Boom. No slideshow. Apologies for that. I'm not a huge fan. I'm not going to lie. I do. Hey, it's fine. I'm happy to be the object of rightfully. But no, I really, sometimes a lesson fits it very well. It's very systematic, laid out, bullet points. But also fine, just for me personally, I had a tendency to maybe just sort of read through the slides a little bit. And so that's not my best way to present. Apologies for that. I know sometimes those visual cues can be good. Also know it's good, I did, a good distraction for you to have something else to look at besides me, which I certainly appreciate. But we're not going to have that today. So as you know, we've been working through this class on apologetics, trying to think of all the different topics that Jim has kind of hit. I know of late, he's sort of been working through just sort of ancient philosophies and the history of world views that have come through the thinking of our world. And one thing I would just say about that, Jim's done a great job. I don't know how you cover that much material in the span of time he has. But it's important to see, and I think he's highlighted this, that when we look at these world views or ideas, They tend to be things that take a really long time to develop. And we'll see this later, I think, in some of the future discussions. But generally, you have somebody come up with this thought or this idea or this new way of looking at the world, this new lens usually. And they write this stuff and a lot of people read it and they talk about it and there's discussion back and forth and it goes through universities and all this stuff. But usually it takes a really long time for that to sort of bleed into the culture. Okay. A easy example would be Karl Marx. Karl Marx was alive in the 19th century. Okay. His writings were late 19th century and yet The things that Marxism that developed into our world really didn't happen until the 20th century, 150 years later in a lot of cases. He was long gone and dead. Frankly, he died in poverty. It's not like he wrote these books and became wealthy. And that's the way so many of the ideas in our world happen. There's a thought, an idea, a new way of looking at something, a lot of conversation, a lot of discussion. And then over a really long period of time, it sort of works itself into the culture. And so many of the things that we'll talk about later in this class about our modern culture come from ideas of long ago. And a lot of them have morphed and blended and evolved and squished and whatever. But anyway, we'll cover some of that today, but I think that's an important point to kind of highlight. Something asking me for the right stars. Today we're going to talk about the reality of the resurrection. So a bit of a deviation from talking about philosophers, although we'll talk about a few. In fact, first thing I want to do in talking about this discussion is read you a quote from Leo Tolstoy. author of War and Peace, author of some great novels in the 20th century. Yeah, 20th century. Late 19th, 20th century. And brilliant man. Would not get into all his religious beliefs, but he did have a conversion experience. But I want you to hear what he had to say of what happened to him in the middle part of his life. He said, my question That which at the age of 50 brought me to the verge of suicide was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man. A question without an answer to which one cannot live. It was this, what will come of what I'm doing today or tomorrow? What will come of my life? Why should I live? Why wish for anything or do anything? It can only be expressed this way. Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy? Man, it sounds like despair, right? And yet, if we're to believe what our modern world thinks about this world and its origins and its trajectory, where it's going, We should ask the same questions if we're to be true to ourselves. What meaning is there? If all this happened by chance, if there is no supernatural, there is no creator, then there's no purpose and meaning. And why does any of this matter? Why does it matter that I get up in the morning and try to accomplish anything? It's really pointless. Because what Tolstoy was saying is what's going to last? After I'm dead and gone, what difference will it make? I hope you feel the tension in that quote. And frankly, whether we hold to the truths of the Christian faith or not, that tension is in all of us, because our faith wavers from time to time. And we feel it, and sometimes we think, does any of this matter? You guys got up early, came to Sunday school. Hopefully you're struggling with that less, but I would tell you there are times in our life where this is acute and we all struggle with the inevitability of death. We can't help but think of our insignificance. What's going to happen when that trap door opens up underneath us? Are we going to fall into the everlasting arms or we just go into oblivion? Right? What will be remembered of us? I can still, I wrote down this note about an illustration. I remember my Sunday school teacher back when I was in high school, really brilliant man. But he used to use this illustration just to wake up teenagers. He'd say, I want you to go out today sometime, go out into your yard, get down on your knee in the grass, pick up a blade of grass. Just break off the smallest