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Thank you, Mr. Chairman, sir, for those very kind and perhaps overly generous remarks. Allow me, ladies and gentlemen, first to discharge a very pleasant duty, which is to thank the organizers of this event for allowing me the opportunity and pleasure of addressing such an attractive audience. Our topic tonight, as you have heard, is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The second part of the title, the rattle of dead men's bones, was deliberately chosen to echo the words of a former Bishop of Durham, when he, objecting to the idea that our Lord's body was raised from the dead, said that if it were so, it would have been a conjuring trick with bones.
Our theme tonight, then, is the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and in particular, our task will be to try to determine, as best we may, what is meant by the term resurrection when we talk of the resurrection of Christ. In days gone by, of course, and for many centuries, the term resurrection would have been understood in its straightforward, simple sense. And nobody doubted but what, when the Bible declares that Jesus Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried and that he was raised again the third day according to the scriptures, nobody would have doubted that it meant simply what it says, that our Lord was dead on Calvary, that his dead body was buried in a grave, and three days after that body was raised from the dead.
But it's common knowledge that in this last one hundred and fifty years, theologians, and among them many Christian theologians, have suggested that it is nowadays impossible for us to accept that the resurrection of Jesus Christ was in fact a bodily resurrection, and that we are not obliged to think it was by the terms in which the New Testament describes it. There have been many suggestions, of course. Some, like the professor, the famous professor Bultmann, suggested that nowadays we cannot possibly believe the account of the resurrection as we find it in the New Testament.
His argument was that in those days people were scientifically very primitive. They believed, so Bultmann would have us think, they believed in a three-decker universe with heaven up aloft, the earth in the middle, and hell somewhere down beneath Australia, you'll see. And they said, you know, the Christians talked about Jesus Christ being buried and going down to hell, then rising again and coming back to earth and going back to heaven. But because we cannot possibly accept the idea of a three-decker universe like that, with heaven aloft, earth in the middle, and hell down below, then we can't accept what the early Christians said about the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
It was Bultmann's idea then, and it has become very popular amongst, uh, theological students, and therefore in many of our schools it has been propounded. Their idea was that when the Christians talked about the resurrection of Christ, they were using rather mythical language to get across their ideas. And if we want to know what really happened, we must decode what they said and come to the heart of their message in plain, straightforward English and dismiss all the peripheral i- mythical ideas that they have spun around it.
And they say that when you do that, the meaning of the resurrection is this, that, um, nothing at all happened objectively. The body of Jesus Christ was buried, and there it remained buried, and as far as anybody knows, it is still amoldering in the grave. What happened was that the early Christians were, first of all, horribly disappointed when Jesus, whom they had come to think was the Messiah, was crucified and then buried. And initially they felt everything was lost, but suddenly in their hearts there rose the feeling, well, never say die, let's get up and have another go at things, and uh, that renewed courage is what they really meant by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
A little bit of a tall story, as you will see, how the early Christians ever came to have the idea that they'd get up and have another go, when they knew, according to this theory, that the body of Jesus Christ was still amoldering in the grave, and how they ever got the courage to preach to the world that the Jesus Christ was risen from the dead, when all the while, as I say, they knew that his body was still in the grave. That is a question that I don't know Bultmann had he had any answer to. That is one view. At one stage, I heard a lecturer in education in the Strandmillage Co- Strandmülles College in Belfast.
Her duty was to teach, not for Strandmülles, I might say, but to teach in the city, students how to teach the Bible in schools. And she said that this was the view that we ought nowadays to put across to students. Another different view, uh, that is, uh, nowadays put forward is that while the tomb was indeed found to be empty and few serious scholars doubt that fact nowadays, while the tomb was found to be empty, that has nothing to say to our idea of the resurrection.
Because the whole story of the resurrection is not to tell us that the dead body of Jesus Christ came out of the grave. That whole idea, as the former Bishop of Durham suggested, would be unworthy, a kind of juggling with dead men's bones. The idea of the resurrection is rather that death doesn't end everything, and that therefore, somehow or other, when the Bible talks that Jesus was raised from the dead, what it means is the real Jesus, the inner man, was, um, not destroyed by death, but survived his crucifixion and burial and is now in God's heaven.
