April 8, 2000
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2)Evidence for Resurrection by John MacArthur
The Evidence for Resurrection
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
As the heart pumps life blood to the body, so the resurrection is the very heart of the gospel pumping life into every other area of truth. Take away the resurrection and Christianity comes out as wishful thinking and just another useless human philosophy. Christians down through the ages have banked their destiny, lives and hope on the fact that the shameful death of Jesus Christ was not the last word, but that He arose and triumphed over death and that when He said, "Because I live, ye shall live also," He granted to anyone who comes to Him by faith the same resurrection hope. It was this belief that turned the heart broken followers of a crucified rabbi into the courageous martyrs of the early church. It was the resurrection that gave birth to the fellowship of the saints that became the church.
They found in those early years that they could imprison, chastise, beat, verbally assault, invent ways to persecute and even kill them but they could never make them deny the reality of the resurrection. It has always been and will always be the cornerstone of the Christian faith. And because that is true, the most fierce blows struck at Christianity in its history have been struck at the point of the resurrection. Because if you wipe out the resurrection you get rid of everything. You eliminate salvation, you eliminate the deity of Christ, you eliminate eternal life, you eliminate the consequence of death, you just wipe it all out. It comes down to the simple reality that the entire destiny of man hinges on whether Jesus Christ is simply a crucified rabbi whose body lies long rotting in some forgotten Palestinian tomb, or whether in fact He is God as proven by His resurrection. The Apostle Paul said, "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth Jesus as Lord and believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." In other words, salvation is predicated on the confession of the Lordship of a resurrected Christ. According to Romans 10:9 you are saved by confessing that God has raised Jesus from the dead.
The Corinthian church was not denying the resurrection of Christ, what they were denying was the bodily resurrection of the saints. 1 Corinthians 15 is written to try to prove to the Christians that because He literally rose, they too will literally physically bodily personally rise from the dead. The Corinthians were having a problem at this point. They weren't having a problem believing in the resurrection of Christ, they were already Christians, they believed that. But they had never seen the ramifications. And what Paul says in the fifteenth chapter is this, look, verses 1 to 11 he says, you already believe in the resurrection. Therefore realize this, Christ is just the firstfruits of all them that slept, so if you already believe in the resurrection of Christ bodily and physically and literally, why are you hung up on your own resurrection?
The Corinthians had allowed themselves to be victimized by the beliefs of their time. They were really the world mixed with the church. It was denied among the Greeks that there was such a thing as bodily resurrection. Even though the Corinthian Christians had accepted the bodily physical resurrection of Christ, their pagan background, the influence of Greek philosophy had convinced them that there was no physical resurrection for anybody else and so they drew the line after Christ. They were like Hymenaeus and Philetus in 2 Timothy 2:17-18 who said the only resurrection that's going to happen already happened. They were teaching the resurrection as past and they were ruining the faith of people. They were saying, "Oh yes Christ rose bodily, but, oh no, there's no resurrection for us."
In Acts chapter 17 Paul is in Athens and immediately begins to preach about Jesus and talks about His bodily physical resurrection from the grave. That immediately creates a problem for the Greeks. Acts 17:18 "Certain philosophers of the Epicureans and of the Stoics encountered him and some said, What will this babbler say? He seems to be introducing some new kind of religion. He seems to be saying something we think is very strange, very different, we've never heard of this. Why? Because he preached to them Jesus and the resurrection. You see, they had no place for a literal physical bodily resurrection.
Further in verse 32 it says, "When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, which he undoubtedly preached, that not just Christ but all the dead would rise, some mocked and others said, We ought to hear this guy again." You'll notice that nobody believed, so Paul left town. They were so steeped in their philosophy that was anti‑physical, bodily resurrection that they couldn't really believe the message of Paul in Athens. Corinth was a suburb of Athens, so you'll understand the impact that Greek philosophy headquarted in Athens had on Corinth.
