Showing posts with label resurrection. Show all posts
Showing posts with label resurrection. Show all posts
Thursday, June 2, 2016
Wednesday Night Apologetics: Lesson 7
In this lesson we cover step 8, which is Jesus' claim to be God was miraculously confirmed by fulfilled prophecy and his resurrection.
Sunday, April 10, 2016
Wednesday Night Apologetics: Lesson 1
Hey everyone! I have had some people express interest in hearing these lessons in some different ways than just on Wednesday night at Trinity Worship Center. Some people work with kids or youth or other places and can't make it; some people are in other classes, but still want to get this information; and still others are in my class and have told me they have trouble taking notes and keeping up with me (for that I apologize). I have decided to record my lectures over the powerpoint presentation that goes with it. That way, you can listen at your leisure and pause it wherever you need to. If you still have questions, please leave a comment or track me down at church. I am always happy to discuss God in the context of apologetics and theology. Below you'll find all the references that I have used in putting this class together. Enjoy!
Reference List for Christianity: True
or False?
I Don’t Have
Enough Faith to be an Atheist by Norman Geisler and Frank Turek
Philosophical
Foundations for a Christian Worldview by J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig
Chapter 6 Theories of Truth and Postmodernism
Chapter 23 The Existence of God (1)
Chapter 24 The Existence of God (2)
Relativism:
Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air by Francis J. Beckwith and Greg Koukl
Chapter 3 Three Kinds of Relativism
Chapter 4 Culture as Morality
Chapter 5 Culture Defining Morality
Chapter 6 Moral Common Sense
Chapter 7 Relativism’s Seven Fatal
Flaws
Tactics by
Greg Koukl
Reasonable
Faith by William Lane Craig
Chapter 3 The Existence of God (1)
Chapter 4 The Existence of God (2)
Miracles:
The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts by Craig Keener
The Case for
the Resurrection of Jesus by Gary Habermas and Michael Licona
The New
Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? by F. F. Bruce
Systematic
Theology by Wayne Grudem
Chapter 26 The Person of Christ
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
Victory in the Risen Christ
One of my favorite movies of all time is The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. I recently watched all three movies in the series again and I was struck by one scene in particular. It is the scene where Denethor is about to burn himself alive. As Gandalf enters the chamber to stop him, Denethor says:
"You may triumph on the field of battle for a day; but against the power that has risen in the East, there is no victory."
Denethor's mind had been poisoned into believing there was no way to win. The irony of this scene is that the Rohirrim had just shown up and were slaughtering the orc armies. If Denethor had just looked at the battlefield at that moment he may have been persuaded that victory, not just on that day, but total victory was possible.
As I watched this I was struck by the thought that we already have total victory in Christ. Not only in one battle but for eternity. From the moment God pronounced the curse on the serpent in Genesis 3:14-15, the war was virtually over. Jesus completed the victory in His death and resurrection and He will consummate it at His second coming. Sometimes it can be difficult to keep that in mind as we walk with the Lord day to day. A lot of the time we are like Denethor when we consider this earthly life; believing that there is no victory against Satan or against the power of our flesh. The Lord reminded Israel of His power in Isaiah 60:1-3:
"Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you. And nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising."
Though things look bleak and dark for the Israelites, God will win through. The victory will be so complete and evident that nations and kings will be drawn to Israel. God has promised those who are faithful in Christ a victory even more complete in the conquering of death:
"I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall all be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:
"Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?" 1 Cor 15:50-55
Victory is already ours! Death has already lost! The message of the cross is victory in God's love and not just at the end of the age, but right now. The inauguration of that victory occurred on a Sunday morning when Christ rose from the grave. That is why Paul taunts death at the end of that passage. Jesus has won and given us the victory. No fighting on our part, no conditions attached.
So my message to you is this: don't be like Denethor when your life looks bad, when you struggle with sin, when you contemplate suffering and evil in the world, or when the day to day grind of this fallen world tries to drag you down. Look out at the battlefield and see that the Lord has won. If you are in Christ, you've already won through Him and you can change Denethor's words to read:
"Satan may triumph on the field of battle for a day; but against the power that has risen from the grave, there is no victory."
"You may triumph on the field of battle for a day; but against the power that has risen in the East, there is no victory."