Not, therefore, a literal resurrection of the body of Jesus Christ. Two views, therefore, I shall not bother you with the many pernu- permutations that are spun among, uh, around these ideas. We come, of course, to the traditional view that what the New Testament actually says it means, that Christ died for our sins according to the scripture, that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scripture, and because he rose, as he bodily rose from the dead, when the disciples went to the tomb early on Easter morning, they found the tomb empty, the body was no longer there for the simple reason that Christ had bodily risen from the dead.
Three different views, therefore, of what we are to think about the resurrection of Christ. I want to start our investigation by asking, why should we nowadays believe that anything happened at all? You will see, one of the answers that you could give to that, I suppose, is to point to the rise and spread of the Christian church. It is the indubitable fact that the Christian church did come into being.
Be a historian atheist or Christian, that much cannot be doubted. The rise of the Christian church is an indisputable fact of history, and like all facts of history, we sooner or later must ask what caused the rise of the Christian church. Now, it is a very interesting thing that the great historian of the church, the early church, namely Luke, who wrote the gospel named after him and the Acts of the Apostles, tells us in his gospel that when our Lord Jesus died and was buried, the disciples gathered in the upper room, frightened, behind locked doors, scared, because in those hours it was a very dangerous thing to be associated with Jesus Christ, whom the authorities, both Jewish and Roman, had so recently executed.
And for fear of the Jews, says Luke and John the Apostle, they met in an upper room with the doors bolted so that they should not be, uh, suddenly surprised and themselves dragged off to execution. It was fifty days later that they came out boldly in the streets of Jerusalem, where Jesus had so recently been executed, and boldly claimed that the nation was guilty of murder in having had Jesus Christ of Nazareth crucified.
We say then the first little question, what was it that catapulted those men onto the stage of world history to begin what we nowadays call the Christian church? And if you ask them what was the spring that sprang them, that catapulted them onto the world, their answer is, why, the resurrection of Jesus Christ? We thought he was finished. We knew he was buried. We discovered the third day that he had r- risen from the dead, and we met him, touched him, and ate with him before he ascended into heaven.
So the resurrection, the chur- the church says, is what, uh, was at its very root. But there is a second question to ask. When these early Christians came out into the streets of Jerusalem and then into the cities of the Roman Empire, what was the message they had to preach? After all, it's one thing to be catapulted onto the stage of history, but if they were going to survive, they had to have a message to preach. What message did they preach? And here there is a very interesting fact to be observed. If you look carefully at the Acts of the Apostles, which is the historical record of the early days of the church, written by Luke himself, a contemporary of his ends, you'll find that practically in the whole of his long book, it has twenty eight chapters, there is nothing, virtually nothing whatsoever, about Christian morality.
Ask anybody nowadays what is the heart and essence of Christianity, and you're liable to get the reply, what Christianity? Christianity is about loving your neighbor as yourself and doing unto others as you would have them do to you. So shall we ask the question? Is that the message that the early Christians had to bring to the world? Was it that they had become so enamored of the wonderful moral teaching of Jesus Christ that they thought they must tell everybody, and they went out through Jerusalem at the risk of their lives. They went out to the Roman cities, and eventually many of them faced the lions and were crunched to bits in their mouths.
All for this message. We have such a wonderful message for the world. You should love your neighbor as yourself. No, no, indeed not. Glorious as that moral teaching is, it's not the heart of Christianity. In fact, the moral lesson, thou shalt love your neighbor as yourself, didn't originate with Christianity. It was to be found centuries before in the Jewish Old Testament, in the book of Leviticus. It would have been nothing new for them to preach that morality, love your neighbor as yourself. What was the message then? Read the Acts of the Apostles, and you will find this interesting thing, that sermon after sermon, speech after speech, has at its very heart and kernel this glorious fact, Jesus Christ, Son of God and Messiah, crucified in Jerusalem City and buried, and on the third day he rose from the dead.
