EASTER—2003

THE IMPOSSIBLE TASK
AND
THE GREAT DISCOVERY

Matthew 28:1-8
"Now after the Sabbath as the first day of the week began to dawn, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to see the tomb.
And behold there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat on it.
His countenance was like lightning, and his clothing as white as snow.
And the guards shook for fear of him, and became like dead men.
But the angel answered and said to the women, "Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified.
"He is not here; for He is risen, as He said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay.
"And go quickly and tell His disciples that He is risen from the dead, and indeed, He is going before you into Galilee; there you will see Him. Behold, I have told you."
So they went out quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, and ran to bring His disciples word."

One thing is sure, and that is that Jesus of Nazareth belongs to history!
We know when He lived, between 5 and 6 B.C., and 30 to 32 A.D.
We know where He was born, in Bethlehem, a real town, not some mythological cloud.
We know where He spent most of the years of His life, in Nazareth, far north in Galilee, where He worked as a carpenter.
We know many of the characters of His day from literature apart from the New Testament, for the names of Herod the Great, his son, Herod Agippa, Pontius Pilate, Tiberias Caesar, Felix, Festus...are found in many of the secular writings of the first century.
Every history of the ancient world, embracing the first century of our era, is compelled to say something about Jesus Christ;

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every encyclopedia published in the western world must record the fact that Jesus lived.
The very dates we use, designated by the letters A.D. and B.C., bear testimony to the fact that one Jesus Christ once appeared on this earth.
Not only did this person, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, live here on earth, among men, at a definite time, in a definite place, among historic characters, speaking as man to man, and going about doing good, but this man Jesus also died. We know more about the details of the hours immediately before and the actual death of Jesus, in and near Jerusalem, then we know about the death of any other one man in all the ancient world. We know of the five trials which Jesus underwent within the last eight hours: two before the Jewish authorities, two before Pilate, and one before Herod. We know what men said to Christ, what they said against Him, and what He said to them.
There is nothing mythical, or even "theological" about the birth, life and death of Jesus Christ; it is all solid, definite, historical fact.
And concerning His death...something happened to the body of Jesus when it was taken down from the cross. The New Testament testifies that it was placed in a tomb of Joseph of Arimathaea. On Sunday morning, for one reason or another, that tomb was empty, as everyone admits--Christians, unbeliever, disciple, scoffer, Jew and Gentile, conservative and modernist. We are here in the realm of history. The reality of the Resurrection of Christ is something we may judge as we do any other historical event. The criteria for determining what Caesar did at Gaul, or how the Goths sacked Rome, or what happened at Waterloo, are the criteria by which we determine what happened on the first Easter Sunday.
So, when we are discussing the birth, life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ...in this realm concerning the greatest of all miracles, we are face to face with definite, historical data! This is one reason that makes our own faith superior to all other faiths of history!

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The distinguished classical scholar, Dr. Clifford Herbert Moore of Harvard University, in a famous work THE RELIGIOUS THOUGHT OF THE GREEKS, has well said, "Christianity knew its Saviour and Redeemer not as some god whose history was contained in a mythical faith, with rude, primitive, and even offensive elements, as were the stories of Attis or Osiris, and to a degree of Dionysus. Such myths required violent interpretation to make them acceptable to enlightened minds. On the contrary, the Christian Saviour had lived and associated with men whose minds and senses had apprehended His person, acts, and character. These witnesses had transmitted their knowledge directly, and they had testified to the life of Jesus Christ and His teaching.
Jesus was then a historical, not a mythical being. No remote or foul myth obtruded itself on the Christian believer; his faith was founded on positive, historical and acceptable facts."
THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST IS A HISTORICAL FACT! The word RESURRECTION in itself means a rising from the dead, a coming forth from the dead, a return from the dead, and assumes that death has been experienced.
When we speak of the RESURRECTION of anyone who has died, we can only mean the RESURRECTION of that person's body. If death affects the body and the body is not raised, death is the conqueror; if Christ can be said to have conquered death then His own body must have been delivered from death's power. In no other way can we account for the empty tomb, and for the appearance of Christ after His Resurrection, and in no other way can we say that Christ conquered death, unless His body was raised on Easter Day.
Jesus Christ staked the future of the Gospel and His Church upon the fulfillment of His prediction regarding His own resurrection.
One of the most amazing things that ever came from the lips of Jesus, as the apostles and His disciples listened to Him, was His frequent assertion, not only that He was going up to Jerusalem to die, at the hands of the religious leaders of Israel, but that on the third day after His death He would rise again.
Early in His ministry, immediately after the

