Transcription
You cannot have a fully developed Christian worldview without being able to defend the resurrection of Jesus.
Listen to me carefully: the center of a Christian worldview is the death and resurrection of Jesus. Unlike any other religion or philosophy in the world, Christianity grounds itself in a singular historical fact: if Jesus Christ rose from the grave, he is the Son of God, and our sins can be forgiven in him.
It comes down to what happened, and we even know the date: April 5th, AD 33. If Jesus walked out of that grave alive, it has huge implications not only for this life but for the eternal life to come.
Here’s the cool thing: my favorite chapter in the book *Body of Proof* is one I wrote that basically says if the gospel writers were trying to make up a story that wasn’t true but would get a lot of people's attention, they did a terrible job in the gospels. If they were trying to make up a story, because just like you've given voice to the skeptics, we don't give people in the first-century time of Jesus enough credit.
Nobody believed that dead bodies came back to life, just like today. They didn’t either in the first century; it was something that was laughable. When I think about the Apostle Paul standing in Corinth at the Areopagus, proclaiming the truth of Christianity, they were giving him a hearing until he brought up one thing: Jesus coming back from the dead. Then they literally laughed him off the Areopagus mountain.
So, Paul dealt with this skepticism. Jesus certainly dealt with it because none of his disciples thought he was going to come back from the dead. They just didn’t get it. Yet, Jesus in Mark 8:31, Mark 9:31, Mark 10:33, and 34 kept saying, "The Son of Man will die and come back from the grave."
So, are you asserting that we can determine that the resurrection really did happen, that Jesus came back from the dead based on evidence? Or is that something we are called by God to believe and embrace by faith? Or is it a combination of reason, logic, and faith? How do they fit?
Kirk, this is why I love takeaways, and I love you in particular because you call us to love God with our hearts and our minds. To answer your question, the resurrection requires certainly belief. Romans 10:9 says no one can be a Christian unless you believe in your heart that Jesus is Lord and proclaim that Jesus is risen from the dead.
But it is also an act of faith based on evidence. We believe to become Christians, but we don’t do so in a vacuum. We don’t have blind faith. The best explanation of what happened at that tomb 2,000 years ago is that Jesus physically and bodily rose from the grave.
Had we been there that first Easter morning, we could have hugged him. In fact, they sat with him; they had fish for breakfast on the beaches of the Sea of Galilee. He was no phantom; he was no ghostly apparition. He was resurrected from the grave.
This is why his brother, who didn’t believe in him—who, according to Mark 6, Mark 3, and John 7, did not even believe in him—thought he was out of his mind when he was proclaiming to be the Son of God. James had an experience, according to 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, of seeing his brother come back from the dead, and that was a game changer.
James, the brother of Jesus, becomes the leader of the Jerusalem Church. That same transformation that James had, everyone in your audience can have as well if you see and believe just like Mary did in John 20.
So, do you think that the resurrection miracle was necessary for the gospel, for Christianity to really take off? I mean, Jesus had already done so many amazing miracles. He had fulfilled prophecies; we know where the Messiah was going to be born. We knew other things about his life and his death. He turned water into wine; he had already fed the 5,000.
He had done all these things. Why the resurrection? Because, I mean, if you want people to believe in Jesus, maybe you could get them to buy into him turning some water into wine or multiplying some fish. But coming back from the dead? That’s a pretty tough sell.
Absolutely, and Kirk, this is why one of the things I point out in *Body of Proof*: Jesus was not the only guy in the first-century world to wave a flag and say, "Hey, I’m the Messiah." In fact, there were at least ten other what I call Messianic pretenders. We actually read about two of them in the book of Acts—one that took 4,000 out into the wilderness; he died, and his following was lost.
Another one’s following was lost, and this should have been no different for the early Christian movement, except for the fact that Jesus did come back from the dead.
Now, is it important? If you look at the gospels, there are 89 chapters in the gospels. Only four of the 89 deal with the birth of Christ. The great majority of the 89 chapters of the gospels deal with the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
What’s fascinating to me, Kirk, when I study the gospels, is that we only have parts of 26 days of the life of Jesus. Think about that for a minute: only parts of less than a month of his life. Because the central focus of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and the early preaching was that God raised his son Jesus from the dead.
