Notes of Faith March 8, 2025
Three Days Later, He Rose Again from the Dead
Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David. This is my gospel. — 2 Timothy 2:8
How do you know Christianity is really true?
This is the inevitable question asked by anyone who is willing to think deeply about the world, its origins, and its meaning. Christianity states that God made the universe, created life on earth, made humans in His image, and gave them a moral law to be their guide. We are then given the details, through the gospel, of how God reached us in Christ. All of this raises the question of how we can know it’s really true.
The simple answer to this question is the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. As the great Anglican missiologist Lesslie Newbigin said, “The gospel is public truth.” This is because the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth happened in history — it was an actual event.
The crucifixion of Jesus is not contested by an overwhelming majority of historians. What is questioned is what happened three days later.
The Gospels state that Jesus’ tomb was found empty by a group of His women followers and that He appeared to His disciples after this. Paul writes that Jesus appeared to Peter, then to the twelve disciples, and then to more than 500 witnesses — at the same time (see 1 Corinthians 15:3–6).
Was this just a hallucination on the part of all those witnesses? Psychologists say no. Hallucinations don’t happen like this to groups of people — hundreds of people do not have the exact same dream on the same night. So this could not have been a “mass hallucination.” Furthermore, Christianity started in Jerusalem three days after Jesus’ death — the very place where it would have been easiest to disprove.
If Jesus’ dead body could have been produced, Christianity would have been no more than a minor footnote of history today.
At least five of the twelve original disciples of Christ would go on to die a martyr’s death rather than deny that Jesus was raised from the dead. Many people are willing to die for what they believe to be true, but no one dies for what they know to be false. Why were they so willing to face martyrdom? Because they were there. They saw Jesus with their own eyes, touched Him with their hands, and ate with Him for forty days after He was raised.
This event shook the world back then — and it still does today. Jesus’ resurrection means so many things for us in the twenty-first century. Fundamentally, it means that Jesus is who He said He was: the Son of God, the Messiah.
We have a real Savior. We can trust that His words are true.
In a world where charges of “fake news” are incessant, we can know that the good news about Jesus is true. This gives us confidence in the Scriptures as being the very words of God. The Bible is not just a collection of commands from God to us but a collection of promises from God to us as well. These promises give us a real hope in a world of fear and uncertainty.
The resurrection of Jesus gives us confidence that our sins are forgiven and the gift of salvation is real. Many leaders throughout history have made grand promises to their followers that only gave them false hope, but we can know that our faith and hope in Jesus are well placed because of His resurrection from the dead. The fact that Jesus triumphed over death means that the power of sin and death have been broken. As Paul states,
Through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death. — Romans 8:2
We can live free of the power of darkness because of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Again, the resurrection demonstrates that Christianity is indeed true.
The gospel of Christ was foretold by prophets, most notably Isaiah (c. 600 BC). In Isaiah 53, he gives us a startling portrait of the suffering Messiah — not the political/military hero that was hoped for by the Jewish people. Before Isaiah, there was King David — the one called “a man after [God’s] own heart” (1 Samuel 13:14). The prophets foretold that one of David’s descendants would sit upon his throne and reign as the future Messiah (see Jeremiah 23:5–6). The apostle Peter would cite King David in the first great message after the resurrection of Christ:
Fellow Israelites, I can tell you confidently that the patriarch David died and was buried, and his tomb is here to this day. But he was a prophet and knew that God had promised him on oath that he would place one of his descendants on his throne. Seeing what was to come, he spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, that he was not abandoned to the realm of the dead, nor did his body see decay. God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it. — Acts 2:29–32
The resurrection was what united believers to take the message of Christ to the ends of the earth. When Christianity started, there was no New Testament. The first-century believers turned their world upside down with the confidence that Jesus was raised from the dead and offered salvation to the world. Recapturing this confidence can unite believers in Christ today to finish the task that He sent us to do. Overall, because Christ has been raised from the dead, we can have a true and abiding hope. We can know with certainty there is life after death — that this life is not all there is.
The fear of death has consumed the great thinkers of history. The idea of physical death being the end of existence is suffocating, to say the least. It leads to a nihilistic mindset of living a life of pleasure and self-gratification. However, when we realize that there is a life beyond this one and that our actions and words will one day be judged, it gives real meaning and purpose to this life. What we do here on this earth with the one life we have been given actually matters.
As my dear friend Dr. Gary Habermas, a historian who is considered one of the world’s leading authorities on the resurrection of Jesus, says, “The gospel requires three things: the deity of Christ, His death, and His resurrection.” May God’s Spirit guide you into a lifetime of joy and adventure as you dedicate yourself to helping as many as possible hear and understand its truth and meaning.
The gospel is the good news that God became man in Jesus Christ. He lived the life we should have lived and died the death we should have died... in our place. Three days later He rose from the dead, proving He is the Son of God and offering the gift of salvation and forgiveness of sins to everyone who repents and believes in Him.
Excerpted with permission from The Purple Basics: Understanding the Message of the Gospel in the New Testament by Rice Broocks, copyright Dr. Rice Broocks.
For the last three days I have been surrounded by 5,000 men from all over the world at a conference of pastors, elders, and other aspiring men who’s desire is to know and serve God greater than ever before. It was truly inspiring. This conference has been a special time for me each year, for almost 30 years. Truth is inspirational! Shared truth is like a wildfire. It continues to be fed by the Spirit from one to another. May we take the truth of the gospel as God commanded…to the ends of the earth. We will meet again when we can no longer share this truth, on the other side of the Jordan… Yet shall we live for all eternity!
Pastor Dale