Denethor's mind had been poisoned into believing there was no way to win. The irony of this scene is that the Rohirrim had just shown up and were slaughtering the orc armies. If Denethor had just looked at the battlefield at that moment he may have been persuaded that victory, not just on that day, but total victory was possible.
As I watched this I was struck by the thought that we already have total victory in Christ. Not only in one battle but for eternity. From the moment God pronounced the curse on the serpent in Genesis 3:14-15, the war was virtually over. Jesus completed the victory in His death and resurrection and He will consummate it at His second coming. Sometimes it can be difficult to keep that in mind as we walk with the Lord day to day. A lot of the time we are like Denethor when we consider this earthly life; believing that there is no victory against Satan or against the power of our flesh. The Lord reminded Israel of His power in Isaiah 60:1-3:
"Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you. And nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising."
Though things look bleak and dark for the Israelites, God will win through. The victory will be so complete and evident that nations and kings will be drawn to Israel. God has promised those who are faithful in Christ a victory even more complete in the conquering of death:
"I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall all be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:
"Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?" 1 Cor 15:50-55
Victory is already ours! Death has already lost! The message of the cross is victory in God's love and not just at the end of the age, but right now. The inauguration of that victory occurred on a Sunday morning when Christ rose from the grave. That is why Paul taunts death at the end of that passage. Jesus has won and given us the victory. No fighting on our part, no conditions attached.
So my message to you is this: don't be like Denethor when your life looks bad, when you struggle with sin, when you contemplate suffering and evil in the world, or when the day to day grind of this fallen world tries to drag you down. Look out at the battlefield and see that the Lord has won. If you are in Christ, you've already won through Him and you can change Denethor's words to read:
"Satan may triumph on the field of battle for a day; but against the power that has risen from the grave, there is no victory."
Friday, December 11, 2015
Blessed be Emmanuel!
O blessed be Emmanuel!
He came to earth and never fell.
He submitted to his Father's will,
And freely he did foot our bill.
For our transgressions he was slain,
But a might victory did he claim.
For on the third day he came alive,
And ministered 40 days before ascending to the skies.
Left alone he did not leave his host,
But empowered by the Holy Ghost.
A whole world he turned upside down,
And he will return again to take his crown.
On that day, holy to the Lord will be every horses bell,
O blessed be Emmanuel!
He came to earth and never fell.
He submitted to his Father's will,
And freely he did foot our bill.
For our transgressions he was slain,
But a might victory did he claim.
For on the third day he came alive,
And ministered 40 days before ascending to the skies.
Left alone he did not leave his host,
But empowered by the Holy Ghost.
A whole world he turned upside down,
And he will return again to take his crown.
On that day, holy to the Lord will be every horses bell,
O blessed be Emmanuel!
Friday, December 4, 2015
Book Review: The Resurrection of the Son of God by N. T. Wright
N. T. Wright's book, The Resurrection of the Son of God, is an argument for the historicity of Jesus' resurrection. Wright goes about his argument mainly through surveying ancient beliefs about resurrection in general and Judaism/Christianity in particular by looking at pagan writings (ch. 2), Jewish writings both from the Old Testament (ch. 3) and the intertestamental period (ch. 4; i.e. after Malachi but before Matthew; 450/400 BC to 4/6 BC), Christian writings from both the New Testament (chs. 5-10), the early church fathers (100-300 AD), and apocryphal writings such as the Gospel of Thomas (ch. 11 for both the fathers and the apocrypha). Wright's conclusion for each group is as follows:
1. Paganism: "'Resurrection' was not one way of describing what death consisted of. It was a way of describing something everyone knew did not happen: the idea that death could be reversed, undone, could (as it were) work backwards. Not even in myth was it permitted." (pg. 33)
"The immediate conclusion is clear. Christianity was born into a world where its central claim was known to be false. Many believe that the dead were non-existent; outside Judaism, nobody believed in resurrection." (pg. 35)
Pagans didn't believe anyone could be resurrected in the sense of new bodily life. While opinions varied, generally, pagans thought the dead went to a disembodied existence in the underworld or, very rarely, divinization by "the gods", whichever gods that might be. For us, as Christian apologists, this has implications. A common objection to Jesus' resurrection is that he was just a copycat savior in the pattern of other ancient mythical dying and rising gods. In other words, his resurrection was not a unique event. What Wright demonstrates, in a lot more detail than this post I might add, is that even if there were myths of "corn kings" as Wright calls them, and there weren't, wherein the hero savior died and came back to life, it meant nothing anywhere close to what Christianity means when it says Christ was resurrected into new bodily life; i.e. something like the life we live now, but different as well.
