The Resurrection of Jesus Christ

1.            As he lay dying 19^th. century evangelist, Dwight L Moody called out, “Earth recedes, heaven opens before me …. This is no dream. It is beautiful, it is like a trance. If this is death it is sweet. There is no valley here. God is calling me, I must go”. A little while earlier he had remarked, “One day soon there will be headlines in the newspaper, ‘MOODY DIES’. “Don’t you believe it!”, said Moody, “On that day I shall be more alive than ever!”. In 1865 Lord Palmerston, Prime Minister of the time, was told by his doctor that he was dying. “My dear doctor” he exclaimed, “That’s the last thing I’ll do!” In the book of Job, probably penned over 2500 years ago, the age old question is posed, “If a man dies, will he live again?” That is a big question which has been asked since man became man, since warriors were buried with their weapons, since Egyptian kings were mummified to preserve their bodies for ever, and, in modern times, bodies placed in deep freeze in the hope of medical advances that can bring them back to life. What do we believe about death? What does the Christian faith have to say about death? “If a man dies, will he live again?”.

  2.            Listen to some of these words of the apostle Paul, written in about 53 or 54 AD. “I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, ⁴and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, ⁵and that he appeared to Peter, then to the twelve. ⁶Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters^* at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died.^{* 7}Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. ⁸Last of all, as to someone untimely born, he appeared also to me.” You see the significance of “most of whom are still alive”. Paul was writing within about 20 years of what he saw as the most amazing and significant event in history!

3.            The world is sceptical, perhaps more so in the 21^st. century than ever before. “I don’t believe in heaven or hell, they’re both here; you choose which one you’re going to lodge in”. And how about this for a romantic touch from your partner, “Without you heaven would be dull, and hell would not be hell if you were there”. “If you go to heaven without being naturally qualified, you won’t enjoy yourself there!” And one very much from the 20th. century, “There’s a rumour going around theological circles that the powers that arrange these matters have done away with hell, and heaven has gone comprehensive”  Clement Freud requested his gravestone to read, “Passed my sell-by date, April 27^th 2009”.

  4.            The apostle Paul had very different ideas. For Paul the resurrection was of “first importance”. I can remember a former Vicar in our local parish church saying to us on Easter Sunday, “Our faith stands or falls by the events of that first Easter”. No resurrection, no Christianity. The whole idea would surely have been stillborn. The disciples, who locked themselves in the upper room for fear of the Jews, would never have been heard of again! With their leader literally “dead and buried”, they would not have had the courage to say anything. Indeed they wouldn’t have had anything to say! But historian Luke records the words of Peter to the crowd on the Day of Pentecost, “This Jesus, God raised up, and of that we are all witnesses”. And when the opposition came, Luke tells us, “With great power the apostles, (Peter, John and the others) continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ”.       

5.            Not only is the resurrection of first importance, it is historical. There were witnesses, lots of them, most of whom are still alive in the mid 50’s AD, says Paul. In other words, if you don’t believe me, go and ask them! Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate, who was the Roman prefect of Judea for 10 years from 26AD. An inscription identifying him as such was discovered in Caesarea in 1961. “Jesus was raised on the third day”, as foretold in the Old Testament of the Messiah, probably on Sunday Apr. 5^th. 33AD, although possibly on the corresponding Sunday in 30AD. The apostle John writes, “That which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you.” If we deny the resurrection we make these hundreds of eyewitnesses, including Peter, John and Paul, into false witnesses. Did they risk, or even give their lives, for what they knew to be a lie? Do they seem like a bunch of liars?

6.            The resurrection is of first importance, it is historical and, thirdly, it is physical. Thomas placed his hands in the wounds. The risen Jesus ate barbecued fish on the lakeside with the disciples. The resurrection was not mere survival as a memory or an influence, or survival in a disembodied state in some spirit world. Nor was it to become united with god and depersonalised like a raindrop in the ocean. These are pagan ideas, nevertheless still believed by many. Neither was the resurrection mere resuscitation, so that death is just postponed to a later date! CS Lewis once remarked that he had great sympathy with Lazarus because he must have had to do his dying all over again!

