David Levin - Class 1: Five Facets of Resurrection

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   This is the 2017 Saanich Peninsula Ecclesia Study Day. The topic is Five Facets of Resurrection, given by Brother David Levin. This is Class 1, titled The Resurrection of Jesus the Christ as an Historical Event. Brother David.

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   Bible heroes. That's where we're going to start. So before we go too far, by the way, my laryngitis is a lot better than it's been the last two weeks. In fact, it's perfectly, my voice is fine. If you can't hear me, it's probably your hearing.

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   So do like Duncan is doing right now, with a writing implement in one hand and some substrate in the other. I'd like you to write down some of your favorite Bible heroes. These can be well-known people, or people just played a relatively minor role, but important. A hero meaning a hero in this definition is somebody who showed up at the right time, did what had to be done, stepped up, took action.

4. 1:28

   Knew what had to be done, took courage, or whatever. That's a hero. See what has to be done, and regardless of the odds, they went on. So write down a few nominees for your Bible heroes. That is 2, 3, 4, 12. Doesn't make any difference. A few names.

5. 2:00

   Oh, I don't need any. You're asking a question, you're going to tell me who you have. I'm not ready for that. Is my whispering heard in the back row?

6. 2:17

   Can you hear me in the back? Thank you. How would you know? How would you know? Yeah. Don't raise your hand if you can't hear me. Okay. I've got a few names.

7. 2:32

   Now, I really don't need to know who's on your list. I just want to know who's. I'm just going to propose one name. And I want to know if anybody has this. Actually, it's not a single individual. It's a group of people. But did anybody write down the Pharisees?

8. 2:57

   You missed that one. Nobody considers the Pharisees as heroes of the Bible. Well, you'll have a different opinion on that by the time I'm done talking today. I mean, by the time I'm done lecturing. I hope that's after I'm done talking. No, they didn't intend to be. But the Pharisees did something without which we would not be able to have our faith.

9. 3:25

   They did something so important to establishing Christianity that without their inadvertent action, Christian faith would probably never have started off at all. So let's go back to our text here in Matthew 27. And we're going to look at the resurrection of Jesus from a few different perspectives.

10. 3:58

    Jesus' perspective. Well, there wasn't much there. He was dead. But we have to look at something about how Jesus would have looked at his resurrection. One looked at the perspective of the Pharisees, from the disciples, and from the Romans. So we're going to see how this all worked. In all this, we're going to draw just about two really essential points we want to know about the resurrection of Jesus.

11. 4:35

    So to bring us up in time, at that point, the crucifixion had occurred. We're here in Matthew 27 where the reading was. The crucifixion had occurred. Jesus was dead.

12. 4:54

    Verse 50, he cried again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. Jesus was dead. Joseph of Arimathea, being a secret disciple, comes, and this also is an act of great heroism. Joseph goes to Pilate and requests the body of Jesus so that he can bury it in Joseph's own tomb.

13. 5:29

    Pilate permits this. It's late in the day, so they don't have time to do the usual burial preparation. But into Arimathea, Joseph's tomb, goes the body of Jesus.

14. 5:49

    The disciples, for their part, are probably dispersed, fearful of their own lives, and hiding or running. They're greatly perplexed that Jesus was, their leader was dead, and really not knowing about the resurrection. We'll get to that.

15. 6:21

    The next day, come down to verse 62 in the reading we just had. This is what we want to focus on. What was it the Pharisees do here? It says, after the day of preparation, the chief priests and Pharisees, and this was really mostly the, we'll find out in a minute. This was the Pharisees doing.

16. 6:41

    The chief priests were in on it, but this, the Pharisees had orchestrated this. They go to Pilate also. Remember, Joseph had gone the day before. Now, the Pharisees come to Pilate. The Pharisees come to Pilate. A very different mission. A very different story. And they say to Pilate something absolutely remarkable. Absolutely remarkable.

17. 7:10

    They say, we remember that this impostor, or deceiver, the different translations there, said that he was going to be raised on the third day.

18. 7:28

    So, just to make sure that does not happen, we want to post a guard of soldiers at the site of the tomb, and we want to seal the tomb to make sure that the disciples don't come, open the tomb when nobody's looking, take out the body, take it away, and then say, oh, look, he's been resurrected.

