Tonight's message was supplied through the auspices of
the Calvary Baptist Church of New York City.
The text, 1 Corinthians 15.
Now, Reverend Stephen F.
Oldford.
Let us pray.
Speak, Lord, for thy servant hereth.
Speak, just now, some message to meet my
need which thou only dost know.
Speak now through thy holy word, and make
me see some wonderful truth thou hast to
show to me.
And in speaking to me, blessed Lord, speak
to the seen and unseen audience that word
of resurrection, life, and power.
For thy dear name's sake, amen.
The reality of the resurrection.
It's sad to have to recognize that one
of the theological tabs of a modern day
is to deny the bodily resurrection of the
Lord Jesus Christ.
Search through the papers at an Easter time
like this, and study and weigh some of
the topics on which the preachers of today
dwell.
And so sadly as one discovers, though they
carry a semblance of the message we stand
for and the message we're called upon to
preach, basically, fundamentally, and radically, so often the
very fact of the resurrection is denied in
the multitude of words and the rationalizing and
the philosophizing of this tremendous truth that Jesus
rose from the dead.
In spite of this, however, nothing is more
certain in all the world than the bodily,
literal resurrection of Jesus Christ.
If we accept the evidence of the holy
scriptures, the evidence of acknowledged historic facts, and
the experience which is personal to men and
women right down through the centuries in the
church of Jesus Christ, we shall find that
the fact of the literal bodily resurrection of
Jesus Christ is irrefutable.
That is to say, the resurrection of Christ
is essentially true the resurrection of the Lord
Jesus Christ is evidentially true, the resurrection of
the Lord Jesus Christ is experimentally true.
Will you consider with me those three propositions
as we seek to amplify them and apply
them to each one of our lives here
tonight?
Will you forget all the thrill and excitement
of what the world thinks of the resurrection,
and especially Easter time, and in the silence
of these next few moments, will you ask
the Lord Jesus Christ to reveal himself to
you in all the wonder of his resurrection
power?
First, then, the reality of the resurrection of
Jesus Christ is based on an essential fact.
It is essentially true, essentially true.
Let me explain what I mean.
When Paul says, now is Christ risen, he
announces one of the greatest facts in the
universe, but a fact that has to be
essentially true in the very nature of the
case.
You see, my friend, the resurrection has to
be in order to maintain an eternal law.
If Jesus is not alive tonight, if he
hasn't been raised from the dead, then God
ceases to exist, and the whole fabric of
the universe collapses.
You see, for has it ever occurred to
you, my friend, that death had no claim
on Christ, no claim whatsoever?
Death is the consequence of sin, but here
is one who was never guilty of sin.
Christ only assumed sin and its consequences in
order to atone for man's guilt and penalty,
but Christ himself was utterly guiltless of sin
in any form.
He was guiltless of its origin.
We read in 2 Corinthians 5 21, he
knew no sin.
Sin never found a lodging place in his
heart.
It never originated with him.
It couldn't originate with him, for he knew
no sin.
He was guiltless of the origin of sin,
but Jesus Christ was guiltless of obedience to
sin.
1 Peter 2 22 reminds us that he
did no sin.
He performed no act out of accord with
the will of God.
He did always those things that pleased him.
He was wholly harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners.
He did no sin.
He knew no sin.
He was guiltless of the origin of sin.
He was absolutely guiltless of obedience to sin,
but he was also guiltless of the outcome
of sin.
1 John 3 5 tells us that in
him is no sin.
Sin found no resting place or lodging place
in the life of the Son of God.
Therefore, he was in the absolute sense, in
the essential sense, absolutely free from sin.
He was sinless.
Therefore, death had no claim upon him.
Death had no claim upon him.
Though Peter had to say, you remember, on
that memorable sermon, on that memorable occasion in
his sermon on the day of Pentecost, death
couldn't hold him, or in his own language,
it was not possible that he, the Son
of God, should be holden of death.
The psalmist had already prophesied, putting the words,
as it were, into the very lips of
the Savior in Psalm 16, Thou wilt not
leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou
suffer thine holy one to see corruption.
Death had no claim upon him.
He couldn't be holden of sin.
He couldn't be decayed by sin.
Peter says it was not possible that he
should be holden of sin.