And we, say these early Christians, we are those appointed by God to be witnesses of these things. That is our raison d'être. That was why we were appointed. That's our total job. What for? To witness to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is what the early Christians say about themselves. And if you ask them, um, what gave you the courage to come out and speak? The resurrection, they say. And what is the burning message you have to proclaim? The resurrection, they say. Well, if you can't believe the resurrection of Christ, now you have a very real problem.
As Professor Charlie Mole used to say, uh, a decade or two ago. You have the Christian church. As good historians, you ought to try and account for how did it come, where did it spring from, what did it think it was appointed to do? And if you say to the early church, well, what's your message? They say the resurrection of Christ. You say, no, no, no, that can't be because it didn't happen. So what, what is your real purpose? Well, then they haven't got anything to say. You'll see. And, uh, it would leave, as Professor Mole used to say, a very big hole in history unaccounted for.
And you'll see, if I might, uh, anticipate what we shall say. You can understand the Christian's counsel. They really believed the resurrection, and because they believed it, of course it lay at the heart of their message. Because if the resurrection be true, it has implications for every man, woman, child under the face of the sun. Carries implications for every man, woman, and child ever since the world began until the world shall end. It is the Christian acclaim that Jesus Christ, being God, was truly human.
His body was a real human body. Their claim is that when that body was put into the grave, dead as dead could be, the normal processes of corruption didn't even begin. And then, presently, three days after, God reversed the process of death and brought the human body of Jesus Christ out of the tomb. And further, the New Testament claims that after forty days, that human body was elevated to God's eternal heaven, a human body still.
If that is true, you can understand why the Christians ha made, uh, made it the center of their message, can't you? Hm. I imagine a Greek, wily old hard-boiled Greek, and an apostle taking him by the jacket, you see, and saying, old chap, I've got wonderful news for you. Oh, says the Greek, what might that be? Love your neighbor as yourself. Oh. Tell us something new, the Greek would say. We've had philosophers as well. Ah, but it would be a different story, would it not, if the apostle came and took hold of a Greek by the lapels and said, old chap, I've something wonderful to tell you, and what might that be?
A man, a dead man, as dead as you will be one day, has risen from the dead, the first fruits of a great harvest yet to come. The resurrection be true, then, not only has implications for every man, woman, and child that has ever lived, it has implications for our whole universe. The chemists tell us that the chemistry of the universe is virtually the same throughout everywhere. And our bodies, of course, are made of chemicals, aren't they? If the human body of Jesus Christ saw no corruption, but on the third day God raised it from the dead, it has implications, as the Bible itself will tell us, eventually for the whole matter of the entire universe.
You say, what do you mean by that? Well, if you listen to the scientists, they will tell you that our universe is running down. And if we inquire what they mean by that, they will say, well, look at our old sun up in the sky, pouring out his millions of tons of energy every day, by definition, therefore getting smaller, running down. One day it will collapse with an almighty explosion. In that moment, planet Earth will evaporate. One day the sun, if it goes on like it's going, itself will die.
We can see other side suns when we turn our telescopes to the universe around us. We can see other suns die. Our sun will be no exception if it goes on like the moment. We live in a dying universe. Not only the sun up in the sky is dying, but ladies and gentlemen, we are too, aren't we? The medics have unpleasant ways about them. They tell us that, um, after you get the age of forty, your brain cells begin to die at an alarming rate, and my friends agree with them when they look at me, you'll see. They say, yes, that's obviously true. Yes.
The universe is running down, and all of us have an invested interest in it. If it, the resurrection be true, you can understand why the Christians put it at the heart of their message. It has implications not only for individual men and women all the way through history, it has implications for our very universe. And the message would be that God who made it is not going to allow the universe to slip gradually into destruction. One day it shall be renewed, and creation shall be delivered from her bondage to corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.
But I have wondered, forgive me, I was quoting the early church as one of the reasons why we ought to begin to think that, uh, something really did happen two thousand years ago in that garden just outside Jerusalem. We sit here on a Sunday night. It is the interesting fact that the early Christians were almost all of them, not quite all of them, all of them Jews. They normally worship God on their Sabbath day or Saturday. Suddenly, as from nowhere, early Christians, still being Jews and still keeping the Sabbath, started to gather together on the first day of the week, and eventually they called it the Lord's Day, Ikiriaki Mera, and Ikiriaki Mera, the Lord's Day, is the name for what we call Sunday.
