Even if we believe Jesus was raised from the dead, so what? What difference does the resurrection make? Why does Easter matter?
Fortunately, we don't have to guess; Jesus told us.
During his ministry, people kept asking Jesus for a sign to validate his authority to teach what he was teaching. He always pointed them to his resurrection (eg, Matt 12:38-40, John 2:18-19). The resurrection was Christ's vindication.
What did he teach that concerns us today?
First, he taught that there will be a day when we will all be judged by God. And we will be judged according to three things:
We will be judged according to our works — the deeds we have done (eg, Matt 5:17-20). We will be judged according to our heart — why we did what we did (eg, Matt 5:21-30). And we will be judged according to how we responded to Christ (eg, Matt 7:21-23). The good news is that responding to Jesus — ie, choosing to trust in and follow him — will mean that you won't be judged according to your actions but his (eg, John 3:16).
Second, he taught that the end is coming. A time will come when people will no longer have a chance to decide what they want to do with Jesus. The choice will have been made. Everyone will, based on how they are judged, experience either everlasting life or everlasting punishment (eg, Matt 13:36-43).
If Christ was really raised from the dead, then how we live our lives matters, and we will be held accountable.
But trusting Jesus means that we are safe from the judgment — Christ has already been held accountable for my sin. Now I will be given credit for his righteousness.
And for those who have trusted in Christ, the resurrection means something else. It means death has been defeated. Death doesn't have to be permanent any more. One day Jesus' people will again live in physical bodies, bodies that will no longer be plagued by the limits of our bodies like age, sickness, or disability. The resurrection means he won, and because he won, we will too.
Sin, where are your shackles?
Death, where is your sting?
Hell has been defeated
The grave could not hold the King! 1
1 from Arise My Love by Eddie Carswell, cf 1Cor 15:54-55.
You may also be interested in:
What is Easter?
Why Do I Believe in the Resurrection of Christ?
"The Bible's been translated and re-translated so many times, no one knows what it means."
I was in college the first time I heard those words. The accusations went on: "Modern Bibles just change the King James into modern English, and it was translated from Latin. No one knows what the Bible said when it was written."
It's hard to believe someone can fit so many inaccuracies into such a small space.
While I'd grown up in church, I had only recently started reading the Bible for myself. Being the nerd that I am, I had read a very under-read section of the Bible: the preface.
The first sentence reads, "The New International Version is a completely new translation of the Holy Bible made by over a hundred scholars working directly from the best available Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts." Every modern (protestant*) version has similar verbiage.
Once upon a time Bibles were translated from the Latin because that was what they had available. Since then, thousands of copies of the New Testament in Greek have been discovered. We also are better able to translate those Greek texts. (Finding people who still speak ancient Hebrew is comparatively easy.)
But in truth the Bible has been translated and re-translated many, many times. And that's a good thing. We don't just have Greek texts and research showing what those Greek words mean. We have translations into Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and many other languages made by people who spoke Koine Greek like a native. When they translated the Greek into Latin, they told us what they thought that Greek word meant. The rich tradition of translating the Bible into local tongues is a priceless gift to Bible translators.
Don't let people snow you. Any mainstream Bible you can put your hands on is a good translation of (to a high degree of certainty) what the prophets and apostles wrote into our modern languages.
If you want to go into more detail on the subject, I recommend How We Got the Bible, which goes into the history of how we got the manuscripts used for modern translations, how we use them to reconstruct the original text, and how we translate them into modern tongues.
* Roman Catholic Bibles are apparently still translated from the Latin Vulgate (which was translated from the Greek texts).
An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, "Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins."
Our chief need was not for a teacher.
Our chief need was not for an example.
We were lost in sin, rebellious and prone to evil. So he sent a savior.
Yes, Jesus was a teacher, and he lived a life we should try to follow. But most of all he came to save, to "give his life as a ransom for many."
There are those who, as Spurgeon said, "cry up Jesus as Messiah, sent of God, to exhibit a grand example and supply a pure code of morals, but they cannot endure Jesus as a Saviour, redeeming us by his blood, and by his death delivering us from sin." They "speak only of him as a prophet, a teacher, or a leader, and care not for him as a Saviour ...." These people do not know him.