While the miracles are certainly important and validate his message, remember what the Pharisees said in Mark 12: "We demand a sign from you, Jesus." And remember, there’s always a Pharisee in the crowd when we teach God’s truth.
Jesus said, "I’m going to give you one sign: the sign of Jonah, the sign of the resurrection from the dead."
Well, you would think that the religious leaders of the day, who were anticipating the coming of their Messiah, the Redeemer of Israel, their deliverer, would be excited about someone who comes from Bethlehem and from this particular bloodline and embrace him and throw a party when they heard the news that Jesus rose from the grave.
Right? Why was Jesus and his followers treated with such hatred when they began preaching the resurrection? Because the truth of the gospel penetrates hearts.
If you and I could take you by the hand back to first-century Jerusalem, the priesthood was corrupt. The Sadducees had no real religious belief system to speak of; they would be like the modern agnostics.
They would have been so scattered in Jesus’ message. In Luke 19, Jesus weeps at his triumphal entry to kick off Easter week. He said, "Would you have seen?" Remember, he’s speaking to the religious leaders. As you’ve just rightly pointed out, he begins to weep.
In fact, the force of the text in Luke 19 is that Jesus begins sobbing. He says, "You’re the religious leaders, and yet peace embodied is before your very eyes, and you don’t even see it. You’re blinded."
So, friends, as I say in the book *Body of Proof*, we can be so religious that we miss Jesus. My message to people today is: look into the resurrection of Jesus. Don’t be so religious that you miss Jesus.
What’s the most common response from skeptics when someone tells them about the resurrection? The most common response is that they’ve never looked into the actual evidence for the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus.
So it’s an answer of ambivalence. But when I’ve given my life to study this, Kirk—I did my PhD in Oxford, a 93,000-word thesis on the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus—I wanted to put together a book that, in about three hours of reading, you could read and be totally current on the evidence, the archaeology, the truth claims of Christianity.
But really, just like you and I are having right now, have comfortable dialogue. Most skeptics will believe, and here’s the fascinating claim: the disciples and the early followers of Jesus had experiences of seeing Jesus alive after he was dead.
Skeptical scholars will grant that, but they must say, "What kind of nature it was, I don’t know." But they don’t doubt the appearance traditions. They remind me of the religious leaders in the gospels who came up with the "stole the body" theme.
"Oh, just make up the theme; pay someone off; they stole the body of Jesus." So, I believe by faith that Jesus rose from the grave. I wasn’t there; I didn’t see it. But there are many, many reasons we have to support that belief that a man rose from the grave.
That’s exactly right. Some people might start out and say, "Wait, how do you know it was really a bodily resurrection, not just a spiritual resurrection? Like the spirit of Christ that now dwells on the Earth and lives in the hearts of good people?"
You’re talking about his flesh and bones coming out of the grave, right? Absolutely, that’s exactly right. Why is that important, and what evidence do we have for that?
John 14:19, Kirk, is the greatest passage. It’s the greatest promise in the New Testament. The promise that we’re given with more frequency than any other promise comes right out of John 14:19.
Jesus said, "Because I live, you will live also." He didn’t mean we’re going to be ghosts someday or we’re going to be some kind of phantom or apparition. He meant we would live again physically and bodily.
I was in the tomb at Bethany, Lazarus’s tomb, 1.8 miles from the city center of Jerusalem, and I yelled in the tomb because I wanted to be like Jesus in Greek: "Duro exo, Lazarus, come out!"
In fact, a lot of us joke that if Jesus hadn’t said Lazarus’s name, everyone who was dead at the time would have just come out of their graves.
It is so vital that we understand the central importance of a Christian worldview as it relates to resurrection belief. What I love about your mission and why I believe God’s raising you up, Kirk, and raising up takeaways as a program, is you stand so rock solid for us to have a Christian worldview.
We’re both dads of tons of kids; you have six, I have five. We’re so concerned about passing on a legacy of faith to our children, and we’re very concerned about a Christian worldview for our children.
Now, here’s a point of why this even matters: you cannot have a fully developed Christian worldview without being able to defend the resurrection of Jesus.
Listen to me carefully: the center of a Christian worldview is the death and resurrection of Jesus. There are 300 passages in the New Testament on the resurrection of Jesus. Think about that; there are only 260 chapters.
