The Resurrection of Jesus

There are multiple sermons to look back on in the Book of Acts. One of the first ones is Peter preaching on the day of Pentecost.

Later, we find Paul preaching, for example, at Athens. Another time he's at the city of Antioch, preaches before, you know, Agrippa. And so there are multiple sermons—Stephen's sermon before he's martyred. And we find multiple sermons in the Book of Acts.

And what I did is I went through and I summarized, what were the elements of these particular sermons? And what did they preach on?

And one of the interesting things I found was that one element—and it's not the only one—but one element that is said in every sermon in the Book of Acts is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Never did the apostles fail to preach that Jesus had risen.

Okay?

We tend to focus on, and it's right and good and fine, on the crosswork of Jesus, and what he did in dying on the cross to pay for our sins. And that is an essential part. That's also in all of their sermons, by the way. But sometimes we can just, especially as Christians, take for granted, "Of course, he rose, we know that."

All right?

But it was a central part of gospel preaching that Jesus not only died, but that he rose again. Because there is an essence to it, there is a purpose to the resurrection that is there to mark Jesus' death as approved by God. In other words, the fact that he rose marked that his death was different than every other death.

You see, he didn't just die like the two thieves who died beside him.

If the Lord tarries, every person in here... you know, the Lord may come first, and that's very possible, and we're looking for His coming even right now. But if the Lord tarries and he isn't coming, not a single person in here is guaranteed to keep on living forever in this body. If we know Jesus Christ, we have eternal life, but it will be in a new, resurrected body.

All right?

So we're all going to face death. Death is a reality, a part of life, because we live in a fallen world that's cursed by sin. But the good news of the gospel is reinforced by the fact that Jesus rose, because His death is not like every other death.

See, we're all sinners, and so the wages of sin is death. And because we all sin, we've all fallen short of the glory of God. We're sinners, and so we die.

Jesus was not a sinner. He's the only man who lived who never sinned. He perfectly obeyed God. He perfectly obeyed His Heavenly Father. So it wasn't possible for death to keep him in the grave. It had no power over him. He was not a sinner. And by the very power of God, he was raised from the dead again. And he resurrected, and we're going to see that in this passage.

I remember years ago, a relative had given my family, when I was a child, a Bible storybook. Maybe you had a Bible storybook when you were a child, and maybe you've given some to children. We have Bible stories in it. And this Bible storybook that was given to us, the last story in it was the crucifixion of Jesus. That's where it ended.

My mother threw it away. Because it didn't include the resurrection.

I could see where you could end at the resurrection and maybe not tell the stories out of the book of Acts or some of those kinds of things, and if I was to not include every Bible story. But to leave out the Resurrection—there was no account of the resurrection in this Bible storybook. Imagine that. That's the wrong place to end. That's the wrong place to end the story, because you don't get the full account.

You see, the resurrection is God's stamp of approval on what Jesus did. And we're going to see that here in Luke 24.

"Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them."

All right, so this is the first day of the week. What we call Sunday today. And the women are coming to anoint the body, to prepare the body. It's been buried already. It's already been put in the tomb, but they're going to do more embalming. That's what these spices are about. They're going to do more embalming of the body. This was something that was done commonly by everyday people for their loved ones. We hire people today, funeral directors and others, to do that for us. But in their day, this was your responsibility to take care of your loved one's body as well.

So here are these disciples who have been following Jesus, especially these women, and they come to embalm the body. "And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre."

Now, that's an issue. This would have been a very large, heavy stone; it would not be easy to move. And so when they see this, this is immediately going to cause them to say, "Who's been in here?"

Years ago, one of our church members who lived in my neighborhood called me and said, "The door to my house is wide open." And I said, "Well, did one of your children leave the door open when you left?" She said, "Well, maybe." She said, "Should I call the police?" I said, "Well, you could call the police, there'd be nothing wrong with that." She said, "I feel bad doing that. Do you mind coming to look at it?" So I put on my scary face and went in there. There was nobody in the house. It was one of the children who had left the door open and they didn't realize it. But if you come to your house and the door is wide open, you wonder, "Who's been in here? What's going on?" Right?

But what we see instead here is these women come. They're wondering, "Who's been in this tomb? Why is the stone rolled away?" You see, these tombs would have been like caves. It would have been carved into the side of a rock, and the opening of the cave would have been closed, might have been blocked by a large stone that would have taken quite a bit of strength to move. That way, grave robbers couldn't easily get in.