19. 8:07

    So, we want to make sure that that doesn't happen. That will be an even worse deception than the first, which was Jesus proclaiming to be the Messiah. So, in order to make sure that does not happen, we propose this. Guard the soldiers, seal the tomb, stay there until the past, after the three days, and by then, the whole thing will have, be done with.

20. 8:40

    No resurrection, the disciples will be scattered, there's this whole Jesus the Messiah thing will be done. So, that was the Pharisee's solution. Well, they made obviously some,

21. 8:55

    I'll just say, probably the biggest tactical blunder in history of what they did here. First of all, the disciples weren't going to come and steal the body because they had no idea there was even going to be a resurrection. This was still hidden from them. So, just look at a couple texts on this.

22. 9:24

    They're both in Luke. Go to Luke 9.44. Luke 9.44. And, actually, to somewhat save my voice and to make sure that these verses will be heard, if you could just call them people or read them yourself. Luke 49.44. 9.45. Okay. Let these words sink down into your ears for the Son of Man is about to be delivered into the hands of men.

23. 10:12

    But they did not understand the saying and it was hidden from them so that they did not perceive it and they were afraid to ask him about the saying. Okay. Okay. And in 18, verse 31 to 34. Luke 18, verse 31 to 34.

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    And taking the twelve, he said to them, See, we are going up to Jerusalem and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will be delivered over to the Gentiles and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon. And after flogging him, they will kill him and on the third day he will rise.

25. 11:02

    But they understood none of these things. This saying was hidden from them and they did not grasp what was said. Thank you. So Luke repeats this. See, that it was hid from them. They didn't understand it. They did not grasp it. In other words, as often as Jesus said that I would be raised from the dead, they couldn't comprehend what that meant.

26. 11:31

    So even if they were inclined to effect the resurrection, they wouldn't have because they didn't know that that's what was supposed to happen. So the idea that the disciples coming to steal the body away was totally superfluous. It wasn't going to happen. So how did the Pharisees know that if the disciples didn't?

27. 11:55

    How can the Pharisees like, oh, we heard him say this. Well, this is interesting. In none of the places where Jesus talks about his resurrection, these two, in any place you'll find, they're always addressed to the disciples. There's no place where he ever told the Pharisees, I'm going to be raised in three days.

28. 12:19

    Now you do have in John 2 where he talked about the temple. He says, you destroyed this temple. It was 46 years. In the three days, I'll raise it. But that was metaphoric. So we have no record of, at least none that I can find, of the Pharisees hearing this directly from Jesus in any of his discourses.

29. 12:42

    But yet they knew that he had said this. So either they had heard it indirectly or there's other things not in the scripture where it's in some interaction with the Pharisees. But because Jesus interacted with the Pharisees and not the chief priests very much, not until his trial, that's why I said it was the Pharisees that were behind all this machinations to make sure he wouldn't be raised.

30. 13:10

    They were the ones who had got this idea. So what they went about doing was the Pharisees would say, well, we're going to prevent something. But in their mind, they didn't know it wasn't going to happen anyway, which is the disciples coming.

31. 13:33

    But what did they actually do that made the resurrection of Jesus now absolutely provable? Well, go back to Matthew a little earlier. Excuse me, Matthew 28. And let's read the first six verses. Matthew 28, verse 1 to 6. Now after the Sabbath, the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see a tomb.

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    And behold, there was a great earthquake for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning and his clothing white as snow. And for fear of him, the guards trembled and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified.

33. 14:53

    He is not here, for he has risen. And as he said, come see the place where he lay. Now, we need to understand the time sequence here. There's a, there's two, it's not obvious as you read this, but there's an ellipsis in here where there's a section of something that happened earlier. because it talks about the guards in verse four trembling and becoming like dead men at the sight of the angels.

34. 15:37

    And in verse five, the angel speaking to the women. So the question is, were the guards still there when the women came? I mean, it sounds like night had come, the guards showed up, the resurrection happened, the guards were there, the women showed up. But actually, there's a parenthesis, I said ellipsis, there's a parenthetical section here.

35. 16:14

    So if you put a parenthesis at the start of verse three and the closed parenthesis at the end of verse four, in other words, verse three and four had already happened when the women showed up. The guards were gone. We'll see that in a moment. Okay. It is had and behold, there had been, there was a great earthquake and angel came.

