David Levin - Class 3: Resurrection as the Basis of Preaching and Teaching

Automatically transcribed. Accuracy is good but not perfect, and words are sometimes wrong. Trust the audio over the text.

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   This is the Saanich Peninsula Ecclesial Study Weekend, February 2017. The classes are being led by Brother David Levin. This is the third class, and the title of this class is Resurrection as the Basis of Preaching and Teaching. Brother David.

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   Oh, you want to make sure people have that, right? Does everybody have one of these diagrams or have access to one? If not, I think Mark has maybe, hopefully, a few extra copies.

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   Also, you can go until 20 to 5. You know, you've got 50 minutes, right? If I could. If I could. We're about the time. Yeah. That's plenty of time.

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   In order for a dead person to become alive again, if that can happen, you have to assume that some power, force, God, exists beyond those things which animate life in the first place. It just does not happen to living things that die that they resume life.

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   Living things die and they decompose. living things. Living things. Come into existence. They come to, whether they're humans or cats or trees or whatever, come into existence. Have a period of life. marked by certain biological characteristics of things like reproduction, metabolism, movement, movement, sensitivity, awareness of their environment, depending on the order of life.

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   And then at some point, all living things cease to function. And when they cease to function, their physical organization decays. And that's the way it is. And that's the way it always has been. There have been extremely few exceptions to that rule. And the ones we know about happen by what we would call divine intervention.

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   So think about the resurrections in the, what we call the New Testament. How many resurrections are there in the New Testament? How many people died and came to life again?

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   I hear the wheels turning. Yeah, I'm not counting those. Just the individuals we know about. There's three and then there's Jesus. Okay. And the likely sequence of events is the first one was the one, the young lady, the synagogue ruler's daughter. And how long was she dead when Jesus raised her?

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   It's in, I think, Matthew 12 or Mark 9. Does anybody remember how long she was dead? Less than an hour. Less than an hour? Yeah, a very brief time.

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    She died while Jesus, it's in Matthew chapter 9. She's on his way to her house. They receive word from some of the servants, don't bother coming, she's dead, he goes anyway, he raises her. So it's a good chance that, that her period of death was maybe less than an hour, maybe an hour or two.

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    So if one wanted to be skeptical about this, if you were there, say, oh well, she really wasn't dead, she didn't even cool off. I mean, she wanted to calm a little bit, and Jesus did something. So you could maybe, maybe be skeptical about that. But the next one would have been a little bit tougher.

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    That's recorded in Luke chapter 7. That's the only son of what we call the widow of Nain. At what point of death was he when Jesus, do you remember that one?

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    Right, he's being carried out from the funeral procession. So he'd probably been dead a day. So this guy was gone. Jesus raised him from death. That was quite a miracle. That'd be tough to say, well, I don't think that they would have buried this guy and he's got to be embalmed already and to come to life again.

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    That's, that's pretty good. What was the next one? The third human resurrection was Lazarus. And how long was Lazarus dead? Days. Four days. Okay. In the tomb. I mean, there's no question that he was dead. You couldn't say, well, maybe he just was dead. No, he was done.

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    So the, the, the reversibility of death pointed, say, even if you're skeptical about the first one, say, eh, maybe some magic trick or whatever. Not like the second one. And certainly if you knew what was going on of Lazarus, you say, this has to be God at work. You just can't bring life out of death.

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    It does not happen in the natural world. Dead people don't have life start again, especially after four days in a cold tomb. the point of that is the world of implication. That is, if this happened, that implies something else. If this happened, that means something else must exist in order that this happened.

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    And that's how we want to look at the resurrection of Jesus is what implications does this have theologically that is what religious doctrines must be true because of the historical fact that this dead person became alive again. Remember, in the first lecture, the point was that in the first instance, resurrection is not a theological doctrine.

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    It's a historical fact. It's a demonstrable fact. And now we want to say if that is true, if that's something that really happened, then what might we conclude about this bigger picture we call worldview? Well, that must mean there's some kind of a god, some kind of force bigger than humans. Can we possibly draw other things?

