In the summer of 1982, I was working on a large Oil Rig in East Texas.
My shift went until 11 at night.
One day, near the end of my shift, I was tired and inattentive, I was walking on a narrow walkway just under the main deck, so about 20 feet off the ground.
I was looking up as I walked, I can’t remember what I was supposed to be doing…maybe looking for a grease fitting…I was the lowest ranking guy on the rig, so I got the worst jobs.
Suddenly there was what felt like two hands firmly hitting my chest stopping me from taking the next step.
I was surprised, to say the least…as I looked down to see what was going on…I saw that a portion of the walkway was missing, and my next step would been a 20-foot drop onto some protruding pipes and equipment…I would have likely been killed or severely injured.
If I asked a panel of different people what happened that night…what might their conclusions be?
Person one: Wind, a well-timed wind.
There wasn’t a wind, never had a wind felt like two hands, and if it was wind, it was miraculous in both its timing and impact.
Person two: You’re lying. it just didn’t happen. Okay, but it did.
-Then it was psychosomatic…your body sensed danger and stopped you.
-“By making it feel like two hands smacked my chest?”…okay.
Person three: Your future great, great, great grandson invented a time machine, and came back in time to make sure you didn’t die so he could be born.
*Okay that’s elaborate…and weird.
Way less plausible than what I believe happened.
I think that God choose on that occasion to keep me from harm. Not because I’m special but for his own good reasons.
My presuppositions about how the world is ordered, along with my experiences, and what I believe from God’s revelation of himself in scripture shape my conclusion.
Everyone has their own set of presuppositions and their experiences and then, a perspective on Scripture…is it the revelation of God or just a man-made book?
Today we celebrate the most important event in human history…the resurrection of Jesus.
Many believe the resurrection is a hoax, an elaborate lie, or they just don’t give it any thought at all.
Their lives don’t revolve around the reality of the resurrection of Jesus and all that it implies.
My life is ordered around that reality.
How is that so?
Well, every Sunday I, along with most of you, celebrate the resurrection…its why we have church on Sunday, not Saturday.
Its why we don’t turn Easter into a major production…because we celebrate the resurrection 52 times a year.
And not just Sunday, but every day, I pray and read scripture, because the resurrection is true.
“Okay, that is religious stuff…but what about real life stuff…how is your real life ordered around the resurrection?”
Well, it’s all real life…and I’ll tell you how my life is ordered around the resurrection, but not yet.
The resurrection is fantastic, hard for some believe, impossible in fact for others to believe.
But world around us is fantastic…acorns become oaks, sperm and eggs become children, we speed around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour on this round blue lifeboat in deadly space.
What is hard to believe is that all this is the result of time plus undirected chance…that is impossible.
What is hard to believe is that a man named Jesus didn’t live, die and raise from the dead…and yet, the world has been changed, my life has been changed by lies, fabrications?
Atheist, Richard Dawkins
“We come down to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s so petty; it’s so trivial; it’s so local; it’s so earthbound; it’s so unworthy of the universe.”
Dawkins is right about some of what he said, wrong about so much.
It does come down to the resurrection of Jesus Christ….he got this right.
And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins. Those, then, who have died in Christ have also perished. If we have put our hope in Christ for this life only, we should be pitied more than anyone. 1 Cor. 15:17-19
So, Dawkins is right…
Everything in our faith depends on the resurrection…if this is not true, none of it is.
If it is not true, we have wasted a lot of Sundays…but even more, we have largely wasted our lives…our hope is a lie.
So, he is right about the priority of the resurrection.
And it does seem petty to some people (God making his son pay for our sins) what’s up with that?
But Dawkins got one this very wrong.
God made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. 2 Cor. 5:21
He got this one wrong because of many false presuppositions:
-He doesn’t believe in God, so how can he comprehend God’s holiness and justice?
-He doesn’t believe there is such a thing as “sin” against a holy God (since there is no god), so how can he understand how great our need for atonement…a sacrifice for our sins?
Trivial and local: He was right, and he was wrong about this.
-Jesus was a 1st century man, who spent his life walking, never far from his hometown.
-He was very local, not global in his earthly life.
-His death was very local…a single cross, on a single day…wasn’t even televised, or on YouTube.
