Today is Easter, the day we celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. And through that Resurrection, we who believe know that we will also have a resurrection and eternal life with Jesus and the Father, forever and ever.
Today, I’m going to stick to basics. I’m not going into any detailed teaching. But I’m going to focus upon the core message of Christianity, the center of what we believe, the part of the Christian message that is most important.
If you are a believer already, perhaps today’s talk will help you lead a friend, a relative, or a neighbor to Christ. If you are not a believer, I hope this talk will lead you to begin to believe – or at least to investigate further. And if you’ve just stumbled on this talk because a friend, a relative, or a neighbor has shared it with you, I hope you’ll take a few minutes to watch or listen, because your friend cares deeply about you and wants to share something deeply personal with you.
First, let me tell you about myself. I grew up in St. Marys, the son of a chemical plant worker who was the safety manager at his plant and a bookkeeper. I learned from their examples that facts are facts – and facts are important. When I went to college, I majored in physics – the most mathematical of the sciences. Once again, opinion had little place in my life – what were the facts and where was the logic? If you call yourself an engineer, a scientist, a medical professional, I think you understand. If you make your living with numbers or mechanical things or chemicals, you know that facts matter – is that cloud of vapor steam or a poisonous gas? Is the lug-nut tightened enough – or not? Does the patient have COVID or not? Is there enough money in the checking account to cover next week’s bills? Is there enough fuel in the tank to get to Charleston?
After college, I worked fifteen years in the factory automation business, helping companies improve quality, reduce waste, or make things faster. Once again, only the facts mattered. My wife and I started an internet-based business. Every day, the question was whether or not we had money to make payroll or not. Later I taught math and physics at Parkersburg Catholic high school and similar classes at both WVU-Parkersburg and Ohio Valley University. What are the facts?
Here are the facts about Christianity:
Around the year 30, almost 2000 years ago, a man named Jesus of Nazareth began to walk around the Holy Land that is now Israel and the West Bank, teaching. He taught many things, but the most important – and the most controversial thing Jesus taught was that He was God’s Son – God walking on earth.
He said, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” He also said, “I and the Father are one.” He repeatedly said and did things that led the crowd around him to believe He was claiming to be God Himself – and they often picked up stones to throw at him because they considered these claims to be blasphemy, an outrageous insult to God. Yet Jesus persisted in these claims, and based His credibility largely upon these claims being true.
Eight men for whom we have names – Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Peter, James, and Jude and one unknown writer, the writer of the Book of Hebrews – they all wrote separate books about Jesus and His teachings. All of these books were written within 75 years of Jesus death by men who mostly had known Jesus personally. One – Luke – did not meet Jesus, but he specifically spoke with Paul, several of Jesus’ students, and Jesus’ mother to write his detailed account of Jesus’ life.
One thing which these nine writers all agreed upon was that Jesus died, most likely on Friday, April 3rd, of the year 33 and then, miraculously, on Sunday morning, the 5th of April, Jesus rose from the dead and began appearing to, speaking to and teaching, eating food and even cooking breakfast for groups of his students. He was seen alive after his death by over 500 people in at least eleven different appearances at different places to different people in different situations. And this is of utmost importance, for if these reports of the resurrection of Jesus Christ are true, then His claim to be God’s Son is true and every word He said is of extreme importance for our lives!
But how do we know these are the facts? How do we know this happened? After all, have you ever seen anyone resurrected? – And notice – we are not talking about a temporary heart stoppage that can be restarted by any Emergency Room physician with a charged up defibrillator. No, we’re talking about a man beaten, losing much blood, hanging on a cross for hours, and being stabbed in the side by a Roman guard, just to make sure he was dead. We’re talking about a man being taken down from the cross and put in a tomb for between 36 and 42 hours. We are talking about true death here. And yet the nine writers all insist that he rose from the dead.
Finding out the facts about a past event is difficult, even today. Even today, with all of our cell phones and television cameras, with our huge investigations, many people are not sure what happened at recent events. Even going back just 60 years, we aren’t sure how many gunmen there were the day John F. Kennedy was shot. So investigating events almost 2000 years ago is difficult, very difficult. How would you investigate?
But this much we know:
After writing their accounts of Jesus Christ separately, some accounts within ten years of the events, some as much as 70 years later, these nine writers traveled and spoke to many people about what they had seen and heard from Jesus. These 27 scrolls and letters were then gathered together about 100 years later, after circulating and being copied and recopied by the young churches in the Roman world. It was only then that these 27 different documents written by at least nine men became know as a single book, the New Testament of the Bible.
Other documents were considered, but rejected, usually because the documents could not be traced to a close associate of Jesus or a friend of an associate. Many were rejected because they claimed special, secret knowledge of Jesus – a man who famously said that he did nothing in secret. (Some of these documents are like the book that claims to have been written by an anonymous former CIA agent who claims to have once seen a file that had a secret source who said extraterrestrial aliens actually shot Kennedy. Sure!)
Each of the nine writers appears to have been Jewish, except possibly Luke. Each of the nine writers definitely believed that Jesus was the Son of God. John claimed to be his best friend; Paul was for a time His follower’s worst enemy, chasing them down and throwing them into prison – until Paul had an encounter with Jesus. One may have been Jesus’ brother; another was a fishing boat captain before he met Jesus. Several were Jesus’ students.
