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5th October 2024
SaturdayReflection
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'John Piper offers'
'founder and teacher of Desiring God.org'
"Reasoning with the Mind"
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That's the way we are as humans.
We have heads, and therefore must be given facts and evidences and arguments in order to make reasonable commitments.
We Christians believe that God has called us to persuade men and women and children to follow Jesus in the obedience of faith.
The very nature of man requires, therefore, that two things be happening in the church all the time.
Evidences and reasons and arguments must be forthcoming that the Jesus we are summoning people to follow is in fact real.
I will focus on only one feature of the biblical portrait of Jesus: the claim that he was raised from the dead.
It is the foundation of Christian teaching; if it disintegrates, everything collapses.
Paul had to deal with the problem of scepticism at Athens, where he was laughed at because of preaching the resurrection and at Corinth, where people were denying that there was any such thing as resurrection
First century people were not any more prone to believe the report of a resurrection than we are.
The preaching of the resurrection, the willingness of the apostles to suffer for it, and the rise of the church are historical facts denied by no serious historian regardless of his faith.
The apostle Peter preached a sermon in Jerusalem in which he said,
This Jesus God raised up, and of that we are all witnesses".
Peter addressed the people of Jerusalem in the temple and said,
"You killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses"
One of the two most important decisions any of you will ever face is this one:
Is the claim true or false?
(The other decision is: If it's true, will I follow him?)
Does the claim start to make sense out of life and death and eternity, or does it cause our experience of the world simply to disintegrate further?
Does it offer plausible answers to life's deepest and most pressing questions?
We should seek to decide whether someone is telling the truth. We should not flip a coin.
There should be reasons for why we credit a person's claim to truth.
I want to argue briefly that there are no extenuating circumstances in the lives of the apostles which would account for their being deceived about Jesus' resurrection or their pushing it as a fraud.
First of all, we may rest assured that the gospel reports of the empty tomb are true.
The reason for this assurance is that the preaching of the resurrection could not have lasted in Jerusalem for a single hour if the authorities could have pointed to the body of Jesus.
The empty tomb was indisputable, and the only recourse of the authorities was to spread the rumour that the disciples had stolen the body.
But the suggestion that the disciples were intentionally pushing a fraud onto the world runs into an insurmountable difficulty.
It would mean that the disciples were risking their lives for what they knew to be a fraud.
And that is as contrary to human experience as a resurrection from the dead.
There is no evidence to support the notion that the disciples were of such a mind set as to hallucinate that Jesus was raised from the dead.
This is especially true when you consider that their specific understanding of Jesus' resurrection as a bodily one, was unheard of in traditional Jewish thinking.
It is a new proclamation, and therefore probably stems from a new experience, namely, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and his authoritative interpretation of that event.
No matter how hard one searches for a non-supernatural explanation of the preaching of Jesus' resurrection in Jerusalem, one always encounters historical improbabilities.
Therefore, the explanation of the apostles commends itself to the open mind,
"This Jesus God raised up. Of that we are all witnesses".
All things considered, the resurrection of Jesus is more probable than delusion or intentional fabrication by the apostles.
We have good historical reason to believe that Jesus rose from the dead.
And when this is combined with the apostles' interpretation of what that resurrection means for us and for the world, and we see the mysteries of life falling into place.
Our sins forgiven and our lives renewed and empowered for authentic love, then we have an unshakable foundation and can say with confidence to the whole world:
"If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved."
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This is an extremely edited version.
The full article (MUCH MORE) is avaiable on request
'John Piper'
is founder and teacher of Desiring God and chancellor of Bethlehem College and Seminary.
For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
He is author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and most recently Foundations for Lifelong Learning: Education in Serious Joy.
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