That’s why not just in the gospels, but in the epistles and all other writings, Jesus is on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24. The disciples don’t recognize him, and he begins with the law, the prophets, and the writings, and he says, "These all testify of me."
He was constantly bringing up this resurrection power that Paul says, "Hey, this same power that raised Jesus from the dead can be alive in you, and it’s alive in me." That’s what makes us unstoppable Christians.
So, is it a real body? Yes, read 1 Corinthians 15. I talk about it in the book. Someday we’re going to have a body in Christ that never needs upgrading. Hallelujah! I’m going to have a body that’s not sore anymore.
I started getting gray hair after my wife gave birth to our triplet boys, and it’s just continued, Kirk. Okay, I’m excited that my body, which is decaying now because of sin, someday will be more alive than it ever was before.
When I’m in Bethany and I’m able to read this passage in John 11:25, and Jesus says, "I am the resurrection and the life. Everyone who believes in me, though you die, yet you will live. Do you believe this?"
And you know what? He performed the greatest miracle right after that and raised Lazarus from the dead.
In your book *Body of Proof*, you cite seven of the best evidences for the resurrection, one of them being how society has been transformed everywhere that Christianity is introduced.
You cannot explain the emphasis on equality and freedom that pervaded the Roman Empire because of this group of Christians apart from the fact that Jesus physically and bodily rose from the grave.
The passage is Galatians 3:28. Paul, who hated non-Jews and didn’t care for women very much, meets Jesus on the road to Damascus, and it changes his whole worldview. Just like meeting Christ today can change your worldview.
He goes from this male-dominant figure, "I’m a Jew; I’m the best of the best," to now, "I’m the least of all the saints; I’m the chief of sinners."
But Galatians 3:28 says, "In Christ, there’s neither slave nor free; there’s neither male nor female; there’s neither Jew nor Gentile. We are all one in Christ Jesus."
This message of unity, this message of freedom, this message of holistically caring for every human made in the image of God—even if you were a Roman slave—catapulted the message of Christianity to the furthest ends of the Roman Empire and turned the world upside down.
We have a letter where it literally says, "If it’s a boy, keep it; if it’s a girl, throw it away" in the first century. No one would have batted an eye until the Christian movement comes along and says, "Treat children as you would let them come to me."
I’ve read in historical sources where you go through the Roman Empire and throughout the ancient world: babies are thrown into the rivers, babies are thrown up into the arms of molten hot idol gods, women are treated like cattle, children are told to go sit down, shut up, and get out of the way.
Then Christianity comes around, and like you’re saying, everywhere it touches, it brings dignity, identity, purpose, equality, and value.
All of this stuff is really amazing, and so many of the things we take for granted today are a result of a Christian worldview. So much so that we see twisted values creeping into our schools for children as the horrors of how bad things are getting.
When really these things that we call progressive are really just regressive, regressing back to the things that were prior to Christianity and the resurrection message.
Exactly. So, this is compelling evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
What about miracles? Is that one of the evidences of the resurrection? Jesus was constantly predicting his death and resurrection, and his disciples didn’t get it.
Jesus takes the Old Testament passage, Hosea 6:2-3, and he applies it. I like to say he "messianizes" it to himself, and he says, "The Son of Man is coming, but guess what? He will be killed."
Even though Peter—remember, Peter tried to stop Jesus from going to the cross to fulfill his messianic program—do you remember what Jesus called Peter? He said, "Get behind me, Satan." Peter didn’t even get it.
Yet, Jesus predicts his resurrection in Mark 8:31, Mark 9:31, Mark 10:33, and 34. He kept saying, "The Son of Man will be put to death, but he will raise three days later."
Not only did he predict it, but point number three in *Body of Proof* is that he demonstrated resurrection power. The widow of Nain in Luke 7: Jesus stops a funeral processional.
I mean, again, if we could go back in time, Kirk, in Jewish burial traditions, that son meant he had died that day. People are grieving, and the fact that his mom is a widow means she is now destitute; she has no son who will care for her.
The young man is young. Jesus stops the processional; he touches the bier, which would have made him, in Jewish eyes, ceremonially unclean. Nothing makes pure Jesus unclean.
Jesus said, "He’s not dead; he’s sleeping. Arise!" We also see it in this wonderful passage in Mark, the ruler of the synagogue. We hear in his own native language, "Talitha cum," and Jesus raises the girl from the dead.