2. Judaism: "It is all the more surprising, then, to discover that, within the Bible itself, the hope of resurrection makes rare appearances, so rare that some have considered them marginal. Though later exegesis, both Jewish and Christian, became skilled at discovering covert allusions which earlier readers had not seen - a skill shared, according to the gospels, by Jesus himself - there is general agreement that for much of the Old Testament the idea of resurrection is, to put it at its strongest, deeply asleep, only to be woken by echoes from later times and texts." (pg. 85)
One of the more interesting points Wright makes about the concept of resurrection in Judaism concerns the Sadducees. They do not believe in the resurrection as evidenced by Matthew 22:23 and Acts 23:6-8. But many Christians, myself included, assume this is because they are the "liberals" of ancient Judaism. In fact, it is just the opposite. They are the "literalists", the "fundamentatlists", the "conservatives". It was actually the Pharisees that held the "radical" position of an end of the age resurrection for all the faithful. When the Sadducees read Job 7:9, they took that literally and inferred there was no resurrection. Of course, they were wrong, but this was interesting to me. As Wright surveys the Biblical and post-Biblical literature of the Jews he establishes that when the Jews spoke of resurrection, it could only have meant a bodily resurrection. It was the reversal of death. Not simply "life after death" where we all float on clouds in heaven playing harps, but life after "life after death". From an apologetic standpoint, currently, the most common objection to Christs' resurrection is that it was not a newly embodied Jesus that the disciples saw, but a vision, hallucination, or spiritual experience. So when the early church talks about resurrection and the life that flows from it, they just mean that in some kind of nebulous, esoteric way; not in a concrete actual event way. Wright has demonstrated this to be demonstrably false: the Jews and subsequently, the early church could only have been speaking about a bodily resurrection. That is what resurrection meant and nothing else.
3. Christianity: "It is, then, remarkable that Christianity, apart from the texts studied in section 7, never seems to have developed even the beginnings of a spectrum of belief, either of the pagan variety or of the Jewish variety, but always stuck to one point on the Jewish scale." (pg. 552)
Here is where it gets interesting. Christianity, in terms of its' beliefs about resurrection, is a sect of Pharisaic Judaism that gained a fuller understanding of that resurrection because of Christ's example and the guidance of the Holy Spirit through the apostles and leaders of the early church. While the Jews always talked about a resurrection of the faithful at the end of the age and used texts like Ezekiel 37 which talked about a born again Israel from bones as analogical references to the literal bodily resurrection, the Christians reinterpreted this around Christ's resurrection. Jesus' resurrection was the inauguration of the new age, and the death knell for the old age, but, with the consummation and the full inculcation of that age yet to come when all the faithful, both Jew and Gentile, would be raised to new bodily life in a remade heaven and earth. Wright terms this new body "transphysical" for transformed physicality. Much like the life we have now, but different as distinguished by Christ walking through walls and disappearing. Christians also always spoke about the resurrection in terms of new creation. While we can't live in this transphysical body until Jesus' second coming, we can live the abundant, resurrection power life marked by holiness, discipline, love, and hope until our time is up or Jesus returns. Again, when considering objections to the faith, we see that there was not a wide array of beliefs about either Christ's resurrection being an actual event or about what that meant for the community of believers. It was not the case that orthodoxy "won" and was put into creeds. It was the case that orthodoxy was true and Jesus said that the gates of hell would not prevail against his church (Matthew 16:18).
Overall, this book was fantastic. I am not doing Bishop Wright's argument any justice in this short blog post. Although the book was 738 pages, it did not read like a dry, academic book and was very easy to follow from one point to the next. If you are looking for a deeper look, both historically and theologically, at the resurrection of Jesus, I would encourage you to give this book a try.
