27: The Life of Jesus: The Resurrection

[00:07] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On the Trail podcast. You are on the trail with father- daughter duo, Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie, and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God. Episode 27. We’re wrapping up our life of Jesus series and talking about the resurrection.

Hello, Father, and Happy Christmas!

[00:30] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. That’s very British of you. Happy Christmas to you too.

[00:35] Stephanie: Yes. Merry Christmas. I do love being merry. Not to be confused with Merry Brandybuck and Pippin Took, but anyway..

[00:47] Marcus: It’s a very Tolkien Christmas. What can we say?

[00:51] Stephanie: Yeah, Ben and I either during Thanksgiving break or Christmas break, like to watch through the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings.

[01:00] Marcus: Yes, I usually help with some of that.

[01:06] Stephanie: Yeah, it’s your fault I was introduced to The Lord of the Rings in the first place. I still remember you trying to bring Hobbits into bedtime stories. And I was like, what are these creatures? And how did you come up with them? Like, that’s so random. And then I found out that it was The Lord of the Rings.

[01:21] Marcus: Yeah, it was fun. I discovered the book when I was in high school. I think I read through it twice while I was in high school. Everybody thought it came out in 2,000 with the movies, but I’m like, nope, I’ve known about this for 30 years.

[01:34] Stephanie: Yeah, you actually made a whole 3D model set of some part of Middle Earth didn’t you?

[01:40] Marcus: I did, yeah, 9th grade. I actually created a four foot by eight foot scale model of middle earth with a railroad kind of thing. It had a Mount Doom and clouds and fire, and it was pretty cool. They actually put it on display at the Fort Wayne Public Library back in the seventies for a while.

[02:01] Stephanie: So fabulous. Some would call you a nerd, but I call you too cool. And in fact, this is an appropriate case of epic. .

[02:12] Marcus: Thank you.

[02:13] Stephanie: Anyway, I totally derailed us from Happy Christmas and Merry Christmas, to The Lord of the Rings. Now going to go back to the resurrection, we’ve been covering the life and ministry of Jesus. We have come to possibly the most important episode of this series, Jesus Resurrection. Paul says in 1st Corinthians 15 that if Christ has not been raised from the dead, our faith is worthless. That’s a very big deal. So it’s only right that Dad, you have two acrostics for us today. Since I’m already derailing us, I’ll have you know that as I was typing up my notes spellcheck wanted to change acrostics to acorns. Which is also on brand for us, so I don’t know if the AI is getting smarter?.

[02:59] Marcus: Yeah, people may not know just how on brand acorns are but that goes back to our whole Bible. Actually, I think we’re going to be doing a Bible series next year on the podcast where we walk through the nine building blocks of Biblical theology a little more in depth. So acorn is related to the promise.

[03:18] Stephanie: Yes, we did and we have talked about the promise on the podcast here. I don’t know if we brought up the acorns? Anyway, as we get into the importance of the resurrection, would you Father help us with what I like to call, “the boots on the ground” context with our first acrostic?

[03:35] Marcus: Sure. The first acrostic, BEAT, I have to give some credit to this. I was reading one of Lee Strobel’s books and I don’t remember actually which of those “Case” books it was, but he was laying out the case for the resurrection. Maybe that was the book? And he laid out four core arguments. So I basically took those four core arguments and turned them into an acrostic so I could remember them more easily. And they spell BEAT.

So I say this is evidence for the resurrection that is “hard to beat.”. So, the  “B” is burial, that Jesus was buried. Very few people dispute that. The tomb was found empty, also rarely disputed. There are people who claim to see him. So there were appearances that people claimed to see and the transformation of the lives of the apostles. And so those four lines of evidence create evidence that’s hard to beat. So I’m happy to unpack those a little bit. But that’s in a nutshell.

[04:40] Stephanie: Yeah. Thank you for that quick overview. So, yes, burial. Talk to us about burial.

[04:44] Marcus: So, first of all, one of the key things about burial is that he was buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. And the reason that’s key is that Joseph of Arimathea was a member of the Sanhedrin. And so it would have been super easy to verify if that was true or not. Like, if this was a made up idea you would not have claimed it to be the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. It was too easy to refute that because he was a very public figure.

So they would have said, oh, he was buried behind an oak tree in a little known used piece of land someplace and nobody knew about it. That’s the kind of thing you would make up. That’s something that’s hard to verify. This is one of the most easily verifiable facts around. And it’s the fulfillment of an Isaiah 53 prophecy that he would be buried with the rich.