Something that came out of Greek society was called "philosophical dualism," basically attributed to Plato. It says you have matter is evil, spirit is good. When they died, the body which was evil sloughed away, the soul which was good went into immortality. They didn't want anything to do with the body. Plato said the body is a prison that binds the spirit and the man waits to be released from his prison. To Plato a resurrection with the body, a rejoining to a body would be like a second hell. So he denied it and Greek culture went along with it. In fact they had a proverb. Their proverb said, "The body is a tomb, I am a poor soul shackled to a corpse." They thought only of the fact that the body was evil, the body was matter, the body was flesh, it would just die and you would flee away to be united with immortality. The Greeks didn't have any problem with the immortality of the soul, it was the resurrection of the body they didn't believe in.
There was another group called the Stoics, mentioned in Acts 17. They believed that God was a spirit but that He was a fire spirit. Every man when he was born, God somehow sent a little spark of that fire to live within the flesh and that's what man is, he is a spark of deity in flesh. So we're a whole lot of little pieces of this fiery spirit of God and running around in flesh. And the Stoics said that when the body dies it goes into the grave, it dissolves into the ashes, goes back to the dust and the spark goes back and rejoins with the big spark who is God. And so it's lost in the immortality of the universal deity.
There's no way that a Greek in his culture or in his philosophy or the religions in which he had been trained would have ever tolerated or understood a resurrection of the body. To him it was a strange message to be mocked and to be disbelieved as occurred in Acts 17. But here comes the Corinthian church and in the midst of the Corinthian church they're a whole bunch of people who believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. They have to to be saved. But now they are denying that the rest of the people are going to rise.
Paul points this problem up in 1 Corinthians 15:12, he says, "How say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?" And then the first part of verse 12, "If Christ is preached that He rose from the dead." If you've already admitted that Christ rose bodily and physically, why can't you believe that you will also? Paul is trying to say, "Look, there is a physical resurrection. It is validated or proven by the resurrection of Christ which was physical and don't worry about the rotten body, let me tell you the kind of body you're going to get." And he starts to do that in verse 35 and following.
Paul's purpose is not to deal with the immortality of the soul. The Greeks didn't have a problem with that, they believed in that. Paul's purpose is to deal with the resurrection of the body. Because before he even needs to deal with the problem he wants to establish some common ground. So his common ground is we all believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ bodily and since we all believe in that, what's the hang-up with believing in our own bodily resurrection? Now that's the flow of the chapter right there and he moves that way through the chapter.
Paul begins in his restatement of the gospel, the testimony of the church. "Moreover, brethren, I make known," and it's emphatic here, very strong statement. "I want to remind you of the gospel." Now let's go back to basic, and some Corinthian might be scratching his head saying, "Why are we going through all this again?" Well he slugs his way through the resurrection, the first eleven verses, and then he hits them with the thunderbolt in twelve, "Listen, if that's true of Christ, why can't it be true of you guys? And why do you have some who deny it?" He says nothing new, it's what I preached to you, it's what you received, it's what you stand on, it's what you are saved by.
Paul says let me recite to you the gospel. I want to declare the gospel. It is that which I received and delivered to you, Christ died, He died for our sins, He was buried, He rose again the third day. Now what happens when somebody receives the gospel? John 1:12, "To as many as received Him to them gave he the right to become sons of God, even to them that believe on His name." So they received it. And remember it? You received the fact that Christ died, that He died for our sins, that He was buried and that He rose out of the grave, you received that. Second point, you stand on that...perfect tense...you took your stand and you continue to stand on it. You haven't changed. This is the permanent state in which you exist. Not only that, but you are being saved by it. In other words, because of your commitment to this truth of the death and resurrection of Christ, you are the possessors of salvation.
Paul is reaffirming that they already believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ as the basis for everything he's going to say in the rest of the chapter. That's the starting point. Sometimes people will say, "Do you have to believe in the resurrection to be saved?" I said it before, I'll say it again...yes. Absolutely yes. And so these are saved people. Now he says look, this is true of you already you believe in this bodily resurrection. But he adds an interesting footnote at the end of verse 2. "If you hold fast what I preached to you, unless your faith is worthless, or unless you have believed without effect, or unless you have had empty faith."
