R.C. Sproul: Witnesses of the Resurrection: The Apostolic Message

I do want to turn your attention to first Corinthians 15 to a portion of it at least tonight and I'd like to begin the reading of the text from verse 12 let there be light doesn't work when I say it's nice to have this Bible if I could just see it the Paul writes to the Corinthians 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's 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 and we are even found to be misrepresenting God because we testified about God that he raised Christ and we did not raise if it is true but the dead are not raised or 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 and those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished and if Christ we have opened this lice own in this life only we are of all people the most to be pitied but in fact Christ has been raised from the dead the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep for as by a man came death by a man also came the resurrection of the dead or as in Adam all die so also in Christ shall all be made alive but each in his own order Christ the firstfruits then at his coming those who belong to Christ and then comes the end when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and authority and power and then if I can jump down briefly to verse 29 otherwise why do people mean by being baptized on behalf the dead if the dead are not raised at all why are people ties on their behalf why are we in danger every hour I protest brothers by my pride in you which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord I die every day and what do I gain if humanly speaking and I fought with beasts at ephesus if the dead are not raised or if the dead are not raised let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die let's pray shall we my father we thank you for this apostolic word that carries to us your truth your truth that is more certain than life itself we thank you for its testimony we thank you for its clarity and how we pray for the illumination of the same Spirit who inspired this text to carry it now into our hearts and into our minds that it may pierce our very souls before we ask it in Jesus name Amen the first of July 1965 our son was born best that I had and our daughter sherry had just recently returned from Europe where I've been pursuing doctoral studies at the Free University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and one of the main reasons why we interrupted that sojourn was so that Vesta could get the medical attention she needed with the delivery of this baby and so from the early hours of July the first Nesta delivered our firstborn son and after I saw him for the first time and comforted my wife after the delivery I went back to my mother's apartment where we were staying in the interim rested for a little bit and then drove downtown Pittsburgh to pick up my mother from her place of employment and she of course was so very excited because I had been the last living male sprawl in our side of the family and she was hoping that the name would be carried on you know how mothers are and so I took her immediately from her work to the hospital that she could see her new grandson and after we visited the hospital I took her out for dinner and then back to her apartment and when we came to the front door of the apartment there was a package there on the stoop and and she was excited about that because it was the dress that she had ordered to wear for my ordination which was scheduled about 10 days from that mom and so we went inside and talked to morn she spent time gushing about the excitement of the newborn baby and then she said that she was tired she wanted to go to bed and I said fine and so before she went in her bedroom she turned to me and she said son this is the happiest day of my life those were the last words that she never spoke to anyone in this world she went to bed later on I went to bed and in the bed next to me we had our three-year-old daughter and in the morning I could hear my daughter screaming for her grandmother to wake up I knew something was amiss and I got out of bed and walked and opened the door to my mother's bedroom and as soon as I looked at her from the doorway I knew that she was dead and I walked over to the bed and I touched her and her body was ice-cold rigor mortis had set in she had obviously been dead for several hours and in that moment I had something of an existential Epiphany as I stood by my mother sped and saw her in death I thought this is absolutely insane this makes no sense at all even though eight or so hours have passed since I last spoke with her those hours were spent asleep and you know what sleep is like you go to sleep at night you wake up in the morning and in your mind it's only been a few moments that have transpired and I said the last time I saw her before I went to sleep she was a living breathing loving human filled with joy and now she is cold and dead I was shaking my head I said it was just yesterday that I saw the first moments of life of my son and that the same day my son was born was the last day of my mother's life and I thought about that this afternoon when Aleister was talking about how rational is the resurrection how irrational is death how death defies everything that we experience in life and perhaps the oldest question that human beings have raised of all types and stripes and cultures is the question posed by Jobe if a man dies shall he live again is there anything after our eyelids close in death and every culture that we've examined has invested some hope that life survives the grave we hear of the Egyptians who built these massive tombs and pyramids giving the burial site all kinds of implements that might be used in the next life we think of the American Indians who dreamed of the happy hunting ground the Norseman with valhalla the Greeks were the shadowy underworld of Hades but wherever we look at human culture we see this hope for the continuity of life that refuses to be extinguished from the human heart and and so there we are with that hope but as the Bible says without Christ we are really without hope and here Paul in writing to the Corinthians is addressing this very crisis because there were those in the Corinthian community who wanted a Christianity without resurrection like we find in the teachings of scholars like Rudolf Bultmann who would consign the resurrection to the realm of mythology and to 19th century liberalism which has turned so many of the mainline churches into museums and mausoleums for the death of God but that problem arose in Corinth in the first century that