November 19

Accountability day... send me one sentence stating the difference the resurrection has made in your life.

12 reasons I believe in the resurrection of Jesus.
1. Common Sense. The disciples could not have believed in Jesus' resurrection if his corpse still lay in the tomb. It would have been complete idiocy to believe that a man was raised from the dead when his body was still in the grave.
2. Implied Gullibility. Even if they preached this, no one would have believed them. So long as the people of Jerusalem thought that Jesus' body was in the tomb, they would never have believed such foolishness as the sermon Peter preached on Pentecost. The tomb was a lunch time walk from downtown Jerusalem.
3. Ease in Refutation. All the Jews had to do to expose the whole affair was simply produce the body.
4. Joseph of Arimathea. The Sanhedrin was the Jewish Supreme Court made up of 70 men, which presided in Jerusalem. Its members were the leading men of Judaism. It seems very unlikely that Christian tradition could invent Joseph of Arimathea, give him a name, place him on the Sanhedrin, and say he was responsible for Jesus' burial if this were not true. The members were too well-known to be invented.
5. The story is simple and lacks legendary development. You need several generations to come up with a legend. The Gospels were written within 30 years of the actual event.
6. The tomb was discovered empty by women. Women were regarded as so insignificant that they could not even serve as witnesses in a court of law. If a man committed a crime and was observed in the very act by some women, he could not be convicted because of their testimony. Women occupied a low rung on the Jewish social ladder. If the empty tomb had been a made up story, certainly it would have been the male disciples who would have made the discovery.
7. Earliest Jewish propaganda against the Christians presupposes the empty tomb. In the refutation of the resurrection, the story was the disciples stole the body. That means the enemies of Christianity agreed the tomb was empty.
8. The disciples were not the “hero type.” The disciples are not an early form of Rambo. These guys were cowards and Jesus had to prove himself over and over to them.
9. The nature of hallucinations. Some critics have suggested that the disciples just hallucinated a resurrected Jesus. But large groups of people do not hallucinate together. 500 saw Jesus alive at one time. The sheer number of separate appearances of Jesus rule this out.
10. The death of the disciples is powerful evidence. All the disciples went to their deaths testifying that Jesus rose from the grave. 10 of the disciples were tortured to death, yet they never recanted their stories. If this was made up at least one of them would have caved in under the pressure.
11. The swoon theory does not fit. Some have suggested Jesus didn’t die on the cross, but rather just fainted. So how does a man with huge wounds in his wrists and feet, awaken in a cold tomb, unwrap himself, push a 2000 pound stone away from the tomb, and beat up a Roman military fighting unit? It takes a lot of faith to believe that.
12. The Muslim theory that Simon of Cyrene died on the cross in Jesus’ place doesn’t fit. His mother and several men who had just spent three years with him were standing there.

Here is the bottom line, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is one of the most wicked, vicious, heartless hoaxes ever foisted upon the minds of men, or it is the most fantastic fact of history. I suggest we proclaim with full confidence these facts:
Confucius' tomb - occupied
Buddha's tomb - occupied
Mohammed's tomb - occupied
Jesus' tomb – EMPTY!!