Easter Hope

easter
Jerry Newcombe, D.Min. Providence Forum

These are very trying times. But the ultimate problem is the threat of death. Despite all of life’s difficulties, Jesus has taken the sting out of death.

After a bee stung a boy one day, his young brother was frightened as the insect continued hovering around him. But his father told him not to worry – there was only one stinger in that bee, and his older brother had already received it.

Jesus is our older brother, and He has taken the sting of death upon Himself. As the Apostle Paul would say, “Oh death, where is thy sting?”

 

The Case for Christ

Easter hope is not just a pious sentiment. There is ample reason to believe that Jesus bodily rose from the dead, historically. 

But what about the idea, promoted by skeptics, that perhaps this was just a legend from the ancient world? One man has an interesting take on that. Lee Strobel, former legal affairs editor for The Chicago Tribune, received his legal training at Yale Law School. 

When his wife started going to church, he worked hard to disprove the faith, so he could reclaim her and the two could live happily ever after, as agnostics.

But his quest to disprove Christianity had an unexpected result: He became a believer in the very thing he tried to falsify. He wrote all this up in his classic book, since made into a motion picture, The Case for Christ.

 

Solid evidence

easterIn an interview for D. James Kennedy Ministries, Strobel noted, “One very powerful evidence is that we have a report to the resurrection of Jesus that has been dated back by scholars to within months of His death. So, what we have is, in 1 Corinthians chapter 15, starting in verse 3, a creed, a report of the early church that says, Jesus died—why? For our sins, He was buried, and the third day He rose from the dead. And then it mentions specific individuals and groups to whom He appeared.” 

Strobel adds, “And if that creed developed so early, the beliefs that make up that creed go back even earlier. Probably, one of the greatest classical historians who ever lived, A.N. Sherwin- White of Oxford, studied the rate at which legend grew up in the ancient world. And he determined that the passage of two generations of time is not even enough for a legend to grow up and wipe out a solid core of historical truth.” With the Christian reports of the resurrection, notes Strobel, “We’ve got a ‘news flash from ancient history.’ So that is a very powerful bit of evidence.”

 

Corroborating testimonies

The interesting thing about the resurrection of Jesus is that the earliest skeptics of the event were the disciples themselves. They were only convinced because Jesus appeared to them over and over. Then they became so convinced, they went out and became unstoppable in their proclamation – in some cases, even when it meant they would be put to death for their testimony. 

As Lee Strobel puts it, “We have nine ancient sources inside and outside the New Testament confirming and corroborating that the conviction of the disciples is that they encountered the resurrected Jesus. That is an avalanche of historical data. When you consider most of what we know from ancient history is from one or two sources, but nine ancient sources inside and outside the New Testament [corroborating the disciples’ conviction], that is a convincing amount of evidence that convinced me that the disciples encountered the resurrected Jesus. It changed their lives, it changed everything about them.”

 

Thank God for Jesus, who has taken the sting out of death for those who believe. 

 

Jerry Newcombe, D.Min., is the executive director of the Providence Forum, an outreach of D. James Kennedy Ministries, where Jerry also serves as senior producer and an on-air host. He has written/co-written 33 books, including George Washington’s Sacred Fire (with Providence Forum founder Peter Lillback, Ph.D.) and What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? (with D. James Kennedy, Ph.D.). www.djkm.org​    @newcombejerry      www.jerrynewcombe.com

For more articles by Jerry Newcombe, visit https://www.goodnewsfl.org/

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