A rather ambitious student had the temerity to say to Voltaire, a great 18th century French philosopher, Sir, I think I'd like to begin a new religion. How do you recommend I start? And Voltaire smiled, looked down at him benignly, and he said, well, I would suggest that you begin by getting yourself killed and three days later rise from the dead.

Voltaire was one of the great free thinkers of his generation,

but even he could see that unless you're going to improve upon the story of the resurrection, you're wasting your time trying to start a new religion.

Apart from the resurrection, anything you care to say about the immortality of the soul, life after death, or for that matter the meaning of this life, is really only speculation and theorizing. And you can crank out your theory, whatever it might be, and it might be a very lovely theory, but we look for the evidence.

Let me put it to you another way. You can speculate in any direction you care to about the soul of Confucius, or Buddha, or Mohammed, or Gandhi, or any other religious leader in the history of the world. You can speculate about their souls,

but we know perfectly well what happened to their bodies. They were buried, and like everybody else's body, they turned to dust.

When you come to the story of Easter, we separate the men from the boys.

When Jesus Christ walked out of that tomb on Easter morning, all of history snapped into focus. Here was something radically, totally unique, unlike anything else in the history of religion or the philosophies that men have spun.

Let me suggest this to you.

there is a point of beginning there is one thing that is absolutely certain in the Easter proclamation and it's that the tomb was empty

think of it with me for a few minutes

a few days after the resurrection Peter and the others began to proclaim in the center of the city of Jerusalem just a stone's throw from the site of the crucifixion within easy walking distance of the tomb that Christ was raised from the dead. And as they proclaimed that message, included in it was a devastating indictment of the powerful coalition of church and state. Peter said, Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs which God did through Him in your midst, this Jesus you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.

And again he said, you denied the Holy One and killed the Prince of Life. Now if the authorities had trouble with Jesus before He died, you can imagine the trouble that that sort of a proclamation began to give them. You have killed God come in human form.

Now, if it was just a small group of fanatics over in a corner somewhere minding their own business, that might not have been a threat. But on the very first day that message was proclaimed, 3,000 people believed it.

And I solemnly assure you that guarantees beyond any argument whatsoever at least one thing. And that is the tomb was empty.

Because you better believe that if the Jews and the Romans, or either one of them separately, could have possibly silenced that preaching, could have stopped that accusation, they would have done so. And there would be no better way, no easier, no quicker way to do it, than by dragging out the moldering remains of Jesus, putting them up on mocking display, and undercutting the whole preaching of the resurrection.

They didn't do that because they couldn't do that. They couldn't do it because they didn't have the body. The tomb was empty.

And ever since then, ever since then, we've had men spin out one theory after another as to how the tomb got empty. That is to say, those who cannot or will not accept the Easter story.

It's amazing and it's somewhat amusing to look at some of these theories. For me, I really think it would take more to believe some of the theories than to believe the miracle.

You see, they understood and men have understood generation after generation the implications of this being true. If in fact Jesus Christ walked out of that tomb, then He is who He claims to be. and suddenly all of life is changed. I am no longer my own boss. I'm answerable to somebody else. If Jesus Christ is King of kings and Lord of lords, then He has a claim upon my allegiance and I can't duck it.

I'm responsible to somebody else.

So some people would turn away from this. They'd try to ignore it altogether. But when you face up to the fact of the empty tomb, and the fact that here are men proclaiming that that tomb is empty because God has pulled off a resurrection, you see the necessity of spinning out an explanation for that if you can't accept the Easter message.

The earliest and the most persistent alternative we find in the book of Matthew. We read in the last chapter that the authorities bribed the soldiers to say that the disciples came while we were asleep and stole the body.

It's a rather pathetic kind of an explanation.

Without even mentioning the fact that this was a calculated perjury,

let's just notice that there's a certain question as to the trustworthiness, the reliability of witnesses who would come and say such a thing when you stop to remember that they were hired precisely to prevent anybody tampering with the tomb.

And if they couldn't do that, one wonders how trustworthy they are in coming and giving this sad explanation. Beyond which, they say it happened while we were asleep.

I trust I don't have to point out that you don't really know what happens while you're asleep. If the tomb got empty while they were asleep, that hasn't told us anything about how it got empty. Maybe somebody came and stole the body, but just maybe Jesus walked out under his own power.

But beyond all that, the theory utterly collapses when you consider the disciples themselves. They've already shown themselves to be a weak, fearful, cowardly, utterly dispirited band of people who run away and hide when Jesus is betrayed, who can't even face identifying themselves as those who knew Him. Peter says, I don't even know His name.