The psalmist declares, Thou wilt not suffer thine
holy one to see corruption.
And Paul declares, the third day he rose
again.
He rose again, according to the scripture.
And as we've been singing tonight, death cannot
hold its prey.
Jesus my Savior, he tore the bars away,
Jesus my Lord, up from the grave.
He arose as a mighty victor for his
foes.
The resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ is
essentially true.
If God didn't raise his Son up from
the dead, if God, by the Spirit of
God, didn't quicken him from the dead, then,
I repeat, God would cease to exist as
God in all his holiness, integrity, and justice.
The whole fabric of the universe would collapse.
Why?
Because an eternal law has been violated.
Jesus must rise from the dead, for death
had no claim upon him.
Once he had taken our sins upon him
and their consequences, and fulfilled their penalty to
the utter, utter limit by his death, he
must be raised from the dead.
He had to rise to establish and maintain
that eternal law.
So, the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ
is essentially true.
But what is more, it's evidently true.
We read in the opening passages of the
Acts of the Apostle these words, he showed
himself alive after his passion by many infallible
proofs.
These infallible proofs constitute the evidential fact that
Jesus Christ rose from the dead, and these
wonderful evidential facts may be summed up as
follows.
First of all, Christ's appearances.
Have you ever studied them, my friend?
The word says he is risen and hath
appeared.
There are ten appearances of Christ scattered throughout
the gospel, and each has sufficient evidential value
to deal a fatal blow upon every theory
that has been advanced to disprove the resurrection
of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Here are some of them, for instance, that
I throw out for some of you young
people as you go back to your colleges
and schools after this vacation period.
There is what is known as the fraud
theory, the fraud theory invented by those Jewish
leaders who wanted to explain away the fact
that the tomb was empty, that Jesus was
no longer there.
You remember how they bribed this soldier, the
god, the religious god, or the god of
the temple that was set at the tomb
there, at the sepulchre, to watch lest anyone
should break the seal and steal the body
of Jesus.
But after the angel had descended and rolled
back the stone and sat upon it in
utter defiance of all that hell would do
concerning the Savior, you remember they did quake
and become as dead men.
But when they recovered, they flew back to
their leaders and told them what had happened,
and they were bribed to say, perpetrate this
lie, tell them, tell everybody you meet that
his disciples came and stole them away while
you slept.
Have you ever thought of the ridiculous character
of that lie?
How could people who were asleep know whether
disciples or not did come and take them
away, take him away?
And how could men ever stand up and
tell a lie about themselves, thus opening themselves
to all attack by the entire religious world?
But in any case, my friend, a lie
never changes a bad man into a good
man.
If Jesus never rose from the dead, if
it was indeed true that his body was
stolen and this was an evil man and
he had, in fact, organized this whole thing
in order to carry it off, I repeat,
a bad man, a bad man can never
change into a good man.
And the whole history of the world gives
evidence to the fact that the goodness of
Jesus Christ has permeated the entire civilized world,
and there isn't anything good that exists today
that hasn't its source in the fact of
Jesus Christ and his resurrection.
The great universities of the world today were
founded in their first instance, all those great
mighty institutions of learning, including the universities of
this great city, upon Christian principle.
Our entire legal system is founded upon the
revealed word of God in its essence and
has all the pervading characteristics of the Lord
Jesus Christ and all that he means to
nations.
All the philanthropic great institutions, the hospitals, the
missionary work.
Billy Graham came back from Africa the other
day and told us in a restaurant up
here that it's recorded by factual evidence that
85 percent of the entire educational system and
all the blessing that flows from that into
every area of Africa, 85 percent is due
entirely to missionary enterprise, men and women who
caught the vision of the risen savior and
left this country and other countries to do
missionary work throughout that great continent.
The fraud theory, a perpetrated lie.
Jesus is alive, risen from the dead.
No fraud theory can explain that away.
Somebody advanced what is known as the swoon
theory, the naturalistic theory which tries to prove
that the Lord Jesus Christ never really died.
He was in a swoon and in the
cool of the sepulcher he revived and came
out.
Can you imagine such a thing?
Have you ever thought back what the savior
went through?
