Resurrection Thoughts

Friends,

As one has shared, some thoughts to consider -- there have been numerous people throughout history who have sought to disprove the Resurrection...only to be rebuffed. From the very beginning the enemies of the Lord tried to deny the historic fact of the Resurrection. The Jewish leaders claimed that Jesus' body had been stolen. If so, how was it done? The tomb was guarded by Roman soldiers and the stone sealed by an official Roman seal. Furthermore, His disciples did not think that He was going to be raised from the dead; it was His enemies who remembered His words from Matt 27:62ff: "The next day, the one after Preparation Day, the chief priests and the Pharisees went to Pilate. 'Sir,' they said, 'we remember that while he was still alive that deceiver said, 'After three days I will rise again.' So give the order for the tomb to be made secure until the third day. Otherwise, his disciples may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead. This last deception will be worse than the first.' 'Take a guard,' Pilate answered. 'Go, make the tomb as secure as you know how.' So they went and made the tomb secure by putting a seal on the stone and posting the guard" (NIV).
They certainly would not have taken the body. The last thing that they wanted was anyone believing that Jesus had indeed risen from the dead. Could the disciples have had "visions" of the risen Jesus and interpreted them as evidences for the Resurrection? No...they did not expect to see Him, and that is not the psychological preparation from which hallucinations are made! Also, how could more than 500 people have the same hallucination at the same time? As to the argument that Jesus did not die, but only fainted and was later revived, little needs to be said. It was proven by many witnesses that Jesus was indeed dead when His body was taken from the cross.

Don