To know him is to take him as God has revealed him. "You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins" (Matt 1:21).
Let us rejoice that God saw our true need and met it.
There is more than one kind of "liberal."
You know about political liberals. They probably vote for a Democrat or Green in an election. They disagree with political conservatives over how much taxes should be or how to address poverty or education.
I'm not interested in them. I want to talk about religious liberals.
Political liberals will read the same Bible as you or me and come away with more or less the same message; they may apply it differently, they may see different ways it should be put into practice, but we're reading the same Bible.
Religious liberals aren't reading the same Bible.
These are people who are uncomfortable with the supernatural. And so the Bible can't really be anything special. It's not inspired; it's merely the product of flawed men. And we probably don't even have what they really wrote.
So they feel free to pick and choose what parts matter.
They'll say religious conservatives do the same thing, but we have a reason, a system even, for "picking and choosing" — it's based on the work of Christ. (I recommend this video of a lecture by Voddie Baucham on the topic.)
They just throw out the parts they don't like.
So liberals will discount anything that suggests God is going to judge us. And, really, without judgment, who needs that whole "Jesus saves" thing? It's not like he died for anything; his life was simply cut short by people who didn't understand his message of peace. That's if he actually lived at all, not that it really matters.
Are homosexual relationships sinful? Of course not! Neither is pre-marital sex. Nothing that doesn't hurt other people is wrong. Hurt by their definition of hurt. As to why it's wrong to hurt other people, well, they'll hand wave why that's bad.
The only thing that matters to them is that God is love. Which is crazy. If you were going to throw out parts of the Bible, why would you keep the hardest part to believe? God is love? What in the world would make you think that apart from the Bible?
The problem with religious liberals is they claim to be Christians. They reject pretty much everything Christians believe. They say there is no sin, or if there is, it's not that big a deal (so long as you're nice). There's no repentance and no judgment to escape. There's no call to a life of holiness or sacrifice (except giving up fossil fuels). They say there's nothing special about Jesus. All while claiming to follow him.
If they called themselves Elbonians, it wouldn't be a problem. But they don't. They claim to be Christians. And we've got to figure out what to do about it.
For many people, the thing that makes Christianity hard to believe is the miracle stories — talking donkeys, burning bushes, and walking dead people.
But for another group of people the hard thing is the people they meet. This can be true for both non-Christians and Christians, and it's the latter that I want to talk about.
For Christians, likable non-Christians can be a strong anti-apologetic. Once we leave our Christian enclaves, we run into nice Muslims, homosexuals, and atheists, and it's hard to think that these people are "wicked sinners" who deserve hell. I've been there. Some of the nicest people I've ever met were Mormons. I've got friends and family living a gay lifestyle. I care about a number of people whose philosophy of religion can be summed up as "meh."
These people make us want to believe that big chunks of Christianity aren't true. Jesus rose from the dead? Sure, fine. God is love? Cool. There will be a judgment after which the unbelievers will be cast away and punished forever? Whoa, wait a minute, I don't like that one.
There are two very important things that we have to keep in mind when we struggle with this.
First, we didn't just come up with this. People ask how we can believe in terrible things like hell. I counter that I believe it for the same reason I believe if you step off a cliff you'll fall to your death — it's true. The truth isn't always nice. Important truths frequently aren't.
We didn't just sit around making up a theology and decided we needed something to do with the "others." We didn't decide that Jesus is the only way to God. We didn't decide that there would be a judgment. We didn't just make up everlasting punishment for unbelievers. Jesus said that.
If we believe Jesus rose from the dead we have to accept that he pointed to that as a vindication of all of his work and teaching. And he taught that one day he would have to tell many people, "Depart from me, I never knew you."
Secondly, we have to remember that, as much as we hate this truth, God hates it more.
CS Lewis put it this way: "I said glibly a moment ago that i would pay 'any price' to remove this doctrine [of hell]. I lied. I could not pay one-thousandth part of the price that God has already paid to remove the fact [of it]" (The Problem of Pain, emphasis added).
God paid a high price to keep people from going to hell. And then he told us to go tell everybody about it.
So don't let your love of your non-Christian friends and family make you shy away from the truth of the gospel. Make it make you determined to share with them the good news:
We're all wicked sinners, but while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
