Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - How We Know the Resurrection Was Real | Learning to Follow Jesus | Luke 24.1-12

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. And I'm Keith Simon. Right now, we're learning what it looks like to follow Jesus by working our way through the Gospel of Luke. I bought a smoker about two months ago, and let's just say I love it. Now, that's partially because I've got a whole cadre of friends who also have the exact same smoker, and they love to smoke meat too. We've got a fun little group text going where we share photos of the meat that we're smoking. I love that group text too, even though it causes me some meat envy every now and then.

Starting point is 00:00:42 Now, we've been getting into smoking hot wings, kind of one of our new smoking deals. And when I say hot wings, I'm not just talking about buffalo wild wings. I'm talking about hot, hot wings. We usually do five or seven different sauces escalating in heat. And the last one is a total bomb, which will inevitably create about seven to 10 minutes of agony, agony, which is so acute that all of us are reduced to a baby state, where we are panicked and pacing with milk gallons in our hand, occasionally shouting, when will it end? And I can't feel my body anymore.

Starting point is 00:01:17 Now, if that last comment is confusing to you, you've truly never experienced hot wings. As you can imagine, we love to tell our stories afterwards. I guess I'm doing that right now. And those retellings can vary a lot depending on our perspective. For example, I told my wife about one taste bud rager, and I described how each person reacted. Now, a few days later, we're hanging out as couples, and it came out that I'd left one person entirely out of the story, partially because he didn't have a very funny reaction. It also came out in this conversation that several of my hot-wing compatriots were claiming

Starting point is 00:01:53 that I, and I don't know how to put this, I lost my stomach. Now, that was not true, and I contested that that was not the case. they mistook me gargling milk and spitting it out for, you know what? Now, here's the question. Did I lie by leaving that friend out? Or was my story false? Was my story faulty? Or maybe somewhat differently, did they lie?

Starting point is 00:02:18 Was their story about me false? Was their story faulty? How you answer those questions says a lot about you, and it also says a lot about your personal understanding of eyewitness testimony. You could ask the exact same question of any documentary that you watch on Netflix or any news article that you read online, whatever it is. All of these things, they're based on eyewitness testimony, but they rarely include every possible angle. And one fact about eyewitness testimony is that people can only see things from their own perspective. They can only see it from their own angle.

Starting point is 00:02:53 And so if you've got a bunch of different people viewing the same event, and they're all telling the story of that event, Each of those tellings is going to be somewhat different. Each person is going to pick and choose and focus on different things. In fact, one way that crime investigators can determine whether witnesses are telling a made-up story is by seeing if their stories are too similar. See, if everybody memorizes the exact same made-up story with the exact same details, when you give your testimony, they're all going to sound just a little bit too similar. A hallmark of real, authentic, eyewitness testimony is actually slight differences.

Starting point is 00:03:31 Not outright contradictions, but different perceptions, different angles, different focal points. One person's gargle spit is another person's spit up. In one person's story, they highlight every person present. In another person's story, they only highlight and focus on the relevant players. Now, this is all a really long preamble to introduce you to one of the earliest eyewitness testimonies of Jesus' resurrection. Now, for a long time, people have known that there are differences in the accounts of Jesus' resurrection in each of the four Gospels. Those differences might be differences in who was mentioned as being present, differences in what exactly was said, or perhaps

Starting point is 00:04:14 in what order, differences in what details are included or excluded. And for a long time, at least in recent history, there have been scholars who have tried to use these differences as proof, that the stories about Jesus' resurrection were all made up. They say, look, they couldn't even get their stories straight. But modern scholarship has turned that around. The opposite's actually true. If the story was made up, we would see almost no differences between each telling. But if the story was real, authentic. And as shocking as it must have been, I mean, imagine being there and how that would just shake you up if you saw Jesus resurrected. If it really happened, we would expect each eyewitness account to be slightly different, not contradictory. And by the way, none of them are contradictory, but we would

Starting point is 00:05:01 expect them to be different. Different perceptions, different focal points, different levels of detail, different levels of focus of detail of who might have been present, and what order things might have been said in. Richard Bacham, he is a preeminent New Testament scholar who wrote Oxford Press's guide to Jesus. And he has argued, and I think shown conclusively, that whether or not you believe in the resurrection of Jesus, the gospel account. counts have every possible mark of genuine eyewitness testimony. One of those marks is the fact that they all agree that women saw the empty tomb first. Now, in the first century, it was a patriarchal, a misogynistic era, and Gentiles and Jews alike both agreed and wrote extensively about

