In the weeks leading up to Easter, we have been thinking about the cross of Jesus Christ. We have seen that…

1. The cross was the climax of Jesus ministry. If you look at the Gospel records of Jesus’ life and ministry in the Bible, you will find that about 20% of the material there is given over to the last six days of Jesus’ life.

2. Jesus knew that the central reason he had come to earth was to die on the cross, and he taught that fact to his disciples. Over and over in his teaching to them, he emphasized his coming death. They didn’t understand what he was talking about. How could someone’s central mission in life be to die? Especially someone like Jesus? And it was only later, after his death, that they began to understand its significance.

3. The cross became the central teaching and the central symbol of Christianity. When the early Christians went out preaching the good news about Jesus, they didn’t preach about his life or his miracles or his teachings as much as they preached about his death on the cross.

4. They taught that his death on the cross accomplished some amazing things on our behalf:

   1. It covered our sin

   2. It cancelled our moral guilt before God

   3. It ascribed to us right standing in God’s eyes

   4. It brought us peace with God

   5. It placed us under the grace of God rather than the wrath of God

   6. It enabled God to justify us and forgive us while remaining true to his holy character

   7. It opened up the way for us to live forever with God

Now those are some pretty amazing claims. And the Bible asks us to believe those claims; to take them by faith. But it would be pretty hard to believe those claims about Jesus’ death on the cross if Jesus were still dead himself.

How can God expect me to believe that Jesus’ death would bring me life if it didn’t bring Him life? How could someone who is still dead claim to have power over death?

That would be like going to a marriage counselor who has been divorced three times. Or taking your driver’s training from an instructor who’s had his license revoked. You could well say to that person “If it didn’t work for you, how’s it ever going to work for me?”

You see what I’m getting at? If Jesus died on the cross and stayed dead, then we are on pretty shaky ground to claim that his death could ever accomplish anything of spiritual significance for us, let alone give us eternal life.

And you know what? The Bible acknowledges that. The Bible says that if Jesus Christ did not rise from the dead, then you and I don’t have to believe anything else about him. The whole Christian faith is worthless.

The Apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:14 “And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.” All these claims about the cross of Jesus Christ stand or fall on whether or not Jesus rose from the dead. And that’s the million-dollar question about Christianity: Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

If he did, then I better take seriously his claims about the cross. If he didn’t, then chuck Christianity. Ignore it. It’s meaningless.

Did he or didn’t he rise from the dead?

People have been arguing about that question for centuries. Many people have tried to prove that he did not rise from the dead. And they have come up with some rather ingenious explanations for how the resurrection could not have happened. Let’s look at the four most common explanations…

Explanation 1 – The disciples were just seeing things when they saw Jesus alive.

In other words, the disciples were having hallucinations. They wanted so badly for the Resurrection to be true that they simply imagined that they saw Jesus alive after his burial.

Incidentally, a book was written a few years ago suggesting that the early Christians used to eat psychedelic mushrooms and have strange visions and hallucinations.

Well, the hallucination theory is an interesting theory. But there are some problems with it.

The first problem is that people simply do not share hallucinations. There is no such thing as mass hallucination. Psychologist Heinrich Kleurer, in a book entitled The Psychology of Perception, states that hallucinatory phenomena are unique to the individual.

The only constant about hallucinations is their variability from person to person. It simply isn’t possible for even two individuals to have the same hallucination, let alone more than 500, which is how many people claim to have seen Jesus after his death.

Secondly, psychologists have found that hallucinations occur when people have a strong desire to see something. A man who is starving to death begins to hallucinate and dream about food. A man who is dying of thirst begins to see water everywhere he looks. The wish gives birth to the perception.

But when you read the NT, you realize that the disciples of Jesus were not expecting Jesus to rise from the dead. Far from it. Their hopes of ever seeing him again had been dashed. As far as they were concerned, it was all over.

And their actions prove it. On Easter Sunday morning, Mary Magdalene and the other women went to the tomb with spices to anoint a dead body, not with incense to worship a risen Lord. The last thing they were expecting was to see Jesus alive.

And when they found the tomb empty and ran back to Jerusalem to tell the other disciples, those disciples didn’t believe them. And then when those disciples told Thomas about it, he didn’t believe them.

All the way through the Resurrection story, there is this undercurrent of skepticism and doubt and unbelief on the part of the disciples. They were not the victims of wishful thinking. On the contrary – they had to struggle over barricades of doubt and disbelief until finally, the evidence was so overwhelming that they had no alternative but to believe that Jesus was alive.