"And they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord Jesus." Normally in their burial practices, there would be a long stone slab on which you would lay the body. They would leave it there for one year, and around the one-year anniversary of the passing of the person, they would go back and they would collect basically what would be left. I'm not trying to be gruesome here, but this was their burial practices. They would take the bones of that person, collect those bones, and put them in a box called an ossuary. On that box, they would carve the name of the person who was in there. And sometimes you could fit more than one person's remains in that ossuary. And there'd be little cubbies cut in the rock in that cave where you'd slide those ossuary boxes. But that slab of concrete or stone that the body laid on would be used for future burials. All right?

And so, in other words, you go into the grave, you go in there, and that body's not lying there where you expect to see it. It's not there. All right, so one, you're going to be startled by the fact that the stone is rolled away, and two, where's the body?

"And it came to pass, as they were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments."

All right, now, the Bible often will describe angels as looking like people. All right? So they see these two men in shining garments. That gives away the fact that these are not just any old human beings standing there.

Which, by the way, this is interesting because our mythological ideas of what angels look like are very different than the scriptures. You know how angels are often portrayed in art and these sorts of things? They're naked little babies with wings, fluttering around. Basically, they're little cupids, fluttering around. The reason that happened was because during the Roman period, what happened was that as Christianity spread in the Roman Empire, people started to take old Roman pagan art and repurpose it to make it Christian. And they would just leave those little cupids in there because they figured those would just stand for angels, and "we'll just carve the face off of whatever Roman person is here, put a face on it that's supposed to represent a Bible story." And so they repurposed that art. And therefore we get these little representations like that.

Don't be confused by this. The Bible often talks about angels having somewhat of a human appearance, obviously with a supernatural element to it. Here, this shining garment.

"And as they were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead?"

What happens? The ladies bow down to them. They're like, "Oh, this is something unusual." They obviously recognize these are angels. And the angels say to them, "Why are you looking for somebody living in the graveyard?" He is risen from the grave.

Think about this for a minute. Any of you, if you were trying to find someone and you've got their address, they said, "Here's my address. Come to my house for dinner." And the address takes you to the graveyard. You're going to be like, "I think I have the wrong directions." There's not a lot of people that I know that usually give or get invited to dinner parties there. Right?

So what do we see here, though? The angels are asking them a question. "You're looking for somebody who's alive, where the dead are." So here are the angels testifying to the fact that Jesus has risen. He's not in that grave. The reason the body's missing is not because someone had stolen it. The body is missing because he's risen. He's not in the grave.

"He is not here, but is risen: remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee,"

He told you about this. He told you he was going to be betrayed. He told you he was going to be killed, and he told you he would rise again. And they had forgotten about this. That was just so confusing to them. "How is this going to happen to the Messiah? He's the king, he's the Messiah. He's going to deliver our people. How could that happen to him? We don't understand what he's talking about." And that was just not a part of their focus and their contemplation and their meditation on what he taught.

It's interesting because we often do this. Many times, people will come up to me and say, "Have you ever preached a sermon on..." and I'll think, "I just did three weeks ago." And that's okay. People sometimes are out of town, sometimes people are sick. I understand you miss things. And so I'm not blaming you. But the fact is that what happens is whatever struggle we're going through spiritually, when we hear the Bible answer to that struggle, we focus on it. But when we hear about something that's not... doesn't feel super relevant right now, we're like, "Oh yeah, okay, that's another blah, blah, blah there. I don't know what he's talking about."

And I'm not excusing this at all, but you can imagine them teaching. He says some things that are hard to understand, they don't understand the ramifications of, and they move on from that to the next thing they think is important.

I've talked to many pastors who said, "I wish I could go back to seminary now." Because some of the classes, specifically the church administration classes and things, some of the things that you didn't even know were important are important. That when you have very little or no experience, you're taught these things, and it's like, "Oh yes, that sounds good," but you didn't realize the implications. Then all of a sudden you deal with it in real life administering and you think, "What do I do here?" You know, they did cover this in seminary. I just forgot. There is biblical truth about this. I just forgot about it.

Isn't this what Jesus said was going to happen? Here it is. "What did he say? Verse 7, saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again." He was that specific about it. All right? He was that specific about it. That he would be crucified, I mean, he would be talking about how he would die, and that he would rise again.

And what happens? "And they remembered his words." Now they say, "That's right, he did say that."

Now, I'm not trying to be hard on these ladies because we all do the same thing. All right? We all can be slow to learn things that we need to learn. We all can be people who, you know, get focused on what we want to focus on. And so we miss these things. Even though it was there all along.