there were those stirring up the people saying there is no such thing as resurrection from the dead and so here in this letter that Paul writes to the Corinthians he responds to this skeptical opinion and he does it in a remarkable way Paul was without question the most educated qu in Palestine he and the equivalent of two PhDs by the time he was 21 and though his education was so heavily Jewish he understood what most modern scholars don't that the Greeks had no monopoly on logic but that logic was something that was shared by all humanity and that the human mind has been created by God with abilities and patterns of thought that are to be rational not chaotic and logical I think that many people misunderstand the role of Aristotle here they somehow think that Aristotle invented logic when in fact all he did was discover the laws of logic and I he would say to my students Aristotle no more invented logic than Columbus and then in America he found what was already there now I make this brief introduction about logic because Paul argues here to the Corinthians in an exceedingly logical manner using techniques of debate that were common in the ancient world and common to his own style of debate and of argument one of Paul's favorite techniques was the use of what is called ad hominem argument ation ad hominem argument ation that literally means arguments to the man now those of you who are students of logic know that there is a persistent logical fallacy that is defined as the ad hominem abusive fallacy and that means if I can't argue with your reasoning I'll attack you as a person instead of dealing with your arguments I smear you by throwing mud at you and of course we know that even bad people now and then can offer a sound argument and their badness does not vitiated they claim to truth that they may make in a given arena and so the ad hominem argument is a fallacy where you attack the person rather than the argument now sometimes that informal fallacy called ad hominem abusive is abbreviated by people who simply call it the at home and an argument that's not good because there is a legitimate form of ad hominem argument ation and that's what Paul does here and that means this that you hear the argument of your opponent and for the sake of argument you step into the shoes of your adversary and for the sake of argument you assume their assumptions you assume their principles and say okay if what you are saying is true let's see where it takes us let's take your premise to its logical conclusion again an ancient form of argumentation made famous by Zeno and that form of argument is called the reductio ad absurdum and if you don't know a word of Latin you just heard some and you could certainly guess what it means reductio ad absurdum means to take an argument and reduce it to absurdity am I going too fast and this is what Paul does here as his method of defending the resurrection he says okay some of you are saying there's no such thing as a resurrection of the Dead but if there is no resurrection of the Dead what would that mean what would follow from that premise let's take that reasoning and carry it out and see where it leads us so he said if there is no resurrection of the dead then not even Christ has been raised let me just stop right there I know my wife would have been happy had I stopped the logic argument five minutes ago I can't help but I used to teach logic okay and in the teaching of logic you have to teach people the laws of immediate inference and if we could all master those laws and keep break stop breaking those laws we would have a whole lot more agreement and a whole much greater clarity of understanding of the things of God is the number one reason why the Bible is misinterpreted is because the laws of immediate inference are violated a simple one then if we have a universal affirmative all men are mortal and then say about a particular man Socrates that he's mortal and we see in the first premise a universal affirmative and the second one a particular affirmative they agree but if we say all men are mortal but this man is not mortal then what doesn't compute you can't have a universal affirmative with a particular negative nor can you have a universal negative with a particularly formative everybody knows that and this what Paul does here he says let's take it if there's no resurrection of the dead that's a universal negative and if there's no resurrection that's dead and you can't have a particular formative if there's no resurrection of the dead then manifestly Paul is saying not even Christ has been raised what could be more simple than that okay says you got that so far let's take it to the next step if Christ has not been raised then what are the consequences of that listen to what he's just not playing abstract games with logic and civic isms what Paul is saying to the Corinthians in their cynicism and in their skepticism he said do you people realize what's at stake here if there is no resurrection and if Christ is still dead if Christ has not been raised then our preaching is in vain Paul saying you know I was ordained to be a preacher I've spent my whole life preaching in Antioch and Ephesus Phillipi Corinth Athens and if Christ isn't raised then all that preaching every moment that I've ever spent in the pulpit has been a Herculean waste of time it's been a pure exercise in futility not only has my preaching been in vain but your faith is in vain listen to the message of the preacher in Ecclesiastes vanity of vanity all is vanity says the preacher he's not talking about vanity in the sense of people who look at themselves in the mirror and in their vain narcissism enjoy their own images he's not talking about that kind of vanity pride hubris he's talking about labor that is worthless that is futile we heard already today at the poor player who struts and frets his hour on the stage and that is heard no more it's a tale told by an idiot full of sound full of fury full of passion signifying nothing we've already heard references today to jean-paul sartre but when he was examining the significance and the meaning of human existence he wrote a little book called nausea it was his final definitive assessment of the significance of human existence nausea he said because man in the final analysis is a useless passion it's one thing I like about Sartre is that he didn't pull any punches he says what we have here is that it's or either dealing with full orb theism or the only rational alternative is absolute needle ISM we're in the final analysis all you have is the sneaks again the needle the nothingness as Nietzsche said a useless passion what a