Though perfectly fit, without any weakness about his
body whatsoever, yet have you ever thought back
the hours starting from the Passover and in
the institution of the breaking of bread through
the garden of Gethsemane where he sweated, if
it were, great drops of blood without a
drink, without a morsel to eat, taken from
there to Caiaphas, from there later on to
Pilate, from Pilate to Herod, back to Pilate
again, then the scourging when the flesh was
ripped off his back until Isaiah tells us
he saw his very bones laid bare with
those thongs and then the carrying of the
cross, and under such weight, tumbling again and
again until he must needs be relieved of
its entire weight, and then Calvary?
Can you see him being hammered to wood?
Can you see that cross being lifted and
allowed to fall into a receptacle made to
receive it until every bone is jolted in
his body?
The hours of agony, and then that final
spear thrust, and the satisfied word of the
centurion, he's dead.
Can you imagine him being embalmed with a
hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes, with swaths
of linen, being laid in a tomb by
a loved hand that would have never allowed
it had there been a flicker of spark
of life in him?
Can you imagine him extricating himself from those
bands as a mere man?
Can you imagine him pushing back that stone
and appearing before his disciples past the guards,
past the seal, as a radiant, triumphant victor?
The swoon theory.
There are others who advance still another theory
called the myth theory.
This was perpetrated and popularized by a man
called Strauss.
The myth theory, the myth theory by Strauss.
He says that it is a mere myth,
the resurrection was a mere myth, but it's
fact that myth has never been known to
develop in 40 to 50 days.
The abiding effects of the resurrection can never
be attributed to a mere myth.
A mythical man can never appear, talk, make
prophetic statements, and talk to his disciples for
no less than 40 days.
It isn't a myth that transformed my life.
When Jesus Christ confronted me and I had
a divine human encounter as a young engineer
studying at university that broke right through into
my life and changed me completely, I didn't
just believe a myth.
I met Jesus Christ, the living Lord.
The vision theory advanced by Renan.
He taught or tried to teach that the
resurrection was just the hallucination of a few
excited women.
But two things are necessary for a vision,
for a hallucination.
One is an intense belief and an intense
expectancy, and neither of these characterize any of
the disciples.
As a matter of fact, they disbelieved.
We thought it was He that should redeem
Israel, but now He's been dead three days.
There was no expectancy for His resurrection, not
even the beloved John.
There was no belief, there was no expectancy.
In fact, when Jesus met them, you remember,
He had to rebuke them again and again
for being so slow to understand all that
the prophets had written, for being so foolish
as not to believe.
Didn't I tell you these things before I
died?
How is it that you didn't expect me
to arise from the dead?
But during those 10 appearances, my friends, there
are no less than 534 who saw the
Lord Jesus Christ.
Over 500 people at once saw Him.
How did all these people see the same
vision at one time?
It's a psychological impossibility.
There are those who talk about the spiritualistic
theory.
This was taught by Key, Professor Key's theory.
His followers saw spirit, he said.
They saw spirit.
It was the spirit of Jesus.
But what did the Savior say?
The Savior said, A spirit hath not flesh
and bone as ye see me have.
Bring me a piece of a broiled fish,
and he ate it before them.
A spirit hath not flesh and bone as
ye see me have.
Come hither and handle me and see.
In any case, I want to ask you
a question, my friend.
Let me ask you this question.
Is it easier to see a man or
to see a spirit?
And in any case, what accounted for the
marks of the cross?
Here was one who stood and could say
to doubting Thomas as he met him the
second Sunday, Thomas, Thomas, come hither.
Be not faithless, but believing.
Bring your hand and thrust it into my
side.
Put your finger into my handprints there.
Be not faithless, but believing.
A spirit hath not flesh and bone as
ye see me have, repeated the Savior.
The spiritualistic theory.
No, my friend, the evidential facts are against
anything less than the fact supreme tonight that
Jesus rose again.
The evidence of Christ's appearances.
But we have not only the evidence of
Christ's appearances, but the evidence of Christ's announcements.
No man ever before him or since ever
made such announcements as Jesus did following his
resurrection.
Being seen of them forty days, he spoke
to them the things concerning the kingdom.
And these announcements could only be made by
one who had conquered the world.
Listen to the word of universal power that
he speaks.
