Easter 2006

Tom Shrader makes the case that the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ is the indispensable cornerstone of the Christian faith, drawing on 1 Corinthians 15 to show that without the resurrection, faith is worthless and sin remains unforgiven. He surveys historical evidence for the empty tomb, eyewitness accounts, and the transformed lives of the disciples to establish the resurrection as a well-attested historical fact. Shrader closes with a direct call to personal faith, inviting those without Christ to believe that Jesus died for their sin, rose from the dead, and can be known as Lord and Savior today.

“Our faith is built on an empty tomb, on the fact that Jesus died and was buried and rose again on the third day. If that did not happen, our faith is of no value.”

— Tom Shrader

Series: Easter

Recorded: 2006 at East Valley Bible Church

Duration: 54 min

Themes: resurrection, easter, hope, faith, forgiveness, salvation, evidence for christianity, new life, seeking answers about faith, skeptic exploring christianity, new believer, doubting faith, Easter visitor, searching for hope, someone grieving death, adult questioning religion

Scripture: 1 Corinthians 15:13-20, Romans 10:9, Matthew 1:20, Mark 8:31, Mark 9:31, Matthew 10:33, Luke 24, Acts 4

Theological Themes: bodily resurrection, 1 corinthians 15, atonement, sin and forgiveness, historical reliability of scripture, empty tomb, justification, eyewitness testimony

Full Transcript

Welcome and the Meaning of Easter

Good morning. Great to see you. For those of you who are guests, we invite you to complete the registration card found in your bulletin and drop it in one of the boxes as you leave the chapel this morning. When the service is over, please exit out the side doors. Those of you who are guests will find people there with white envelopes containing more information about East Valley Bible Church.

It is a wonderful time for us to come together, to celebrate, and to be with one another. This is a special time in our calendar. We look at the soberness of Good Friday — almost the darkness of it — and many of you were here for that service. As you left, there was a sense almost of despair. Today is the counterbalance to that: not despair or heaviness, but joy and gratitude. We are thankful that you are here to celebrate with us.

We come together today to celebrate Easter. Let me give you Webster's definition: a feast that commemorates Christ's resurrection. Now, for some of you that is obvious. Others of you may find that surprising. We live in a world that does not necessarily embrace that meaning. For the last ten days I've had to look out my back window across at a six-foot-high pink rabbit with eggs. That kind of imagery has become associated with Easter. But when we talk about Easter, what we are talking about is a factual, historical, and truly indisputable event in history — the commemoration of the morning that Jesus rose from the dead.

The Resurrection Is the Foundation of Christian Faith

The resurrection is absolutely essential to the Christian faith. If you are part of the group here that is a little antagonistic, curious, skeptical, or trying to figure out what Christianity is all about — maybe you would love to see this thing come crumbling down — I can tell you exactly where to strike. It is the resurrection. If you destroy the resurrection, you destroy all of the Christian faith. Our faith is built on an empty tomb, on the fact that Jesus died, was buried, and rose again on the third day. If that did not happen, our faith is of no value.

J.I. Packer writes this: "Christianity rests on the certainty of Jesus' resurrection as a space-time occurrence in history. All four Gospels highlight it, focusing on the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances. Even the book of Acts insists on it. Paul regards the resurrection as an indisputable proof that the message about Jesus as judge and savior is true."

Packer continues with the practical implications: "Jesus' resurrection demonstrates His victory over death. It guarantees the believer's present forgiveness and justification. It is the basis of resurrection life in Christ for believers here and now." The resurrection is the cornerstone of our belief. It is in the resurrection that we see the death of Christ and its intended purpose — to save His people from their sin — was accomplished. The empty tomb signifies that. Our sin is forgiven. We have hope. We know that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, and that one day all who know Christ as Lord and Savior will spend eternity with Him in heaven.

What If There Were No Resurrection?

I enjoy browsing bookstores, and one of the prominent phenomena in popular history right now is the what-if book. What if the South had won at Gettysburg? What if the Confederacy had won the war? What if Hitler had won World War II? What if John F. Kennedy had not been assassinated? A great deal of speculation. Paul used something of that same approach in 1 Corinthians 15 to speak directly to the resurrection.