It's still the name for Sunday in modern Greek to this very present day. It raises an interesting question. What made those early Jews start meeting specially on the first day of the week? The answer is, of course, to be found in their belief that it was the first day of the week when Jesus, their Lord, rose from the dead. That bit of evidence is still with us, isn't it? Christians still have that habit, as they have had since the very beginning of things. But now, uh, let us just briefly ask, therefore, if we need at this stage, what did the early Christians mean by resurrection?
Is it true, what Professor Bultmann used to say, that this talk of the body coming out of the grave was only a kind of a mythical figurative expression for their own personal subjective feeling that it was worth carrying on still. Or did they really mean a literal physical bodily resurrection? Well, that's quite clear what the early Christians mean. And not only the early Christians, but according to them, it was what Jesus Christ, our Lord, said himself.
The story is that on the first day of the week, the disciples were together in an upper room, barred and bolted, when suddenly the Lord Jesus appeared in their midst, and they were shaken, terrified. They thought this was a ghost, a spirit. And Jesus said to them, don't be afraid, uh, it is I myself. A spirit hath not flesh and bone, as you see me. Handle me and see. I'm not a disembodied spirit.
It is I myself. And he made his apostles touch him and eventually eat with him to convince them that he was not just a disembodied spirit that had survived death. He was a risen human being with a risen human body. And you will see how the early Christians, uh, constantly tell you a very interesting fact. They do not merely say that Jesus Christ rose from the dead.
They will tell you that Jesus Christ rose from the dead on the third day. And why is that important? Well, if it were merely a question that when he died, his spirit or soul survived, well, the spirit and soul would have survived from the very moment his body was put to death, yes? It wouldn't take three days for the spirit to survive. So when the Christians say he rose again the third day from the dead, it is obvious that they're not talking about the survival of his spirit.
They're talking about the resurrection of the body that was in the grave over parts of three days, and on the third day rose from the dead. At the same time, you will notice that the early Christians are quite clear about this. One, it was the same body. They report, for instance, an occasion when one of the disciples called Thomas, who hadn't been there on the first occasion, he doubted when they told him that Jesus was risen from the dead, and said, except I put my finger in the print of the nails where he was crucified and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe that he is risen from the dead.
The following Sunday, Thomas was with the rest of the apostles, and Jesus Christ appeared to them again and said, Thomas, bring your finger and put it into the nail print, Thomas, and thrust your hand into my side. Evidence that this was the very same body that had been crucified, that had been buried, and was now raised from the dead. The same body. It had not been replaced and another one put in its place. It was the same body. And yet they are equally adamant that while it was the same body, it was in another respect exceedingly different.
It could, for instance, suddenly appear. Some history books tell you that our Lord's risen body was of a sort that it could come through doors without opening them. Scripture doesn't say it came through the doors. That's a minor point, isn't it? It suddenly appeared. Ask some astrophysicists nowadays, and they will talk to you about different dimensions in the universe. I think at the last count they got up to some eleven different dimensions that are in the universe, you'll see. Whatever the explanation is, his body was different.
It is what the New Testament calls a glorified body, but a real body that could still be touched and handled. A body that had flesh and bones. Now here we must pause just a moment to deal with another argument. Some theologians would nowadays tell us that Paul the Apostle held a very different view of the resurrection from people like Luke and Matthew and John and Mark. Luke, Matthew, and John and Mark tell us that the Lord Jesus in resurrection had a literal body of flesh and bone.
Now, some theologians nowadays point out that when Paul writes about the resurrection in his letter to the Corinthians, chapter fifteen, he describes the resurrection body as a spiritual body, and say the theologians, Awa. Paul disagrees with this stuff in the gospel. He regards that as mere legendary addition. His own belief is that the risen body of Christ was a spiritual body. He was, in other words, a spirit. It was the survival of his human spirit. But the argument is false, isn't it?