See, there's always a temptation for us as Christians, especially if you've been a Christian for a while, to think there's nothing new for us to learn. And by new, I don't mean novel. I mean, like, "I've learned everything I need to know from the Bible." Well, the Bible is pretty big. 66 books God inspired for us. We don't know it all. Nobody knows it all. And we certainly haven't learned all the implications and lessons from it that we need to learn.

But here, they remember what he had said. "And returned from the sepulchre, and told all these things unto the eleven, and to all the rest."

So they leave there, and they go back, and who do they find? The apostles. Now, remember, one of them, Judas, had betrayed Jesus and had committed suicide. There's not 12 currently, there's 11. So they go back to the apostles, and they go back to them, and they say, "We saw an empty tomb, and we saw two angels. And the angels told us that we were in the wrong place, that he had risen, that the living wasn't there among the dead, that he had risen just as he said he would." And they told the other disciples that were there with the apostles.

"It was Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women that were with them, which told these things unto the apostles."

There was a whole group of ladies who had gone. These were ladies who had followed Jesus, had listened and paid attention to his teachings, and they had gone to the apostles. And how do the apostles take it?

"And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not."

They thought these ladies have so much grief that this can't be true. You know, Jesus had said this was going to happen, right? Jesus had told them. I mean, we see that here. The angel said, "He told you this when he was with you." The apostles should have been looking for this to take place. The timing, everything is right to what Jesus said, and they're like, "Who are these ladies making up this story?"

Now, I do understand. I've been told this as a pastor many times by people that in the process of grieving, sometimes after we lose someone, we can tend to think we see them in places. And by that, I don't mean they're appearing to us, but that after the person's gone, we're so used to them being there that we see somebody who resembles them out of the corner of our eye and we're like, "Wait, is that them? No, that can't be." Or we're at home, and we can go, "Did that person just walk into the room?" They didn't. In other words, our mind is programmed to look for them and then see them. And so maybe this is what the apostles thought was going on, this kind of normal grieving process where it's hard for us to imagine the person's gone has taken place. But that's not what has happened.

Maybe it's just that the apostles were like, "You know, these silly ladies are making up a story." I have no idea. But they don't believe them for whatever reason. But in not believing them, they're also not remembering what Jesus said.

We do have to be careful of this here. Christianity and the biblical teachings of the Bible do teach us that there is such a thing as the supernatural. God is real. The spirit world is real. Jesus did rise from the dead. That doesn't naturally happen. All right?

Many in our society have a view of materialism. The only thing that exists in this world is the material world. There are no spirits, there's nothing like that. You live, you're just a bunch of chemical reactions going on in your brain, you die, you become worm food, and that's it. It's over. That's what a lot of people believe. So they would discount anything supernatural. But some of that attitude is in our society.

Now, I don't want to be gullible. But on the other hand, when a person says to me, "You know, I was struggling financially, I had lost my job, and I didn't know how I was going to pay my bills. And out of the blue, a Christian I hadn't seen in ten years sent me a check and said, 'You know, I borrowed $1,000 from you years ago and forgot about it, and I'm paying you now.' I got this in the mail just as I needed to pay for it." Did God do that? Yes.

But sometimes we can kind of be like, "I don't know about this person." Certainly, there are people who embellish things and lie and make things up, okay? But let's not assume that's always what's going on. God is working.

On the other hand, you have superstition. Superstition is God not working, but having this idea that somehow I have some control over the spiritual world. And if I do a spell or an act or do something, I carry around a little rabbit's foot or whatever, it wards off bad spirits, you know, I'm superstitious kind of thing. No, no, no, no.

Where the Bible is, is in the middle. Yes, there is a supernatural world. There are angels, there are demons. There is God, there is a spiritual world. God does work. He's doing things providentially right now, working in people's lives. He's working. He does the miracle of regeneration in people's lives. Those things go on. That is all real, but it's in God's hands. You're not going to manipulate the spirit world. You're not going to, you know, take an eye of a newt, a toe of a frog, you know, a billy goat's beard and whatever, and mix it in something and make up some potion and be able to cure somebody or be able to change somebody's mind about something or have a good business deal because of it. That is all superstition.

Both superstition and materialism are outside of scripture. They may be opposites of each other, but they're outside of scripture. Christians are not supposed to be superstitious, nor are we supposed to be materialists. We're to be biblical. And to be biblical means that I reject superstition, and I reject materialism in favor of the fact that the Bible testifies that God does miracles.

Verse 12, "Then arose Peter, and ran unto the sepulchre; and stooping down, he beheld the linen clothes laid by themselves, and departed, wondering in himself at that which was come to pass."

