The Word in Focus with Dr Larry Taylor

I recently read a post that gave someone’s reason for being an atheist. It said something to the effect of “we don’t believe in things for which there is no evidence.”

There is overwhelming evidence for the literal bodily resurrection of Jesus:

1. There is no question that Jesus actually died. I mention this because it’s been speculated that he was only comatose and awakened later. The Romans knew how to kill people. They did it daily. In Jesus’ case, to be doubly sure, they pierced his heart cavity with a spear after he died on the cross. Jesus was dead.
2. Jesus’ body was washed, anointed with spices, and wrapped with wide strands of burial cloth wound around his body in normal first century Jewish fashion. A turban was fashioned for his head.
3. Jesus’ body was placed in a tomb carved into rock. The entrance to the tomb was closed with a heavy disc-shaped rock. 
4. Pilate ordered the tomb sealed – large strips of leather attached across the entry rock emblazoned with the Romas seal. Anyone breaking that seal would be put to death. 
5. Pilate ordered the tomb guarded – four Roman soldiers, shoulder to shoulder blocking the entrance, standing at attention in four-hour shifts, twenty-four hours a day. If one of them dozed off, all four would be executed.
6. Someone or something moved the massive rock off by itself, yet there were no drag marks to indicate it was pulled by animals. 
7. The burial cloth that had been around his body and the turban that had been on his head were observed to be undisturbed, but no body was in them.
8. Who moved the stone? Who broke the seal? How did they get past the guards? How could a human body get out of a wound-up grave cloth without disturbing it?
9. Hundreds of Jesus’ apprentices insisted they saw, touched, ate with, and talked with Jesus alive.
10. Thousands of Jesus’ followers died brutal torturous deaths rather than deny that he was risen from the dead.
11. Millions of people over two millennia testify to radically changed lives after encounters with Jesus.
12. The argument for the literal bodily resurrection of Jesus goes deeper, as explained here: https://www.peterkreeft.com/topics-more/resurrection-evidence.htm

There is also overwhelming evidence that Jesus was God incarnate:

1. Jesus did things only God could do – walked on water, turned water into wine, raised the dead, healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, and so on.
2. Jesus said things only God could legitimately say – he claimed to be the resurrection and the life; he said “Before Abraham was, I am.” 

Given the evidence, we have three possible choices, but only one of them is logically possible:

1. Jesus was mistaken about who he was. He was deceived.
2. Jesus lied about who he was. He was a fraud.
3. Jesus told the truth about who he was (and is). He is Lord.

And, if he is Lord, we are at a crossroads. We cannot logically dismiss him as a liar or a lunatic. We can either reject him as Lord and go our own way, or we can submit to him as Lord and go his way.

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” ― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Jesus’ way is spelled out in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). His way is the way of nonjudgemental, nonviolent, other-oriented, all-forgiving, unconditional love for all people, and all of nature.

His way bears no resemblance whatsoever to the xenophobic, homophobic, racist white Christian nationalism practiced by the alt-right today.

I resonate with Frederick Douglass:

“I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.”