Yes, Paul says the body of Christ and all the resurrection bodies are spiritual body, but what does he mean by a spiritual body? Let me take a humble analogy. If you'd asked about my car, how does it run, and I said, well, it has a petrol engine. What would you deduce from that? That the engine was made of petrol? Well, no, of course not. If I said I have a car, but it's got an electric motor inside, what would you conclude from that? You'd say the car is is the motor must be made of electricity. Well, of course not. If I say my car is a pet- got a petrol engine, I don't mean the engine is made of petrol, I mean that petrol is the driving force in the engine.
And you can have engines that are driven by petrol, you can get engines that are driven by diesel, you can have engines that are driven, uh, by electricity, you can get engines that are driven by steam. What Paul is talking about this, our earthly bodies such as we have now, he says, are soulish bodies. There is their driving force. The resurrection body is a real resurrection body. Its driving force, however, is not soul, but spirit. There is one of its differences. Not that it's made of spirit.
Its driving principle is spirit. That then, as I understand it, is what the Christians are telling us about the resurrection. It is a bodily resurrection, a body not replaced with another substituted, but a body changed, the same body changed, and glorified. But here come the objections once more. You will say to me, perhaps, the early Christians, you know, were rather primitive. They were so primitive, they didn't understand modern science, they would believe any old thing that anybody told them.
And for them, it was very easy to believe in the possibility of a bodily resurrection. Everybody in those days would have found it easy to believe in a bodily resurrection. Of course, we nowadays are so sophisticated and scientific, we couldn't possibly believe in a bodily resurrection, not we today, but the early Christians were primitive. And I wonder where you got that idea from. It sounds very curious to a classicist like myself, who spent my youth in the luxury of reading the classics and the literature of the times of Christ and before Christ.
I don't know where you got the idea from, if you have it, that people in those days would find it easy to believe in the resurrection of the body. The vast majority wouldn't have believed any such thing. In Judaism, the Pharisees believed in the resurrection, but the Sadducees, and they were the people largely responsible for putting Jesus Christ to death. The Sadducees, with the Bible in their hands, so to speak, with the Old Testament in their hands, for they were Jews. Some of them were the high priests in Jerusalem. The Sadducees, with their Old Testament Bible in their hands, downright refused to believe in resurrection of any kind.
They didn't believe in angel. They didn't believe in the survival of the soul or the spirit. They felt when you died, you were done for. They certainly didn't believe in the resurrection of anybody, let let, let alone the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Christian apostles went out and preached the resurrection in the face of that opposition. If you turn to the Greeks, you'll find that the Greeks likewise didn't believe in the possibility of the resurrection of the body. We're told that on Mars Hill, Paul was invited to give a lecture to some of the learned Greeks, and among them were Epicureans.
Now, Epicureans believed in the early form of the atomic theory. The atomic theory is a very ancient theory, you know, and they believed it. And they held that when a person dies, the atoms of which his body is composed come adrift. They never can be collected again. Moreover, they said the atom of a man's soul, they all come to bits and couldn't be put together again. They didn't believe in the resurrection. And when Paul preached the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, they laughed and nearly broke their sides with laughing. They'd never heard anything so ridiculous. The great Aeschylus the poet, great tragic poet of the Greeks, he said on one occasion that when man lies down in death, there is no resurrection.
When the apostles therefore went out to preach the resurrection, they had to preach it against the face of almost one hundred percent unwillingness to believe. Most people believed in the s- survival of the soul, of course, like the great Plato did. But you know, when they laughed in the court of the Areopagus at Paul, he didn't stop his lecture and say, look here, don't be so quick to laugh, if you please. All I meant was that Jesus Christ, when he was crucified and buried, his soul survived. Don't laugh. Plato preached the same thing.
No, he didn't say that. He didn't mean that. In the face of the opposition, he preached the bodily resurrection of Christ. Yes, but you say, um, we can't nowadays believe it. Why can't you? Well, you say science has proved, hasn't it, that such things are impossible. The resurrection from the dead would be a straight miracle, and hasn't science proved that miracles are impossible? Well, it is the fact that many scientists say that, ladies and gentlemen.