Now, Peter thinks, "I need to see what's happened." So he runs to the tomb. He runs there to the sepulchre, and he looks in. And when he looks in there, he sees the linen straps that were used to bind the body, the linen cloths, laid by themselves. It's like somebody unwrapped the body. You wouldn't do that if you stole it. There would have been no reason to do that. It's like somebody rose again and took these things off and walked away. Or somebody rose again and passed straight through them and walked away. But this isn't what you would do if the body was stolen.

So Peter starts to think something unusual is going on. In other words, he's starting to realize a miracle had taken place. And this wasn't just the ladies making up a story. This wasn't just some kind of superstition. It wasn't just idle chatter. Something has happened here. He has risen. The text is very clearly telling us he has risen, but it's taking a little while for those who are Jesus' disciples to understand it. Because this is a pretty major thing.

I think sometimes of a person who comes to faith in Christ. If you get a person and they've lived a very debauched life, maybe they've had addictions, maybe they've just lived pretty wild. We had a man who attended our church years ago, and he had two teardrop tattoos on his cheek. He'd spent time in prison. Those tattoos were put there because he had murdered two people. He was in a gang, and he had murdered two people. So he had these tattoos on his face to show that he'd murdered two people. He had served time. He came to faith in Christ. Right?

But there's something in us that sometimes goes, "Well, I don't know about that, somebody like that." No, we can watch the miracle of God working in people's lives. Sometimes they come from a really rough background. But don't underestimate the miracle of saving the soul of somebody who's self-righteous. That's no less of a miracle than saving somebody who was really corrupt or reached a high level of violent behavior or something like that.

But what can happen is we can go, "You know, I don't know about this. He's just too bad. She's too wild." These people... No, no, no. God works. And we can be slow to believe God's work in people's lives.

Now, of course, genuine faith in Christ produces change in people. So if somebody just says they believe in Jesus, but there's no change... You might remember this years ago, back in the 1970s, it was popular for everybody to start saying they were "born again." Now, the Bible talks about being born again. What does it mean by that? It doesn't mean you go back into your mother's womb and be born physically a second time. Jesus says that very clearly to Nicodemus. What he means is, you're born and you're alive physically, but spiritually, you don't have a relationship with God. You're dead. You need to be made alive spiritually. That only happens by the power of the Holy Spirit. And you are made alive spiritually when you come to saving faith in Jesus Christ.

John 3, "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." You go from death unto life when you come to saving faith in Jesus Christ, and God works in you. All right?

But there was a time that people were using this term "born again" for all kinds of things that weren't in the Bible. So, Hugh Hefner, a pornography publisher, was talking about how he was born again. Did he stop publishing pornography? No. Did he change the way he was living? No. Did he repent of his sin? No. I was very skeptical. I wasn't that skeptical because I was a child, but there's one of those things where you are rather skeptical of these things.

But being skeptical of whether it's genuine doesn't mean I should be skeptical of the fact that God can save a lot. Those are two different things.

You see, the gospel is clear. Every one of us is a sinner who has sinned and come short of the glory of God. And every one of us, because of our sin, is under God's condemnation. We are facing separation from God for all eternity because of our sin. Condemnation in the lake of fire, as it's presented.

And I don't say this to say, "Hey, you bunch of rotten sinners." I say this, if I have to stand before God—I'm a pastor—if I have to stand before God and say, "Hey, God, look how good I am," I wouldn't go to heaven. I have not earned anything before God. The only thing I have to plead before God is Jesus Christ. That God sent His Son to this earth to die on the cross for my sins, to shed his blood, to die, to be buried, to rise again, to conquer death. Who Jesus is, what he did, that's my only hope. I have no hope in myself.

And so the good news of the gospel is this: while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. So every one of us is a sinner, and we have no hope in ourselves. The only hope we have is that Jesus is God, that Jesus has lived a righteous life to satisfy God's requirements, that Jesus has died on a cross to bear your sins and mine in his body on that tree, that Jesus was laid in the tomb, that Jesus rose again and came out of that tomb, and now lives forever. That because of who Jesus is and what he accomplished, I can have the sure hope of eternal life. My sins can be forgiven, no matter how great they are, no matter how sinful I am, my sins can be forgiven because of what Jesus has done.