So the hallucination explanation simply doesn’t work, because these were not the kind of people who were in a hallucinatory state of mind. They were realists, skeptics, and pessimists.

Explanation 2 – The women who said that the tomb was empty had gone to the wrong tomb.

Had they gone to the right tomb, where Jesus’ body was buried, they would have found the body still there.

But, knowing how women often get their directions mixed up, they went to the wrong tomb—an empty tomb—and then they started this wild rumor about Jesus rising from the dead.

The problems with this view are pretty obvious, beginning with the fact that the Bible tells us that the women knew very well where the right tomb was.

Matthew 27:59 Joseph took the body, wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and placed it in his own new tomb that he had cut out of the rock. He rolled a big stone in front of the entrance to the tomb and went away. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were sitting there opposite the tomb.

The women were watching as Jesus’ body was hastily prepared for burial; they were watching as it was placed in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, and they took careful note of the location, because they were intending to return on Sunday morning to complete the embalming of the body.

Those women weren’t stupid. They knew exactly where Jesus’ body lay.

But suppose, just suppose, that the women did go to the wrong tomb and then started this incredible rumor. Would not Joseph of Arimathea have put a stop to it? He would have known where his own tomb was located.

And furthermore, would not the enemies of Jesus, the very men who had put him to death, have known where his body was buried? After all, they had stationed a guard there to watch over the tomb.

If the disciples had started spreading a false rumor around Jerusalem about Jesus rising from the dead, what would the authorities have done? They would have gone to the right tomb, hauled out Jesus’ corpse, put it on a cart and paraded it through the center of Jerusalem. And that would have been the end of that.

Which raises a good question: Why didn’t they do that? Well, the answer is that they apparently didn’t have the body. The body was gone. It had disappeared. Why had it disappeared? That gets us to our next explanation.

Explanation 3 – The disciples had stolen the body.

They somehow managed to sneak past the guards, rolled the stone away, entered the tomb, dragged the corpse out, and hid it somewhere else. Then they started preaching that Jesus was alive.

So this explanation claims that Christianity is founded on a deliberate deception—the biggest hoax in history. Jesus’ disciples, knowing full well that he was dead, deceived everyone into thinking that he was alive.

This is actually the oldest explanation of all, because it got started on Easter Sunday morning. In fact, you might say that it got started the day before that. The chief priests and Pharisees suspected that this very thing might happen. That’s why they went to Pilate and requested that a guard be placed over the tomb.

Matthew 27:63-64 “Sir,” they said, “we remember that while he was still alive that deceiver said, ‘After three days I will rise again.’ So give the order for the tomb to be made secure until the third day. Otherwise, his disciples may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead. This last deception will be worse than the first.”

So Pilate gave them their guard, and that should have been the end of it. But the whole thing came unglued anyway. On Sunday morning, to the utter consternation of the chief priests and Pharisees, the tomb turned up empty. How would they explain it?

Well, the only way they knew how to explain it was to fall back on their original hypothesis that the disciples had stolen the body. But what about the guards?

Ah, what about the guards! It seems that the guards had come to the Pharisees early on Sunday morning babbling an unbelievable story about an earthquake at the tomb, and angels rolling the stone away.

Rather than take this report at face value, here is what the chief priests did:

Matthew 28:12 When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day.

Are there any problems with this explanation? There most certainly are. To begin with: How can a person who is asleep know what happened while he was sleeping?

Secondly: No Roman soldier in his right mind would tell people that he was asleep while on guard duty, because sleeping on watch was a crime punishable by death. Maybe that’s why they had to give these soldiers a large sum of money. They had to swallow their professional pride and put their necks on the line by admitting that they had been derelict in duty.

Thirdly: If the guards were not, in fact, asleep, then there are only two alternatives: either the disciples had attacked, and overpowered them, or else something supernatural happened to get Jesus body out of that tomb. Because at the end of the day, you have to account for the fact that the tomb was empty. Even the chief priests realized that.

Now the idea of the disciples launching a sneak attack on the guards is a pretty wild scenario. For one thing, the disciples were in no frame of mind to mix it up with the Roman authorities. They were running scared. They were scattered, disorganized, and demoralized. They were trembling in fear that they were going to be arrested next.

Furthermore, these fishermen would have been up against professional soldiers. What were they going to do: throw fishnets over them? Hit them with boat oars, maybe? No, the whole idea is ludicrous.

But the biggest problem with the idea of a stolen body is this: if the disciples had stolen Jesus body, then they knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt that Jesus was dead. They had to form a conspiracy to keep that fact a secret.