-Yet it was the most untrivial event in history…trivial means of little value or importance.
-It was epic and of cosmic, transcendent importance.
He was in the world, and the world was created through him, and yet the world did not recognize him.
John 1:10,11
Jesus was the world creator who was largely unrecognized by those he created.
Richard Dawkins, included.
He said the resurrection is “Earthbound, unworthy of the universe”
Here is where is Dawkins is wrong precisely because he himself, is so earthbound and blinded by the physical universe, to spiritual realities.
“Though the world (cosmos) was created by him, the world (people) did not recognize him.”
What does he mean by “The resurrection is unworthy of the universe?”
I don’t know, I haven’t asked Dawkins…but I suppose it means that some 1st century pedestrian prophet, killed on a piece of wood by the Roman government, supposedly coming back to life…is nothing compared to the vast expanse of the cosmos.
How can a single collection of molecules (we call Jesus) on one tiny blue dot compare to black holes that can swallow stars?
How can someone who lived a mere 33 years, compare to the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall…a collection of galaxies, 10 billion light years across.
186,000 miles a second…it would take 10 billion years to traverse it…we can’t get our minds around that.
But we can get our minds around a man dying on a cross…but can we? I don’t think so.
1 Peter 1:12 says, Even Angels long to look into the suffering and glory of Christ (death and resurrection).
The Angels find the cosmos far less amazing than the gospel.
But you can see how a man like Dawkins can question how…A single guy, killed by a now defunct government, then supposedly returning to life…2000 years ago, in a small Mideastern country…is supposed to be the greatest event in the world, or even cosmic history?
No, he believes the resurrection is unworthy of the vast universe.
But size has nothing to with value…a small diamond is worth more than a thousand-pound rock.
A baby is worth more than a billion-dollar aircraft carrier.
His problem is his presuppositions and perspective.
This single man, killed on a cross in space and time…created space and time
He was God-incarnate…human presuppositions blind people to what is true.
The vast cosmos…is nothing compared to the infinite worth of the Creator.
How could art be more valuable than the artist?
Atheist Bertrand Russell was once asked what he would say if God were to ask him after his death why he had not believed:
His reply, that is often quoted by modern atheists was, “Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence.”
John Lennox, Scientist, mathematician, and follower of Christ says, “They say there is not enough evidence, but then a curious thing happens. When evidence is offered to them, they refuse to examine it.”
He writes, “I can well recall when I first read Russell’s book as a student in Cambridge. It had been recommended to me as one of the most powerful and important intellectual rebuttals of Christianity ever written; and I took it up wondering what effect it would have on my thinking. I was totally unprepared for what I found. I had expected a careful, incisive examination of the evidence that was readily available, a lot of which I had already been exposed to; yet I came away with the impression that Russell simply had not engaged at any depth with the substantial body of evidence that supports Christianity. The net effect of the book was to leave me very disappointed with Russell (after all, he was a mathematician), and to confirm my Christian faith, not undermine it.”
LENNOX, JOHN C. . Gunning for God: Why the New Atheists are missing the target (pp. 189-190). (Function). Kindle Edition.
The evidence for the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus…is abundant and compelling.
So much so, I am not going to go over it again today…many Easters, I have.
If you have intellectual doubts about the life, death, resurrection of Jesus I can recommend enough books to keep you busy for some time.
However, if you don’t have those kinds of doubts, that’s quite okay…there is no intellectual deficiency in having faith without doing an exhaustive research of the facts.
It is enough to take the gospel at face value.
Many children in our church have simply believed the gospel, they couldn’t win an argument about their faith, but they are born again into new life in Christ.
You have to know the facts of the gospel…but that’s all the information required to repent and believe.
My grandmother (granny we called her) wouldn’t know what the word “apologetics” means…but she lived a life of transformational faith in Christ through many trials and troubles.
She wasn’t highly educated, lived a pretty simple life on Lickskillet road, in Biloxi, MS.
But her life gave evidence of transforming faith, she was an apologetic for the gospel.
Perhaps you couldn’t win an argument against some brilliant atheist…but the truth doesn’t depend on your ability to defend it…does it?
As we have talked about over and over this year…reality is what it is. Truth is truth.
The fool, we read last week, in David’s Psalm, says there is no God…but of course there is.
