting. Why?

It’s because, ultimately, our worldviews frame how we understand the evidence.

If you come into the discussion that anything supernatural that can’t be observed in a lab is impossible, despite all of the evidence in favor of the resurrection, your heart won’t let you believe it. It’s vital that we recognize this.

If you’re here as a skeptic, is your skepticism based on facts or some deeper emotional wrestling with Jesus?

But this discussion is not reserved merely for skeptics and non-Christians. In many ways, it is just as applicable to Christians, which is probably most of us here today.

The evidence for the historicity of Jesus and his resurrection is incredible.

The facts of history tell us that Jesus Christ was a real human being who walked on this Earth, rose from the dead, and changed the course of history forever.

How does a small group of heavily persecuted people, often slaughtered by those in power at the time, against all the odds, lead the charge to form the greatest movement in history? Because they saw the real, true resurrected Christ.

The resurrection changes everything.

If Jesus was a real man who really rose from the dead and defeated sin on the cross, everything about reality and life changes and can never be the same.

Yet, we Christians, the very people who claim to believe in Jesus, often treat him as nothing more than just this vague idea that we can pat ourselves on the backs with on Sunday mornings while living as if we never knew Him throughout the week

For the non-Christians here, you’ve heard the evidence. Ignorance is bliss no longer. Jesus is not some mythical idea that you can disregard.

Real Reality With Which We Must Reckon

For all here, the evidence for the historicity of Jesus and his resurrection point to a vital fact that we must face: Jesus Christ, his life, death, and resurrection are real realities with which we must reckon.

Christian or non-Christian, we cannot fail to face the the facts any longer

Jesus is exactly who He said He was.

He is the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the Savior of the world. He was truly God and truly man.

He came, lived a perfect life and fulfilled the law, then was crucified where He took on our sin and the just punishment that we deserved, He died, then rose from the grave defeating death and Satan and made a way for us to be in relationship with God for ever, perfectly satisfied in Him.

That’s the greatest news you could ever hear, and that’s exactly why it’s called the Gospel.

This Jesus, the one who has changed everything, the reality with which we must reckon…we must know what he’s really like.

I don’t mean the various and random facts we may have accrued over years of being in church or in a post-Christian culture.

I mean that we must really really get to know him and do so with our eyes opened to the gravity of who he really is precisely because he is reality with which we must reckon.

Explanation of the Series and Invitation to Invite Friends

Over the next few days, including tonight, we will be taking a look at Jesus to see what he was really like, maybe in a way you’ve never experienced before

If you’re a Christian, I want to invite you and come and take a look at Jesus with new eyes, as a concrete reality that you may never have really conceived of.

If you’re a non-Christian, I want to invite you to come and see what this Jesus, who changed history forever, was really like. Not like the cheap straw men you might have heard from culture, but in the words of Scripture and history.

Bring a non-Christian friend or family member. This a great time for them to hear the Gospel and be challenged by it.

Some of you here today, after hearing of the evidence for Jesus and hearing of what he’s done in the Gospel may be feeling something already.

If you feel the tug of the Holy Spirit on your life, if you want to know more about Jesus and his Gospel, or if you want to pray with someone here today, we’ll have some friends up from including myself that you can talk and pray with.

We hope to see you at tonight’s service and our other services this week and we dive into the person and work of Jesus.