way to describe a human being see Sartre understood that people as every existentialist understood have booze Erdogan they have care they have concern they have feelings things matter to you when your loved one dies your heart is broken and you're torn by grief and your feelings are so intense that you go to the house of mourning and you weep and you sob because the intensity of your feelings is so great it's passion but sort said it's a useless passion a passion that can't change anything you can't bring back your loved ones can't make any sense out of the nonsense and the meaninglessness of human existence that's the message of the atheistic existentialists in which our culture has not only been swimming but it has been drowning for decades but in a very real sense the Apostle Paul here anticipates art and from one perspective agrees with him you're right jean-paul if Christ is not raised give me that premise then you're right we're all nothing but a mass of useless passion you know this I appreciate of Sartre this I appreciated the Apostle Paul they had no time for the stupidity of humanism that lives on borrowed borrowed capital that his friends are safer once said the humanists has both feet firmly planted in midair he's on a rollercoaster without brakes he tells you that your origin is from nothing you popped into existence fortuitously by chance you're nothing more than a grown up germ sitting on one cog of one wheel of a vast cosmic machine that is destined to annihilation your origin is meaningless and nothingness and you are rapidly moving towards the abyss of non-being so the two poles of your existence birth and death simply an oscillation between nothingness and nothingness but the humanist wants to exalt the dignity of this grown-up germ between these two poles you talk about superstition talk about nonsense you know if you're a grown-up germ who cares we're black germs sit or white germs sit on the bus I'm not going to lose any sleep over the rights of germs but if we're creatures made in the image of God then it matters profoundly where we sit on the bus and what our dignity is you see the humanist once that was cake and eat it too he wants he wants to borrow and extrapolate some of the values from the Christian faith while denying it's very foundation is crazy that's why I appreciate Sartre and Nietzsche so much more come oh they tell it like it is if there is no resurrection from the dead your faith is in vain and none of that I stop there the Apostle says we're even found to be misrepresenting God instead of calling us Christians call us Jehovah's false witnesses because we've been testimony testifying to the whole world that not only is Jesus raised but the one who raised him is God listen to be careful now look at the close work of Paul here whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised you know that are not raised then God didn't raise Jesus because dead are not raised God hasn't raised anybody am I going too fast for the dead are not raised not even Christ has been raised and again if Christ has not been raised your faith is futile and you're still in your sins his death was a martyr's death but it had no atoning value because not only was Jesus killed for our justification he had to be raised for our justification and if God did not raise him from the dead if God delivered him into the hands of death who had no claim over him and left them there and it would be clear that his sacrifice was not acceptable to the Father and that you and I they're still in our sins well we were were before we ever met Christ lost hopelessly lost that's not all there's more then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished your funeral services were hoaxes your father who died your mother who died your baby you died your brother who died your sister who died your son who died your daughter have died they're gone forever they've not just fallen asleep to be awakened at the last trumpet they have perished and if in Christ we have hope in this life only if we only have Jesus to help us through the struggles and ordeals and afflictions of this world then we are of all people the Apostle says the most to be pitied I say to my friends who are unbelievers when we have discussions like this and they manifest hostility and anger towards Christians I said really don't be mad at us pity us because we are poor deluded souls who have committed our lives our money our time our hope - an illusion piteous because we're not only pitiable we're the most pitiable type of people imaginable Liana goes on to say why are we in danger every hour he says I protest I protest I die everyday let me think about this in human terms like what in the world am i doing fighting the wild beasts at ephesus why am i slandered imprison beaten stoned shipwrecked cut it out don't come into my church and tell me you're a Christian but you don't believe in the resurrection of Jesus I protest the Apostle says as you've reduced my suffering my pain and my ministry to nothingness now I want to interrupt my own self for just a second here because if the only defense for the resurrection of Christ that Paul can offer is how grim life would be without it then we have no argument at all we would be vulnerable to the charge that people make that religion is simply a bromide an opium for the masses a crutch for people who can't face the stark harsh reality of human life and so in order for us to be able to cope with a meaningless existence we cling to our myths of religion our dying and rising gods and Allison Wonderland is simply I mean Christianity is simply a chapter out of Alice in Wonderland who walks up to the fork in the road and doesn't know whether to go to the left to go to the right she looks up in the tree and there's the Cheshire Cat smiling at this girl's the lemma and she looks up at the cat and she says which way should I go and you with the Cheshire cats as well it depends where you headed and houses I don't know and the Cheshire Cat says and it doesn't matter it's like Yogi Berra when you come to a fork in the road take it but you see it's not enough to seek the Christian faith as a pain killer if Christ is not raised I'm going to sleep in tomorrow morning I'm not going to waste another moment of my life preaching and teaching the things of God to people nor does Paul stop with the grim realities he's just simply saying I want you to understand what's at stake here I wanted this a value of any compromise like humanism but Paul not for a moment does he rest his case on this ad hominem argument by which he shows that without resurrection life itself is reduced to absurdity he's not