I think it's good, especially on a day
like today, when we're all so happy and
laughing, it's good to talk realistically about death.
So maybe you would just think for a
moment or two of deaths that you have
known, and I could remember my dad's death.
It was about 17 years ago, and he
died on the 17th of March.
It was St. Patrick's Day in Belfast, and
he died in the morning, and I remember
being with him, and I was probably like
all of you.
I just couldn't conceive of life without my
father, and you know the way you feel
that.
You feel it's unbearable.
I couldn't even think of it, life without
my dad.
Yet it's amazing, isn't it?
The mind is incapable of conceiving the magnitude
of the last beat of a loved one's
heart.
Isn't that right?
I mean, the last beat occurs, and the
mind can't conceive of it, and that inability
to conceive of it kind of is God's
good gift to us, because it kind of
dulls the pain, and I remember seeing him
just breathe, you know, and then I thought,
well, he has just died, and then I
asked the nurse to come in that I
thought my dad had died, and would she
make sure that he was dead.
Then you know, over the next few days,
the continued closeness that you feel to the
loved one, you feel that they're kind of
just around you, you know, still there in
their rooms.
That's so good of God to give us
that feeling, and then, especially after the burial,
you know how you just feel that's it.
There's a separation between anyone who passes through
death and this present world.
There's just a separation.
They're separated from us.
Probably all of you, even maybe the youngest,
can think of some experience that you have
had like that.
You know, too, that we human beings have
been trying to crack the finality of that
experience in all kinds of ways, and you
know that all of our attempts seem to
end up as kind of cheap frauds or
just inappropriate fakery of some kind, and we've
made many attempts.
The mediums and the spiritualists have claimed to
be able to communicate with our loved ones
who have passed beyond, and yet don't you
agree that if you've ever heard or read
any of their communications, they always seem to
have that static lifeless quality of evil spirits
that are imitating our relatives rather than the
bright vitality of expressions of living people, and
I don't know if you got involved in
it, but I think most of us have
at some time wondered, could they communicate?
Could they communicate?
And yet you feel at the end of
the day that all they're doing is communicating
with evil spirits who are imitating some of
the words and some of the attitudes of
our dead relations, and of course that's why
God condemned mediums and witches and all that
kind of attempt to communicate with the dead
as rebellion.
He said it was as the sin of
rebellion.
That's why you remember the witch at Endor
was struck with fear when God made Samuel
materialize in reality instead of the evil spirit
that she expected to call up to imitate
him, and she was absolutely astonished, and God
really has indicated to us that that whole
world of spiritualism is evil and is not
inside his will, and if you have had
any experience of it at all, you have
probably felt as I have had, that it's
evil and that it destroys the dignity of
your loved one and destroys the dignity of
life, destroys the dignity even of death, and
of course our television programs recently and our
books have been filled with those dear ones
you know who have lived in that twilight
zone between biological death and technical death.
They've lived in that twilight zone where their
heart has stopped beating and their minds pulses
have continued, and so technically we've said they
were dead, and yet they were able to
be revived, and you know that they've written
or they've had their experiences recorded in books,
and we've had television programs about those things,
and yet I don't know how you feel,
but I always feel well yeah, but I
don't really feel they died whatever the technical
definition is or whatever the emotional experience was
that they had, I don't really feel that
they died, that they passed beyond, and they
experienced what life after death is like, and
that what they're telling us is what it's
really like.
I feel look their bodies were still warm,
they were still just on this side of
death, and I myself don't feel I can
trust that what they've talked about is anything
more than their own ideas or their own
feelings of what life after death might be.
Of course it's for that same reason that
most of us I think are skeptical of
the gurus and the yogis who can control
their breath so precisely that they are able
to be for days at times and apparently
come back to life.
I think most of us feel look they're
not dead at all, they've just controlled their
breath so that they appear to be dead,
and they appear to be able to stay
buried longer than any of the rest of
us, but I think most of us feel
well they never died, it's all a hoax,
and of course it's that sheer difficulty of
faking death and resurrection that has probably prevented
the followers of other religious leaders like Muhammad
and Buddha ever claiming that their great leader
had been raised from the dead, because it
is a very difficult fact to prove.
It's a very difficult fact to hold up
in court, that a person has died and
has risen from the dead.
And loved ones do you see that all
those examples make the one great exception so
much more striking, because there was a religious
leader who was different from all the other
religious leaders.