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    And that's what is depicted on the chart and that's where we're going now. But let's first go back to Acts chapter two. And I'm going to have Duncan read a few more passages from the first half of the book of Acts to point out that when the first century preachers, whether it was Peter or Stephen or Paul, Barnabas, whoever's teaching, preaching, we don't have everybody's but we have some.

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    Whenever they preached, it was always centered on the resurrection of Jesus. That was the central aspect of their preaching. Whenever they talked about religion, it was the resurrection of Jesus. So you read that in Acts chapter two. And I'm going to get back to that one shortly but just listen to a few more passages just to get the flavor.

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    We've got a couple from Peter here. One's in Acts three and one's in Acts four. And then Peter again in Acts ten and finally Paul in Acts thirteen. So I'm just going to have Duncan announce these and read these. Okay, so Acts three verses twelve to fifteen. And when Peter saw it, he addressed the people.

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    Men of Israel, why do you wonder at this? Or why do you stare at us as though by our own power or piety we have made him walk? The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our fathers, glorified his servant Jesus, whom you delivered over and denied in the presence of Pilate when he had decided to release him.

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    But you denied the holy and righteous one and asked for a murderer to be granted to you. And you killed the author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses.

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    The next one is Acts chapter four verses eight to ten. Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, rulers of the people and elders, if we are being examined today concerning a good deed done to a crippled man, by what means this man has been healed, let it be known to all of you and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead, by him this man is standing before you well.

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    And Acts chapter ten, verses thirty-four to forty-one. This is Peter speaking to Cornelius now. It's outside of Jerusalem, the first door in Jerusalem, talking to primarily Jewish audiences. Now he's up in Caesarea talking to Cornelius and his household. So Peter opened his mouth and said, Truly I understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.

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    As for the word that he sent to Israel, preaching good news of peace through Jesus Christ, he is the Lord of all, you yourselves know what happened throughout all Judea, beginning from Galilee, after the baptism that John proclaimed, how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power. He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him, and we are witnesses of all that he did, both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem.

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    They put him to death by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him on the third day and made him to appear, not to all the people, but to us who have been chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. And he commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one appointed by God to be judge of the living and the dead.

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    The last one is Acts 13. Paul is the speaker in the synagogue of Antioch, speaking to a combined Jewish and Gentile audience. So this is Acts 13, starting at verse 26 to 31. Brothers, sons of the family of Abraham, and those among you who fear God, to us has been sent the message of this salvation.

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    for those who live in Jerusalem and their rulers, because they did not recognize him, nor understand the utterances of the prophets, which are read every Sabbath, fulfilled them by condemning him. And though they found in him no guilt worthy of death, they asked Pilate to have him executed. And when they had carried out all that was written of him, they took him down from the tree and laid him in a tomb.

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    But God raised him from the dead. And for many days he appeared to those who had come up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are now his witnesses to the people.

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    So you see that in all of the, it's a little bit different in Stephen's speech, but in every proclamation in Acts, the speaker is going to, whether it's Peter or Paul or Stephen to, the central point was, you killed him, God raised him from the dead. You put Jesus to death, God raised him again.

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    They are, these speakers are saying, this we know because of the witnesses we have. We are preaching you this fact and now they can develop from that fact a religious, say, this now is the Christianity, although they didn't call it at that point, Christianity. This now is the religion of God that we preached to you because of what happened.

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    So if you look at the chart, you'll see some of the features that go into the other aspects of the first century preaching. On the top of the chart,

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    okay, top, you see God and it's testified as, well, he raised Jesus from the dead because we can take that as being true because dead people don't become alive. Something had to happen, so God raised him. So that establishes the fact that we're talking about God. So now we have Jesus raised from the dead and we have the existence of God.

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    because prior to Jesus' death, there were a number of historical facts pertaining to him. This was not just a dead person becoming alive again. This was a very special dead person. As a matter of fact, he happened to be a person called the seed or the son of David, the son of Abraham, the son of man.

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    And there's lots of prophecies about this individual who would become this certain person and live a certain kind of life. So go over to the left side of the chart and see these are things we know about Jesus before his resurrection crucifixion and then the circle which is the resurrection, the depiction that's the center of all this that's happening.

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    And then on the right side we add not just the son of David, the son of Abraham, the son of man, but also now, as Paul says, the son of God in power according to the spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Romans chapter 1.