[05:38] Stephanie: Yeah. They didn’t ship his body back to Nazareth or something.

[05:41] Marcus: Yeah, exactly. He wasn’t just dumped in a mass grave somewhere. He was buried with the rich. And so Joseph of Merimthea placed him in his tomb. And because of that this is virtually irrefutable. In other words, this is not the kind of story you would invent.

Also, we get the idea that nobody in the early years of Christianity tried to refute it. You can’t find Jewish sources or Roman sources or any other sources that are saying, oh, he wasn’t actually buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. It was not something anybody even came up with an alternative theory for. Everybody agreed on it. So that’s the first evidence that’s hard to beat. He was buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. So that’s the first one. “E” is empty. That tomb was found empty.

This is also irrefutable because everybody knew where the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea was, and if Jesus was there, there would be no discussion. So these first two points everybody agrees on. The question becomes, why is this tomb found empty?  What happened that this tomb would be found empty? Some of the counter arguments get pretty crazy, right?

So two of the most common throughout the years have been that the disciples stole the body and then persisted in lying about it all of their lives. Even though they were all tortured, they were all brutally murdered. Right? They all went through extreme hardships and not one of them cracked. They held to the lie to the end.  That’s theory number one, it’s still the most common.

Number two is that Jesus didn’t really die on the cross, but that he swooned. The cool dampness of the cave revived him and he was able to push the rock away, overpower a roman guard and get himself out of there. So that’s again kind of ridiculous on multiple levels. Here is the one that I most recently heard. William Craig was debating a professor at a major university and this guy’s theory was maybe Jesus had a twin brother and the whole thing was a setup.

And one twin died on the cross and the other twin appeared to people and that’s what was going on. So once again, there is zero evidence for this. No one even proposed that idea for 2,000 years. But his point in bringing up a theory like this is that anything is preferable to a resurrection, right?

[08:13] Stephanie: Because as we say, if the resurrection didn’t happen our faith is worthless. Yeah, and his enemies didn’t even dispute any of that. Like his enemies were like, oh, hey, we need to come up with a reason why this tomb is empty.

[08:36] Marcus: Yeah, exactly. So those are the first two lines of evidence you’ve got to explain the empty tomb. And then the fact that the tomb was guarded and that it was sealed. These are again not things you would make up because they’re easily refuted. Especially because the original audience of the gospel message were the Jews. They were right there. I mean, this was not something done in a corner.

As Paul said in one of his trials in the book of Acts that these things weren’t done in a corner, everybody knows about these. And so then we get to “A”, which is the idea of the appearances where the clearly people claimed to see Jesus. This was the foundation of the whole thing. First the women at the tomb. Which is also interesting because as it has been pointed out to in the first century Palestine days, the testimony of a woman was not admissible in the court of law.

Now obviously that’s not very politically correct, but that’s the way the law was back then. And so I find it interesting that God chose women to be the first witnesses of the resurrection, just like he chose shepherds to be the first witnesses of the birth of Jesus. Because a shepherd’s testimony was also not admissible in a court of law. That was just sort of synonymous with not being dishonest in that culture.

[10:03] Stephanie: Which is also another plus for the accuracy of the scriptures. Because if that hadn’t actually happened, why would they fabricate something so implausible?

[10:19] Marcus: Like, that’s not bolstering your case, right to do that. So the only reason to tell that story is because it’s true and because it’s not going to bolster your case with the audience you’re trying to reach. The other thing we find is that the appearances happen both to people who believed in Jesus and to non-believers. It happened to people who believed in Jesus first.

But then you get Saul of Tarsus. Now, Saul of Tarsus, is famously attacking the followers of Christ. And so we see that it wasn’t just those who were predisposed to want to see him alive who he appeared to. And then you get the idea that he appeared to groups of people. He appeared to the disciples when there were ten of them without Judas and Thomas and then when there were eleven, because Thomas was present.

Paul says he appeared to more than 500, all at the same time, most of whom are still alive. Kind of like, ask me, you know, we’ll double check this. So you have these appearances, you have eyewitnesses, and you have Peter’s original sermons, we are testifying to what we have seen and heard.

And so no one is denying that people claimed to see Jesus alive. It was both friends and enemies that it was individuals and groups. And you know, that it started again with stories you wouldn’t normally make up, that women were the first ones to bring this testimony. So that’s the “A”.  All right, so those are the first three, burial, empty tomb,  appearances.

And then the “T” is transformation. And this has to do with two things. Number one is you look at the transformation in someone like the apostle Paul. Three times in the book of Acts he stands up to give testimony to the reason for the change in his life, that he went from persecuting the church to proclaiming the gospel, was that he met the risen Christ. That is his transformational thing.