You say, "They received it, they stand on it, they're being saved by it." Yes, if they hold fast to it. You say, "Oh no, you mean you could lose it if you didn't hold fast to it? I thought you believed in the security of the believer?" I do. "What about this believing in vain? You mean somebody could believe and God could say I'm sorry, you believed in vain?" What is it saying here?
In the New Testament there is always a balance between assurance and presumption. There's always a balance between what God does to secure the believer and what the believer does to persevere in his faith. One is looking at it from the divine side and one is looking at it from the human side. The same Paul exactly who wrote this, "For whom He did foreknow He did predestinate to be conformed to the image of His Son that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom He did predestinate He called. Whom He called He justified. Whom He justified He glorified. Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect, shall God that justifieth? Who is He that condemneth, shall Christ that died, yea rather that is risen again? Who shall separate us or what shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, distress, or persecution or famine, or nakedness or peril or sword? For I am persuaded that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor powers nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor any other creation shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
Paul there says if you've been called it's because you've been predestinated. And if you've been predestinated and called you'll be justified. And if you'll be justified you'll be glorified. And nobody but nobody at no time will ever be able to make a change in that. Who will lay any charge to God's elect? It is God that justifies. If God says you're just, who is going to condemn you? If Christ declares you're His, who is going to condemn you? What is going to separate you? Nothing. Paul says in Romans 5:9-10 if the death of Christ can justify us, imagine how the life of Christ interceding for us can keep us. That's Paul's faith. He believes in the security of the believer. He believes that God holds His own.
But on the other hand, looking at it from the human standpoint, Paul also says that a true Christian is known by the fact that he continues to believe. And somebody who goes along for a while believing and then changes to unbelief gives evidence that he never was saved to begin with. He has believed in vain. What do you mean? He has had a worthless faith, a useless faith. To put it another way, a non-committal faith. How many people do you know who believe Jesus died and rose again but aren't Christians? I know a lot of them. In fact, I meet people some times and I'll say, "Do you believe in Jesus Christ? Do you believe He died? Rose again?" Oh yeah, I believe it. They're not Christians. Why? Because that's a useless faith. It has no commitment to it. It's like James says in James 2:17-20, "The devils believe in tremble." And James says you tell me about your faith, let me see its evidence. And what is it evidence? Continuance in the manifestation of faith in the life.
In John 2 it says of Jesus, "Many believed on His name." You say terrific, it's a great revival. The next verse says, "But He never committed Himself to them because He knew their hearts." You see, it was a superficial empty faith with no commitment to it. That's the point. That's why in Romans 10 it says you're not only to believe God raised you from the dead but you're to confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord. There's commitment that goes along with the faith. In John 8:30 a text that frequently comes to mind in this regard, it says, "And as He spoke these words many believed on Him." And again it looks like a great evangelistic harvest. But the next verse says, "Then said Jesus to those Jews who did believe on Him, 'If you continue in My Word then are you My real disciples.'" In other words, there's all kinds of people who initially jump on the bandwagon. In John 6 there were disciples who believed for a while, superficially, and then when things weren't going the way they thought it says His disciples turned away and walked no more with Him, and that's John 8:31 too. Jesus said if you continue in My Word, then you're My disciple for real. So from God's standpoint a true believer is kept, but from our standpoint a true believer is manifest to us because he is one who continues in the faith. The one who departs give evidence of never having really been saved. Luke 8:13 says the same thing, it says this, the parable of the soil, "They that fell on the rock are they who when they hear receive the Word with joy." Oh, it's so wonderful. "And they have no root and for a while they believe but in time of testing they fall away." And their faith was empty, vain, useless, worthless, without effect. It had no real commitment.
Hebrews 10:38 says, "Now the just shall live by faith." You can tell a just man because he lives by faith. He doesn't have a bang moment of faith, he doesn't have an experience of faith, he has a life of faith and he continues in that life and he follows it out. The just shall live by continual faith. But if a man draws back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him. But he says we Christians are not of them who draw back but of them who continue to believe to the saving of the soul. So you can tell a false Christian, one with empty faith, vain faith because he falls back to perdition.