But it's not their science that forces them to say so. They say it not because science has forced them to say that miracles are impossible. They say it because they start off with the assumption that there is no God, that all there is in the universe is matter, and that if that is so, miracles are impossible, and therefore the story of the resurrection can't be true. It's not their science that, uh, proves it. It's their presupposition that there's no God leads them to conduct their science in such a way as they will tell you science proves the resurrection impossible.
Now, don't just take that from me. I want to read you a recent statement from a scientist. His name is Richard Lewontin, one of the leading older scientists in the United States. He's a great personal friend of Carl Sagan, the scientist who, before he died, had made it his speciality to use his radio telescopes to listen into space. He did it in the conviction that there must be intelligent beings on other planets trying to get in touch with us. Both Carl Sagan and Richard Lewontin are, are atheists. Carl Sagan now dead, but Lewontin an atheist.
I want you to listen, this is rather difficult language, I want you to listen to what this atheist scientist says. Here he comes. Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs.
In spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for the unsubstantiated just so stories. And why do we take that view? Now, he tells us honestly, because we have a prior commitment to materialism. That's where he starts, refusing to believe in God, believing that the whole universe is composed of nothing but matter. And because that's our prior commitment to that belief, he says, that's why we take the side of science, even when some of its explanations now current are just so stories, scarce scientific at all.
It is not that the commitment, uh, sorry, it is not that the methods and institution of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the femo- phenomenal world. Science doesn't force us to any such thing. Uh, on the contrary, we are forced by a prior adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations. Now listen to his final, uh, uh, confession.
Moreover, says he, the materialism that we follow, the belief that there is no God, there's only matter in the universe. Our commitment to that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow the divine foot in the door. That is Professor Lewontin, one of the leading scientists of the United States, and himself a confessed atheist. It's not that science proves that miracles are impossible. It's not that science proves that there is no God nor spirit.
It is because we start from that presupposition, there is no God nor spirit. And that presupposition is absolute. Why do we adhere to it absolutely? Because we are not prepared for God to put his foot in the door. When you'll hear, if you ever hear scientists saying that science has made it impossible for people to believe in God or the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Pray remember what Professor Lewontin says, himself an absolute atheist, a world famous scientist.
It's not science that makes it impossible for us to believe in such things as the resurrection of Christ. What is it then? It's our prior commitment to materialism, and we are determined to maintain that standpoint. We're not prepared for any God to put his foot inside our door. There is a God, isn't there? How do we know there's a God? One of the reasons is that, as the Bible puts it, the evidence is all around us that there's a God. For everywhere we look in the universe, there is clear evidence of an intelligence behind the universe.
There is overwhelming evidence of design. The modern biochemist Michael Behe of the States uses constantly nowadays the technical term of what he calls irreducible complexity. That is, he says, the more you study the cell, the more you see that it is so fantastically complicated that it couldn't have happened by accident. He says, moreover, many of the systems within the cell are not only complicated, but all the systems must have been there before any of them would work.
To illustrate his point of what he means by, um, irreducible complexity, he uses the simple illustration of a mouse trap. You will know it very well, I suspect. Mouse trap is made up of various bits and pieces. There is the wooden bottom to it, there is a hammer thing, there's a spring, there's a thing to catch the whole thing upwards until the mouse treads on the trap here and gets smitten by the hammer. And Professor Behe says, now ponder the mouse trap for a moment. Would you think that you could start off for a few million years just with a baseboard and catch a few mice?
Well, of course not. And then, some millions of years later, add, add a hammer and catch a few more mice. And then, some millions years later, add a spring and catch rather a lot of mice. And finally, add the old hook here and add a bit of cheese on and catch all the mice there are. Of course not, you wouldn't think that, you wouldn't begin to, would you? You would say that's a foolish man to talk like that. Uh, if a mouse trap's going to work, simple thing that it is, all the parts must be there and functioning together, else you don't catch any mice.