7.            The resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ is physical, historical and of first importance to our Christian faith. Paul again, “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.” It is that important! Christians believe in the resurrection. Jesus told his probing, incredulous, disciples that he was going ahead of them to prepare places for them in heaven. For them, and for us today, his resurrection confirmed the truth of what he had said. It makes the incredible: credible! “Our faith stands or falls by the events of that first Easter”.

8.            One of the most influential Christians of our time is Joni Earickson-Tada a quadriplegic. As a teenager she dived into a lake and broke her neck. Now in her 60’s, despite being paralysed from the neck down, Joni became an advocate for disabled persons which led to a presidential appointment to the US National Council for Disability, leading to enactment of the reforming Disabilities Act in that country.  She has been round the world in her wheelchair witnessing to her faith in Christ. She has said, “The Bible speaks of our bodies being glorified. I haven’t been cheated out of being a complete person. I am just going through a forty year delay, and God is with me even in that. Being glorified – I know what that means. It’s the time after my death here when I shall be on my feet dancing!”

9.            Many see this as wishful thinking! - pie in the sky when you die! “Where is the evidence?”, they say. The answer is that the evidence is in the truth and reality of the historical and physical resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is why the apostle Peter writes, “By his great mercy (God) has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” So what is the significance of the resurrection for us today?

10.          Listen to these words from later in 1 Cor. 15, “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.^{* ….. 22}for as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive . ²³But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then, at his coming, those who belong to Christ.” John Stott, commenting on these verses says, “The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the first glimpse of the material universe which has been redeemed and transformed.” In other words it is the forerunner or the prototype of the future for all those who put their trust in him. In other words, Jesus Christ has gone ahead of us, as he promised, “to prepare a place for us”.

 

11.          The apostles, Peter and Paul, both wrote their final New Testament letters from prison in Rome. Shortly after they put down their pens each, separately, was led out and put to death by their Roman captors. Along with others at the time they lay down their lives for the truth of Christianity, and in particular for proclaiming Jesus as the Son of God and his resurrection from the dead. After examining this and all the other evidence, Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby School and later Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, declared the resurrection to be "the best attested fact of history".

Miracles

It was Alistair Campbell, redoubtable press secretary in Downing Street, who interrupted a question to Tony Blair with, “We don’t do God”. Of course we know that did not mean that no-one in Downing Street believed in God! Subsequently Tony Blair himself was received into the Catholic Church! To invoke God in politics would be a cop out –it would be to admit defeat in the face of an electorate that expects politicians to take responsibility for what is happening, to organise the affairs of the nation in such a way as to secure peace, security, welfare and prosperity as far as is humanly possible.  In a similar way science does not do God – or specifically miracles – because it is the job of science to find out the answers. If there is no apparent answer the scientist must go on searching! To invoke God is a cop out. Again that does not mean that a scientist cannot believe in God or miracles. Of course many do!

 

As a matter of principle, miracles are not testable by science because they are by definition unrepeatable. Given the same physical circumstances, repeatable in controlled laboratory conditions, science expects and requires the same outcome. A miracle would be a different outcome to the norm, unpredictable and unrepeatable. Not the stuff of science or the material of scientific laws! There are many scientists and others who believe that all truth can be reduced to scientific cause and effect. There is nothing else to the cosmos except that which is accessible to the scientific method. And in the end that includes you and me.

Unfortunately that means that many key aspects of our experience are destroyed, including our very dignity as human beings. Our fundamental experiences of freewill, conscience, consciousness, and rationality are set aside as illusory. You have no choices in your life because all is determined by your genes and your past experiences. Any feelings you may have that this or that are right or wrong, or that you are a person with an I-story to tell (a narrative identity of your own), and a responsibility for your life and actions, are illusions. As one atheistic scientist has put it, "I think the idea we exist is an illusion.... The idea there is a self in there that decides things, acts and is responsible is a whopping great illusion. The self we construct is just an illusion because actually there's only brain

and chemicals and this 'self' doesn't exist - it never did and there's nobody to die". This kind of attitude implodes, as was pointed out by Haldane many years ago, “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true ...., and therefore I have no reason for supposing my brain to be made of atoms."