His life is perfect, theirs was not.
His miracles were greater than theirs, his teaching
transcends theirs, but the one great fact that
distinguishes him from them is the one event,
the proclamation of which brought persecution to his
followers, and that was the resurrection from the
dead.
This great religious leader was raised on the
third day, stayed alive for 40 days, and
then his body lifted off the earth, and
it has never been found since.
And that is what distinguishes him from everyone
else, that resurrection from the dead.
And loved ones, that is why we're meeting
together here, because such an event as that
took place.
Many of us see of course that if
it did in fact take place, if in
fact Jesus did rise from the dead, then
it means that he is alive now.
And it means that if he is alive
now, he's the one important person in the
whole universe for you and I to contact,
if we possibly can contact him, and if
he will bother with us at all.
But really that's the crux of the whole
issue, isn't it?
Is this Jesus really alive?
Did he actually rise from the dead?
There are four rules that philosophers and historians
have accepted down through the years for determining
a matter of fact, and they not only
appeal to historians and philosophers, they'll appeal to
your own common sense and my common sense
this morning.
And a man called Leslie summarized those rules.
And he said, for instance, the first one
is, in order to determine a matter of
fact of any kind, and to find out
if it really happened, the matter of fact
must be such that men's outward senses, their
eyes and ears may be judges of it.
And you can see that.
If a thing is a matter of fact,
either in history or today, it must be
such that men's outward senses, their eyes and
their ears may be the judges of it.
Now if that had not been the case,
big honest fishermen like Peter and cynical skeptics
like Thomas would never have believed that this
man rose from the dead.
It was only because he appeared to their
outward senses, to their eyes and their ears.
Now you can see it yourself if you
look at John 20.
It is John 20 and
verse 24, page
945.
Now Thomas, one of the twelve called the
twin, was not with them when Jesus came.
So the other disciples told him, we have
seen the Lord.
But he said to them, unless I see
in his hands the print of the nails
and place my finger in the mark of
the nails and place my hand in his
side, I will not believe.
Eight days later his disciples were again in
the house and Thomas was with them.
The doors were shut, but Jesus came and
stood among them and said, peace be with
you.
Then he said to Thomas, put your finger
here and see my hands and put out
your hand and place it in my side.
Do not be faithless, but believing.
Thomas answered him, my Lord and my God.
Jesus said to him, have you believed because
you have seen me?
Blessed are those who have not seen and
yet believe.
Now Jesus did many other signs in the
presence of the disciples which are not written
in this book, but these are written that
you may believe that Jesus is the Christ,
the Son of God, and that believing you
may have life in his name.
The men and women who gave us the
first record of Jesus rising from the dead
were actual eyewitnesses.
They ate with him, they slept with him,
they talked with him, they traveled with him
both before and after his death.
They knew him, their eyes and their ears
had perceived him.
He was a fact that was present to
their outward senses.
Now you may say, yeah, but can you
trust them?
Are they the kind of people who can
be trusted to tell you what they actually
saw?
Well, you know that again and again we've
tried to impugn their trust and we've tried
to suggest that maybe there are other explanations.
But it never really works and probably the
most popular today with our preoccupation with psychology
is hallucinations.
Maybe these men, maybe they were honest, good,
down to earth, fishermen, maybe they were ordinary
people like us, but do you not think
they could have had hallucinations?
And that the 12 or 14 so-called
appearances of Jesus during those 40 days could
in fact be hallucinations.
And what makes that difficult to believe is
that the appearances to the disciples and the
friends do not fit the laws that govern
hallucinations.
Hallucinations, for instance, occur to certain kinds of
people.
And those are people with vivid imaginations who
perhaps have a nervous kind of makeup to
their character.
Now when you look at big, honest, bluff
Peter the fisherman, and you look at hard
-headed James, and you look at cynical, skeptical
Thomas, you must admit that those were not
the kinds of people who were likely to
have hallucinations.
Another law that governs hallucinations is that the
person wants something to happen, you see.
They want something to happen.
They want this event to take place.
And so they project that into their imaginations,
and then they blur the distinction between their
imaginative life and reality.
And they have a hallucination.
But why did Mary go to the tomb
with spices to anoint a dead body if
she actually hoped that he would be alive?
And you remember, she went and told the
disciples that he was alive, and they wouldn't
believe it.
They said, no, we don't believe it.
You're just imagining it.
So that when Jesus actually appeared to them,
they said, he's a ghost.