It is irreducibly complex. Take one part away, you don't catch anything. Professor Behe points to the wonderful, complicated processes within our cells. Fantastically complicated processes. And the point of them is, he says, that they are not only complex, but all the bits have to be there working together. If one little bit is missing, things stop working, and we suffer from disease or even death. The evidence, therefore, is increasingly these days, ladies and gentlemen, increasing evidence of design and intelligence behind the universe, behind our bodies.
And if there's a God, I say to you what Paul said to King Agrippa. Why should it be thought an impossible thing for God to raise the dead. If God, by his word, brought the whole universe into being, how can it be thought incredible that that same God would raise the dead? Must be there and functioning together, else you don't catch any mice.
It is irreducibly complex. Take one part away, you don't catch anything. Professor Behe points to the wonderful, complicated processes within our cells, fantastically complicated processes, and the point of them is, he says, that they are not only complex, but all the bits have to be there working together. If one little bit is missing, thing stops working, and we suffer from disease or even death. The evidence, therefore, is increasingly these days, ladies and gentlemen, increasing evidence of design and intelligence behind the universe, behind our bodies.
And if there's a God, I say to you what Paul said to King Agrippa. Why should it be thought an impossible thing for God to raise the dead? If God, by his word, brought the whole universe into being, how can it be thought incredible that that same God would raise the dead? We come to a final objection, and that is the objection by the learned former Bishop of Durham.
But, says he, he cannot believe in the, uh, resurrection of the body, for what would be the point of it? Raising a dead body from the grave. He can think of the survival of the soul, but the resurrection of the body? What's the point of the resurrection of the body? He says it would be like God performing a conjuring trick with bones. But what is the point of the body, the resurrection of the body? Here we touch a very profound matter. In the first place, the Bible view of man.
And here the Old Testament and the New stand out against many a world religion. The Bible says that the human body is not like the wrapping paper around your packet of peas. The peas are the real things, uh, and you get the wrapper and throw it in the bin. The human body is not that. It's not just a temporary motel where you lodge for the night, and it's not really you. The human body, says the Bible, is an integral part of the human personality.
Now that's a marvelous thing. I'm sure I'm going to carry you with me in this, if in nothing else. You'll see. Um, the great Greek Socrates and the philosopher Plato, they hold a very different view of the body. They taught that the body is a kind of a tomb, and in Greek they made a play on the words, soma, sema. The body, soma, is a sema, that is a tomb. The body is like a tomb, or it's like a prison house that keeps the soul imprisoned.
And they told people that the way, the proper way, the way of wisdom is, while you are forced to live in the body, to keep as far away from the body as you can, lest the soul be defiled by the body. And when at last the time comes to die, what a happy release, you leave your body behind, and your mortal soul goes back to the realms of eternity. In other words, they despised the body. Millions of Indians and others who are adherents of Hinduism hold the same thing virtually, don't they? The body is made of matter.
It is a very lowly form. It is unfortunate. The whole point of the wise man is so to live that when at last he dies, he may escape the body and not be obliged to come back into the body ever again. In other words, they decry the body. The body is something in fatigue. The body is something you'd like to get rid of. And what, uh, sad results that can have sometimes, can we not? You have heard this last day or two the sorry story of the people that committed voluntary suicide in California, in San Diego, and the explanation that so far is available, that they regarded their bodies as a kind of a prison house, and they were wanting to set their soul free from the human body and go and join some terrestrial starlight body that was following the comet or something.
And so, because they despised the human body, they cut themselves adrift from it. That is not Christianity. Christianity teaches the value, the wholesomeness, the goodness of the human body, made by God himself a delightful thing, dispelled by sin, and therefore on its way to corruption and to death. But because of the redeeming work of Christ, the body itself one day to be redeemed and fashioned like our Lord's glorious body.
And what is more, so far from the resurrection of the body being a conjuring trick with bones unworthy of God's attention, the story of the body of Christ lies at the very heart of the Christian gospel, does it not? When God set himself to save us fallen human beings, he didn't remain in his high and lofty heaven. God is spirit. He didn't remain simply like that, but sent forth his son, who being God, never ceasing to be God, took upon himself a human body, and took it not just as a temporary motel in which he might live for a few years and then discard it as a hereafter irrelevant.