The risen Christ appeared to him and changed his life forever. And you look at somebody who believed it, in 2nd Corinthians he goes down the list of all the things that he suffered, and all he had to do to stop suffering was say, “Yeah, it might not have been Jesus.” “You know, maybe something else happened, maybe I was a little fuzzy that day?”

[12:34] Stephanie: No, it was his twin.

[12:36] Marcus: Yeah, it was his twin that showed up and “Charles” was very convincing. And Paul clearly saw Jesus more than just the one time on the Damascus road, because he says the gospel that he taught was taught to him by Jesus. It came by revelation directly from Jesus. So there’s that transformation. There’s also the fact that all twelve of the apostles including Matthias who replaced Judas, they all died a Martyr’s death.

Rather than saying, no, we actually stole the body.  When I think about conspiracies the idea of trying to get twelve people to all die for a lie, is just ridiculous. In fact, the evidence for the resurrection was so strong that for many years back in the eighteen hundreds, especially at Harvard law School, it was used as a demonstration of irrefutable evidence for a court of law. So it’s really only when the worldview changed that simply would not permit this explanation of the evidence that things like that began to change. So I say this because it’s important to know that there really is a strong case here and that we don’t believe in the resurrection just because we want to.

[13:57] Stephanie: And as you were talking I just couldn’t help but think about friends we know personally and  many, many testimonies from modern day people in closed countries, and around the world, who have seen Jesus and have been transformed because of it.

[14:17] Marcus: That’s true we’ve talked to people we know personally with that testimony, haven’t we? In fact, I was told by one organization there was a billboard somewhere in the Middle East with a picture of Jesus on it that said, “If you’ve seen this person in a dream, call us.” Because so many people we’re having appearances of Jesus. So that’s awesome, it’s still happening today.

[14:37] Stephanie: That’s awesome. All right, let’s look at your second acrostic, which is very appropriate, LIVE. What did the resurrection give us?

[14:47] Marcus: Yeah, the resurrection gave us life eternal. That’s the “L” of LIVE. That’s the first key thing. And Jesus is called the first fruits. And the point of the first fruits is that other people had risen from the dead before Jesus. Right. We have several examples of Jesus raising people from the dead.

And people even in the Old Testament being raised from the dead, but all of them died again. Jesus is the first fruits of those who rise from the dead, never to die again. So he is the first fruits of those who experience life eternal. And he said, if we are attached to him, if we are in union with him, then we share that life eternal. So Jesus had to first rise from the dead in order to be the first one to experience this.

Now, I also say that we sometimes think of the goal of Christianity as getting to heaven, but that’s not what we mean by life eternal. It Isn’t life in a different realm someplace. We’re talking about going to paradise now, but Jesus is going to come back someday. We are going to come with him and we will be on earth with Jesus for eternity. I just want to dispel this idea of harps and clouds and things right off the bat here.

What we’re talking about here is a resurrection life, such as the kind that Jesus demonstrated when he came back from the dead. So that’s the anchor thing and why this is so key. And it comes back again to this idea of the first fruits. But I thought LIVE was better than five, so we went with life eternal instead of first roots there.

[16:19] Stephanie: Yes, it’s very appropriate. I don’t know if this is too much to go into right now, but just the idea of him being the first fruits, we are in the last days because he is the first to resurrect. So from his resurrection we have been in the last days, because the last days happen when the resurrection of life eternal happens.

[16:46] Marcus: Yes. And the other part of that is that the days of being under law came to an end and we are now in the days of the Messiah. The days of the Messiah are the last days, that’s the definition. That’s why the Bible can say that we are in the last days and they were writing in 60 A.D.

[17:08] Stephanie: A lot of people and myself included for a time, would hear last days, and would think, Left Behind. I would just think, oh, you know, last days means the tribulation. And we don’t have to get into all of the second coming stuff right now, but yes, just wanted to bring that up.

[17:35] Marcus: Yep. It’s a good thing to bring up and we’ll maybe deal with the second coming someday, but it’s not yet.

[17:43] Stephanie: All right, so inheritance in the kingdom.

[17:45] Marcus: Inheritance in the kingdom. The core thing that happens because of the resurrection, we gain entrance into the kingdom of God. So when the Bible talks about our hope, right? That is that our life is now anchored on hope. It’s built on a foundation of hope. That hope begins with life eternal.