In the Bible, Paul says that he preached repentance toward God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. He says in Acts, summarizing to the Ephesian elders his preaching. What do we mean by repentance? We don't mean turning over a new leaf, doing good works, doing some sort of penance. Penance is this idea of, "I do some good things, it pays for the bad things I do." That a good deed erases a bad deed or some kind of nonsense like that. That's not true. Okay. So, for example, if someone murders somebody, what good deed can they do to erase the act of murder? Nothing. That person's dead. They're not coming back. Not now, not until God raises them from the dead. There's nothing you can do to undo what you did. So there's no penance, that's not what we're talking about.

Repentance, what we mean by that, is not some kind of works. What we mean is I've been loyal to self and sin and my own autonomy. It means that I'll live my own life, I'll do what I want, like our first parents in the garden. Instead, I turn from my loyalty to self and sin, and I turn instead to Jesus Christ. You see, no man can serve two masters. I can't serve my sin and serve Jesus. It doesn't mean I don't struggle with sin if I come to faith in Jesus, but I turn from my sin, and I turn to Jesus. I say, the hope I have... I have no good works, I have nothing. "Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but by his mercy he saved us." All I have is what Jesus has done and God's mercy for me in Christ. "And whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved."

If I turn in repentance and faith to Jesus Christ, I have the sure hope of eternal life. "All that come unto him he will in no wise cast out." And the good news of the gospel is exactly that: while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Jesus died, and he rose again. This enables him to save sinners.

And it doesn't matter how great of a sinner you are. You say, "No, you don't understand some of the things I've done." I know that. But none of them is so great that Jesus didn't die on the cross for it. That the forgiveness available through Jesus is available to all who come unto him, no matter how great a sinner you think you are. Jesus' death on the cross and His resurrection saves us from our sins. And that is the good news of the gospel.

Now, maybe there's someone here with us today who's never come to saving faith in Jesus Christ. We want to invite you to do that today. After the service, you can find me, you can find Matthew, he led our singing. Most of our church members can direct you to somebody who could help you. We'd love to show you from the Bible how you can know Christ, who to know is life eternal. If you're a lady, we'd be glad to have a lady meet with you and counsel with you. If it's children, parents come with your children. We want to be involved in your children's lives. But we don't want you to leave today without getting some spiritual help. If there's anything we can help you with spiritually, please feel free to come and talk to me. Especially if you want to come to know what it means to believe in Jesus, to be a follower of Jesus Christ. Not by good works is it going to save you, but trusting in Jesus and Jesus alone, coming to repentance and surrendered faith to Jesus.

For the rest of us, as we look at this passage, how many things are there that we're slow to believe that the Lord says? I find people slow to believe things sometimes, and I find myself that way sometimes. That we say, "God says that this is true in scripture," and sure, the big things we say, "Yeah, amen." You know, God created the earth, God rescued Noah in the flood, God called Abraham. I mean, you know, God had David defeat Goliath. We know all those things.

But let me ask you this. When the Bible says, "Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church," and I'm counseling with a husband who's struggling in his marriage, and I tell him that, he says, "But you don't understand. In my marriage, that won't work." That's slow to believe.

When I say to the wife in that counseling situation, "You know, submit to, respect your husband, and follow his leadership," she says, "No, but you don't understand." I had a lady tell me, "This fella hasn't earned my respect yet." Have you earned his love? Do you see my point? In other words, he's not commanded to love you because you're so lovable. You may be, but that's not why he's commanded to love you. And you're not commanded to show him respect because he's earned it. But what happens is, "But you don't understand. You know, that may be what God says, but that doesn't work in my situation."

That's what we say about all sin. "You don't understand, if I don't steal, I won't be able to buy food." Really? So in your case, it's okay to steal? God's made an exception for you? Now, those are obvious examples, but those kinds of things happen all the time. The Bible says, "Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right." But there are a lot of children... "You don't know my parents, they make difficult rules. I have to clean my room. They won't let me... all my friends, all my other six-year-old friends in kindergarten have cell phones, and they won't let me have one." That may be wise. But from a child's standpoint, that just seems too difficult. You can't obey God in that situation.

We can be slow to believe things. Now, obviously here they're being slow to believe the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but we can be slow to believe in things too. Things that God has clearly said to us. Jesus clearly said to them he was going to rise. God has clearly said things to us. And sometimes we're slow to believe them, aren't we?

Maybe the Lord's working in your heart. Maybe he's put his finger... the Spirit of God has put his finger on something in your life and said, "Here, you're not believing here. You're not believing this right here." And you know it. You know it's an area of your life where you need to trust God, you need to believe what he said. You're doing it your own way, rather than God's way.

In just a moment we're going to bow our heads and close our eyes and have some time to pray.