tip of the blade that you can find and put it in the palm of your hand. Blow it out into the air, watch it disappear. See, when James talks about your life being a vapor, that's what it is. And for a 16, 17 year old, it's like, man, that kind of wakes you up a little bit, right? Because we don't think about the inevitability of death when we're at that age. We feel a bit invincible. When we think about apologetics, the subject of this class, and sort of defending the faith, there is no more important question than the reality of the resurrection. Everything hinges on it. If it's true, it changes everything. And if it's not, what did the Apostle Paul say? we are most to be pitied. If it's not true, we have no hope. There is no meaning. We're back to where Leo Tolstoy was, right? So let me expand on this for a minute. When people are wrestling with Christianity, there's so much in the Bible that they could take issue with, right? When we're talking to people about our faith, when we're talking about why it is we believe what we believe, so many of the objections come up about various teachings in the Bible, things that Jesus said, his stance on divorce, how he thinks about adultery, how he thinks about a million things. And honestly, those are things that I can identify with how they wrestle with them. I wrestle with them in my own heart, right? Sometimes I think, why is that? Why is the Sabbath a thing, right? What's so central about that? Why does that matter? Why does he want me to honor it the way he does? Why is honoring my mother and father so important to him? But what we need to direct them to when they're wrestling with those sort of peripheral questions is the resurrection. Because it's the only thing that matters. If the resurrection is not true, who cares what Jesus said, okay? But if it is true, if Jesus is alive, okay, if he raised from the dead, then everything he said matters. Because he is the chief authority. And we have to we can no longer say I'll just do whatever I want to do Because one has risen from the dead and he promises eternal life to those who will follow him But if he didn't again why bother why bother with the rest of the stuff he said So there's a sense in which I would tell you whenever we want to get somebody wants to get us caught up in those peripheral things and Honestly, just own it with them. Just say, look, I struggle with some of those things too. But Jesus said it. And let me tell you why I listen to what He says. And get to the central heart of what really matters. The resurrection is where it's all determined. It's what everything hinges on. So the question is, did it really happen? Hopefully what we'll do today is work through some of the arguments over the centuries that have come up against the resurrection. I would tell you it's sort of interesting. A lot of that happened during the Enlightenment in the 19th century. And I would tell you that many of those arguments have already been done away with, frankly, in the late 19th century and the 20th century. by even by unbelievers themselves, people who were arguing with each other about how that can't be a good argument. What about this argument? So in that process, many of these things were sort of refuted already. But we're going to talk through that and hopefully not only talk about some of those false arguments, but hopefully strengthen our faith as well. If we're believers, we have to know that the resurrection really happened, because if it didn't, as I said earlier, we're wasting our time. If you got your Bibles, open up to 1 Corinthians chapter 15. This is Paul's chapter on the resurrection of Christ. It is powerful stuff. We're gonna read verses 12 through 19 here just to frame things. But I would tell you, when you think about this, Paul wrote this letter anywhere between 15 and 25 years after Jesus died. So really current stuff, okay? This is not something that was written centuries later, all right? It's essentially contemporary. Listen to what Paul tells the church at Corinth. He says, now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God because he testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope, in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied." And that's what I mentioned earlier. For believers, Paul is writing to this church in Corinth saying, if you don't think there's a resurrection, you're wasting your time. There were some at that time who were, remarkably, holding to the resurrection of Jesus, but thinking there wouldn't be a resurrection of believers. And he's explaining to them here in this rationale how that makes no sense. The very reason Jesus was raised from the dead was to be our first fruits that we might be raised from the dead. and he was explaining to them just the futility in their logic and rationale. That's for believers. But even unbelievers, for those who don't hold to the Christian faith, if they want to understand our world, they have to ask the question, where did the church come from? Why do these crazy people believe what they do, right? It's so prevalent in our world. It has to be a question. Where are these people? How do they have these beliefs that they have? How does it make any sense? Why do they hold to this view of the resurrection? I'm gonna read you a quote here from Tim Keller's book, Reason for God. It sort of just lays out a rationale, if