36. 16:51

    Excuse me, the parenthesis start before verse two. It's two through four is a parenthesis saying what had happened overnight. Because chapter 28 starts with after the Sabbath toward the dawn of the first week, Mary and Magdalene, the other Mary, went to see the sepulcher.

37. 17:17

    The earthquake already had happened. That's why I'm saying that two, three, and four tells, is a parenthesis that tells what had already happened. So the action continues from verse one to verse five when the angels talked to the women. So when you read verse two, three, and four, that's telling you what happened during the night before the women came.

38. 17:47

    So when the resurrection actually happened, the physical, I mean, the physical moment of the tomb opening, the angel of Jesus coming out, who was there to see it? Who were the only people on earth that saw the grave open were the guards. Now, whether you think these are Roman guards or the Jewish chapel guard is immaterial, I know there's arguments both ways.

39. 18:17

    But the point was the immediate witnesses to the act of resurrection were people who had no interest in having a resurrection. In other words, these are reliable witnesses.

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    If they weren't there, take the contrapositive, supposing that there was nobody there. If there were no guards there, and the angels, and there's a resurrection, the women come in the morning, they see the tomb open. They say, my goodness, he's been resurrected.

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    They start spreading this rumor. Now, the Pharisees could say, well, you're just saying that. How do we know? Nobody saw it. But because they had put the guard, it was their witnesses who were actually there, and the only people who could say there was, yeah, this light in the manifestation of God and the tomb opens and Jesus comes.

42. 19:28

    These are Roman or Jewish guards who don't want the resurrection to happen or don't even know anything about it. So, therefore, we have an extremely reliable authority that that actually happened. If there was nobody there, you couldn't prove it because nobody could see it. If there was just disciples or women there, then, again, they want this to happen.

43. 19:57

    They're not reliable witnesses, so you have just the kind of witnesses you want. In other words, think sometimes of a, this is not the greatest, but it's good enough. Okay. You watch a sporting event, and there's two teams or two players, and there's a close call, and of course, the people who want the call to go their way, what do they do?

44. 20:27

    Oh, it was in, the ball was in, you know, they're all making the signs, they're jumping up and down, he made it, he made it, he scored the touchdown, and on the other sidelines, everybody's going, oh, no, no, no, no, no, he was out, you know, and they're just seeing what they want to see, these are not reliable witnesses, they're saying, we want this to be that way, so we're going to call it that way, so these, in other words, so these guards are not people who are going to want to say, yeah, we want a resurrection, they were trying to prevent that from happening, so it's like the other team saying, yeah, you're right, yeah, he did score the touchdown, so, okay, so therefore, we can, find out that the Pharisees, by trying to prevent the resurrection, actually, as I said, heroes, they took the important step to make sure that we can believe there's a resurrection by providing the right, not just witnesses, but the right kind of witnesses, and also sealing the grave, just to make sure, well, how did that get unsealed, who would have done that, if the guards were watching, so you can't have disciples showing up, because there was guards, and they wouldn't have showed up anyway, and you have a witness, so, you come down to verse 11, and you find out how the report of the resurrection started, and it wasn't the women, or the disciples, it was who?

45. 22:20

    Read 11-14, instead of 15. 28, 11-15, yeah. 28, verse 15, 15. While they were going, behold, some of the guards went into the city, and told the chief priests all that had taken place. And when they had assembled with the elders and taken counsel, they gave a sufficient sum of money to the soldiers, and said, tell people, his disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.

46. 22:54

    And if this comes to the government's ears, we will satisfy you and keep you out of trouble. So they took the money and did as they were directed, and this story has been spread on the Jews to today.

47. 23:08

    Again, here's a parenthetical part that Matthew's inserting of what was happening. So while the women were now to go tell the disciples, some of the guards had already gone back to the Pharisees and said, guess what happened?

48. 23:28

    There really was a resurrection. You tried to prevent this, and we saw it. We were witnesses. What else could we conclude? You see that kind of bright light, and Jesus and the Pharisees, of course, said, okay, now what do we do? You'd think, you would hope, they would believe. Well, they weren't ready for that yet, but so they tried to bribe them and say, tell people his disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.

49. 24:05

    Well, you can see the holes in that one. Again, first of all, the disciples wouldn't show up because they didn't expect a resurrection, be they afraid for their own lives and weren't hiding. If the soldiers were asleep, they wouldn't possibly have known who came. If they were sleeping, they wouldn't have been sleeping anyway because they were there to guard the soldiers, so this whole thing makes no sense, so it's just paid off with bribery.