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cleansing of the temple, our Lord said to the Jews of Jerusalem, "Destroy this temple, and in three days, I will raise it up...He spoke of the temple of His body." Immediately following Peter's great confession, we read that "Jesus began to show unto His disciples how that...the third day He must be raised up." Here is a teacher of religion and He calmly professes to stake His entire claims upon His ability, after having been put to death, to rise again from the grave. We may safely assume that there never was, before or since, such a proposal made!
IT IS THE IMPOSSIBLE TASK...DIE, THEN CAUSE YOUR BODY TO BE RAISED AND DEPART FROM A TOMB SAFELY SECURED AND PROTECTED.
But Jesus did the impossible!
And because Jesus accomplished the impossible...rise from the dead...the preaching of the early Church was centered in the RESURRECTION of Jesus! The first sermon of the divinely established church, the one delivered by Peter on the day of Pentecost, is wholly and entirely founded on the Resurrection. Not merely is the RESURRECTION its principal theme, but if that doctrine were removed there would be no doctrine left.
For the RESURRECTION is propounded as being
(1) the explanation of Jesus' death; (2) prophetically anticipated as the Messianic experience; (3) apostolically witnessed; (4) the cause of the outpouring of the Spirit, and thus accounting for religious phenomena otherwise inexplicable; and (5) certifying the Messianic and Kingly position of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus the whole series of arguments and conclusions depends for stability entirely upon the Resurrection. Without it the substance of the apostolic witness would have disappeared! If we study the great sermons recorded in the Acts, those of Simon Peter, and those of the Apostle Paul, we will discover that so far from being a mere accessory or appendage to the apostolic message, a detached event added on to the life and teaching of Jesus to assure the disciples of His survival of death and the truth of His claim, in this lay, germinally and as in a kernel, the whole gospel they had to preach; so that the

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preaching of Christ is for the apostles the preaching of the resurrection, and their primary function is to be witnesses to the fact.
Well could Paul say, "If Christ hath not been raised, then is our preaching vain." If one carefully investigates the subject of witness-bearing in the New Testament he will realize that in almost every case where the word WITNESS occurs in relation to what Christians are to say concerning the Lord Jesus, it will be found it has to do with their testimony to His RESURRECTION! "Thus it is written and thus is behooved Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day; and that remission of sins should be preached in His name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem and ye are WITNESSES of these things." (Luke 24:46,47)
Faith in the RESURRECTION OF Christ is acknowledged to be the primary cause of the phenomental growth and power of the early church. One writer states: Had the crucifixion of Jesus ended His disciples' experience of Him, it is hard to see how the Christian Church could have come into existence. That church was founded on faith in the Messiahship of Jesus. A crucified messiah was no messiah at all. He was one rejected by Judaism and accursed of God. It was the RESURRECTION of Jesus, as Paul declares in Romans 1:4, which proclaimed Him to be the Son of God with power."
From the first day of its divinely bestowed life, the Christian Church has unitedly borne testimony to its faith in the RESURRECTION of Christ. It is what we may call one of the great fundamental doctrines and convictions of the Church, and so penetrates the literature of the New Testament, that if you lifted out every passage in which a reference is made to the RESURRECTION, you would have a collection of writings so mutilated that what remained could not be understood!
To say that God revealed Himself in Jesus, or that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, is to say nothing of real meaning unless we take our stand with the New Testament at one decisive point.
That point is where God manifests Jesus as