1. Paganism: "'Resurrection' was not one way of describing what death consisted of. It was a way of describing something everyone knew did not happen: the idea that death could be reversed, undone, could (as it were) work backwards. Not even in myth was it permitted." (pg. 33)
"The immediate conclusion is clear. Christianity was born into a world where its central claim was known to be false. Many believe that the dead were non-existent; outside Judaism, nobody believed in resurrection." (pg. 35)
Pagans didn't believe anyone could be resurrected in the sense of new bodily life. While opinions varied, generally, pagans thought the dead went to a disembodied existence in the underworld or, very rarely, divinization by "the gods", whichever gods that might be. For us, as Christian apologists, this has implications. A common objection to Jesus' resurrection is that he was just a copycat savior in the pattern of other ancient mythical dying and rising gods. In other words, his resurrection was not a unique event. What Wright demonstrates, in a lot more detail than this post I might add, is that even if there were myths of "corn kings" as Wright calls them, and there weren't, wherein the hero savior died and came back to life, it meant nothing anywhere close to what Christianity means when it says Christ was resurrected into new bodily life; i.e. something like the life we live now, but different as well.
2. Judaism: "It is all the more surprising, then, to discover that, within the Bible itself, the hope of resurrection makes rare appearances, so rare that some have considered them marginal. Though later exegesis, both Jewish and Christian, became skilled at discovering covert allusions which earlier readers had not seen - a skill shared, according to the gospels, by Jesus himself - there is general agreement that for much of the Old Testament the idea of resurrection is, to put it at its strongest, deeply asleep, only to be woken by echoes from later times and texts." (pg. 85)
One of the more interesting points Wright makes about the concept of resurrection in Judaism concerns the Sadducees. They do not believe in the resurrection as evidenced by Matthew 22:23 and Acts 23:6-8. But many Christians, myself included, assume this is because they are the "liberals" of ancient Judaism. In fact, it is just the opposite. They are the "literalists", the "fundamentatlists", the "conservatives". It was actually the Pharisees that held the "radical" position of an end of the age resurrection for all the faithful. When the Sadducees read Job 7:9, they took that literally and inferred there was no resurrection. Of course, they were wrong, but this was interesting to me. As Wright surveys the Biblical and post-Biblical literature of the Jews he establishes that when the Jews spoke of resurrection, it could only have meant a bodily resurrection. It was the reversal of death. Not simply "life after death" where we all float on clouds in heaven playing harps, but life after "life after death". From an apologetic standpoint, currently, the most common objection to Christs' resurrection is that it was not a newly embodied Jesus that the disciples saw, but a vision, hallucination, or spiritual experience. So when the early church talks about resurrection and the life that flows from it, they just mean that in some kind of nebulous, esoteric way; not in a concrete actual event way. Wright has demonstrated this to be demonstrably false: the Jews and subsequently, the early church could only have been speaking about a bodily resurrection. That is what resurrection meant and nothing else.
3. Christianity: "It is, then, remarkable that Christianity, apart from the texts studied in section 7, never seems to have developed even the beginnings of a spectrum of belief, either of the pagan variety or of the Jewish variety, but always stuck to one point on the Jewish scale." (pg. 552)
Here is where it gets interesting. Christianity, in terms of its' beliefs about resurrection, is a sect of Pharisaic Judaism that gained a fuller understanding of that resurrection because of Christ's example and the guidance of the Holy Spirit through the apostles and leaders of the early church. While the Jews always talked about a resurrection of the faithful at the end of the age and used texts like Ezekiel 37 which talked about a born again Israel from bones as analogical references to the literal bodily resurrection, the Christians reinterpreted this around Christ's resurrection. Jesus' resurrection was the inauguration of the new age, and the death knell for the old age, but, with the consummation and the full inculcation of that age yet to come when all the faithful, both Jew and Gentile, would be raised to new bodily life in a remade heaven and earth. Wright terms this new body "transphysical" for transformed physicality. Much like the life we have now, but different as distinguished by Christ walking through walls and disappearing. Christians also always spoke about the resurrection in terms of new creation. While we can't live in this transphysical body until Jesus' second coming, we can live the abundant, resurrection power life marked by holiness, discipline, love, and hope until our time is up or Jesus returns. Again, when considering objections to the faith, we see that there was not a wide array of beliefs about either Christ's resurrection being an actual event or about what that meant for the community of believers. It was not the case that orthodoxy "won" and was put into creeds. It was the case that orthodoxy was true and Jesus said that the gates of hell would not prevail against his church (Matthew 16:18).
Overall, this book was fantastic. I am not doing Bishop Wright's argument any justice in this short blog post. Although the book was 738 pages, it did not read like a dry, academic book and was very easy to follow from one point to the next. If you are looking for a deeper look, both historically and theologically, at the resurrection of Jesus, I would encourage you to give this book a try.
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