James 1:22. "Be doers of the Word and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves." Now there are plenty of people who hear and they say, "Oh, this is so wonderful." "If a man is a hearer of the Word and not a doer, he's like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and he beholds himself and then he goes his way and he forgets what manner of man he was." He looks in the mirror and he sees himself and he walks away and he forgets. "But whoever looks into the perfect law of liberty...watch...and continues in it, he is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed." It's the one who continues, not the one who looks and says, "Isn't it wonderful?" and walks away and forgets. True Christians are evident by their continued faith.
Colossians 1:21"And you that were once alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works has He now reconciled." The saved. "And the body of His flesh on the cross through death and He's presenting you holy, unblamable, unreprovable in His sight." That's a statement about salvation. Christ in His death has saved you. Watch 23, "If you continue in the faith, grounded and settled and be not moved away from the hope of the gospel." So you see, if you move away from the hope of the gospel you give evidence that it never really took, that you believed in vain, your faith was empty, worthless, useless, faith with no commitment to the lordship of Christ.
1 John 2:19 it says, "They went out from us but they were not of us for if they had been of us they would no doubt have continued with us, but they went out that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us." When you see somebody leave the fellowship, they don't continue in the faith. John says they went out from us because they were not of us. If they had been of us they would have continued with us. And so the upshot of all of this, beloved, I say to you the words of the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 13:5"Examine yourselves whether you are in the faith, prove yourselves." You better look and see that your faith is not empty, uneffectual, useless, worthless faith with no commitment.
Back to 1 Corinthians 15, Paul opens up then by reminding them that if they are true Christians and they give evidence of it by continuing to believe, then they're the ones who've already received the gospel, they already stand on the gospel, they are being saved by the gospel and the gospel is a gospel of a bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. So they're already resurrection believers. And, you know, by this time in the verse they're saying, "Amen, Brother Paul, amen, amen. Oh, we believe it." And later one he'll say, "How come if you believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ you're so hung up on your own bodily resurrection?" That's the point.
The greatest proof of the resurrection is the existence of the church. Who else could have changed them but a living Christ? I doubt seriously that a system of ethics could have literally transformed that entire population of Corinth in a period of eighteen months, and that's what happened according to Acts 18. It had to be a living Christ. Christ had to be alive. And here they are some years later still believing, still standing, still committed, still holding. And, beloved, let me add to that, here we are 2000 years later still believing in the resurrection. And I think we are the greatest proof in the world of the fact that Jesus rose from the dead. Do you realize that for those 2000 years while we've been continuing in the faith the skeptics of the world have done their best to disprove the resurrection and never been able to prove...to disprove it at all to the true saved community? In fact, the longer we live, the greater the resurrection evidence is. And we are literally living evidence that He is alive.
The second evidence of the resurrection is testimony of the Scripture. And you'll notice that at the end of verse 3 he says this all according to the scriptures and the end of verse 4 again, according to the scriptures. In other words, the gospel of the resurrection was not some late edition. It was all predicted in the Old Testament.
He says, "It isn't just my idea, it is according to the Scripture." And that refers to the Old Testament. Paul says this is Old Testament prophecy. Old Testament prophets saw Jesus dying and rising from the dead the third day. In Luke 24 Jesus after His resurrection is walking along the road to Emmaus with two of the disciples. He says to them, "O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken, ought not Christ to have suffered these things and then to enter His glory?" He says you didn't believe the prophets or you would have known they said He would die, you would have known they said He would rise to be glorified. That it was all in the Old Testament. At the end of the book of Acts, chapter 26 verse 22, Paul talking to Agrippa he says, "Having therefore obtained help from God I continue this day witnessing to small and great saying no other things than those which the prophets and Moses did say should come." I just repeat Moses and the prophets so the Jews if they're upset at me ought to call up Moses and tell him. And what is it the prophets and Moses said? That Christ should suffer and that He should be the first that should rise from the dead and show light to the people and the Gentiles. First there the primary one of all who have ever raised from the dead.