We’ve already mentioned Lazarus. So, Jesus not only predicted resurrection power; he demonstrated resurrection power.
The cool thing is, this is really fun, and this is why you’ve got to watch *Takeaways* because you get all these delicious details like this. Lazarus has been buried twice.
Think about this for a minute: Lazarus is one of the few people to die twice in the history of humanity. He died, and he was risen from the dead in Bethany. He dies a second time because, remember, Jesus is the first one to rise from the dead never to die again.
Paul says Jesus was the first fruit of our resurrection body. In fact, you can go to the island of Cyprus today, Kirk, and you can see Lazarus’s second burial location only because of the power of Jesus’ resurrection over death.
Lazarus died; he was resuscitated by Jesus; he dies again in Cyprus. I don’t think he was afraid the second time around.
That’s right. So, you talked about the Pharisee Saul who was met on the road to Damascus and completely turned his world around. He was someone with all this religious pride, this toxic religious spirit, better than everybody else, and he gets transformed into one that he calls the worst of all sinners.
He is just modeling humility; he’s no longer persecuting Christians; he actually is one. And he’s proclaiming the message to everybody.
What about the evidence of all of the disciples and all of the others who seem to have no reason to believe in the resurrection, who suddenly become the greatest proponents for Christianity? Is that another evidence?
Without a doubt. What’s interesting to me is the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 gives us three groups and three individuals who Jesus appeared to. This is called the appearance tradition.
We have the empty tomb tradition; that’s what we read about in the gospels. The women go to the tomb; it’s empty. "Where’s his body? Where’s Jesus?" That’s John 20.
Then we also have the appearance tradition: men and women who saw Jesus. As C.S. Lewis said, "Make no mistake: to preach Christianity is to preach the resurrection of Jesus from the dead."
The first men and women to be called apostles, according to the New Testament, were men and women who saw Jesus alive after he had been dead. Those were the first apostles, and that was then to preach Christianity, to proclaim, "I’ve seen the Lord; he’s alive," exactly what Mary said in John 20.
One of the seven evidences that you cite here is that there’s no real motivation, you say, to invent Jesus’ resurrection narrative. We can’t find any real evidence that people were motivated to fake this whole thing.
What do you mean by that? Yeah, this is one of the cool new trends in the fluidity of resurrection research, and this is a cool new fun way to argue for the truth of the resurrection: to convince people that, hey, if Kirk and I wanted to make up a religion, we have no reason to make up that Jesus came back from the dead.
If you and I were first-century Jews, we would have believed in an eventual general resurrection of all of Israel when the Messiah comes. We would have had no problem venerating Prophet Jesus as a godly rabbi, as a pious man.
And guess what? We could have gone on and even published his writings and published his sayings, and we could have become successful.
To go on the skinny branches and make this crazy claim that one guy actually came back from the dead? We wouldn’t have started there because nobody would have given us a hearing.
Jesus’ own disciples didn’t expect that either. We really can’t emphasize this enough. You’ve probably heard of something called the Dead Sea Scrolls, which was the greatest archaeological discovery of the 20th century.
The Dead Sea Scrolls reflect the belief of pious Jews in Qumran in the land of Israel in the time of Jesus. In 4Q 285, that would just be scroll number four, excuse me, found in Qumran cave 4, number 285, they’re writing about their belief in the coming of the Messiah.
Kirk, they believe that when the Messiah comes—if you’re reading the scrolls—he’ll kill the Roman occupiers; he will kill the Roman Emperor, and he will set himself up as king.
No one thought that their Messiah would die on a Roman cross. They expected a Messiah that would vanquish a corrupt priesthood, cleanse the temple, and yet Jesus comes and says to Pilate, "My kingdom is not of this world. If it was of this world, my servants would fight. But even so, my kingdom is coming, but it’s not of this world."
That is why Jesus had to go to the cross. Our sin needed full payment, and the only representative who could do that was Jesus as the Lamb of God.
That’s why John the Baptist, it’s recorded in all four gospels, quotes Isaiah 40 when he says, "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world."
This is the power of Isaiah 40:5-8 that, Kirk, God built a superhighway to save you and me. So many people in our audience are trying to find God.
We’re trying to find God for our marriages; we’re trying to find God for our parenting; we’re trying to find God for our kids. We don’t realize God built a superhighway to save us according to Isaiah 40 in the person and work of Jesus Christ.