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    And then because he is now the son of God in power, there are certain other things that are going to follow through. But let's go back to the left side of the chart and say, what does it mean to be the son of Adam, the son of Abraham, the son of David? How did Jesus fulfill that role and what implications come from that?

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    Well, let's start with son of Adam. That's Luke 3, 38. Excuse me, is that? Yeah. This is the tail end of Luke's genealogy. The son of Enos, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God. There.

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    Luke takes the genealogy of Adam all the way, excuse me, genealogy of Jesus all the way back to Adam. What the son of Adam means, the seed of Adam. Who else, or what else do we know about the seed of Adam? What other scripture does this bring into play?

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    Genesis 3, right. This is the seed that would destroy the head of the serpent. So the arrows, the implication is if Jesus is the son of Adam, then he is the one that is also going to destroy sin. And that takes arrows up to, well, he's really a human, so any doctrine we have about the humanity of Jesus stems from this also.

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    That is, if you die, then you're human. If you're human, then you die. You can't be resurrected unless you're dead. You can't be dead unless you're human. So we know that Jesus was a real person, but he didn't stay in the grave, so there was something more than that. he was the specific person predicted or prophesied way back in Genesis 3 about the son of Adam.

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    Turn to Matthew chapter 1. I'm going just through some basic ideas very quickly, but I'm just showing you how this works. this is the very first verse of the New Testament. So if you're a first-time reader of the New Testament, somebody gives you a, let's say you've never read the New Testament before, you've never heard of it, somebody gives you a Bible, and you pick it up and say, well, what's this about?

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    Say, let's read it. Oh, the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. And you say, well, that can't be true. I mean, like, David lived a thousand years before Jesus, and Abraham was hundreds of years before David. Can't be a son. Well, in the Bible, son means descendant.

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    And that means a specific person. There's prophecies, promises that are written a long time ago about a certain person who had come from the lineage of Abraham and David. And with respect to Abraham, it had to do with inheriting a blessing from God, and with David inheriting the throne of the kingdom, and you can go through all that.

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    But, unless Jesus is resurrected, what happens to these promises? Ishmael was the son of Abraham. Solomon was the son of David. I mean, it was other people. They weren't resurrected, or, and a figure, of course, Ishmael was, but, no, Jesus is the only one who was raised from the dead, so it's pointing to a specific person who would make everything that God said move into a different realm.

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    That is, this is the fulfillment of the reality of all these things. That all the promises of God, whether the promises to David, or Abraham, or prophecy in Adam, they all have to move through Jesus to the resurrection to the resurrected Jesus. So that's why the core of the teaching is still, we have to take what would just be a material and say a natural, yes, there was lots of descendants of Abraham, he actually had a lot of children and so forth.

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    No, we're talking about one. David had lots of wives, lots of children, but we're talking about one lineage, one specific descendant, and they all happen to be, well, they come down to this one person that God raised from the dead.

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    So the implication of the resurrection now is that the seed, the seed of Abraham, the seed of David, the seed of Adam, this is now fulfilled in Jesus. So now you have, well, we know there's God because of the resurrection. We know that these promises now must be true because they came to pass in this event that really happened.

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    And all these writings now that were just kind of latent and historical and how they take on a, well, this is really for real. This really happened.

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    So over on the right side, if you look at that and go to Romans chapter one, and we're going to read the first four verses of Romans chapter one. Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures concerning his son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the son of God in power according to the spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.

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    So you see how the graphic depicts what Paul is saying of moving through promises on the one side, then the resurrection, and now the new designation, son of God in power. verse 2, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures. That's all over there on the left side of your chart.

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    All the promises concerning his son, who was descended from David according to the flesh, and designated son of God in power, by his resurrection from the dead. All the promises now, once the resurrection happens, are no longer just promises, they're reality. They are evidenced. They are the son of God in power. Now, he's very different.

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    He always had been intentative, potential. now it's really there. And, of course, when Jesus returns, everything will be fulfilled. But that's the idea, is that the resurrection is core to bringing all these ideas that we've learned about God, which we call theological doctrines, into a singular focus of, because the resurrection now, that makes all these things make sense of how it works.