Today, we are going to celebrate the reality of the resurrection by looking at how the resurrection orders our lives.
We believe it, because it is true…and because it is true…it changes us, helps us, gives us hope and courage, direction.
John wrote his gospel so that his readers would believe that Jesus is the Christ (Messiah, savior), the Son of God, and by believing have life in his name.
The book begins with Jesus as the eternal cosmos creator who became incarnate, became human.
It then gives 7 signs, clear, real-world evidences that were designed to point to Jesus as creator, savior…to validate his truth claims.
The 7th sign was the greatest one, it was the raising of his friend Lazarus from the dead.
This story is found in John chapter 11 and it is the turning point in the book.
The second half of the book records Jesus’ last night, his final words, his death and resurrection.
It was after the resurrection of Lazarus that the plot to kill Jesus really took form.
We went through the gospel of John verse by verse several years ago.
I will simply read one part of the beautiful story.
Then Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died. 22 Yet even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.” 23 “Your brother will rise again,” Jesus told her. 24 Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” 25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live. 26 Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
As soon as Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and told him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died!” 33 When Jesus saw her crying, and the Jews who had come with her crying, he was deeply moved in his spirit and troubled. 34 “Where have you put him?” he asked. “Lord,” they told him, “come and see.” 35 Jesus wept. 36 So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” 37 But some of them said, “Couldn’t he who opened the blind man’s eyes also have kept this man from dying?” 38 Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. 39 “Remove the stone,” Jesus said. Martha, the dead man’s sister, told him, “Lord, there is already a stench because he has been dead four days.” 40 Jesus said to her, “Didn’t I tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” 41 So they removed the stone. Then Jesus raised his eyes and said, “Father, I thank you that you heard me. 42 I know that you always hear me, but because of the crowd standing here I said this, so that they may believe you sent me.” 43 After he said this, he shouted with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” 44 The dead man came out bound hand and foot with linen strips and with his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unwrap him and let him go.”
This final sign pointed to the reality of Jesus’ power over death.
All the signs pointed to something greater than themselves.
That being the resurrection of Jesus from the dead…and the possibility of resurrection life for us.
I said I would tell you how my life is ordered around the resurrection:
It can be stated in that single quote from Jesus.
“I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live.”
I believe in life eternal through faith in Christ.
Because of this I believe every small and great act of faithfulness matters.
I believe either it all matters, or none of it does…there is no in between.
If the end of us and the end of the universe is nothing but cold, dark, emptiness…then nothing is of real value or importance.
Nothing is epic: All of it is trivial… world wars, great discoveries, presidents, kings…none of it matters.
And neither do great black holes, or vast expanses of celestial bodies.
Noble acts of courage, suffering with faith, your life, your death, your new baby,… “Yawn”
None of it matters…none of it.
Since Christ has been raised and we will experience resurrection, and there will be a new heaven and earth.
Everything we do in faith, matters.
Death has been swallowed up in victory.”“Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.
1 Cor. 15:55-58
Mowing my grass matters, if that is what God has for me today…even though it will need mowing next week.
Sitting with my suffering daughter matters, her suffering will matter, her unborn son…whether he lives long or dies as a baby matters.
Holding my dad’s hand at the end of a long life matters.
His life of flying around the planet, building pipelines…mattered.
His life of lying in a bed, immobile, in pain…mattered.
All of my life is ordered around the reality of resurrection…worshipping with you on Sundays, and suffering with you in hospitals and gravesites.
Physical exercise with a body that will become dust, is not in vain…if it a part of life ordered around the resurrection.
It all matters or none of it does…if Christ has not been raised, none of it does.
Since Christ has raised from the dead…every act of faithfulness done in faith matters.
You are currently believing something is real and true and everything that is not that, is not true and real.
What you decide to believe is true and real is going to determine what you do with your life.
Your life will end, and you get no do overs.
Everyone is staking everything on something.
The stakes are high.
Be born again if you are not…to not choose, is an ongoing choice.
Rejoice in the reality of the resurrection if you have been born again.
The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said.
Matthew 28:5,6
The reality of the resurrection changes everything, impacts everything.
The Universe is not worthy of the resurrection, we are not worthy of it…but Christ, the risen Lord is worthy of or lives.
Order your life around this reality…order your lives around him.