One of your chapters is titled, "If the disciples invented the story of Jesus’ resurrection, they did a terrible job." You mentioned that a little bit earlier. It seems to have worked pretty well; there are billions of people on Earth that say they follow Jesus Christ.
What do you mean that they did a terrible job? Well, in Luke 24:21, Cleopas and an unnamed disciple are doing a seven-mile walk from Jerusalem to the little town of Emmaus.
They’re walking, and Kirk, I just filmed there. You can get there; if you go off-roading, it’s a lot of fun to get there. The Roman curbing is still there; there are Roman milestones that are six feet tall that say, "Emmaus this way, Jerusalem that way."
They’re joined by someone they don’t quite recognize, and they say, "Haven’t you heard of everything that’s happened in Israel?" They said, "You know, we had hoped he was the Messiah, but he died on the cross."
They were dejected; they did not expect their Messiah to rise from the dead. Jesus was going to go on, and they invite him in, and their eyes are opened. They said, "Were not our hearts burning within us while we were walking with the resurrected Christ?"
My point is that they had given up all hope; they didn’t expect him to die on a Roman cross. So why would anyone invent that narrative?
This is so important that Christians understand this: there was no psychological motivation. There was no way to profit from a story like this. Nobody believed in bodies coming back from the dead.
The reason they believed it is because it actually happened, and that’s why they proclaimed it.
Wow. One of the other evidences that you give in your book *Body of Proof* is that the resurrection gives meaning to suffering. Can you unpack that for us?
You know, the resurrection of Jesus is the key to every belief in the New Testament. Every belief in the Christian life is fueled by this promise of resurrection for all eternity.
For anyone out there who’s been touched by suffering, I remind you of Romans 8, where the Apostle Paul says that the sufferings of this world are not compared with the glory that is ours someday in the resurrection in Jesus.
You know, Kirk, as you’ve rightly pointed out, as a Christian thinker, we live in a world where society has largely given in to despair. Gen Z has lost all hope; there’s a loneliness epidemic when we’re quote-unquote more connected than we’ve ever been.
The resurrection of Jesus shows that my life can be lived with purpose. My life can be poured out in a God-honoring way because I’m not just living for this world; I’m living for the world to come.
Eternity, when Jesus promised heaven and earth will come together, and we will see him as he is. Paul says, "Not through a glass dimly; we will see him face to face."
That is a promise that took hold in the first century, and it’s been changing lives for 2,000 years. It changed my life.
I’m not a Christian because I have some kind of emotional need to be a Christian or I feel like a Christian. I am a Christian because the evidence is overpowering that Jesus physically and bodily walked out of that grave alive.
What’s the danger if we don’t study the evidence for the resurrection and learn how to share it with other people?
The danger for every Christian who does not stay current in resurrection belief—and by current, I mean when you look at the archaeology, when you look at what’s happening in the Holy Lands, plural—all of it shows the authenticity of the resurrection accounts that we see in the gospel narratives.
Guess what? You’re going to lose pace with how exciting it is to be a Christian if you have a ho-hum attitude about it.
"Well, yeah, I believe that when I became a Christian 20 years ago, but I can’t really articulate it anymore." We’re so forgetful, just like the Christians were in Corinth.
Remember what Paul says? He opens up the greatest chapter in all the Bible, 1 Corinthians 15, and he says, "Now, I want to remind you, brothers and sisters, of the gospel that I preached to you."
He starts off 1 Corinthians 15, which ends, you know, verse 58: "Therefore, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in your work of the Lord, knowing that your labor in the Lord is not in vain."
"Be strong." He starts by saying, "Hey, Kirk, Jeremiah, I’ve got to remind you of the gospel, guys. I’ve got to remind you of what we preached, what was given to me and what I passed on to you."
Then he gives the truth of the resurrection. It’s like being at a wedding with my wife, Audrey. Sometimes I’ll just lean over and say, "I love you so much," but I’m reminded how much I love you being at this wedding.
I wish I could marry you all over again. That’s the power when you study the resurrection every single day in your life.
When you pray resurrection prayers over your family, when you believe those resurrection promises apply to you today just as they did in the time of Jesus, that puts a protection on your family.
It puts a focus on your life and a purpose in all you do for the Lord. That’s why it matters.