What did Moses and the prophets say? That Christ would die and rise. Study the Old Testament and find prophecy after prophecy about the death of Christ: Psalm 22, Isaiah 53, the marvelous prophecy of Genesis 22 in the type of Isaac who is laid as a lamb on the altar to be sacrificed, that is a picture of the death of Christ because a ram comes and takes the place. And the ram is Christ. And Hebrews 11:19 says that when Isaac went off the altar to live again, he became a picture of the resurrection of Christ. Every single sacrifice in the Old Testament spoke of Christ prophetically. We'll see a chapter tonight when we meet to study Zechariah chapter 11, one of the most unbelievable prophecies you've ever seen. In Zechariah 11 it details everything Judas would do in the betrayal of Jesus Christ leading to His death, hundreds of years before Judas was ever born. So His death was prophesied, clearly prophesied in the Old Testament.
The resurrection is also prophesied in the Old Testament. It can be seen in Leviticus 23 in the offering that is given there which is a picture of the resurrection. It can be seen in Psalm 16 where the psalmist said, "He will not let His holy one see corruption." But in the next verse it says, "He will show me the path of life." In other words, the holy one will be buried but His flesh will never see corruption but will come out of the grave to life. That's a clear prophecy of the resurrection. And in Acts 2:25-32 and in Acts 13:34-37 both of those sermons there quote that passage in Psalm 16 as explicit prophecies concerning the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Then you have Jesus' own words. Our Lord said, "As Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the fish, so shall the Son of Man be in the earth." Jonah was a prophecy of Jesus. In Isaiah 53 you have Christ dying and at the end of the chapter you have Him reigning in the earth in the Kingdom. Well you've got to have a resurrection. So the Old Testament speaks of the resurrection. Nothing new. The living church testifies to the resurrection. Now, beloved, we are committed to that resurrection, are we not? Not only as the staple truth of our salvation, but as the hope of our own resurrection which we await when God comes to take His own.
We mark the fact in our minds that everything that happened in the death and resurrection of Christ was prophesized in the Old Testament. The Old Testament said it would all happen, and it happened exactly as the Old Testament said. The Old Testament generally predicts resurrection for everybody. In Psalms 49:15, it predicts the resurrection of the human being. In Psalm 73:24 it predicts the resurrection of the physical, the body and that He is going to be with the Lord. In Isaiah 26 it states that we will be resurrected. Daniel 12.2 also states that we'll be resurrected. So the idea and the concept of mankind being resurrected is in the Old Testament and so is the promise that Jesus would rise from the dead.
There was the promise of the scripture. It is a prophetic absolute. If Jesus doesn't rise from the dead literally, physically, and bodily, without corruption as Psalms 16 says, then He's not the Messiah. Just as the scripture predicted He would be born in Bethlehem and just as it predicted that He would die. So it predicts that He would rise. And of course, when Jesus came into the world He immediately picked up this Old Testament scriptural format and He began to speak immediately about His death.
As early as the Mark 2 He was talking about being taken away, and the phrase there taken away in the Greek is the same one used in Isaiah 53:8 and the Greek rendering to speak of Him being taken away to slaughter. From the earliest part of His ministry, He began to predict that He would die.
In Mark 8:31, he says, "He began to teach them that the Son of man must suffer many things, be rejected by the elders, by the chief priests, by the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again." See also Mark 9:9, "Until the Son of Man is risen from the dead," In verse 31, He taught His disciples again that He should be killed and rise the third day. So He began to teach death and resurrection from the earliest part of His ministry. This was the essence of His whole ministry.
The mission of Jesus was to die and to rise, and this became the format for all the apostolic preaching. As soon as you get into the church in Acts 2, the first sermon ever preached is preached on the resurrection. You get into Acts 3 the second sermon ever preached is preached on the resurrection. When in Acts 1, they went about to choose somebody to take the place of Judas, he had to be a witness with us of the resurrection, because that was the bottom-line.