50. 24:35

    So this is how when we read this account, and the way Matthew writes it, I'm also impressed by just how natural and low-key he just records these events. Here's how it happened. It makes a lot of sense.

51. 25:00

    He doesn't say anything, there's no commentary, in other words, here's the facts, here's what happened. And it's all very human and very normal given what had happened to the Pharisees and all that's going on. It's a very believable account. Well, there's another, I say that's one perspective. The Pharisees totally shot themselves in the foot here, made absolutely the biggest blunder in history by trying to prove there was no resurrection, actually proved that there was one by providing the only people who were there when the angels came.

52. 25:51

    But there's a few other things. What if Jesus had never been buried? In other words, what would have happened? Joseph had never taken the body of Jesus to put in a tomb in the first place? Then what would have happened? Where would the body have ended up?

53. 26:16

    Well, the usual repository for disposed criminal bodies was to be burned to nothingness. now, how do you prove a resurrection under those circumstances? If somebody totally disappears and there's no body and there's no tomb, you can't show that something was opened. So this makes it a lot harder. Now you could say, well, here he is again.

54. 26:47

    In other words, he could be resurrected, but how do you prove that he had been buried and come alive again? Well, now you have to say that, well, this guy here that we're claiming to be Jesus really is, and everybody else just looks like him, he's, you know, an actor and we got him dressed up and that's the day before DNA testing.

55. 27:11

    So you couldn't really prove without the body being, in other words, what's that phrase? they use, you use, for about, yeah, oh, no, it's not true, when you're shipping something and you have to be accountable. Chain of custody, yeah. Chain of custody means we have to account at every moment for the body from the time it was taken down.

56. 27:44

    The cross, taken to a known grave, the grave was sealed, there was a guard of people watching it, then the tomb was empty, so now you know that this is, you know, the same person that went in, he's out and he's alive again. You have every, on the human side, everything that someone would need to know to believe that this really did happen.

57. 28:11

    This really happened. Had there been no tomb, so Joseph of Arimathea is absolutely instrumental also in this. The disciples were, say, not part of the picture at all, which had to be the way it was because they would have been the only ones who would have had a vested interest in this, but again, their minds were closed by God to this whole thing.

58. 28:39

    One last perspective. I mentioned earlier, what was the perspective of Jesus about his own resurrection? I said, well, there was no perspective because he was dead. But Jesus knew that all this had to happen. In other words, he knew he'd be resurrected, but being resurrected and being proven to be resurrected are two different things.

59. 29:11

    so what did Jesus do to ensure that his body would be buried and not thrown to Gehenna? What did Jesus do to make sure that the Pharisees would be there? In other words, all this had to be set up. You say, well, God works in different ways. But for the only time in Jesus' life, I say life because he was dead, but whenever Jesus interacted with his enemies, he was always in charge.

60. 29:49

    He never lost an argument. He knew the scriptures better. He knew the purpose of God. Jesus was always in control with the disciples, with the crowds, with the seas, roaring seas. Jesus was in control. But with his respect to his own resurrection, he had no control. He was dead. but he had to make sure that all this would still happen this way.

61. 30:15

    So when you go back to those places where Jesus talked about his own resurrection, the disciples didn't get it, but the people who didn't believe it did get it. The prophecy of your resurrection is not necessary to prove your resurrection. It's not like, saying you have a tomb, you have a guarded tomb, you have a sealed tomb, that's all necessary to prove resurrection.

62. 30:43

    But prophesying wasn't. But it had that odd way of coming back to the ears of the Pharisees and not to the disciples. So the Pharisees would take this step to ensure that people could actually believe it because the wrong people saw it and had no choice but to accede to the fact that it happened.

63. 31:07

    I think there's another story with Joseph Arimathea too, a story for another day of how he knew what to do. When we read this account, it takes us to a place in history where an event happened and an event that had a significant theological meaning, that is, resurrection. But in the first instance, resurrection was an historical event.

64. 31:53

    It was not a theological doctrine. We think of resurrection as an important first principle. all. We believe in the resurrection of Jesus. But when it happened, it was news. It was, this is reality. This is something that just happened. And I like to think of three generations of belief in the resurrection. I don't mean generations in the sense of human generations, but three theological generations, philosophical.