The commonly held idea that there is nothing to the cosmos except what we might call scientific truth, no activity or oversight of God in creation, or in sustaining that creation, nothing which cannot be explained in terms of mathematical equations, no miracles – this kind of nihilistic philosophy implodes on itself. There is no truth, and no valid science either! And there are many angry people in our world right now, reacting to the failure of world views associated with atheism such as humanism, secularism, materialism, which simply do not work!

What is a miracle? There is a lot of confusion! Deists believe that God set up the world at the beginning of time, like Pugin built this church, and then disappeared off the scene, rarely if ever to be seen here again. In that case a miracle would be an intervention from outside to heal a dying person, or rehang a fallen candelabra. But as Christians we are not deists, we are theists. The apostle Paul put our position very clearly, “(Jesus Christ) is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; ¹⁶for in^* him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. ¹⁷He himself is before all things, and in^* him all things hold together.” In other words, God in Christ is not like an absent architect, he is as it were a cosmic artist who upholds and sustains this world moment by moment, in such an intimate way that should he cease activity the whole cosmos would not merely become chaotic or run down like a clockwork toy, it would disappear “like some imploding light bulb”, as I once heard the present Bishop of Liverpool remark. “Your God is too small” was the title of a book written in the 1960’s!¹⁸
 

 What then is a miracle? The laws of nature, as drawn up and developed down the ages by scientists, be they physicists, chemists or biologists, describe what God normally does. A miracle is an activity of God which is something different from what he normally does? It is not occasional intervention from a remote deistic god. Rather it is an unusual action by a God who is here present all the time upholding and sustaining the universe. Of course such an action appears to break the laws of nature. But since these laws are descriptions of God’s normal activity we need not be surprised that from time to time he choses to act differently!

 How does he do this, rather than whether he does it, is probably the more important question. The Bibles’ answers from the beginning of the OT to the end of the NT is “by his word”. In Genesis we read, “And God said … and it was so. The epistle to the Hebrews puts it this way, “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.” The apostle John in the passage we all know writes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ²He was in the beginning with God. ³All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. John Lennox equates this “divine logos” to what we would call information. Richard Dawkins has unwittingly concurred, without linking his thoughts to the Bible, you’ll be surprised to know, “What lies at the heart of every living thing is not fire, warm breath, nor a ‘spark of life’. It is information, words, instructions …. “

It may be helpful in the limited time available to address miracles in a bit more detail under 3 headings:

                                                                       Creational

                                                                       Structural

                                                                       Personal

By creational miracles I mean those unusual and exceptional activities of God, carried out during the course of the creation of the universe and of life, and ultimately the creation of human life itself, the culmination and ultimate purpose of the universe! Now we have to be careful here. There was a time when there was no scientific explanation for the rainbow, no natural explanation for an eclipse of the sun, of earthquakes, of evolution, let alone of the nature of matter and fundamental particles. Particularly since the so called “Enlightenment”, science has made the most enormous advances. We now know much more. To many people mankind is well on the way to what Stephen Hawking called the “theory of everything”.

 

 

In the 1960’s SH expected a theory of everything to be available by the end of the century. As that time approached he revised his assessment to the end of the next century, now he has recently said, “I used to belong to that camp, but I have changed my mind. I’m now glad that our search for understanding will never come to an end, and we will always have the challenge of new discovery”. Even SH does not believe that such a solution to the secrets of the cosmos will ever become fully known or understood by man.

As time goes on the gaps in pure scientific understanding of the universe, including how it came to be, as well as how it works, have obviously been closed down by modern science. However, the continuing, accelerating, advance of knowledge appears, in the 21^st. century, to be opening up new and arguably more challenging gaps, gaps which as John Lennox has put it, are not revealed by ignorance, but by knowledge. Hitherto this has been most apparent in the realm of particle physics, which in many ways is the most fundamental area of research, since everything is made of matter and energy, which are interchangeable.