you will, of kind of modern thinking. This is how, I won't say this is how everybody who thinks who doesn't believe in the resurrection, but it's very plausible, thought out. A lot of the views here are what people would hold to who don't believe the resurrection. He says their sort of mentality would go something like this. People at that time, back in the first century, it is said, did not have a scientific knowledge about the world. They were credulous about magical and supernatural happenings. They could have easily fallen prey to reports of a risen Jesus because they believed that resurrection from the dead was possible. Jesus' followers were heartbroken when he was killed. Since they believed he was the Messiah, they may have begun to sense that he was still with them. even guiding them, living on in their hearts and spirit. Some may have even felt that they had visions of him speaking to them. Over the decades, these feelings of Jesus living on spiritually developed into stories that he had been raised physically. The resurrection accounts and the four gospels were developed to booster this belief. You could totally see a modern, scientific-focused mind honing in on that to rationalize what happened in the gospel accounts, right? Can't really refute that the gospels are historic narratives, that these things did occur. We know these people existed. There are other accounts outside of the scriptures that speak to these things and verify them. There are a lot of verifiable points. What this person is trying to do is rationalize how these things could have come to be. Why someone may have said that Jesus raised from the dead in a way that aligns with scientific information, if you will. What that starts with is a presupposition that miracles don't happen, that there is no supernatural, right? You heard Jim talk about the Greek philosophers, this debate over the things that we can observe and the things that we can't. And that will go on, okay? We're gonna continue to have that debate. And frankly, No matter what anybody tells you, there's always going to be faith in which side of that you come down on. Whether you believe that there is supernatural, that there is, for example, a God who started everything and intervenes in his creation from time to time, or you believe that there's not supernatural, there is faith in your belief. We can't prove all those things. We can't put the universe in a laboratory and observe it, okay? Everything about the concepts of Big Bang and the origins of the universe is based on theories. And frankly, there is faith in those theories. You have to make leaps. There are gaps you have to plug. We get accused of You know, just everything being based on faith. Everyone's belief is based on faith. We can't know everything. We can't observe everything. We can't put everything in a laboratory. So that's an important discussion too to have with people when you're talking about our faith and defending our faith. We all are expressing faith. It's just what are you expressing your faith in? Okay? And I think that's an important distinction as we work through any of this stuff. To the contemporary mind, what I just read to you from Keller's book is a very plausible explanation. But I want us to look at the evidence. Let's see what the evidence is. There's some presuppositions, some presumptions in that narrative that I just read you. One, that people back then were superstitious, easily led to believe magical things. that they thought the resurrection was possible. That's an important presumption. Some of these ideas about Jesus' followers, a lot of presumptions in these things. One was the fact that they said these accounts took place over a long period of time. Sort of like the telephone game, you know, you whisper it over here, go through enough ears, and the story's totally different by the end, right? There was this view, again, back, some of the skeptics back in the 19th century. These things were written long afterwards, made up, morphed over time, myths, legends. The reality is these accounts were written within a generation of Jesus' death. We know that now. It's been substantiated. What I just read you from 1 Corinthians, 15 to 25 years after Jesus died. I mean, that's a blink, right? So as I said, inherent in that account that I just summarized are a lot of presumptions, views, that frankly ignore some of the facts. A couple of the key facts it ignores are A, the empty tomb, and we're going to talk about that, and B, these eyewitness accounts. Earlier in that chapter, 1 Corinthians 15, Paul talks about 500 eyewitnesses of the resurrection of Jesus. That Jesus appeared to more than 500 people after he rose from the dead. And Paul is saying this in a public letter that's being read publicly. He's basically saying, you don't believe me, go talk to these people. Okay, it's only 15 to 20 years after this happened. These are people you can go talk to. He names Peter, names himself. So if you don't believe me, go talk to these people. I'm not making this up. But this view that, well, let's come back here to the first account that we have of the resurrection from Paul's letter. I mentioned this already. I'm kind of doing some circular rationale here. Paul's letter written 15-20 years after the death of Jesus is the first account we have of the resurrection. We're going to go up to verses 