It's Easter, Resurrection Sunday, and as I do regularly, I look at what I've posted for the major holidays in the past, and often modify them quite a bit. Not wholesale tear it up and start over, but some extensive additions and deletions. FWIW, this one is largely unchanged from 2024.
Looking for the Living One in a Cemetery
Luke 24: 1-12 New Living Translation24 But very early on Sunday morning[a] the women went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared. 2 They found that the stone had been rolled away from the entrance. 3 So they went in, but they didn’t find the body of the Lord Jesus. 4 As they stood there puzzled, two men suddenly appeared to them, clothed in dazzling robes.
5 The women were terrified and bowed with their faces to the ground. Then the men asked, “Why are you looking among the dead for someone who is alive? 6 He isn’t here! He is risen from the dead! Remember what he told you back in Galilee, 7 that the Son of Man[b] must be betrayed into the hands of sinful men and be crucified, and that he would rise again on the third day.”
8 Then they remembered that he had said this. 9 So they rushed back from the tomb to tell his eleven disciples—and everyone else—what had happened. 10 It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and several other women who told the apostles what had happened. 11 But the story sounded like nonsense to the men, so they didn’t believe it. 12 However, Peter jumped up and ran to the tomb to look. Stooping, he peered in and saw the empty linen wrappings; then he went home again, wondering what had happened.
Coming from my background, becoming an evangelical Christian was a large change. I had studied biochemistry and microbiology in college through my third year before life imposed some detours, eventually getting my degree and starting my career as an engineer late in life (over 30). I had been an amateur astronomer since about age 10, so between them I was deeply marinated in the standard model of Cosmology as well as conventional biological evolutionary theory. Frankly, I wasn't giving it much thought any longer, but my wife had re-affirmed her faith (she had first accepted Christ as child) and I was having all of my mental models disrupted. She had started a subscription to Bibical Archaeology Review and the constant refrain from archaeologists, not religiously motivated, along the lines of "we thought this was old Jewish folklore, but here it is" got me thinking "if that's true, maybe there's more that's true." Strobel's The Case for Christ, played a role in filling in the gaps in my historical knowledge.
I went forward for Baptism in an evangelical church and an important part of that change was because the pastor had a similar background to mine, at least in the biochemistry/microbiology. He was a pharmacist and the director of the pharmacy department in one of the local hospitals. He quickly became one of our closest friends in the worst time of our lives - Mrs. Graybeard's cancer in 1997. It's a long story, but in the last couple of years the church's elders dumped him. As the story came out, we found a new church - a nearby Southern Baptist church. Our pastor started going to another Baptist church, but closer to his home. He passed away a little before Easter last year.
Easter is the most important day in Christianity and far more important than Christmas because of the resurrection. Everyone has a birthday, but history only records one resurrection. The resurrection is essential to Christianity; without it there simply is no reason for Christianity to exist. Since virtually everyone, including honest atheists, agrees Jesus was a real man in history (I've always found it amazing that Jesus' existence is better attested in ancient sources than that of Julius Caesar - but no one claims Julius Caesar was not a real person) and died on the cross, the question becomes whether or not it can be verified that Christ was seen after the resurrection by someone other than the closest circle of disciples. Strobel says:
Did anyone see Jesus alive again? I have identified at least eight ancient sources, both inside and outside the New Testament, that in my view confirm the apostles’ conviction that they encountered the resurrected Christ. Repeatedly, these sources stood strong when I tried to discredit them.
Could these encounters have been hallucinations? No way, experts told me. Hallucinations occur in individual brains, like dreams, yet, according to the Bible, Jesus appeared to groups of people on three different occasions – including 500 at once!
In the end, after I had thoroughly investigated the matter, I reached an unexpected conclusion: it would actually take more faith to maintain my atheism than to become a follower of Jesus.
I still think a great summary is "Five Confounding Facts About Jesus' Resurrection" a 2016 post at Donald Sensing's Sense of Events, which has been gone for a while and replaced by Sensing Online. He has done several excellent posts on the subject, including Jesus and History and links to articles put together by working scientists, "On what basis would a scientist accept the Resurrection?" and "Is Belief in the Resurrection Unscientific?"
Enjoy your day and your time with your family. This is going to be a
very far from normal day here; while doing an image search for the one I used
up top I was looking at a few different images and their websites and later found one of them left a bomb
download on this PC. As you can see, I've restored it to operation, but
it's like replacing my CNC machine tools with a hammer and chisel. Much
work is required to get back to normal. The bomb was a link to a site in India that probably would have done much more damage, and I've deleted it from everyplace I know to look.
Graduated from high school convinced that evolution answered where we came from and how we got here. Then I went to a state run college and took anthropology classes that taught evolution as fact. And I was surprised at the gaps appearing all over the place in their teachings. That led me to start taking a serious look at scripture. A few times I've looked at current evolution teachings, and I see that a number of things that were 'facts' back then have been dropped.
ReplyDeleteI came around relatively early, like in late elementary school. I tried the whole scientific way thingy, you know, we are from stuff that came from stuff that came from stuff that... all the way to the Big Bang. And my mother countered with, "Where did that stuff come from?" and "What started the Big Bang?"
ReplyDeleteNo good answers there. Something from nothing, right, pull my other leg...
And, yes, the archeological evidence of pert near every biblical story (and all the Homeric and other proto-Greek myths, or various Scandinavian sagas and stories, or Egyptian myths, or...) are just too obvious to ignore, unless one is a historian or archeologist (two groups of people who seem to love ignoring the truth and embracing the Big Lie(s).
Rejoice and celebrate. It's the most joyous day on the calendar indeed!
ReplyDeleteIts said Christ is the light and it is Crystaline Time. That the balance of the light verses the dark has changed dramatically, where the dark is lost much of its power, where no longer there is cause to maintain a perfect balance, that the covenants dictating balance have expired, and that we are seeing the last days of the dark, where the dark is flailing in its efforts to remain relevant, the turmoil and darks agents no longer have power and so as these final days transpire we see much revealed as never before, all the lies exposed and the light of truth shines upon God's/Source's Earth.
ReplyDeleteHappy Easter, Si. May the joy of His Resurrection -- His promise kept -- pervade all you do this year.
ReplyDeleteSiG, for whatever reason I have missed this posting previous years. Thank you for the history - I am always interested on how people came.
ReplyDeleteAnd thank you for the references. This is something I should be better at that I am.
He is Risen Indeed!
He is Risen!
ReplyDelete