It is not difficult to find particle physicists and cosmologists who understand these new kinds of gaps. Arno Penzias, “Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe that was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the right conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say ‘supernatural’) plan ”. Perhaps most significantly of all, Sir Fred Hoyle, “All that we see in the universe of observation and fact ……. remains unexplained. And even in its supposedly first second the universe itself is acausal. That is to say, the universe has to know in advance what it is going to be before it knows how to start itself.”

More recently this kind of scepticism has spread into the biological field, and we have people like Francis Collins of human genome fame, for example saying, “No current hypothesis comes close to explaining how in the space of a mere 150 million years the prebiotic environment that existed on planet earth gave rise to life”. American philosopher, Professor Anthony Flew, converted to theism after 50 years of atheism because, “Biologists’ investigation of DNA has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved”

Even these great and marvellous creational miracles should not be seen as physical intervention by force or energy, but rather the input of information by the creator during the course of the creation of the cosmos, and of life. The ultimate example is creation of what John Stott dubbed in the 1960’s, “Homo Divinus”, men and women who are capable of fellowship with God, that is you and me! The divine logos of John’s Gospel, the creational instructions of Genesis (and God said), the Word of God - impacting on creation and directing perhaps in something of the same way as a Board of Directors directs a company. In the words of cell biologist Graeme Finlay, “The image of God refers to our spiritual capacity to relate to God, and receipt of a commission to serve him.” and “God conferred his likeness upon a member of the ape family, and brought into being Homo Divinus, the ape-in-the-image-of-God, with the unique capacity to know, love and serve its creator.”

Structural miracles are miracles, beyond the process of creation, which are seen as once off unusual activities by God within the created world as it continues its everyday existence. The most obvious examples are the miracles of Jesus, and the supreme miracle of the resurrection. There can be no scientific explanation of the resurrection! But if we think back to the concept of the divine word or logos, we may begin to think of modern discoveries like DNA, and the information contained in seeds and embryos. The apostle Paul, writing to the Corinthians about the resurrection of Christians says, “When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. ³⁸ But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body.”

And finally personal miracles would perhaps be better called “personal encounters” – encounters with the living God, the greatest and most significant of which is when someone comes to Christ in faith, seeks forgiveness and as we would say, “becomes a Christian.” There are many weird and inexplicable events and coincidences in the Bible and in everyday Christian life which fall into this category. The star of Bethlehem was probably a most spectacular example. It was one amazing coincidence that it came upon the scene at the birth of Christ. God used it as a sign. The answers to our prayers may involve structural miracles, but they are far more likely to take the form of personal encounters, incidents of guidance which give rise to “coincidence”, transforming circumstances in our personal lives, averting disasters, forwarding the purposes of God in world which would have things otherwise, providing for the Word of God to do its transforming work in the lives of individuals. William Temple once wrote, “When I pray coincidences happen, when I don’t they don’t”.

Looking back I became a Christian through a number of coincidences which brought me face to face with the right people at the right time. Similarly with our marriage! Moving to Fyfield and standing here today, talking about miracles is a miracle in itself! I look back to the first WATSAN “Walk for Water” launched to pay for a new project vehicle. We talked of £10000, but our Treasurer thought we’d be lucky to raise £3000 and we prayed. We raised £13500 – why so much, Lord? Because that’s actually what the vehicle cost! That I would submit is the result of a whole series of personal encounters. “When I pray coincidences happen, when I don’t they don’t”.

It is miraculous that our world and we are here at all, that there is something rather than nothing! The supreme miracle – CS Lewis called it “the grand miracle” is the coming of Jesus Christ, his life characterised by amazing structural miracles culminating in the resurrection. These wonders together with the personal encounters experienced by Christians in day to day life all testify to the reality of the power of God in our world. To summarise, Austin Farrer (Warden of Keble College, philosopher and theologian), once said, “The atheist’s ultimate fact is the universe; the theist’s ultimate fact is God”.