Here is what he writes, beginning at verse 13: "If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain." The word vain means useless — nothing, of no value. He continues: "If the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied."

But then Paul rescues us from that despair. He writes in 1 Corinthians 15:20: "But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who are asleep." That is from the New American Standard — a word-for-word translation. Eugene Peterson takes those same verses and offers this paraphrase: "If there's no resurrection, there's no living Christ. And face it, if there's no resurrection for Christ, everything we've told you is smoke and mirrors, and everything you stake your life on is smoke and mirrors. If corpses can't be raised, then Christ wasn't, because He was indeed dead. And if Christ wasn't raised, then all you're doing is wandering about in the dark, as lost as ever."

The Resurrection Is Essential to Christian Faith

Even worse for those who have died hoping in Christ and resurrection, because they're already in the grave. I love the way Paul deals with verse 19: "But if all we get out of Christ is a little inspiration for a few short years, we're a pretty sorry lot." But the truth is that Christ has been raised up, the first in a long legacy of those who are going to leave the cemeteries. It's essential to the Christian faith.

Let me take it just a little bit deeper. If you don't believe in the resurrection, you aren't a Christian. That's what Paul teaches in Romans chapter 10, verse 9: "If you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved." If we state that negatively: if I don't confess with my mouth, if I don't believe that Jesus was raised from the dead, I won't be saved. I won't be delivered. That's what the Bible teaches us — that we need to be saved from our sin.

For many of you, you're going, "Yes, amen, that's great." For others of you, you're going, "I don't even know what that means, and it certainly doesn't sound like something very interesting to me." Well, I don't know if it's interesting to you or not, but I will tell you this: it's going to be really important to you at some point in time — maybe in the next few minutes. This whole idea of Jesus and who He is, it's not just for church folk to debate and discuss.

What Was Christ's Mission?

Let me show you the cover of U.S. News and World Report from last week, because they ask that very question. The cover reads: "Christ's Mission — New debate about the role of Jesus in the world." On the inside, they state it a little differently: "What did Jesus do? What was Christ's mission?" Now, if we want to answer that question, it's going to be really important to look in the right place.

You've had that experience with a car problem — it's really important to find a factory-trained mechanic who has the manual, who can diagnose the problem and tell you the solution. Well, when it comes to our problem, when it comes to Christ's mission, we need to look in the right place, and that's Scripture. Life is an open-book test. The questions we seem so prone to debate — Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? — are not that difficult to figure out if you know where to look. Christ's mission and what Jesus did are not that tough to figure out if you know where to look.

When my girls were in school — and I'll put a little asterisk by this, because some of you parents probably don't want me communicating this message to your kids — the message I committed to my girls was this: a lot of what you're learning is really stupid and doesn't have much value. I'm sorry you've got to go through it. I'm sorry somebody ever even thought about geometry, and you're never going to use it, but get your C and get out. I know — all the kids love that and the parents want to write me. I'm sorry.

It would drive me nuts, because I would come in and my girls would be working on math, and I'd say, "Come on, let's go for a walk, let's go play, let's go to the mall, let's do something." They'd say, "We've got to finish this math." I said, "When I was in school, the math book had all the answers in the back. Doesn't your book have the answers in the back?" They said, "Dad, we want to know why, not just the answer." I said, "Wow, what a waste of time." Now, that's geometry. But figuring out life is not a waste of time, and if you go to this book, you find the answer. It's not that tough.

Haven't you had those moments — the secret to unleashing your swing, and all of a sudden it clicks, just get those wrists set right, and there it is? There's that moment when you discover the key, if you know where to look. Right here, in Scripture.

What the Bible Says Jesus Came to Do

So when we're talking about Jesus' mission — why did He come to this earth, what did He do — here's what the Bible says. Matthew chapter 1, verse 20: Mary is pregnant, the angel appears to Joseph and says, "Joseph, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. She will bear a son, and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sin." That's the third time already this morning that we've talked about sin and being saved. What does that mean?

Here's what the Bible teaches. The Bible teaches that all of us have sinned. If I break a law, I break the law. If you tell a lie — whether it's a big lie or a little white lie, like "I really like that shirt" — either one is still a lie. If I steal, whether it's hundreds of thousands of dollars or an ink pen, I'm still a thief. If I commit adultery — and Jesus takes it even further and says that even in the heart, if a man looks on a woman with lust, there is sin. All of us have sinned. If there's anything it seems to me that empirical data supports, it's that all of us have sinned.