Took a human body because a human body as an integral part of a human. And our salvation, it meant that he would become truly human like we are. His body was sinless. But listen to what the gospel says. He bore our sins, says scripture, in his body on the tree. Took upon himself the death we deserved. The penalty and judgment under a holy God for our sin as human beings.
He died for our sins, according to the scripture. Really dead, he was buried. Ah, but now he was raised the third day, according to the scripture. And the significance of it? Oh, the significance is glorious indeed. Take the first thing. The Bible says that Jesus Christ was delivered over to death for our trespasses, dying the just for the unjust, bearing in his sinless body our sins, paying the penalty.
But he was raised the third day by God as our justification. In raising the body of Jesus Christ, God was saying, it's this same Jesus that stood before the cross as the representative of all mankind, truly human, and therefore with a human body, and went to the cross to bear our sins in his body and bear the judgment of God against our sin. And now, says God, that judgment is passed. The penalty has been paid, and the guarantee and demonstration of it is this, that that holy body is raised again from the dead.
A glorious, isn't it? And Jesus Christ is raised not as a disembodied spirit, but as a man still. A man who, for our sakes, died at Calvary, but has been raised as our representative man and received up into glory. And the other part of the gospel is this, that one day all who trust him shall have a redeemed body, a body fashioned like unto his glorious body.
This is not half a salvation. It's God's giving of the whole of Christ, body, soul, and spirit, for the whole of a man, body, soul, and spirit. When God's redemption is finished, it shall not be a collection of disembodied spirits that God will have in heaven. It is collection of whole men and women, spirit, soul, and body redeemed by Christ. A whole Christ for the whole human being.
And finally, the resurrection, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, proclaims him to be God's son, is the evidence of a coming judgment. One day, because he is truly human and remains truly human, because he is the son of man, all judgment shall be committed to him. The day will come when he shall speak the word, and those that are in the graves shall hear and come forth. They that have done good to the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil to the resurrection of damnation.
That is the Christian gospel. The more wonderful thing, perhaps, for us sitting here tonight is this. The risen Son of God tells us not merely that one day he will call the physically dead out of their graves to stand before his judgment throne. Now, the risen Son of God tells us this, that even now he longs to give us the gift of eternal life, imperishable, incorruptible, eternal life.
Yah is coming, said he, and now is. When the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live. Which brings us now to the end of our lecture. To this marvelous fact. Jesus Christ not only rose again the third day, according to the scripture, not only ascended to God's right hand, but is alive still.
The resurrection is not something that simply happened two thousand years ago, and that was the end of it. The resurrection is a beginning. Jesus Christ is no older today than he was two thousand years ago. But in the eternity where he now is, age doesn't apply. Jesus Christ lives. And therefore, he lives for each one of us. Lives, longing that we hear his voice, offering us here in our world, in our dying world, the gift of new life.
A new life that is now at this moment a spiritual life, forgiveness, fellowship with God, the very life of God, our Father. That he offers us now, in preparation for the day when he shall come again, and the dead in Christ shall rise first. We which are alive and remain, that have trusted the Savior, shall be changed and all caught up to meet the Lord in the air.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is what I understand the Bible to be saying when it talks to us of the empty tomb and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And that, as I understand it, is the relevance of his resurrection for us today. Because that is so, allow me, before we leave, to speak to Jesus Christ in prayer. Shall we pray? Lord Jesus Christ, the Bible says that thou art risen from the dead, and we believe it.
We thank thee for everyone who down the ages has discovered thee as being the living Lord. We thank thee for the bright prospect that one day thou will bodily return, and the whole universe shall be delivered from her bondage to corruption into the liberty of the children of God. But now in these moments, we turn to talk to thee personally, because thou art the living Christ. Thou are near us, thou readest our hearts and thoughts afar off.
Cause us, we pray, each one, to hear thy living, creative word in our hearts, to hear thy voice, and hearing to believe, and believing receive thy gift of eternal life, as thou hast promised to all who accept it. For thy name's sake. Amen.