As He sees it Himself as the Old Testament prophecies see it, as the Epistles relate it, the mission of Jesus was to set up a kingdom. And for that He must live. But in order to have any subjects in His kingdom He had to pay the price of sin and for that He must die. That's what scripture said. The Old Testament again and again and again and again predicts the death of the Messiah. The death of the servant, the death of the sacrifice and it also predicts the King is coming and He will set up His kingdom and He will reign and if you've got a dying Messiah and a reigning Messiah, you've got to have a resurrection in the middle.
Thirdly, it is given by the testimony of eyewitnesses. Look at verse 5. "And that He was seen of Cephus, the of the 12, and after that He was seen of about 500 brethren at once of whom the greater part remained to the present time, but some are fallen asleep or have died. And after that, He was seen of James, then of all the apostles." Human courts today, human courts all through history have pretty much predicated the decisions that make on the basis of eyewitnesses where possible, especially where you get intelligent, competent, sound men and women with real integrity giving the testimony. Paul is saying, in case you have any question about the bodily resurrection of Christ, let me tell you about the 500 plus people who saw Him.
Professor Thomas Arnold was 14 years the famous headmaster or rugby. Author of a famous three volume history of Rome. Appointed to the chair of modern history Oxford University in England. And this is what he writes. "The evidence for our Lord's life and death and resurrection may be and often has been shown to be satisfactory. It is good according to the common rules for distinguishing good evidence from bad. Thousands and tens of thousands of persons have gone through it piece by piece as carefully as every judge summing up on an important case. I have myself done it many times over, not to persuade others, but to satisfy myself. I have been used for many years to study the history of other times and to examine and weigh the evidence of those who have written about them and I know of no one fact in the history mankind which is better proved by fuller evidence than the great sign that God has given us that Christ died and rose again from the dead."
Mary-Magdalene was in the garden. She saw Him. Did she know it was Him? No, she thought it was the gardener and she didn't know until He revealed Himself. Two disciples who had been with Him for three years, walked along on the road to Emmaus, did they know who He was? They didn't know who He was until he revealed himself. In John 21 He appears on the shore and they don't know who He is until He chooses to reveal Himself. Post-resurrection, no one saw Jesus as Jesus until He revealed who he was, to a select group. And so He revealed Himself after His resurrection. And now Paul chronologically lists those revelations.
Since this is the oldest record of the resurrection written even before any of the gospels, this is the first insight into who were the eyewitnesses who saw Him. Number one, was Cephus, and that's Aramaic for rock, Greek for rock is what? Peter. And Luke 24:31 when the road to Emmaus disciples came along, they reported to everybody else that He was seen by Simon. Somewhere along the line right after Jesus came out of the grave, He went right to Peter. You say, why did He do that? Peter was a coward. He didn't deserve anything. Why did He go to Peter, the disciple who denied Him? Number one, I think God wanted to emphasize what grace is and what love is and what forgiveness is. Jesus needed Peter for a strategic ministry. He can use crooked sticks as well as He can use straight ones. And he went right to Peter because He needed Peter. And after all, Peter had denied Him, but what had he done immediately after he denied Him? He wept bitterly.
He had a broken heart because he had denied Jesus and now Jesus was dead and he could never make it right. So Jesus went right to Him and met with Him. It was just a very private meeting. But Peter became eyewitness number one. Why did He pick Peter out? Who was the unquestionable leader among the 12? Peter. Who had the greatest ministry in the first 12 chapters of the book of Acts? Peter. Who was the guy with the greatest line of credibility, with the most clout, with the greatest power, with the greatest impact on the early church in Jerusalem. Peter. And He picks out the prime witness of the resurrection and says, "Peter believed it."
Verse 5, "Then He appeared to the twelve." Do you remember that same day it says in John 20:19, "And the same day, it being night, the disciples were in the upper room, the door being shut and Jesus appeared to them and said, "Peace be unto you." Immediately in John 20 after the incident with Peter He goes right to the uper room and He meets the twelve. (There are only eleven now, but the twelve became their official title.)
These are the apostles who were righting the theology the church was born out of. From Acts 2:42 on the church studied the apostles doctrine. They were the bottom-line. They were the ones who articulated the revelation of God and He says it is Peter who was the primary one and the rest of the twelve, they saw the living Christ. That's evidence folks.