He stands and he looks into the face
of his disciples and he says, all power,
all authority is given unto me in heaven
and in earth.
No one could say such a word, heaven
and earth, unless he says it on resurrection
ground and all the significance of what we
mean by resurrection ground.
He has conquered hell.
He has conquered death.
He has conquered sin.
He has shown to principalities and powers and
the angelic hosts of heaven that he is
now supreme in power in heaven and on
earth and in hell.
He stood on resurrection ground and spoke not
only of universal power, he spoke of universal
program.
He says, he shall be witnesses unto me
in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and unto the uttermost
part of the earth.
Greater work than these shall he do, he
told them before his death, because I go
to my father and he see me no
more.
From his control point at the throne of
the universe, he was going to release such
power and authority through his followers that they
would represent him to the far corners of
the earth.
Yes, earth remote is bound, and he makes
that wonderful statement because he's risen from the
dead.
And listen to this, he said this, not
only will you know my universal power, not
only will you know my universal program, but
you'll know my universal presence wherever you're found
in any part of the world.
Lo, I am with you always, even unto
the end of the age.
And ladies and gentlemen, if you're following me
thoughtfully, you will see to it that once
when Jesus was in Palestine, he was localized
to every spot to which he went, but
now risen from the dead, communicating himself through
resurrection light, he is everywhere omnipotent at the
same time by the power of his spirit.
Lo, I am with you always, even unto
the end of the age.
And our friends in China are saying that
right now, behind the bamboo curtain, the Coptic
church that was doubled and trebled with its
audiences in worshiping God the same God, and
Christ our risen Lord behind the iron curtain
in Moscow over the Easter tide, are knowing
the same presence.
Folk over in Britain tonight, and here in
this great country of America, are meeting with
the same law.
He's here, present by his mighty spirit.
The announcements of a risen Christ evidence his
resurrection.
Yes, not only his appearances, not only his
announcements, but to my mind, the greatest evidence
of resurrection is what happened after the Savior's
ascension.
He who rose ascended, and after forty days,
he went back to his Father.
So then, after the Lord had spoken unto
them, he was received up into heaven, and
they went forth and preached the gospel everywhere.
And here, I believe, is the greatest evidence
of Christ's resurrection.
What happened after he ascended?
Three very simple facts I want to show
you, in passing quickly.
First of all, the transformation that took place
in the disciples.
They'd all fled.
One had denied him.
One had betrayed him.
He who betrayed him had committed suicide, and
that was the end of that man.
He went to his own place, as the
scripture says.
But Peter and the rest, shut up in
that upper room for fear of the Jews,
trembling with fear, suddenly came face to face
with the risen Christ.
And he breathed on them and said, Receive
ye the Holy Ghost.
As my Father hath sent me, so send
I you.
And in a few days, it happened.
The Holy Ghost, who'd been given in earnest,
came in all his plenitude apart from heaven,
and on the day of Pentecost, the risen
life of Jesus was communicated in a way
they'd never known.
And those men who cringed and cowered behind
closed doors for fear of the Jews burst
out into a religious world of their day,
amidst all opposition, like flaming prophets, and no
one dared tell them to be silent.
Peter stood and said, We cannot but speak
the things which we have seen and heard.
Never has there been such a revolution and
transformation in the life of men throughout history
like the men who were changed from Calvary
to Pentecost.
Jesus, alive from the dead, and the cardinal
thought in all their preaching was this.
He is risen!
This Christ, whom ye crucified, has God raised
to be a prince and a savior.
Alive from the dead.
But something else happened.
Not only were the disciples utterly transformed, a
miracle took place on that day of Pentecost.
The church came into existence.
A hundred and twenty disciples were fused into
a society of saved sinners, and from that
moment onwards, something began to grow that the
gates of hell have never been able to
overthrow.
As soon as Jesus ascended to heaven, as
the risen head of the church, the body
came into formation, and that body started with
a hundred and twenty disciples in chapter one.
In chapter two, three thousand plus a hundred
and twenty.
In chapter three, another five thousand added.
In chapter five, another five thousand.
And in chapter one, twenty-one, Luke uses
the Greek word that we translate, millions were
added unto the Lord.