What the Bible tells us is that the result of that sin — the wage of that sin — is death, meaning separation. That's what death means: separation. In this case, I am separated from God. Now, this can be very deceiving, because I can walk in here at 98.6 degrees and 120 over 70, physically fit, and yet be dead inside — a corpse inside. I need what Jesus describes: to be born again. I need a new life. I'm sick. I need to be saved — that is, delivered from the consequence of my sin. As a result of my sin, I can't experience life as it's meant to be lived. And when I die, which is absolutely coming — the statistics on death are impressive, one out of one people —

Jesus Knew What Was Coming

When I die, I spend eternity separated from God, in a place called hell. That is what the Bible says. Jesus understood this. Throughout His life, Jesus was continually saying to the disciples, "Listen, there's something coming. The reason that I was born was to be betrayed, to die, and to rise again."

Matthew chapters 8, 9, and 10 each make essentially the same point. Matthew chapter 8, verse 31: "He began teaching them that the Son of Man" — that is Jesus' favorite description of Himself — "must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed and after three days rise again." A little bit of time passes. Mark chapter 9, verse 31: "Jesus was teaching His disciples, telling them the Son of Man is to be delivered into the hands of men, they'll kill Him. When He's been killed, He will rise up three days later."

Then in Matthew chapter 10, He is ready to implement the plan. Matthew 10, verse 33: "Behold, we're going up to Jerusalem, the Son of Man will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes, they'll condemn Him to death, they'll hand Him over to the Gentiles, they'll mock Him, they'll spit on Him, they'll scourge Him, they'll kill Him, and three days later He'll rise again."

Jesus was not the innocent victim of a political plot that went awry. Jesus knew exactly what He was doing. Jesus knew that this was the fulfillment of Scripture.

The Risen Christ Opens the Scriptures

After He died and rose again, Luke tells us in Luke chapter 24 of an incident where Jesus is walking along and talking with two men on the road to Emmaus. They do not recognize Him. This is the risen Christ. He opens the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms and shares it with them.

Then He opened their minds to understand, and He said, "Thus it is written that Christ would suffer and rise again from the dead, the third day, and that repentance for forgiveness of sin would be proclaimed in His name to all the nations beginning from Jerusalem and you are witnesses of these things." In other words, this has taken place. That is the gospel. The gospel is that you and I have sinned, Jesus died and rose again, and if we come and believe in Him, we have eternal life.

Truth Under Attack

Now, that is a difficult statement to make, because we live in a world that is not convinced about truth. The last thing I heard before I dozed off last night — I happened to be watching, along with probably the majority of you, a debate on C-SPAN 2 about university education — and one of the men was making the claim that there is no such thing as truth.

I noticed that Starbucks now prints wisdom on their cups. Someone showed me one recently, and I said, "When you're done with that, can I have it? I think that's my Easter message." It read: "The way I see it, number 74: in a time when even our soil and air might not know the truth, the only solace we can take in decision-making about our inner peace is through honest, organic, and sustainable farming." This is the kind of thinking that surrounds us. The last sentence read: "I guarantee you, if you know the name of the people who pick your carrots and peas, you'll feel better, and so will your grandchildren."

We come and say, "Here is a historical fact — Jesus rose from the dead," and people make fun of us. And yet someone else is out there finding truth in farming.

Books That Attack the Faith

I walked into Borders recently and was confronted at the very first table with six titles: *The Lost Gospel*, *The Gospel of Judas*, *The Secret of Judas*, *The Jesus Papers*, *Misquoting Jesus*, and *The Jesus Dynasty*. And I had not even reached the next table, which had *The Da Vinci Code*. All of those books attack the very core of the Christian faith, beginning with the idea that Scripture and Scripture alone is not our only reliable and infallible truth.

The Historical Evidence for the Resurrection

Let me read to you from several historians. One professor of history writes: "I know of no one fact in the history of mankind which is proved by better and fuller evidence of every sort to the understanding of a fair inquirer than the great sign which God has given us that Christ died and rose again from the dead." Another educator writes: "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."