These are competent intelligent witnesses. And then he goes on to verse 6, and he says after that He was seen by over 500 brethren at once, at the same time. And He adds, "this of whom the greater part remain to the present time, but some have died." He says, there's a second line of evidence. Not only is the resurrection validated by the character of these witnesses, but by the number of these other witnesses. You've not only got the twelve whose character is impeccable, unquestionable, but you've got the mass of 500 people who saw the living Christ.
In one case you have the quality witness. In the other case, you have quanitity witnesses. Some believe it occurred in Jerusalem, because that's where so many people lived that were associated with the church. But if you really look at the text in Acts 1, you find there were only 120 disciples in Jerusalem when the church was born gathered in the upper room. There may have been some more, but it seems best to assume that Jesus' greatest reception was not in Jerusalem, but maybe the greatest crowd of people would have been Galilee and in fact, perhaps the sighting of Jesus by the 500 occurred on some hillside in Galilee when Jesus was in Galilee as Matthew indicates in the latter chapters He would be. You have any case in court that you want to have and you drag through 500 people who all say the same thing, that's fairly convincing.
All you need according to the Old Testament law was that something had to be confirmed in the mouth of what, two or three. God always goes overboard. Everything He does, He just had 497 more than He needed. He says, "the majority of them are still alive." You check it out. Not only the character of witnesses who would some of them be dead, but the quantity of witnesses most of whom were still alive, you can ask them yourself.
Paul adds, "And after that He was seen by James. This is James the brother of our Lord, the one who wrote the Epistle of James. The one who became the head of the Jerusalem church in the sense that He was the leader. James the brother of Jesus, the half brother, the son of Joseph and Mary. You say well, what's so important about this? Well, this is a witness of a different kind. Listen to John 7:5. "For neither did His brothers believe in Him." Now you've got the testimony of His own brother who's an unbeliever. You say well, what's the importance of this? You have a witness right out of his family who was a skeptic who has totally been changed and he is now a believer of the resurrection. Maybe when Jesus died, James began to feel a little remorse. And maybe as he knew the circumstances of the death of his half brother, humanly speaking, maybe he began to feel some admiration for Jesus. And Jesus wanted a witness out of His own family, because you know it would be hard. People would say, don't kid us about you resurrecting from the dead. Your own family doesn't even believe it.
Jesus sought out James. Jesus appeared to James in resurrection form and James believed and James was changed. And James starts out his letter by saying, "James a servant of our Lord Jesus Christ." Well, that's a big change for an unbeliever. Now you've got not only the testimony of quality men and of a quantity crowd, but you've got the testimony of a skeptic here. Right out of Jesus' own family an unbeliever is transformed into one who does believe. The resurrection convinced him when all the rest of the stuff didn't apparently. He'd watched Jesus' life. It didn't convince him. The resurrection did.
Acts 1:3, it says, "He showed himself alive by many infallible proofs being seen by the apostles literally 40 days speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God." So he appeared to the apostles again, at least on three occasion to them as a group. And so you can see the witnesses are really there. Quality men, quantity of people and even a skeptic.
Fourth, the testimony of a special witness, Paul. "And last of all, He was seen of me also." And he throws in...this is a whole other category of witnesses. This isn't some quality person who's very much behind Jesus. This isn't 500 believing brethren. This isn't His own human brethren. This guy is a Christian killer. He says, "I am as one born out of due time. I am the least of the apostles not fit to be called an apostle because I persecuted the church of God." Here is a total unbeliever. He is a total persecutor of the church. He says, I'm the last to see Him. Last of all.