And Jesus had to say to them, look,
a ghost hasn't flesh and bones, as you
see that I have.
Come, let's have fish for supper.
Let's eat together, and you'll see that I'm
not a ghost.
Now those were not men and women who
were expecting Jesus to appear.
Those were men and women that had given
up any hope that this man was anything
more than a man.
Hallucinations are things that have to appear over
a long, long period of time and keep
on appearing for years.
These appearances of Jesus took place during 40
days, and then they stopped.
And that was it.
Some of us say, well, yes, maybe not
hallucinations, but do you not think that the
disciples themselves had an interest in getting us
all to believe that Jesus had arisen from
the dead?
Do you not think that they would become
very important religious leaders of this new sect
if they could persuade that their master was
someone who was different from every other religious
leader?
Do you not think that they could have
been con artists who were out to make
up for the disappointment that they found when
they discovered that their master had died instead
of leading them into a military victory?
Do you not think they could have stolen
the body and then could simply have pretended
that he was alive?
And you know the difficulty.
Why didn't they stop the lie when they
saw the first child being slaughtered?
Why didn't they stop the lie?
Why didn't they stop telling the lie the
first family that was imprisoned?
Why didn't they stop telling the lie when
they themselves began to be slaughtered by their
thousands?
When they saw their friends used as torches
at the garden parties of the Roman emperor?
Why didn't they stop the lie?
You know that men and women will not
die for what they know is a lie.
They will not.
When they see that it's gone that far,
they'll stop and they'll say, listen, listen, we
just want to pass on his teaching.
But we don't want to pass on that
lie that is bringing upon us all this
persecution.
So really it's hard to explain in any
other way but that the resurrection meets that
first rule.
That it was an event that presented itself
to the outward senses of the men and
women in that age.
It presented it to their eyes and their
ears, not to their hearts or their emotions
or their hallucinations.
Leslie has another rule.
He says that the fact should be done
publicly on the face of the world.
That is that it shouldn't be done in
a corner.
Shouldn't be some little guru somewhere telling some
of his friends that he was actually dead
for three days and now is alive.
But that it is something that is done
publicly in the face of the whole world.
That was the very complaint of the Roman
authorities at once, if you like to look
at it.
It's Acts 17 and verse 6.
Acts 17 and verse 6.
It's page 964.
Acts 17 and verse 6.
And when they could not find them, they
dragged Jason and some of their brethren before
the city authorities, crying, these men who have
turned the world upside down have come here
also.
And that was the problem for the Roman
authorities.
These people had kept this thing quiet.
They might have been able to cover it
up, but these people were turning the then
known world upside down.
It isn't only writers in the Bible here
that write about them.
You can study Roman governors like Pliny and
you can study their letters to the emperor
asking, what am I going to do with
these Christians?
Here's what I do.
And if they confess, then I let them
flee.
If they don't, I kill them.
Now, what do you think I should do?
Celsus and Porphyry wrote continually about this Christian
group.
And oh, there's a Tertullian who kept the
archives in Rome and here's the way he
writes about it.
Tiberius accordingly, in whose days the Christian name
made its entry into the world, having himself
received intelligence from Palestine of events which had
clearly shown the truth of Christ's divinity, brought
the matter before the Senate, that's the emperor,
with his own decision in favor of Christ.
The Senate, because it had not given the
approval itself, rejected his proposal.
Caesar held to his opinion, threatening wrath against
all the accusers of the Christians.
The thing wasn't done in a corner.
This matter of fact was known throughout the
world.
It was not something that was done in
secret.
Leslie is interesting because he then goes on
to the difficulty of preserving correctly the memory
of an event.
And he says the third rule for establishing
particularly as a historical fact, as a fact,
is that not only public monuments be kept
up in memory of it, but some outward
actions be performed.
Not only that some public monuments be kept
up in memory of it, but that some
outward actions be performed.
And that's to guarantee, you see, that the
event will be remembered as it actually took
place and that that memory will be accurately
passed down from generation to generation without any
exaggeration or without any distortion.
And that's why he says the only way
to be sure of a historical fact is
that public monuments be kept up in memory
of it.
That is monuments that are obvious to everybody
and that certain actions be performed.
Maybe the most obvious monuments, because monuments are
not necessarily statues.
They're just things that make it clear what
actually happened and remember it.
Maybe the clearest monuments, you know, are the
manuscripts that hold the written record of that
event.