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    There's a couple more things we can add to here, and the arrows showed that. What about, we've said that, it is not the nature of dead objects, living things, to become alive. It only happens because, say, God did that.

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    And what basis would God make a dead creature alive again? Dead human being, especially. See, this is the moral realm of sin, and the effects of sin. As Paul explains in Romans 5, we all die. It's an Adam, all die. sinless life. Jesus was raised not just by the power of God, but by what?

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    The power of a holy life, a sinless life. So, we learn also, the implication is the conquering of sin. That's back over there on the right side of the chart. And in order for this to happen, there also happened, you get the doctrine or the understanding of Jesus' sinless life, fullness of his faith and his obedience to God, allows the resurrection to make sense at a moral level.

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    Once Jesus is raised the Son of God in power, he is now immortal, perfected, over here on the right hand side, top right hand thing, sinless, perfect, immortal, that we read about in Hebrews. The high priest, the perfect high priest who abides forever.

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    Son of God in power implies also the, as I said, the return to earth to manifest that power, the kingdom, the king of the kingdom, the resurrection of the general resurrection, the judgment, all aspects of Jesus' power.

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    So if you look at this, you know, just about everything we believe in is what we conventionally call first principles or fundamental doctrines or what do you call them, Duncan? Salvation? Salvation truths. salvation truths is all implied, that is, because of the physical fact that Jesus was raised. It implies things which don't have a basis in fact, but a basis in theological truth.

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    It's a different kind of truth. To say that God is one is different. To say that God raised Jesus from the dead, I'm not going to dwell into that. the reason we believe all these things is because we know the validity of the resurrection and all these other things that now make sense and fit together.

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    If this happened, then this must be true, this must be true, this must be true. One thing we are going to talk about a bit tomorrow and I'm going to not talk about much now because there's not much that's going to come out. anymore here is baptism. Let's go to Romans chapter 6.

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    Verse 4, Romans 6, 4. We were buried, therefore, with him by baptism into death in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. Okay. Just as Christ was raised from the dead, we too might walk. so now this is a bit of introduction for actually lecture 5 is the resurrection is the basis of moral teaching, but here we use it as the basis of baptism.

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    It's this symbol of death and coming alive again. It's implied because of the resurrection of Jesus. So let's finish by going back to Acts chapter 2 and back to the original reading of Peter standing up on the day of Pentecost and seeing how much of these implications are actually contained in what Peter is saying here.

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    And what certainly is a very abbreviated account of probably what he his whole speech. So back to Acts chapter 2 verse 22. Men of Israel, hear these words, Jesus of Nazareth, the man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs which God did through him in your midst. So here we have God is what?

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    Not Jesus. God did through him. Jesus was a man. God was God. So we have the understanding of the relationship of God and Jesus. The fundamental principle of the faith is explicated right there. Jesus couldn't be God himself because Jesus died. But God worked through him. So we know there is a God and we know there is Jesus.

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    This Jesus delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God. That's all the promises that we talked about earlier. Say God is controlling history. God makes prophecies. All that is implied. Not implied. Just stated right there. You put him to death for him to die. He must have been a real mortal human being.

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    That happened. God raised him up. Already stated that. That implies that there is a God. It was not possible for him to be held by it. Meaning he had a sinless life. And he had to be raised from the dead.

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    Alludes again to the prophecy in David's Psalms. Verse 29. David, patriarch David, died, is buried, his tomb is with us to this day. So the promises about the greater son of David was there. This was not about David but about his son. He was a prophet. he spoke of these things to come.

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    But Jesus would sit on his throne. So the whole idea of the kingdom is here. Jesus was not abandoned to Hades or corruption just as anybody else would have been. But God raised him from the dead and we are witnesses. So you have so much encapsulated of what we call fundamental doctrine. It's all based on the resurrection and just to say one more time because it's so important that they had confidence in what they believed.

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    It was not just a set of, you know, this is a religion that makes sense because we preach all this, which we believe, but it's a religion that made sense because the basis of it was a historical event that happened on earth in the first place because we have that tangible evidence. We can now develop theology from that and present to you not just, say, the true Christian faith as we know it today, but as we'll find out tomorrow, the moral implications that also belong to that.

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    so we will continue with dinner. Thank you, brother.