3-6 and read those real quick. And I want you to realize that what he writes here in, I think it's verses 4-8, is essentially an ancient creed, a creed that many say was developed within a few years after Jesus' death. So he's sort of quoting back to the Corinthians this well-established creed within the early church. He says, For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, here comes the creed, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. and that he appeared to Cephas and then to the twelve, Cephas being Peter, right? Then he appeared to more than 500 brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James and to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared to me. And he goes on, but what I want you to see is that creed, by the way, probably sounds familiar. We hear a lot of that phraseology in the Apostles' Creed that we would read and worship from time to time. But that was something that had already been accepted in the church shortly after Christ's resurrection. These things were held to by the early believers. Important to make that distinction. Why is that important? First of all, Paul's saying many of these people are still alive. You don't believe me, go talk to them. But second of all, it's recent. There are a lot of things in our history books that frankly don't have this sort of recency of sources. One of the things I was reading was talking about Alexander the Great. Somebody we wouldn't dispute many of the things we know about, but do you know the earliest sources we have about Alexander the Great were written 300 years after his death. It's sort of like, how do we even know he existed? Nobody asks that, right? Does anybody ever say, how do we know Alexander the Great existed? Nobody says that. And yet the earliest sources we have about him and his life, three centuries. after he died. And by the way, he wasn't around that long before Christ, okay? So really important that we see the recency of the scriptures is an important distinction in our apologetic. And I mentioned the fact that this document's public. Paul says he received it directly from these witnesses. And then he points out that he himself was a witness of Jesus, that Jesus appeared to him. You know that from Acts chapter nine, right? The road to Damascus. The Lord Jesus appears to Paul. Now let's think about this idea that these narratives in the gospels are fabrications. I don't think I'm telling you anything new. You've probably heard this before, but if you were gonna drum up a tale If you're going to tell a story to get people inspired and motivated and support this idea of the resurrection, you wouldn't have the details that the gospel writers put in the gospels. First of all, you probably wouldn't talk about your own weakness. These guys were going to go on to be leaders of the church. Why would you describe the falling away? Why would you talk about your denial of Christ? Why would this story about Peter talking to a probably 12-year-old girl just sound like such a wimp that he would deny his Lord? You'd leave that out, right? Of course you would, unless it was true. Why would you tell in the narrative that the first people to see Jesus were women? In that day, you probably know this, I'm sure we've talked about it in our Sunday school classes. In that culture, women were so thought of as sort of second class that they were not even allowed to provide testimony in a court of law. Wasn't evidential. They were viewed as too emotional. Their testimonies did not count as evidence. And so as a writer of the gospel, you're gonna say, The first people to see the risen Jesus were women? Of course you wouldn't do that. You'd leave it out. Or you'd reorder the facts. Maybe Peter and John saw Jesus first and then the ladies came along and saw Jesus. Why would you do that? Only because it was true. N.T. Wright, one of the scholars of the resurrection, who has some great writings on this, by the way, he makes the argument there must have been incredible pressure on the gospel writers to leave that detail out. They had to know that would actually weaken their story. But they include it. Why? First of all, because these narratives were well known by then. By the time they've written these things down, people already know. that the women were the first ones to see Jesus. And they knew it would destroy the credibility of their narratives. And they knew it happened, right? Really powerful stuff when you think about the inference of that argument. And then, of course, we have the empty tomb. Now, look, there are lots of theories about the empty tomb. But what nobody argues is that the tomb was empty, okay? It's a well-established fact. Even the enemies of Jesus said the tomb was empty. In fact, they sort of the first ones to throw one of these theories out there to say, well, let's just tell everybody his followers came and took his body, right? What a powerful support, by the way, for the argument of the empty tomb that the very enemies of Jesus said the tomb was empty. But if we think about the parties involved around the tomb or some of these theories of skeptics, some would say that his enemies were the ones who took the body. maybe so that Jesus wouldn't be made a martyr or for whatever reason that either the Pharisees or some of the Roman officials or somebody took Jesus's body. But what's wrong with that