Paul says, "I saw him." I was on the way to Damascus. Read Acts 9. And I was just going there and I was breathing out fire and slaughter and I was going to do my thing, you see. All of a sudden I got slammed to the dirt and there in front of me was the blazing glorious resurrected Christ and I said to Him, "Lord what will you have me to do?" Paul saw Him. He saw Him and He was so brilliant He blinded him. It was the blinding of darkness. It was the blinding of light, like gazing at the sun. He says, "I saw Him as one born out of due time." Literally ectrometry. From the word ectroma, which a pre-mature birth. Ectrometry is an aborted fetus. Now that's interesting. He says, "I saw Him as an aborted fetus." An abortion, a miscarriage. Paul is saying I was useless. I was ugly. I was despised. I was worthless. I wasn't even born at the right time and yet it was me that Jesus appeared to. That tells me that God is no respecter of persons. Paul says, "I saw Him." I'm not fit to be even called an apostle, because I've persecuted the church of God." Can't you imagine that all through the life of that dear man in his mind he saw the visions coming back and the people he had persecuted because the loved Jesus Christ. They were all his brothers and he killed them once. I didn't deserve it, he said. The least of all. Verse 10, "But by the grace of God I am what I am. And His grace which was bestowed on me was not in vain." Beloved it is always by the grace of God we are what we are, is it not? If you're saved, it's of His grace. But Paul says, "it was a sovereign thing. It was unmerited. I was just going to kill the Christians and the next thing I knew Jesus came and He appeared to me and He changed me and He made me an apostle and I can't believe it. I was the scum," he says.
Paul didn't just accept salvation. He gave his life to fulfill God's will, and it shattered his life. Tough for the skeptics to deal with Paul. And so he says it wasn't in vain either. "But I labored more abundantly than the rest of the apostles, yet it wasn't me, but it was the Grace of God was with me." I work to the point of exhaustion. And God gave more abundant fruit to me than He did to anybody else, he says. It wasn't me, it was God. He's not extolling his hard work. He's saying I worked hard and there was a more abundant response as God's grace worked. It's the idea of results in the more abundant rather than effort. God's grace did it. How do you turn a guy going killing Christians into the greatest apostle who ever lived. How do you take somebody who is doing everything he can to destroy the church and to the greatest proponent of the church that every lived? There's only one thing that could do it. He saw the living Christ.
Fifth is the testimony of the common message, verse 11. "Therefore, whether it were I or they, whether it's myself or the other apostles, so we preach and so ye believed. He's saying this, we all are preaching the same message. We all are believing the same gospel and it is a gospel of resurrection so we preach the resurrection. So you believe the resurrection. Whether it's Paul or Peter or the twelve or James or whoever it is, it's all the same proclamation and whether it's Corinth or Galatia or Ephesus or Colossi or anywhere else, we all believe the same thing. One of the greatest testimonies to the resurrection is the unity, the uniformity of the common faith of the early church. There weren't a few over here who believed in resurrection and a little segment over here who didn't. That's something new folks, that's something new. It's only been in the age of the skeptic that all of a sudden we've got some part of the church that's the church believing in resurrection and some other so-called Christian church that denies it.
Paul says early, we all believed it. And if we all believed it and if we all believed that Jesus rose and we all believe in a bodily resurrection, then go to verse 12, and watch how his argument moves. "Now if Christ is preached by all of us that He rose from the dead, how come some are saying there's no resurrection of the dead?" If you have accepted already the resurrection of Christ bodily, what's the problem with the concept of bodily resurrection. There are three great implications of the gospel. Implication number one, when you hear the gospel of the resurrection the first thing that should happen is a recognition of sin. "And last of all He was seen by me as a dead fetus, the least of the apostles, not fit to be called an apostle because I persecuted the church of God." The first implication the gospel had in the life of Paul when he met Jesus, he recognized he was a sinner.
Second, not only a recognition of sin, but secondly a revolution of character. Verse 10, "but by the grace of God I am what I am in His grace, which was bestowed on me was not in vain." In other words, he was changed. He was miraculously transformed. The first implication of the gospel is a recognition of sin. The second is a revolution of character.
The third is a redirection of energy. "And so I labored more abundantly than they all. Yet not I, but the grace of God in me. Listen beloved, when you hear the gospel of the resurrection, number one you should respond with the sense of sinfulness. Number two, you should turn to Jesus Christ, the living Christ for a revolution of character and number three, you ought to be anxious to see a redirection of energy so that from then on, your life is given not so that grace is in vain, but so that grace fulfills it's plan. Your life is given in a total commitment to bear fruit for His glory.
