To my non-Christian friends,
The Resurrection is the cornerstone of Christianity—where the rubber meets the road for the Christian belief system. It centers around the person of Jesus. If He was not dead, and then come back to life, the whole of the Christian worldview is demolished—a house of cards unable to support itself. We Christians celebrate Easter for just this reason; a celebration of Jesus—God in human flesh—as risen from the dead.
You my friends, know Jesus as an historical figure. You don’t doubt that. You might even claim He was a good moral man, who taught His followers some pretty cool things about how to treat others and lived that life Himself without hypocrisy.
What you can’t believe is that a man certifiably dead for three days can come back to life. That’s a hurdle you can’t quite get over no matter how much you think about it. You’re a man or woman of science and reason, and science has shown that dead men stay dead. This claim that the historical Jesus rose from the dead—the hurdle you can’t believe—is quite possibly one of the main reasons you are not a Christian, am I right?
You’re a skeptic, then. You need hard proof. Something real and empirical. Something you can really sink your teeth into. You, like many of us, want something you can see, or touch, or hear or smell. Your mind won’t recognize something as true that your senses and reason can’t verify. You assume that the natural world is all there is, and claims about transcendent matters—the super-natural—are offensive and a reproach to your intellect.
Consider Tom. He was also known as Didymus, and most people called him Thomas. He was a common man, just like you. He worked for a living, paid his taxes, and kept to himself without bothering anybody. He lived in the early first century A.D. in Israel. He was Jewish and ordinary in every way; nothing special.
Until he met this other fellow countryman, a carpenter named Jesus, who was saying some pretty amazing things, and claimed to be the long-awaited Jewish Messiah.
Not only did this Jesus claim to be the promised Messiah, but He also made the outlandish claim that He was in fact God Himself; that as God He had come-down to earth, and He hadn’t just come to be the Jewish Messiah, but the Savior of all mankind.
How can God be a man? Why do I need a Savior? What is sin, and am I a sinner? Tom was skeptical, but he hung around, following this itinerant carpenter from place to place and listened to what He had to say. Ultimately he became a committed follower of Jesus and was chosen as one of twelve of Jesus’ disciples—His inner circle.
Fast forward three years. It’s AD 30. Jesus has been arrested, convicted, and executed on a Roman cross and his dead body placed in a rock tomb. Some of the other twelve disciples claim that the tomb was empty that Sunday morning after his crucifixion on Friday and that they have seen Him again in the flesh, not dead, but now alive. Tom wasn’t there so he doesn’t believe it.
Here’s how the Biblical narrative describes it in John 20:24-25:
“But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus [the Twin], was not with them when Jesus came. The other disciples therefore were saying to him, ‘We have seen the Lord!’ But he said to them, ‘Unless I shall see in His hands the imprint of the nails, and put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into His side [Jesus had been pierced in the side during His crucifixion, see John 19:34], I will not believe.'”
The words of a true skeptic, right? As a skeptic yourself, you can probably empathize with him. Hard proof is needed. He wants to see this for himself. He wants to touch the holes where they drove the spikes into Jesus’ hands and feet, and put his hand into the lacerated gash made by the Roman spear. Nothing less will convince him that a man dead, is now alive.
The Biblical account continues:
“And after eight days again His disciples were inside, and Thomas with them. Jesus came, the doors having been shut, and stood in their midst, and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ Then He said to Thomas, ‘Reach here your finger and see My hands; and reach here your hand, and put it into my side; and be not unbelieving, but believing'” (John 20:26-27).
“Thomas answered and said to Him, ‘My Lord and my God! (John 20:28).
“Jesus said to him, ‘Because you have seen Me, have you believed? Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed'” (John 20:29).
That same challenge to skeptical Tom, my skeptical friends, goes out to you. “Be not unbelieving, but believing!”
Yes, it takes faith. But no more of a faith than what you already exercise every day of your waking life. It speaks to your metaphysic. You already exercise faith in believing that Chance brought both something from nothing into Being, and then directed it with purpose into everything that is (see my post The Matter of Irrationality – Part III). That’s a lot of faith, my friends. So faith is not the issue. It’s where that faith is placed that matters.
Remember, you are a culpable knower of God. As a culpable God-knower you are without excuse for not following the threads of that knowledge into further knowledge of God, His actions in the past, and His plan for the future. You start with one question and keep pulling the thread that leads to further questions, that then leads to definite conclusions.
Faith in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, His claim to be God, and His claim on you and your life are no more difficult than believing that Chance fine-tuned the universe, brought life out of non-life, and then produced organisms conscious of their own existence who can reason about Reason, and that with meaning (see my post The god of Chance).
Be a skeptic, but take that skepticism to it’s rightful conclusion, where with Tom you can say about Jesus, “My Lord and my God!“
“And we know that the Son of God has come, and has given us understanding, in order that we might know Him who is true, and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life” (1 John 5:20).
[Update 4/2/24: A good article by former homicide detective J. Warner Wallace on the evidentiary process can be found here: https://harbingersdaily.com/former-cold-case-homicide-detective-christs-victory-over-death-is-indisputable/]
As always, with love,
Your friend
Vaya con Dios!
Luv Notes To Daughters 