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the Son of God with power, by the Resurrection from the dead.
And concerning His burial, we know more about the burial of the Lord Jesus than we know about any other single character in all ancient history...more about His burial than we do about any Old Testament character, of any king of Babylon, Pharaoh of Egypt, any philosopher of Greece, or triumphant Caesar. We know who took His body from the cross; we know something of the wrapping of the body in spices, we know the very tomb in which this body was placed, the name of the man who owned it, Joseph, of a town known as Arimathaea. We know minute details concerning events immediately subsequent to our Lord's entombment, that a stone was rolled against the tomb, that this stone was sealed, and that, by the wish of the Jews, Roman guards were set before the tomb to prevent the body being stolen. THESE ARE HISTORICAL FACTS!
The two primary testimonies, and there are many secondary ones, to the fact of Christ's RESURRECTION, have always been recognized as resting upon two facts, concerning which the New Testament is most emphatically insistent, and we believe transparently clear: the fact that the tomb in which Jesus was buried was, on Sunday morning of the same week, found to be empty, and the fact that Christ Jesus, in His own risen body, appeared to His own disciples. No man has ever written, pro or con, on the subject of Christ's RESURRECTION, without finding himself compelled to face this problem of Joseph's empty tomb. That the tomb was empty on Sunday morning, is recognized by everyone, no matter how radical a critic he may be; however anti-supernatural in all his personal convictions, he never dares to say that the body was still resting in that tomb, however he might attempt to explain the facts that the tomb must have been empty.
THE QUESTION...HOW DID THE TOMB OF JOSEPH OF ARIMATHAEA BECOME EMPTY? It should be noticed first of all that the Jewish authorities never questioned the report of the guards. They did not themselves go out to see if the tomb was empty, because they knew it was empty.
"Now while they were going, behold, some of

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the guard came into the city, and told unto the chief priests all the things that were come to pass. And when they were assembled with the elders, and had taken counsel, they gave much money unto the soldiers, saying, Say ye, His disciples came by night, and stole Him away while we slept. And if this come to the governor's ears, we will persuade him, and rid you of care. So they took the money, and did as they were taught; and this saying was spread abroad among the Jews, and continueth until this day." (Matthew 28:11-15)
The story which the Jewish authorities told the soldiers to repeat was a story to explain how the tomb became empty! Notice...these soldiers were bribed to tell a story, they were paid to report a lie, a lie concocted by the same men who earlier had sought false witnesses by whose testimony they might condemn Jesus to death.
The very idea that the disciples of Jesus came and stole the body away is unbelievable, for at least two reasons. (1) These disciples were in no mood to go out and face Roman soldiers, subdue the entire guard, and snatch that body out of tomb. (2) The disciples had absolutely no reason for taking away the body, which had been honorably buried. They could do no more for the body of their Lord than had been done.
Yet, this theory and lie proposed by the Sanhedrin apparently had a wide vogue among the Jews of succeeding generations...even unto this day!
There is another theory about the empty tomb which has been spread abroad in recent years.
It is suggested that the women who found a tomb on Easter morning, for one reason or another failed to get to the tomb of Joseph of Arimathaea, but stopped in front of another tomb in which no body had been recently placed.
Those who hold this view believe that the reason the women missed the tomb was that they were convulsed with sorrow, their eyes blinded with tears, and hardly knowing where they were going. But the Scripture is very clear...these women had watched where the body of their Master had been placed just a few hours before the return visit. This is a groundless theory!

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Of the four great religions of the world resting directly upon personalities, rather than upon some philosophical system, the Christian religion is the only one that even talks about an empty tomb in relation to its founder. Abraham, the founder of Judaism died somewhere about 1900 B.C. but no resurrection was ever suggested or claimed. His burial place has been carefully preserved and today a mosque is built on the spot. The original accounts of Buddha never ascribe to him any such thing as a resurrection. Mohammed died June 8, 632 and was buried in Medina, a place visited by millions of his followers each year. Christianity believes, as a historical fact, that Jesus Christ rose from the dead three days after His burial, that He ascended into heaven where He is interceding for the saints as our Great High Priest...and that some day in future, He will return for His followers and rapture them into His eternal presence to live with Him forever! "For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus. For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep.
FOR THE LORD HIMSELF WILL DESCEND FROM HEAVEN WITH A SHOUT, WITH THE VOICE OF AN ARCHANGEL, AND WITH THE TRUMPET OF GOD. AND THE DEAD IN CHRIST WILL RISE FIRST. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord. (1 Thessalonians 4:14-17)
BELIEF IN THE RESURRECTION IS CENTRAL TO THE GIFT OF SALVATION AND ETERNAL LIFE! "...if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with mouth confession is made unto salvation." (Romans 10:9-19) When we declare Jesus Christ is Lord is to say that He holds the supreme place in our life. To believe in the resurrection is the declare that Christ is alive today, reigning in heaven as our Master and Great High priest. We declare these truths with our mouth in open confession and witness!
When we do this, we are saved and forgiven.