And of course, that's what you look to
when you study any ancient history.
If you look at Caesar's history of the
Gallic Wars, you immediately ask yourself, well, how
do we know that this event was remembered
as it actually occurred?
And how do we know that it was
passed down through the years reliably without distortion?
What you do is you go behind the
manuscripts.
You try to get to Caesar's original manuscript
and you find out where he wrote the
history, because it was written at the time
the event took place.
So you try to find the original record
of it.
Then you find the next record, maybe a
hundred years later, check that up to see
if they confirm each other or if somebody
changed them.
Then you check the other manuscript.
Caesar's history of the Gallic Wars has a
grand total of nine or at the most
ten manuscripts.
That's all.
We believe ancient history on the basis of
nine or ten manuscripts and never question it.
Those are all the monuments you have to
Caesar's Gallic Wars.
Do you know when the first one was
written?
It was written nine hundred years after Caesar
wrote his original history.
Nine hundred years.
Nine hundred years elapsed during which all kinds
of myth and legend could have developed, yet
we never question Caesar's history of the Gallic
Wars as being true.
We say, no, these are public monuments.
These are literary manuscripts that give us the
original record.
We can check them against each other and
they're more or less the same, so we
believe it.
It's even worse with Livy's history.
His history has two manuscripts, and the oldest
one is a thousand years after he wrote
his original history.
The monuments and the manuscripts behind this book,
four thousand Greek manuscripts, and the oldest one
is written thirty years after John completed his
fourth gospel.
In other words, there is no manuscript evidence
for any history as reliable as the manuscript
evidence for this history.
There is none.
You cannot find it.
If you throw out this book as unhistorical,
you throw out not only all the ancient
Roman and Greek authors, but you throw out
half of our own history because there is
no manuscript evidence for any history up to
maybe three, four hundred years ago that is
as solid as what lies behind this.
These manuscripts have been found throughout the ancient
world, and we have four thousand of them
plus thousands of scraps of manuscripts.
Then the actions that need to be performed.
Here it is today.
This action has been performed for 1,900
years.
Ever from Peter's little Jewish son, asked him,
Dad, why do we worship on Sunday when
all our friends in the Jewish church worship
on Saturday?
And Peter answered, my son, because our Savior
rose on this day of the week.
And loved ones, ever from that first Easter
Sunday, there has not passed one Sunday, but
there has not passed one day in the
world's life when a group of people have
not got together and celebrated the communion of
the Lord's Supper.
That action has been performed down through the
years for 1,900 years.
Now, you see the importance of that.
We human beings are pretty dumb people.
But we will not keep on doing something
like that again and again and again without
some horrid little cynical son sometime persuading us
this is a ridiculous game we're playing.
There's no reason for it.
There'll always be somebody to say, Dad, why
are we doing this?
And unless Dad really can show that there's
a reason, the thing will die out.
That's what happens in our society.
Things die out when there's no sufficient reason
for them or no sufficient basis.
And then Leslie adds one other fourth rule.
He says that such monuments and such actions
and such observances be instituted and do commence
from the time that the matter of fact
was done.
You see the importance of that.
That the monuments and the observances and the
actions be performed from the very moment that
the original fact took place.
The reason for that is so that there'll
be no time gap during which legend and
myth could develop.
And that's the difficulty, you see, with the
lives of Muhammad and Buddha.
It's years afterwards that we wrote of their
lives and myths and legends of all kinds
surrounded them.
But if you have no time gap between
the original fact and the first record of
it, and if that record is the same
as all the other records that you have
down through the centuries, then you can be
sure that that fact actually took place as
it was written about.
Of course, that's the situation with this book.
The letter to the Galatians was written in
48 AD.
In 48 AD, there were thousands of people
alive who had seen Jesus die, were thousands
who had observed him and seen him alive.
All they had to do was as this
letter to the Galatians was circulating around all
the churches in the world at that time,
they simply had to say, no, it didn't
occur this way.
There were many eyewitnesses alive at the time
that these records were circulating and all they
had to do was contradict them and that
would have been the tale finished.
It's the same, loved ones, with the actions
that are to be performed.
If you like to look at it, it's
there.
It's Acts 20 and verse 7.
Acts 20 and verse 7.
It's page 967.
Acts 20 and verse 7.
On the first day of the week, when
we were gathered together to break bread, Paul
talked with them, intending to depart on the
morrow and he prolonged his speech until midnight.