theory? If that were the case, how easy would it have been for them to produce his body when his followers started talking about a resurrection? We know from the book of Acts the craziness that they stirred up in Jerusalem. How easy would it have been to put all that to an end if his enemies stole his body? They would just produce it and say, this is silliness. These guys are lying. What about his friends? Why would we not think that, you know, there's this theory that Jesus' followers went and took his body and then came up with this this narrative of the resurrection. And listen, on its surface, maybe that sounds like a reasonable theory. Until we realize, we put it up against what we read in the scriptures that Jesus' followers themselves talk about falling away, being scared and hiding from the officials. denying their Lord. They're in this incredible place of weakness and defeatism. Why would they then go steal a body and drum up an idea about resurrection and now have this unbelievable confidence to defy authorities, preach with conviction, live changed lives, and die for what they believed in? Now I'm not going to say it's impossible that that could have been a scenario, but it seems highly unlikely, right? Does that make any sense that that would be the case? It seems irrational. And then there are these ideas that maybe Jesus really wasn't dead, that he was heavily injured, but his body was taken down and he got put in a grave and he just walked out. Still injured, but whatever. Obviously that doesn't align with the things that we read in the narratives. Not only that he rose again, but his followers saying that he walked through walls, that he ate. I would also submit to you, how powerful would it have been to his followers if he just showed up in front of them, weak and wounded, barely able to probably stand? Does that inspire them to go and do the things that they did, right? Again, seems illogical and irrational. Jesus' followers proclaimed the resurrection from the very beginning, as early as Pentecost, right? And I mentioned to you this creed that Paul references. If there was no empty tomb, then no one would have believed their preaching. And if skeptics could have produced the body, After stealing it, they would have quickly squashed the uprising. And why would Paul sit here and proclaim in a public document, go talk to 500 people who saw Jesus in his resurrected body? But even if the tomb was empty and there were eyewitnesses, does that mean Jesus was resurrected? Maybe his followers just wanted it to be true. or they had just seen him and when they talked about this, or they wanted it to be true, or just thought that they had seen him, maybe a hallucination, you hear those kind of theories. And when they talked about this to their audience, their audience was just eager to believe. This seems plausible to modern ears because of what we said earlier, that we think people in the first century unlearn or unlearned, unsophisticated, not scientific, gullible, superstitious. Pick your chronological snobbery. We always think looking back that people in history were backwoods sideways, didn't think rationally, silly in their arguments. But you know, we never do. We never look at our time and go, you know, one day, We're gonna be the people people look back on. And they're gonna say we were stupid and backwoods and superstitious and whatever. Isn't that funny? We never do that. But it's always within us that we think with this sort of chronological snobbery is what C.S. Lewis called it, where when we look back we think people in generations past were just idiots. But there's this view that people in the first century were open to anything, that they would have just embraced this teaching of the resurrection. This scholar I mentioned to you earlier, N.T. Wright, in his book really goes to depths of explaining that that's just not the case, that nothing could be further from the truth. I'll walk you through this here, I'll try to be quick. If we go back to the first century and look at how people thought, okay? And Jim kind of covered this in some of the things of the philosophies he taught from the Greek philosophers, ancient Greek philosophy. But the predominant mindset in Jesus' time was a Greco-Roman mindset, okay? Shaped by those ideas that have been filtering their way through the culture. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, and others. And inherent in that view was this sort of predominant idea that the soul of the spirit was good and the body was bad. The physical material world was weak, corrupt, even defiling. Plato said that the body was a prison for the soul. After all, the physical body is in constant decay and decline. It's going to ultimately lead us, let us down, certainly upon death. And the body was holding us back. Therefore, in their minds, salvation was to be free of the body, allow the spirit to be free. So the resurrection was not only impossible, But who would want it? Who would want to be trapped in this prison that Plato describes? So if you're talking to sort of non-Jewish people in the first century, to them the resurrection is not desirable. They would have listened to this teaching by the apostles and said, who wants that? I don't want this body, I want to be free of it. You even see this in Paul's writings in the New Testament. He's often confronting the ideas of