And since then, thousands and tens of thousands
have been added to the church of Jesus
Christ, and in every part of the world,
somewhere or other, the flag of Jesus Christ
tonight flutters in the breeze.
Jesus, alive from the dead.
And the wonder of it is this, wherever
that church of Jesus Christ is found, three
things happen.
They commemorate the resurrection on the first day
of the week.
Whatever changed the Jewish mind, particularly within Jewry,
particularly from the Sabbath, with all the sadatic
ritual and rigor, to the Sunday which of
the Lord there was nothing less than a
mighty, mighty event which turned a whole thinking,
and I'm thinking now, of believing Jews as
they met the Savior in His resurrection power.
And Sundays being celebrated all over the Christian
world today as Resurrection Sunday.
But not only that, the ordinances of baptism
and the Lord's Supper.
Every time a man is baptized, the woman
is baptized, they go down into the water
to show their death with Christ, under the
water to show their burial with Christ, and
up from the water to demonstrate the resurrection
with Christ.
And that is an active parable all over
the world today, because Jesus is alive.
We gather around the Lord's table here, and
we partake of the bread, and we partake
of the wine, symbols of His outpoured life.
But notice, we do it until He comes.
Why?
Because He's alive from the dead, and He
who rose will come back again.
We act the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
And so, the church of Jesus Christ is
one of the greatest evidences of the resurrection
of our wonderful Lord.
And crowns and thorns may perish, kingdoms rise
and wane, but the church of Jesus constant
will remain.
Yes, the transformed disciples, the formation of the
church, but I think a still more wonderful
evidence of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
One day I'll tell you why I think
it's even more wonderful.
Though I cannot really put one against the
other, I call it the conversion of Saul
of Tarsus.
The conversion of Saul of Tarsus.
This is a study of mine in particular,
and I can't think of all his epistles.
I can't think of the mighty, mighty impact
that man made in his lifetime for Jesus
Christ, without thinking that the most strategic blow
that Christ ever struck to the whole of
the first-century world was the conversion of
Saul of Tarsus.
He was gloriously converted.
A man who was a destroyer, a man
who breathed fighting and slaughter against all the
church of Jesus Christ, caused men to blaspheme,
hailed them to prison, wrought havoc in the
church and in the family of our Savior,
and yet was gloriously converted.
Why?
Because he saw the risen Savior.
Armed with old documents, on his way to
Damascus to hail further men and women to
prison and to cause them to blaspheme, he
met the risen Christ, a light shone above
the meridian sun.
He was stricken to the earth, and he
saw in the blaze of that glory that
this Jesus of Nazareth was none other than
the risen Son of God, and he said,
Lord, Lord, who art thou?
And back came the answer, I am Jesus
whom thou persecuted.
It is hard for thee to kick against
the goads, Lord, what wilt thou have me
to do?
And Paul, picking up his pen and writing
that letter to the Corinthians, says, and last
of all, and last of all, he was
seen of me also as one born out
of due time.
By the grace of God, I am what
I am.
Some of you who've done some deep reading
on this great theme will have come across
two very valuable books.
I've read both of them.
I don't know if they're published in this
country, but doubtless they can be bought.
They come from the pen of two men,
two very brilliant lawyers, champions of the rationalistic
school, who decided many years ago to disprove
the Bible altogether, to deny the supernatural in
the Bible.
They both agreed, however, that before they could
do this, they would have to remove two
mighty stumbling blocks in the way.
Do you know what they were?
One was the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The other was the conversion of Saul of
Tarsus.
And the rationalistic society which is established in
London, Great Britain, gave them almost unlimited supply
of money to tour the whole of the
world, visit all the major libraries, and do
complete research on the subject.
Remember, they were two lawyers, men who were
well equipped to sift evidence and come to
factual conclusions and found judgments.
They were brilliant men, both of them, very
brilliant men, and so they separated.
They decided what their plot was to be,
they decided what their procedure was to be,
and so they separated.
And for many, many months, considerable time, they
were away from each other.
And they decided not to correspond with each
other while they did their research.
One research concerning the resurrection of Jesus Christ,
the other research concerning the conversion of Saul
of Tarsus.
At the appointed time and place, they met,
and they began to discuss what they had
discovered.