On the first day of the week, we
gathered together.
That was five, six years after Jesus rose
from the dead.
Right from the earliest times, Easter has been
observed, the communion of the Lord's Supper has
been observed.
In other words, the most amazing thing about
this fact of Jesus destroying death is that
this incident that stands so unique in the
lifetime of the world, this one event in
which a human being so absolutely demonstrated control
over death and life, that this incident has
been studied and discussed and criticized and examined
more than any other event in history and
has now come out among all scholars and
philosophers and historians as the most established and
the surest fact of our history.
There's an old brilliant scholar at Cambridge, an
old cynic too, but he says this about
the resurrection.
Taking all the evidence together, it is not
too much to say that there is no
historic incident better or more variously supported than
the resurrection of Christ.
If you say that Jesus' resurrection from the
dead is not a fact, let's throw everything
away.
There are no facts then.
There are no facts anywhere in the world.
Because if you say that is not a
fact, there are millions of facts that are
far less surely established than that one.
And this life that we live is not
real at all if you say that that
resurrection of Jesus from the dead is not
a fact.
But do you see the conclusions?
If Jesus destroyed death once, then he can
destroy it however often he wants.
And that means he's alive today.
And he's alive and can see us all
here.
See, you have to conclude that, don't you?
You must admit that if he is able
to pass through death, and if death does
not keep him away from us, then he
must be here in this room this morning.
He must be here, right here.
And do you see that that means there
is an elixir of life?
It means there is a fountain of rejuvenation
and of eternal youth, such as all the
old explorers searched for.
There is an uncreated life that turns death
into sleep.
Because that's what it did in him.
There is an uncreated life that comes into
this created life we have and changes it
completely.
There is an uncreated life that can change
you and can enable you to exist forever.
But, loved ones, what we find is that
that same life is able to change the
bitterness in your heart into love.
Because that life is the Spirit of Jesus.
And that life can change you completely.
And it can change you from being a
miserable, petty, selfish creature into a person that
is the image of Christ.
And that's what uncreated life did in Jesus.
It's what uncreated life did in me.
And it's what uncreated life has done in
hundreds here in this room.
And it's what uncreated life can do for
you.
You have created life.
And you can see it there.
But there is an uncreated life that can
turn death into sleep.
If you say how, all you do is
be willing for that life to come in.
You have to be willing for that life
of Jesus Spirit to come in and reproduce
in you himself.
And you may think that's easy.
But that is the hard part.
And the reason you don't experience that life,
the reason you're still bitter at times, the
reason you're still angry at times and selfish,
is you won't let that life come in
and control you.
And that's the same reason that will force
you to go out into lonely darkness at
the end of this life.
And loved ones, it is a package.
It's either Jesus and the beauty of love
and the kindliness of his Spirit ruling your
life now, and that continuing forever.
Or it's you continuing as you are with
that created life that you've got, with your
selfishness and your pettiness and at times your
misery.
And it's that going on forever after this
life is over.
So Easter is not a day for spectators.
Easter is not a day for applause.
Easter is not a day to stand outside
the tomb and look at the mighty thing
that happened.
Easter is a day to go into the
tomb yourself and ask this Jesus, Lord, if
you are alive now, and it seems I'm
led by my own logic to believe that,
will you begin to show me how to
let your life come into mine?
Because I sorely need a change.
Lord, that is what we would pray.
Death is something that is so real that
we have no trouble imagining it, Lord.
We may have trouble with imagining what we
mean by anger or jealousy or envy, but
we know what we mean by death.
And we know as sure as anything that
we're going to meet that.
That's the one thing we're sure of, Lord.
We're going to meet death.
And Lord, you seem to have a way
through.
And Lord Jesus, we want to find that
way ourselves.
We feel we're made for something more than
just a gravestone.
We feel we're made for something more than
just to be forgotten.
Lord, we ask you now to show us
why your spirit that enabled you to rise
from the dead has not been able to
come into us.
Show us what we have to be willing
to do for your spirit to come in
and change us.
And Lord, we want to do that.
Lord, I pray for our brothers and sisters
here that they, in spite of all the
excitement of the lunchtime and the lilies and
all the brightness of the day, pray that
you'll give them grace to settle down somewhere
in their room today for 15 minutes and
pray to you and ask you to begin
to change them and to give them the
spirit that will enable them to live forever.
I ask this in your name and for
your glory.
Amen.