65. 32:28

    In the very first instance, to believe in the resurrection, if you were Peter putting your head in the tomb, if you were the women, if you were Thomas, put your fingers here, if you were the eyewitnesses, the task of believing that Jesus was risen from the dead was for them. It was, can we believe our eyes?

66. 32:58

    Can we believe what we have seen? This was the first generation of belief was, can we believe what we have just seen happen? We are the immediate witnesses to the risen Christ. the second generation of believers,

67. 33:20

    or the second generation of belief, I should say, would be the people who heard those people talk about what they believed. When you think about the day of Pentecost, in Acts chapter 2, in Peter proclaiming the resurrection, and he's, I've seen Jesus, I had my head in the tomb, I saw it, I know this was happening.

68. 33:45

    So if you are a listener to Peter, and the day of Pentecost, or any of the people that knew the disciples, your task was, do we believe these people? Do we believe what they're telling us?

69. 34:00

    Is that credible? They sound so convincing. They have such good, they say, here's the story. Say, yes, that's a very, and then you go back into the background of the Hebrew prophecies of the resurrection, and so forth. So the first generation of belief was can we believe our eyes? The second generation is can we believe the people that saw it?

70. 34:28

    And the third generation, which is actually everybody since the last 1900 years is, because we relate to all this only from the documents written about it, our task of belief is can we believe the writings? We encounter all this not through people telling us, not through actually seeing Jesus, but can we believe what Matthew wrote?

71. 34:59

    Can we believe the Bible? And that's the way it's been ever since the scriptures became written as a recorded document of what God was doing. So when we read, our challenge or our task of belief is can we believe what we're reading?

72. 35:28

    And the way Matthew has this just so matter-of-factly recorded, the way it all works out to me makes it extremely believable. And it's not just here, it's just a lot of how do you know Matthew's just not writing a story? Well, because he's writing history and there's many other things outside of this, but taking this as a document of history makes perfect sense that this is the way things went down.

73. 36:03

    So we have very good reason to believe what we are reading is a record of what happened. What happened was a record of what God did. And what God did was set up in a way so that the first generation of believers, the people who would be looking at that could have faith in what they saw.

74. 36:28

    It was absolutely necessary for the very first people to believe so that they could start preaching and writing what happened. As I said at the very beginning, if it weren't for the Pharisees, their Christian faith mightn't have ever started. Because there would be no guards running around saying this really happened.

75. 36:53

    And people could really believe that. Interesting. Interesting, marvelous, the way God works. So the two points, as I said, that I think we want to carry away from all this is, yes, we have very good reason to believe that what Matthew wrote happened. Jesus was raised from the dead. And that the cornerstone of religion, of Christianity, the resurrection of Jesus, is in itself not a religious doctrine.

76. 37:36

    It's an event of history. There are a lot of religious doctrines which are not historical events, such as, let's say, the mortality of the soul. there's no event in history that tells us that when we die, we die. It's very different. So the basis of Christianity or the basis of religion itself is not religious.

77. 38:02

    It's historical. Because it's historical, it's verifiable. because it's verifiable, it's a challenge, or I would say even beyond a challenge, it's a try to prove this wrong. It's as if God were saying, Christianity has a basis. It's not just somebody thinking up a really cool way of having a religion. It starts with an event.

78. 38:40

    It's something that's tangible, it's real, it happened or it didn't happen. I'm willing to stake the verification of faith on a provable item. in scientific discourse, it's called falsifiability.

79. 39:02

    In other words, if you can prove this wrong, it has a real content. It's not something like, well, the immortality of the soul, well, I'll get into that the next lecture. You can't prove that one way or the other. We have no idea. We go by other inferences. It's not tangible, it's not this, but if I say we're staking religion on an event, and the event is set up in a way that there's reliable witnesses and all the facts about it point to it happening,

80. 39:35

    then that gives that the theological implications of that, which is our third lecture today, a lot more, not a lot more, it gives them a real basis. we can believe, for instance, in the existence of God, because if Jesus was raised from the dead, then God had to raise him. So the second point is, think of the resurrection not primarily as a statement of faith, belief, like I believe this, it's not religious doctrine, it is, in a sense, but it's reality, it's something that really happened, and because it's something that really happened, and we have good reason to believe it really happened, therefore, we can have faith in our, and understand how Christianity works in all of its religious aspects also.

81. 40:38

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