Then, they had to go out and start preaching a lie: that Jesus Christ was alive. And, here’s the kicker: They had to be willing to die for what they knew was really a lie. Eleven out of the twelve apostles died martyr’s deaths because of the fact that they had taught and preached that Jesus was alive.

I ask you: is it consistent with human nature to suppose that these men would be willing to die for something they knew wasn’t true? Don’t you think that one of them, facing the executioner, feeling the flames at his feet, hearing the hungry lions roar in the Coliseum, would have cracked and confessed the truth? But none of them ever did. They went to their deaths with their heads held high, because they knew it wasn’t a lie.

Explanation 4 – Jesus didn’t really die on the cross

Everybody thought he died, but he really just went into a coma. They took him down off the cross, wrapped him up in the burial clothes, and placed him in the tomb, where sometime over the next couple of days, he revived.

Let’s look at this idea more closely. In order for this explanation to be true, we must accept that Jesus survived the acute physical trauma of a Roman scourging followed by a crucifixion.

Then we must accept that the Roman soldiers at the cross—men who were professional executioners who had seen countless victims crucified—made a mistake. They mistook him for dead when he really wasn’t. The centurion testified to the governor, Pontius Pilate, that Jesus was dead. But the centurion was wrong; Jesus still had a pulse. He still was breathing. He still had vital signs.

He survived a spear thrust into his side, causing a substantial loss of blood. He survived being completely wrapped with tightly wound strips of linen cloth. He survived having 75 pounds of a gummy mixture of myrrh and aloes smeared over that cloth, creating a hardened coating like a mummy. (And, by the way, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus mustn’t have noticed that he was still breathing while they were embalming him, either.)

Then Jesus survived 36 hours, unattended, in a cold, dark, damp, rock-hewn tomb. (I have been in such tombs in the Holy Land, and I can personally vouch for the fact that they are cold and damp, especially at this time of year.)

Then we must accept that, after going through this kind of physical ordeal, Jesus somehow resuscitated there in the tomb. His strength came back to him to the point where he was able to extricate himself from those yards of grave clothes—an escape act that would have done the great Houdini proud.

Then Jesus somehow summoned up the strength to roll away the great stone covering the entrance to the tomb. (This, by the way, from a man who was too weak to carry his own cross to the site of the crucifixion.)

He must have done all this without attracting the attention of the soldiers who were guarding the tomb, otherwise he would have had to engage them in hand to hand combat in order to escape.

Then, Jesus would have had to find his disciples in Jerusalem, and present himself to them in such obvious and vigorous good health that they would assume that he had risen from the dead a new man!

Frankly, I find this explanation to be utterly absurd. It takes more faith to believe that than to believe that Jesus rose from the dead.

There can be no doubt that Jesus really died on that cross on Good Friday. Crucifixion was invariably fatal. The Romans intended that it should be. The Journal of the American Medical Association confirmed that from a modern medical standpoint in an article in their March 21, 1986 issue, entitled On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ. Let me quote to you the concluding paragraph:

It remains unsettled whether Jesus died of cardiac rupture or of cardiorespiratory failure. However, the important feature may be not how he died but rather whether he died. Clearly, the weight of historical evidence indicates that Jesus was dead before the wound to his side was inflicted and supports the traditional view that the spear, thrust between his right ribs, probably perforated not only the right lung but also the pericardium and heart and thereby ensured his death. Accordingly, interpretations based on the assumption that Jesus did not die on the cross appear to be at odds with modern medical knowledge.

So we have these four major attempts to explain away the resurrection:

1. The disciples were seeing things

2. The women went to the wrong tomb

3. The disciples stole the body, then lied about it

4. Jesus did not actually die on the cross

Each of these explanations is fraught with so many problems and inconsistencies that it actually takes more faith to believe any one of them than it does to accept the final explanation – the explanation that the Bible itself gives for the empty tomb.

“He is not here. He is risen just as He said.”

If the Resurrection is true, and I believe that it is, then that means that…

1. Jesus is alive today. He has conquered death.

2. Jesus really is who He says He is – the Son of God.

3. His death on the cross accomplished all the things that the Bible claims it did.

4. He wants us to believe in Him as our Savior and Lord.

You can choose to disregard all this if you want to. You can say “The cross – big deal. So what?” But just remember when you stand before him at the judgment and you’re trying to come up with an explanation for why you didn’t believe that you won’t have a leg to stand on.

Do you know Jesus? Have you accepted Him as your Savior? I’ve tried to give you the facts as clearly as I can today, now it’s up to you to decide what you’re going to do with them.