Starting point is 00:05:46 the unreliability of women, and both refused to admit a woman's testimony in court. So if you were making up a story about Jesus's resurrection, you're just making this up from scratch. And by the way, a resurrection, that was an event that absolutely everyone in the ancient world would have found ridiculous. The story of one person's resurrection after his crucifixion and three-day burial, that would have been a story that just seemed outlandish and crazy. And so if you're making up a story that everybody agrees is just bonkers, you're not going to make your first witnesses women. Not in that. world. The only reason to say that women were the first people to see the empty tomb, the first

Starting point is 00:06:28 people to see the resurrected Messiah, well, the only reason to say that was because that's actually what happened. Let's read in Luke. We're going to pick up in chapter 24 verse 1. But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared. And if you've got the context, you'll realize this is a group of women. This was incredibly common for women to be in charge of the burial anointing. Let's keep going. Verse two. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb. But when they went in, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel. And as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here,

Starting point is 00:07:17 but has risen. Remember how he told you while he was still in Galilee, that the son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise? And they remembered his words. And returning from the tomb, they told all these things to the 11 and to all the rest. Now, it was Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary, the mother of James, and the other women with them who told these things to the apostles. But these words seem to them, that's the apostles, an idle tale. And they didn't believe them. So let's just pause. The idea of Jesus' his resurrection sounded ridiculous to his closest followers who he had told to expect it. Why? Well, first of all, it's because no Jews, no ancient Jews, would have expected one person to be resurrected in the

Starting point is 00:08:06 middle of history. There was nothing in their scriptures or in their view of the end times, we might say, that would have expected anything like that. Some Jews expected a great resurrection of all people at the end of the age. But many Jews and Gentiles, in fact, virtually all Gen. Hiles stanchly denied the idea of resurrection. They might say that there was nothing that happened after you died, or some people said, yeah, the soul will go and be in some sort of heavenly bliss. But the body, this material world, they would have all agreed, these things are bad, they're wrong, they're not the way it's supposed to be. And that's why they denied the resurrection, who would want to spend the rest of your life in a body? This is exactly the reason why,

Starting point is 00:08:48 when Paul comes into the city of Athens and he goes to the local colloquium of scholars and he tells them the story of Jesus' resurrection, they literally laugh him out of town. Because resurrection just sounds crazy. It sounds like the kind of uneducated backwater make-believe stuff that they would expect to come out of a place like Jerusalem. Now here's the deal. If the first followers of Jesus were trying to make up a story that people would believe, You would think that they would have picked something that would have been more plausible to their first century audience than a resurrection. They could have said that they'd seen a vision of Jesus or perhaps a ghost. Because back in those days, just like today, actually, there were lots of people who were open to the idea of supernatural events like this. But hardly anyone, hardly anyone, would have thought that it made sense for one person to be resurrected in the middle of time.

Starting point is 00:09:41 Again, this isn't a story you would make up. it has all the marks of an eyewitness, real-life authentic testimony. One more verse, verse 12. But Peter rose and ran to the tomb, stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves. These are the cloths that they had wrapped Jesus' body in, and he went home marveling at what had happened. This story is remarkable, and as a story goes on, all of these people are going to encounter the resurrected Jesus. And again, it all has the mark of being eyewitness testimony. So just pause. Let that sink in. These aren't just idle stories. They're not even just about history

Starting point is 00:10:20 past. Jesus actually rose from the dead after being crucified and buried for three days. Jesus is still physically, bodily alive. He is still physically and bodily sitting on the throne of heaven right now. People actually witnessed this and they told us their story. Why? Because they believe that this true story about Jesus's resurrection reinterpreted all of history. It tells us that whatever appearances may be, there's only one everlasting, never-dying king of reality, and that's Jesus, and he is the one who is reigning right now. So today, here's what I want you to do. I want you to ask Jesus to help you believe deep down the true story of his resurrection. Ask him to make his living reign. The living rain that's happening right now in heaven, ask him to help you believe.

Starting point is 00:11:11 him to make that heavenly reality a reality in your earthly experience. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps other people find this podcast more easily. Also, ask yourself, who could you share this podcast with? Texting an episode to a friend or a family member is a great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.

Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - How We Know the Resurrection Was Real | Learning to Follow Jesus | Luke 24.1-12

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