the Gnostics. Gnostics were people who believed that there was special knowledge which allowed one to escape the material world and sort of enter this divine realm. Paul is often speaking against Gnosticism in his writings in the New Testament. And as Jim pointed out a week or so ago, that you had the Stoics and the Epicureans, you know, the Stoics wanting to suppress the body and emotion. The Epicureans, yes, they're where hedonism comes from, but it wasn't this idea of hedonism that we have now. In fact, the Epicureans would have said that the greatest pleasure was mental, to be free from fear and pain. So all of these schools of thought running amok at the time, who basically view the physical world as no good, the spiritual as what to desire, and here the apostles are talking about a resurrection of Jesus being stuck in a body. They would have said, we don't want anything to do with that. So the non-Jewish person would have thought returning to the body was foolish and undesirable. At the same time, the Jews would have found Jesus's resurrection unthinkable. And this is what I found very interesting. You guys have heard, obviously, that there were people of the Jewish faith back then who didn't hold to the resurrection. What do we call them? Sadducees, because they were sad, you see, right? But there were plenty of others in the Jewish faith who did believe there would be a resurrection. But the Jewish idea of resurrection, based on the Old Testament writings, without an understanding of Christ and how He was fulfilling the Old Testament, was this view that at the end times God would renew the world, that He would come to the righteous, and resuscitate the righteous and restore this world. Take out sin. A lot of the views that we have of heaven, right? Get rid of misery. Get rid of the decay that's going on. Essentially, restore the world back to the Garden of Eden. Shalom. Restore things to the way that they should be. But the resurrection was in that time. If you were to come to them and say, hey, this great Jesus that we love and hold to, He was resurrected. They'd say, what are you talking about? If Jesus is resurrected, then why is there still sin? Why is there still disease? The lion's not lying down with the lamb. The Romans are still in charge. That's craziness. They would have thought... That kind of resurrection made no sense. They would have rejected it. So to suggest that Jesus' disciples came up with this idea of resurrection and then threw it out into the petri dish of superstition and backwards thinking and people just embraced it willy-nilly, it's silliness. Nobody would have embraced that. That's not how their minds worked. That's not what they'd held to for centuries and centuries of time. Back to that point of how ideas slowly develop, take a long time to take root. This thing at Pentecost took off. Hundreds, thousands started worshiping the Lord Jesus. That just doesn't make sense, right? I've been rambling here. Anything, yo good, other than we're not raising a hand. All right, we'll keep rolling. We're gonna run out of time quick. I'm not gonna hit that. One last point. There were lots of other messianic figures pre-Jesus, first century, second century, third century. who came along and were ultimately executed by those who were in authority. But we see in none of those cases that their followers suggest that their leader has been resurrected, that he's come back to life. Basically, they had two options. They could quit whatever revolution they were a part of, or they could find a new leader. But none of them would dare say their leader had been resurrected. unless of course he was. So that's another important historical fact. But then the last little argument here that I want to hit you with is not only do we have sort of these views of the resurrection, what happened to Jesus' time, but this explosion of the church. I said earlier that the unbeliever cannot ignore the resurrection. They have to ask, why do these people believe what they do? How do they explain millions of people believing in the resurrection? How do we explain the origins of the church, this explosive growth that took place? And I sort of alluded to it, but these beliefs that the apostles held to, which frankly were not things they drummed up. They were merely talking about what they saw, right? But these ideas of this bodily resurrection of Christ and the impact on their lives were totally novel ideas, brand new, unthinkable to their culture and communities. As they got their head wrapped around it, they had a resurrection-centered view of reality. They believed that the future resurrection had already begun. What they had grown up hearing in their Jewish faith, they saw as Jesus being the first fruits of that. And they believed that this future resurrection was different in the sense that Jesus had a transformed body. He could walk through walls and yet he still ate food. That was different than their Jewish faith, which is more like just a resuscitation, being brought back to life. Jesus' resurrection is different. He has a whole new body with different capabilities. And it was certainly different than what non-Jewish people thought who were totally focused on sort of this spiritual existence. Yeah, I think I already hit that. So, I sort of alluded this a second ago, but this idea that the resurrection was such a