And there was another man, a man named Josephus. When the great Jewish revolt happened in the late 60’s that resulted in the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, Josephus was for a time a general for the Jewish armies in the north, but after his capture, wrote a detailed history of the Jewish nation for the Romans. Josephus was not a Christian – but mentions the Christians as a particular group that began in the 30’s.
Another man, Pliny the Younger was a governor of part of Greek-speaking Turkey in the early 100’s, and wrote letters which we have to the Emperor describing Christians and asking for advice on how to handle them.
A hundred years ago, we had great missing pieces of evidence when we looked at the archeology. Where, for example, was Nazareth? Where was a particular road which the documents say Jesus traveled upon? Where was any evidence outside the Bible documents that a man named Pontus Pilate even existed, the man who condemned Jesus to death? Where was the Pool of Siloam, a bath in Jerusalem where Jesus sends a blind man to wash and recover his sight? None of these could be found.
But the particular road was found during WWII when aerial photography found it, exactly as the Bible said. Nazareth was found and excavated around 1960. Also, about the same time, a plaque was found with the right dates, indicating that Pontius Pilate had donated money for a particular building in Israel. And in 2004, the Pool of Siloam was found by Israeli archeologists. Many other places, people, and items mentioned in the Bible documents have been confirmed over the past hundred years by archeologists. In fact, the New Testament documents have been confirmed to be extremely accurate. The men who wrote these documents were precise recorders of where they traveled, what they saw, and apparently who said what. As near as we can tell from all the evidence, they understood that what they were recording was extremely important – and so they tried to be equally precise, doing an excellent job by the standards of the time.
But how do we know the Bible documents haven’t changed over the centuries?
In the 1920’s, a fragment of parchment was found with a group of scrolls found in southern Egypt, apparently buried in the desert for safe-keeping. That fragment, known today as the Ryland fragment, contains part of the Gospel of John document that, based upon the shape of the letters, was written in western Turkey around the year 110, possible about 30 years from the original document.
For the New Testament documents were so important that they were hand-copied time and again by professional writers, known as scribes. These highly paid professionals used a number of tricks to keep from making errors, such as counting the total number of letters, figuring out which letter was the middle letter in a document, double and triple checking the copy, and similar devices. They were not in a hurry – they were professionals with reputations to uphold.
We have today over 5000 hand written copies of New Testament documents from ancient times. They are regularly compared against each other. There are also over 20,000 copies of sermons from ancient times – it has been estimated that the entire New Testament could be reconstructed just from the quotations found in the sermons. And, although differences are sometimes found and controversies arise over the precise translation of a particular word or phrase – the core idea that Jesus was Son of God, claimed this, died and then rose from the dead is not in dispute.
And this is why over 2 Billion people worldwide claim to be Christians. This is why scientists such as Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel, Louis Pasteur, politicians such as Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, performers such as Fred Rogers, Bono, Tom Hanks; writers such as Dorothy Sayers, Harper Lee, Daniel Defoe, C.S. Lewis, JRR Tolkien all claimed Christianity.
For Christianity’s central message, the core message of Christianity of a part of God who came to earth, taught us that God loves us and died to show us how much God loves us, and then returned from the dead to show us that death does not have to be the end; this message changes people for the better.
When we realize that Jesus claimed to be God on the earth, died specifically because of that claim, and came back to life, we begin to study his other teachings much more closely, recognizing that these teachings are very important simply because of who the teacher is.
And Jesus taught that the Father, God, loves us very much, as His children. Jesus taught us to not return insult for insult, to not fight our enemies, but rather to accept insults, to pray for our enemies, to do good things for all people. And we do this because it makes us stronger. We do this because Jesus asked us to do these things. We do this because it is what is meant by following Jesus.
And Jesus told us that all who follow Him will receive the gift of eternal life with Him and the Father. We will not be alone, we will not be left to struggle through death by ourselves, we will be loved and have companionship.
If understanding the facts about Christianity is difficult, now we come to the second barrier in our lives. It is hard to accept that miracles happen, especially if we have never seen a miracle. It is hard to accept that a good, loving God exists, especially if we have been taught that gods and miracles cannot exist. It is particularly hard for men and women who have always been strong and self-sufficient to accept that there are some things that we cannot do by ourselves.
Yet the smartest, the wisest, the most open-minded of people recognize that they cannot defeat death. Even the billionaire men of Silicon Valley who plan to freeze their bodies or put their consciousness into machines know deep down, that they can only delay death for, at best, a few years. You, my friend, know that you do not have the knowledge or the wisdom to keep your soul alive an hour after your brain dies.
And so, accept that there is solid evidence, as solid knowledge as we can hope to have, that almost 2000 years ago a man claimed to be the Son of God, taught us how to treat each other, was tried and convicted of claiming to be the Son of God, God Himself on the earth, was brutally beaten and nailed to a cross for this claim, and died there on a Friday afternoon. And also believe that on Sunday morning, the day we celebrate today, Jesus of Nazareth came back to life, appeared to many people, spoke to them, taught them, ate with them, prepared breakfast for them, and eventually was seen by over 500 people, of which eight or nine wrote down on very expensive parchment what they thought was valuable for us to know.
For if Jesus is the Son of God, what He says defines good and bad, life and death, living eternally or suffering eternally. If Jesus is Son of God, He must be listened to and followed!
Jesus is alive. He is Risen from the dead. Hallelujah!
He is Risen! He is Risen! He is Risen Indeed!
I ask that you share this far and wide to all your friends, your relatives, and your neighbors. For Christ has risen from the dead and we are to tell the world!
Amen!
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