But then the second element of that is the inheritance that is ours that cannot be taken away, that cannot spoil or fade. Part of what was given to us was a place in the kingdom and an inheritance there. And so, Peter talks about the joy that we have because of this inheritance that is being kept for us in heaven. When Paul says it’s the hope that we have in Christ that leads to our faith in that hope and love. Because we know we’re taken care of, we can live a life of love.

So I look at this inheritance a little bit like being a trust fund kid and I know when I turn a certain age I got a billion dollars waiting for me, that kind of thing. I’m going to be okay is the idea. If I knew that five years from now I had a billion bucks waiting to come my way, it would change the way I live a little bit right now. It’s like I could kind of forget about myself some and realize I’m going to be okay. Let’s focus on taking care of other people. If I know I’m okay it sets me free a bit to love better.

And so I do think that that’s part of what grows out of there. So I think about faith, hope, and love. And hope is about our inheritance in the kingdom. And because we have this inheritance in the kingdom that’s where we put our faith. We are trusting that is going to come and that is the case. And then because of that, it sets us free to love other people. So I think that faith, hope, and love are anchored there. While love is the greatest of them all, I think hope is the anchor of the whole thing.

[19:42] Stephanie: Beautiful, “V”.

[19:44] Marcus: The verification of the claims of Christ. Okay, so, again, when we’re told that Jesus died for our sins on the cross, how do we know that’s true? Well, because he rose from the dead. If he had simply died and that was the end of it, that would have been a problem. How do we know when Jesus said, I am the light of the world, I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the father except through me. When he makes these kinds of claims how do we know that these are true?

And the answer is,  because he rose from the dead. If he had died like everybody else does and stayed dead like everybody else does, then there’d be no reason to accept the idea that he was divine. No reason to accept that he was more than human. And so the resurrection becomes the verification that all of these things are true, he gave proof of this. Paul in his Mars Hill sermon to the people of Athens tells them about the gospel and then says, God has given proof to all people of this by raising Jesus from the dead.

And so this is that idea that the verification or the proof that this is all true. And that’s why we go back to that acrostic of BEAT and the evidence for the resurrection, because all of Christianity really hangs on this. If this isn’t the case then you can be philosophically Christian but you can’t actually be a Christian, because it all hangs on this.

[21:10] Stephanie: Yeah, if he didn’t rise from the dead then maybe he was just a good teacher or a good man. Even in  that you can start saying, well, he said he was going to rise from the dead?

[21:22] Marcus: Well, as he said, destroy this temple in three days, I’ll raise it again. That’s also part of it. You could just go on and on with this about the whole thing. Everything is verified by the fact that this took place. So, life eternal, inheritance, verification of the claims. That brings us to the “E”, exaltation. The exaltation of both Christ and of his people.

And one of the things we find interesting is that it says, Jesus, after his resurrection, says, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Now, at first that strikes me as odd because I’m like, well, wasn’t he the son of God? Wasn’t it already his? In what sense can he say that this authority is given to him. And the analogy I like to use is that he was like the crown prince and the kingdom was rightfully his but he was being challenged by the first knight, who was in rebellion against him. And so the kingdom became Christ’s both by birthright and by conquest.

And so now that he conquered the enemy, as we looked at in the last podcast, his subjugation of the enemy at the cross. When he rose from the dead it says he took captivity captive and he ascended on high, and he put them on triumphal procession. And so his exaltation included his triumph in which he displayed those whom he had conquered, and he was then given this position.

And so it says that he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, and he is now seated in the heavens waiting while the rest of his enemies are made a footstool for his feet. So the battle continues, but Jesus is now in a place of authority and a place of majesty. Now, Ephesians 2:6 becomes very important here because it says that we have been raised with Christ and that we have been seated with him in the heavenly realms. Well, what does it mean to be seated with Christ?

If Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father and we are seated with him in the heavenly realms, that means we also have been exalted by our union with Christ and we participate in his death and his resurrection. And because of that, it is the anchor point for the authority of the believer over spiritual forces of wickedness with which we do battle.

And this is why Paul says, we don’t wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places, We are engaged in this battle from a position of authority and we have also been exalted. So you think about this idea like in Romans 8, Paul says, whom God foreknew, he predestined, whom predestined he called, and so on, and it ends with God has glorified us. And it always struck me that it doesn’t say he will glorify us someday. It’s Aeris, it says he has glorified us.

And so I look at that and I say, God has already shared his glory with us his people. And there is an already not yet aspect to this, right? And that is that we already participate in that glorification at some level, but we will someday participate fully in that glorification. And you can look at all of these things and kind of see that “already not yet” element to it, that we already have life eternal now, but we do not yet have our eternal bodies.