Each of them was a little reticent to
open up, but the story is dramatic and
true, that as one took the initiative and
then the other followed, both had to look
into each other's and say, well, my dear
friend, I started out to disprove the resurrection,
but I've come to the conclusion that there
is no greater proof, there is no greater
proven fact, than that Jesus Christ rose from
the dead.
And Smear or Scott said one of them
to the other, I have committed my life
to this doctrine, and more than that, to
the person of this doctrine, even the living
Son of God.
Shake hands, said the other man.
I set out to disprove the conversion of
Saul of Tarsus, and I finished by being
converted myself.
If you want to know the names of
these two men, the first was Lord Littleton,
his research was on Saul of Tarsus, and
Gilbert West, his research on the resurrection.
Two lawyers, a brilliant mind, set out to
disprove what gripped them and changed their lives,
and each wrote a book to support the
resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the mighty transforming
experience of total conversion.
Yes, my friend, the resurrection of the Lord
Jesus Christ is a certainty.
Why?
Because it's essentially true to establish an eternal
law.
It's evidentially true on the basis of Christ's
appearances, on the basis of Christ's announcements, on
the basis of Christ's ascension, and all that
flows from that.
Transformed disciples, an established church, and the conversion
of Saul of Tarsus.
But I would fail if I finished there
tonight.
There is one last thought I must leave
with you, and to me it's the greatest
and most wonderful of all the thoughts concerning
the resurrection.
I know that Jesus Christ is alive tonight,
not only because it's essentially true, not only
because it's evidentially true, I know that Christ
is alive tonight because it's experimentally true.
Listen to the words of Paul once again,
Christ liveth in me.
This was Paul's experience, and it has been
the experience of millions and millions and millions
down through the centuries, and it's my experience.
And the choir summed it up when they
opened this service tonight, when they sang with
vim and vigor and soul.
He lives!
Christ Jesus lives today.
He walks with me.
He talks with me along life's narrow way.
He lives!
Salvation to impart, you ask me how I
know He lives.
He lives within my heart, because the resurrection
is an experimental and dynamic experience of men
and women.
We can know three things as we leave
this place tonight.
First of all, a living faith in Christ.
A living faith in Christ.
If Christ be not risen from the dead,
then our preaching is vain, and your faith
is vain also.
But now is Christ risen from the dead,
and become the first fruits of them that
slept.
My friend, human faith may be the initial
instrument that God uses in bringing a soul
into touch with the living Christ, but by
the prevenient workings of the Holy Spirit, and
because of the value and wonder of all
that Jesus Christ has done and earned, a
faith from our hearts, something happens the moment
you stretch out your feeble hand of faith
to Him.
He takes hold of it and makes it
a living faith, a saving faith.
That's why Paul uses this phrase, I live
by the faith of the Son of God,
who loved me and gave Himself for me.
And think again, looking off unto Jesus, the
author and finisher of faith, who for the
joy that was set before Him, endured the
cross, despising the shame, and is now set
down at the right hand of God.
The moment, my friend, you look away to
this risen Christ, a faith is born within
you.
And this is the victory which overcometh the
world, even our faith.
And there's something you can never take away
from me.
You may argue my mind into utter confusion.
You may be able to knock down all
manner of theological arguments.
You may be able, with philosophy, to bring
me into an absolute attitude of groping and
bewilderment, but you cannot take away a living
faith.
For Jesus not only gives a faith, He
sustains the faith.
Even when Peter lost his loyalty, even when
Peter dimmed in his love for Jesus Christ,
Jesus said, Peter, I have prayed for thee
that thy faith fail not.
Not only have I a living faith, but
thank God I have a living forgiveness in
Christ.
A living forgiveness in Christ!
If ye be not risen from the dead,
your faith is vain, and ye are yet
in your sins.
But now is Christ risen.
And as we were seeing this morning, so
I repeat again tonight, because Jesus is alive,
my beloved friend, you can go out of
this place with a living faith.
You can go out of this place with
a deep heart experience of forgiveness, for because
He lives tonight, you can know forgiveness.
To Him give all the prophets witness that
by faith in His name, we can know
the forgiveness of sins.
And my friend, you can be forgiven tonight.
Like the little child, you can go away
singing, joy, joy, joy, with joy my heart
is free!