Do you think that that same group of people, two and a half days later, could somehow pull themselves together, gather the strength and the courage to go and overwhelm a crack Roman guard, or maybe they came while they were asleep,

roll away this mighty stone too heavy for three women to touch,

do it quietly so we don't wake them up, steal the body away, go hide it somewhere else, and then stand up and proclaim resurrection. For what? What did they possibly have to gain by such a thing? They had everything to lose, and as a matter of fact, they lost everything. They were thrown out of the synagogue. They were cut off from temple worship.

They were disenfranchised from the political process. Their families disowned them. They were persecuted and in almost every single case martyred. And yet they went on proclaiming resurrection.

Some people have come up with a very ingenious explanation for saying that they would steal the body and proclaim what they knew to be a lie. It runs like this.

They knew that if people would believe that Jesus was in fact a supernatural figure and had come back from the dead, then they'd be more likely to accept His teaching. And so they embellished the story.

But now notice, if that's what they did, then the real point is not the resurrection itself.

The real point is the teaching, the theology, the ethics of Jesus. You scrape away the resurrection. Scrape away any claim to divinity. He is no longer Christ. He is no longer Messiah and Son of God. He is not God come in the flesh. He's just a teacher and we're interested in His teaching.

The only problem with that is that His teaching, once you've taken all that else out of it, is nothing more or less than straight Judaism, which everybody already believed. I mean, that does seem rather a lot of work to go to to get people to believe what they already believe.

Especially when you stop to consider that the message itself, the theology itself, would condemn the very thing that we're now saying they would do in order to promote it. Lying about God. Claiming that God, who alone is God, has become a man and were to worship Him. That's blasphemy if it's not true. And nobody was more conscious of that than the apostles. Paul says we are even found to be misrepresenting God if we claim that He raised Christ and it was just a fabrication.

Men don't die for a lie.

We can point to any number of instances in history of fanatical people dying for a mistaken belief, yes.

But how many do you know that have given their lives willingly, joyfully, for what they knew was false?

And yet we have, in the history of the early church, a united witness. Men going gladly to crucifixion, to being boiled in oil, to being burned at the stake, to being thrown to the lions proclaiming resurrection.

Now I'm afraid that the pathetic theory of an apostolic conspiracy only demonstrates the absolute poverty of any intelligent alternative to the explanation of the empty tomb.

If you read the New Testament with anything like an open mind, I believe you'll come away convinced that these men believed what they were saying. They believed it and they offered their lives gladly for it.

Some people have said, it wasn't the disciples who took the body of Jesus, but the Jewish authorities or the Roman soldiers themselves, fearing that somebody might tamper with the tomb, they came and they moved the body elsewhere. That's sort of a variation on the Old West theme of guarding an empty stagecoach while the gold rides in an inconspicuous wagon somewhere else.

You see, the problem with that is, as we've already said, if they knew where the body of Jesus was, surely they would have produced it when the apostles began proclaiming resurrection.

well a few people have said no it wasn't the apostles it wasn't the Jews and it wasn't the Romans but there was in fact one man who had access to the body of Jesus and who might very well have gone in and moved it because he didn't want again somebody tampering and that was Joseph of Arimathea after all it was his tomb he could come and go as he saw fit

but again why?

People are divided in their opinions of Joseph. Some think he was just a faithful Jew. Some think he was a quiet, hidden disciple of Jesus. If he was a faithful Jew, then he would have been on the side that would have wanted to produce the evidence to explode the story of resurrection. If he was a disciple of Jesus, surely he wouldn't have allowed the apostles to go on proclaiming what he knew to be a falsehood.

The body was missing. It was gone.

Now the silliest theory that I have ever come across was propounded in 1907 by a very famous scholar named Kersip Lake.

And his theory took off from the passage that we read a moment ago in Mark's Gospel, which he reconstructed in a rather interesting way. Dr. Lake said, you see what happened was, The women went early in the morning. They weren't too familiar with Jerusalem, and they didn't know their way around very well, and it was kind of misty and foggy, and their eyes were full of tears, and they were fearful and superstitious and all emotional anyway. And in the early morning twilight, they missed their way, and they went to the wrong tomb.

Now, there happened to be a young man there, and he realized what they were up to, and he said, you seek Jesus of Nazareth, he isn't here. Pointing to another tomb, he said, behold where they laid him. The women being frightened and superstitious and very emotional, well, they were women.

Supposed that they had seen an angel and went and ran and told the disciples that Jesus was risen from the dead.