saying since the only option to resurrection is grim we need to embrace the resurrection no that's not the Apostolic testimony what is it he says but now in fact Christ has been raised from the dead the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep back up to the beginning of the chapter where Paul says now I would remind you brothers I'm not telling you something new for the first time I'm giving you a reminder of the gospel I preached you which you have received in which you stand and by which you are being saved if indeed you hold fast to the word I preached you unless you believed in vain for I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures let me stop right there for a second you want the highest proof you can ever imagine of the truth of the Resurrection wouldn't you like to know that Jesus really came out of that tomb and though it was certainty how would your life change if you knew absolutely without a shadow of a doubt that jesus is alive and not dead how would that change your life how if you could get an answer to that question that it was so certain that it came to you a from a source that was indisputable that it was infallible well guess what we have the testimony of the Word of God the only infallible rule of faith and practice known to the human enterprise no laboratory experiment no logical syllogism no formal affirmation or material demonstration can possibly exceed in certitude a single affirmation an infallible Word of God if God walked in this room right now and said listen now hear this you can quit arguing with the skeptics and the cynics let me just tell you I raised my son and he's alive would that settle it would you say well let me hear some more opinions from somebody else that's why Jesus said of the scriptures and said of his father Oh God sanctify these people and by thy word because your word is truth I grew up in a liberal Church they celebrated Easter every year the minister told us that the meaning of Easter was that we were to face the dawn of each new day with dialectical courage another minister on the staff said this when you're dead you're dead I thought Christianity was about morality and September the 13th 1957 that was interrupted on my way to a bar by a football player set me down at the table and start talking to me about Jesus but he talked to me about Jesus like no human being had ever talked to me but Jesus I'm thinking this guy's talking about Jesus like Jesus is alive and I walked away from the table and I said to myself more than anything else I've ever known in my life I want what that guy has by one of my closet into my room I turn out the lights and I get down on my knees put my head in my bed and met the Living Christ which was the defining moment of my entire existence and I know whom I have believed it and I am persuaded that I will see him standing on that day and Paul says first of all I delivered to you the first importance what I received the Christ died for our sins according to the scripture that was buried that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas then to the twelve then he appeared to more than 500 people at one time most of them were still alive though some have fallen asleep then he appeared to James the brother of Jesus who didn't believe in Jesus until the resurrection and through all the Apostles and last of all as one born untimely he appeared to me so what I'm talking to you about is not a hypothesis like Plato's concept of the seed that dies before it comes to life the plate of mused that his dialogues over the death of his beloved Socrates said I believe in the resurrection because I saw him just like Peter saw him just like James saw him just like the twelve saw him just like five hundred people saw him he appeared to me while I was in the midst of my effort to expunge this sect from the face of the earth he spot me in my tracks and as one born out of due time he came to me and I saw him and they goes on to spell out the consequences of that that now that Christ has died that rose risen he's not just risen as a isolated event that human history but he is risen as the first fruit of all of those who will come after him who are in him and when he talks about this triumph and this victory over the grave and over death mocking the great Oh death where is your victory where's this thing it's like we've taken the tale of the scorpion and we've removed the stinger and let me just close with Paul's conclusion that he wrote to the Corinthians when he says therefore remember now when you see that word therefore it's again like a syllogism it's like a logical argument it presupposes the premises that have come before it and in light of those premises now drawing things to its conclusion therefore he says my beloved brethren and as much as Christ has been raised from the dead what does that mean what's the logic of that requirement here's what it means be steadfast immovable always abounding in the work of the Lord for in as much as you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain your cancer is not in vain your grief is not in vain your labor your sweat and your toil is not in vain that's what's at stake that's why at the heart of the Christian faith is that a first in importance that he is risen it makes all the difference in the world let me just stand with us can you imagine what it would be like to live this life without the knowledge of the resurrection can you imagine that I told folks last night in another meeting us that you know my board of directors had a meeting they wanted to have a succession plan for when I'm gone because they said after all or say you're not going to live forever I said wait a minute I am so gonna live forever I'm just changing my address I'll send one of the post-office because I know that every tear every pain every labor counts for ever let's pray I followed our God you have defeated our worst enemy in the person of our greatest friend your beloved Son in whom you are well pleased so pleased then you raised him from the dead thank you Jesus

Channel: Ligonier Ministries

Views: 36,783

Rating: 4.8409786 out of 5

Keywords: ligonier, ligonier ministries, ligonier conference, sproul, rc sproul, resurrection of christ, resurrection, raised to life, witnesses of the resurrection, the apostolic message, necessity of the resurrection, is the resurrection necessary, general resurrection, christ's resurrection, ligonier conference 2009, centrality of the resurrection, resurrection testimony, doctrine of resurrection, new life, easter

Id: QwJHhB2oJz0

Length: 52min 46sec (3166 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 05 2015