radical idea and it took root so fast and that it spread through the culture with a speed that we don't typically see with new ideas. It really comes from the fact that, again, the disciples were not sitting around working through this. These ideas weren't worked out in a university. They weren't writing papers back and forth, having arguments. They were merely talking about what they had seen. And because of that, this movement took root. Why else would people have believed them? Now, I don't want to lose the fact We're Reformed believers here, and this is really important in apologetics, by the way. We can explain all these things with incredible specificity and logic and evidence, and at the end of the day, if the Holy Spirit is not working in the heart, people will not embrace these truths, okay? How do I know that? You remember Jesus' story about Lazarus and the rich man? You remember that? Lazarus is in Abraham's bosom and a rich man is suffering in hell and he just wants a drink of water. And then he says, hey, can I at least go back and tell my brothers so that they won't suffer this fate? And Lazarus says, it doesn't matter. Even if somebody who rose from the dead went back and talked to him, they wouldn't believe. That is sobering, right? But isn't that what Jesus did? He rose from the dead, and He went and talked, and people went and talked about Him, and people still didn't believe. Back to this point, there will always be an element of faith. I think it goes all the way back to Genesis 1. I think it goes all the way back to Genesis 1. This is why when God says, don't eat of the tree, there's an element of faith in that. Right? I mean, if He told them exactly, here's why you don't do this, with incredible specificity, where they could rationalize it themselves, there'd be no faith. But at the end of the day, what He was really saying is, don't eat of this tree, because I said don't eat of this tree. And I want you to put your trust in me. And unless the Holy Spirit is working in our hearts, we're not gonna do that. We're gonna suffer the same fate they did. So it is important to remember that as we talk about apologetics, all this stuff is tied together. We got two minutes and we'll go get donuts. Finally, I'll just sort of sum up this way. I do think this is important to highlight. Remember that these first century Jews, especially those in the early church post-Pentecost, they have started to worship this human divine. And that would have been unthinkable in their faith. The Jews held to a single transcendent personal God. Deuteronomy 6.4, Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. The Shema, they call it. It's a central confession of the Jewish faith. It would have been blasphemy to say a human was God. So why did they do it? Except that they saw the risen Lord Jesus. There could be no other explanation. How could you rationalize it? It wouldn't make any sense. Unless they had seen him resurrected. and that they knew this was very son of God and worthy of their worship. I said I was done, but I think that's probably good. So, any questions or thoughts before I let you see myself? I'm terrible at this in terms of I just get up here and talk and don't give you guys a chance to speak. Let's certainly work through these things. There are a lot of great things to read. If you'd like to talk about some of that, I'd be happy to give you some direction. But hopefully what you take away from today is the importance of the resurrection, the centrality to the gospel message. As believers, if it's not true, everything we're doing here today is in vain. If it is true, What motivation we have to go worship a great and mighty God. One last thing. Just as you're talking to other people about your faith, if you're hammering them over the head with facts, that's not always gonna be the best way to win people. But I think ultimately what I want you to think about is how do we make them salivate? You know, when somebody's cooking a steak and you're, Suddenly you got a burn in your stomach. You just want that thing. Your mouth starts to water. You just know it's going to be incredible. That's how we should talk about our faith, that people want what we're saying to be true, even if they can't get their hands wrapped around it, that they would say, man, yeah, if the resurrection is true, then there should be justice for the poor. We should try to take care of this amazing planet that we live on. So many other things that have meaning and purpose that, frankly, if we're here by chance and accident, they're irrelevant. If we're here by chance and accident, who cares if the poor are disadvantaged? Let the mighty win. Survival of the fittest. But the gospel is real. Jesus did rise. All right, I'll shut up. Let's pray together. Father, we thank you for the wonder of the resurrection. And Father, we have worked through evidences and facts and arguments this morning, but I pray that your Spirit would show us this morning as we worship the true reality of the resurrection and that we would not leave here unchanged. That our hearts would be moved that we would know there is purpose and meaning in everything that we do. And that, Father, what a wondrous and glorious future you have for your church. We thank you for Jesus. We thank you for the wonder of the gospel. We pray you'd be with us now as we worship in his name. Amen.