So the experience of that is going to be different. We already have an inheritance waiting for us in the kingdom and we can grow that inheritance by our obedience to Christ and our walking with him, but we do not yet experience it in its fullness. And so, same thing with the exaltation. We have already been glorified but we will someday see him face to face, know him fully, be in a resurrected body, and participating in his kingdom. It’s going to be a much different thing someday.

And so there’s a couple of mistakes people can make when it comes to this Eschatology about the end times. And one of them is what we call an over-realized Eschatology. And that is the idea that everything about the kingdom is already here. Well, clearly not, right? Because not everything about the kingdom is already here. Otherwise we’d already have our new bodies. We wouldn’t be able to die and all these things would be complete.

The other mistake you can make is to postpone everything to, someday. When people tend to say, well, someday it is going to be like this they also tend to spiritualize it in the sense of they make heaven the eternal thing. But heaven is not the eternal thing. Heaven is like the holding place and then when Christ comes back, we come back with him.

Here is the amazing thing about this, God says he’s going to make his dwelling place on earth with his people for all eternity. So it’s a pretty remarkable thing. So that’s kind of the summary of what the resurrection does for us.

You can remember it with LIVE or LIVE, but life eternal, inheritance of the kingdom, verification of the claims of Christ, and the exaltation of both Christ and his people. So those are the four essential teaching points that come out of the resurrection that every Christian needs to know.

[26:51] Stephanie: Amen. Thank you. So next week we’ll be taking a break for Christmas and then we’ll be back for the new year. But for now, any final closing thoughts for this episode and for this whole series?

[27:06] Marcus: I just come back again to the importance of hope. Right. It is impossible to live without hope and everybody needs it. We can anticipate a fun event coming up next week or another thing we’re looking forward to over the weekend, but real hope, out of that comes purpose. And the idea that because we can have a secure, eternal destiny, we can know where we stand with God, we can know that it is meant to set us free. To live with greater faith, to live with greater love, and to live with greater confidence that comes out of this.

And so that’s why it’s worth revisiting these fundamentals of the faith again and again and reminding ourselves of the worldview, the values, the perspective that flows out of this. Because these are the foundations of our faith and we need to come back to them again and again. So I just encourage people that there is a very solid hope in Christ. Not only for the age to come, but this same God who’s going to take care of us then is walking with us right now, and is intimately involved in everything that we go through today.

[28:22] Stephanie: Thank you. Hey, before I close this out, would you pray over our listeners?

[28:28] Marcus: Yeah, absolutely.

[28:29] Stephanie: Closing up this year and going into Christmas,

[28:35] Marcus: So, Father in heaven we do come to you in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, your son, who you sent into this world. He took on flesh, he became incarnate. He became one of us in a tremendous act of humility that we have trouble even grasping. Not only that, but he became a servant. He humbled himself even to death. And then you raised him up and you gave him a name above every name so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow.

And God we just pray for revival in our world and a hastening of the day when every knee will bow to the Lord Jesus Christ. Every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord and that you will receive glory. We’ve longed for that day when the glory of the Lord will fill the earth as the waters fill the sea. And God, while we await that day, would you fill our hearts in this way. That your glory would fill our hearts. That Jesus would live in our hearts by faith and give us that anchor for our souls, the hope that sees us through all of the various storms of life.

I just pray your blessing especially this holiday season, Christmas and the New Year. And may we sense your presence and your guidance, and your direction both as we celebrate the season and as we begin to anticipate the year to come. May we do so with hope, in the name of Jesus, we pray. Amen.

[30:00] Stephanie: Amen. Thank you, Daddy. All right. And thank you all for joining us on the trail today. Deeper Walk International is a nonprofit organization and we partner with people like you in order to do what we do. Some are on the trail with us as official Trailblazers who commit to donating $25 or more per month. Because of our Trailblazers and other donors who go above and beyond with end of year giving or sponsoring projects, we are able to provide free or discounted resources like this free podcast. Or our video streaming, the Learning Library Basic.

Also like the free January conference where John Eldridge from Wild at Heart will be joining Dad to speak about emotional resilience. And that’s coming up at the end of January. So as we close out today we invite you to consider becoming a Trailblazer. You can do this very simply by visiting our website, https://deeperwalk.com/trailblazers/. If you want to keep going deeper with us on your walk with God, please subscribe to the Deeper Walk podcast and share with your friends.

Thanks again and we’ll see you back next year. Merry Christmas!