One more: "If all the evidence is weighed fully and fairly — if it is indeed justifiable according to the canons of historic research, meaning if you apply the same principles of history you would apply to, say, the Roman Empire — here is the conclusion: the tomb in which Jesus was buried was actually empty on the first Easter morning. That is the only conclusion. And no shred of evidence has yet been discovered that would disprove this statement."

The Empty Tomb

Jesus died. What do you do with dead people? You bury them. They buried Him in a rock tomb with a two-thousand-pound rock across the entrance. The seal of Rome was placed on it, meaning that if you broke that seal, you would experience the full wrath of Rome and be killed for it. Rome's highest-trained militia stood guard at that tomb to ensure that the seal was not broken and that nothing was removed.

Yet on that first Easter morning, the tomb was empty. There were eyewitnesses — hundreds of people who saw the risen Christ. There were lives that were changed.

A Changed Peter

Consider Peter. On the day of the crucifixion, Peter was saying, "I never knew Him, I never knew Him" — confronted by a little servant girl, and this big fisherman

From Fear to Boldness

Intimidated by a servant girl, Peter says, "I never knew him." Yet just weeks later, Peter is preaching, and Luke records it in Acts chapter four: "There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we may be saved." Those who are antagonistic, those who want to destroy him and eliminate the Christian faith, observe the confidence of Peter and John. They understand that these are untrained, uneducated men, and they are amazed. Luke says they began to recognize them as having been with Jesus.

Not the Jesus who walked the earth, but the Jesus who rose from the dead. The same Jesus you can encounter. As the Holy Spirit opens your eyes and invades your heart, you can have a relationship with this same Jesus. He can be your Lord, your Savior. This historic Jesus who rose from the dead and lives today can be your Savior, if you come in repentance and faith, if you believe He is who He said He was.

A More Radical Invitation

We are not going to ask you to walk an aisle or check a box. We are going to ask you to do something much more radical than that. We are going to ask you to encounter Him personally on your own, to invite Him in and respond. If He is opening your eyes to see this truth, respond to the truth He has given you.

Here is what we learn: God raised Jesus from the dead and put an end to the agony of death. I do not have to be afraid of death anymore. I do not have to worry about what happens when I die. I do not have to go it on my own. I do not have to try to cook up some scheme about how I am really a good person.

Please do not try that one. You are not a good person — you are a sinner, and everybody around you knows that, and so do you in the quiet of your heart. The only way to heaven is through Christ, because He is risen. He is risen indeed.

What Is Coming Next

Let me tell you what we are going to do over the next five weeks, because as I said, all we can do today is whet your appetite. Next week, on the 23rd, we are going to ask the question: what is the matter with people? On the 30th, we are going to talk about what is so special about Jesus — what makes Him different. On the 7th of May, we will look at what is behind the death of Jesus. His death is a historic fact, but was there something more to it? On the 14th, we are going to tell you how you can find God and know Him personally. Then, two days after the movie opens, on the 21st of May, we are going to crack the Da Vinci Code and show how it stands against everything Scripture teaches.

If you are here with us on a regular basis, we know you will be back. But perhaps you are here as a guest today. What we have just talked about is too important to get through in only fifteen or twenty minutes. These are life and death issues, and I do not know who you are or what you are doing, but I will tell you this: you have nothing more important than this to figure out in your life. This is the most important thing you will ever deal with. And what I am here to tell you is that it is not that complicated, if you know where to look — and the Bible tells us the answer to these questions.

Closing Prayer

Father, thank You for bringing us here this day and to this place, that we can come together and celebrate. Thank You for the resurrection. Thank You for the fact that that tomb was empty on that first morning, and that we as Your people can come before You and praise You and worship You and honor You.

God, I pray especially for our guests who are here today. As we have said, some may be here with questions, some curious and skeptical, some antagonistic. What we know is this: we can talk and talk, but if You do not open eyes, nothing happens. Will You open eyes? Will You bring those people back again as we talk about Your Son Jesus — who He is, why He is so special, why He died, and how we can know You as Lord and Savior?

Father, in a world that wonders whether there is any truth at all, when we listen to the foolishness that surrounds us, help us rejoice in the truth that Jesus Christ is Lord and that You raised Him from the dead. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen.