Why Christ’s Resurrection Matters
This Sunday, April 9th is Resurrection Sunday (also known as Easter). A couple of years ago, I wrote about the resurrection, and how we can know it really happened.
But why is Jesus’s resurrection important? The Bible tells about other people who came alive after being dead, such as Lazarus (John 11:1-44) or the story of Elijah and the widow’s son (1 Kings 17:17-24). Yet Jesus’s resurrection is rightly called the cornerstone of Christianity. Why is that?
The reason is because of the things Jesus said about himself (which I discuss in Chapter One of my first book, Beyond Blind Faith, entitled “Christianity Is Different”).
Christianity claims that Jesus was much more than a mere man. Christianity asserts that he was also God—or at least divine. That is not something the apostles or the early church fathers invented. It was what Jesus said about himself. In short, he made claims about himself that no mere human has any right to make about himself, such as: [1]
1. He thought He was perfect.
2. He claimed to be eternal.
3. He said He was the Christ (Messiah), the Son of God, and He considered Himself equal with God.
4. He taught that following or rejecting Him was the same as following or rejecting God.
5. He insisted that He had come from Heaven, and He spoke about Heaven as if He’d been there.
6. He predicted His own death—and, more importantly, His resurrection.
7. He believed His death was necessary to save the world.
8. He claimed to have authority to forgive sins—not just wrongs committed against himself, but wrongs committed against other people.
9. He didn’t bother to cite any type of authority to validate what He said or did. He believed that his say-so was enough.
If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead—if it was all a lie, a fabrication, by his followers, then he was either a deluded lunatic or a despicable fraud. But if he died and rose from the dead a few days later. . . . Well, you know.
[1]. If you want the Biblical cites for each of these, you’ll have to do your own research, or read my book.
0 Comments