Well, of course, Dr. Lake leaves out the most important phrase in the story. You see, Jesus of Nazareth, He is not here. He is risen.

Go tell His disciples and Peter that He's going before you to Galilee. There you'll see Him as He told you.

Do we suppose that not only the women, but Peter and John went to the wrong tomb?

That the other apostles went to the wrong tomb? That the whole band of the disciples went to the wrong tomb? and that finally the authorities also went to the wrong tomb and couldn't find the body of Jesus when they began to proclaim resurrection.

I find as one of the most fascinating elements in the Easter story, the fact that when the women went back to the apostles, they didn't believe them. They didn't believe the women.

They said, unless we see it for ourselves, we're not going to accept this story. Last year in his commentary on Easter evening, Rod McLeish made the comment that religious faith has gone out of favor because it ignores the cold scientific rules of evidence. Not so Christianity. Not so Christianity. Christianity is based upon the hard, cold, scientific rules of evidence. These were no gullible band of stupid fishermen.

They said, unless we see with our own eyes, we're not going to believe. Unless I put my hand in the nail print, my hand in his side, said Thomas, I'm not going to believe.

I can't reproduce a resurrection for you in a laboratory experiment any more than I can reproduce any other event of history. That's not how you verify history. You verify history by going to eyewitnesses. That's why we footnote things in history books. You go to the eyewitnesses and you say, what happened? And the report of an eyewitness has to be considered innocent until proven guilty.

And so we come, you see, to the second great pillar on which the whole edifice is built. It's not just a matter of the empty tomb, though that's where we begin. It's also a matter of the appearances of the risen Christ.

He comes and appears to Mary. He appears to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. He appears to ten on Easter evening, Thomas being absent. Eight days later, he comes and appears again to the eleven, Thomas being present and having his wish fulfilled. Thomas, put your finger in the nail print. Put your hand in my side. And Thomas falls down on his knees, my Lord and my God.

he appears to Peter and John for breakfast one morning on the shore of the lake of Galilee he appears to James his half brother who up to that point didn't believe in him interesting Paul says he appeared to more than 500 brethren at one time it's a very interesting footnote to that you remember that on Pentecost there were 120 gathered in the upper room waiting for the promised Holy Spirit Paul says there were 500 who saw Jesus prior to that where were the other 380?

we don't know but what we do know is that when the apostles finally got up and began to leave Jerusalem to evangelize as they were told all Judea, Samaria the uttermost parts of the earth they didn't do that for a while because Jerusalem was very comfortable until the authorities began to persecute them drove them out of the city, and when they finally went out on their evangelistic effort, they discovered that the proclamation of resurrection preceded them to city after city after city.

One can only surmise that some of those 380 others had gone back home, had gone to their businesses, had gone to their cities and hamlets and towns, and said, you'll never believe it. I saw a man risen from the dead.

And then Paul says, last of all,

as to one untimely born, he appeared to me.

Do you see what I'm suggesting? There is absolutely no room whatsoever

for our saying this was a little bit of an exaggeration. They didn't really mean to say He rose again. That was just a way of saying life triumphs over death or hope conquers despair or think good thoughts because it will all come out right in the end. They bent over backward to tell us we were there, we saw it, we talked with Him, we touched Him, we ate with Him, He's alive!

We're not interested just in a historical argument this morning. Because we're not interested just in a Christ that walked out of a tomb. We're interested in a Christ who's alive today. Who's alive today.

And as Paul says, He appeared to me as to one untimely born. That's the message of Easter. That He would appear to you, and to you, and to you, and to me, as to those untimely born. We weren't there. We didn't have the privilege of knowing Him in His earthly life.

but He would come to each one of us as we would open the doors of our lives and invite Him to make Himself known.

Jesus says in the book of Revelation, I stand at the door and knock.

If you hear My voice and you throw open that door and you invite Me to come in, I will come in. And I'll make fellowship with you. Do you see that the claim of Christianity is not just, as I say, a historical argument, but it's a blatant invitation.

You too can know this risen, living Lord Jesus Christ. Throw open the door of your life and say, Come in, Lord Jesus Christ. I will abdicate the throne of my life. I will turn my life over to You. Thank You for loving me. Thank You for dying for me. Thank you for rising for me.

Come into my life, Lord Jesus Christ.

And unless he's a liar,

unless the whole thing is a lie,

he will surely do so. He will surely do so. That's the message of Easter. He is risen. He is risen indeed. Hallelujah. Hallelujah.