he defeat of sin and death. Remove the empty tomb from the gospel, and the storyline becomes a senseless death and an incomplete resurrection. But with the stone rolled away, the cross and the resurrection of Jesus are proven true and efficacious.
Alright, let me go to a hymn that’s a knockout. Scholars just say, you know, “Let’s just show you that this is a hymn that the Christians sang.” Listen to the words and the content of this song, this hymn, that they sang, and it is talking about the earliest Christians’ belief in Jesus.
“When I was young, I was reading a book by C. S. Lewis, who wrote that the New Testament says nothing about the Resurrection. I wrote a real big ‘No!’ in the margin. Then I realized what he was saying: nobody was sitting inside the tomb and saw the body start to vibrate, stand up, take the linen wrappings off, fold them, roll back the stone, wow the guards, and leave.” – Gary Habermas[1]
We began Part 1 by explaining the significance of the disciples’ reaction to seeing the risen Jesus. Critics are forced to accept that the disciples truly believed that they saw Jesus alive after His crucifixion because of the changes that took place in their lives. They went from cowering in the upper room to being bold proclaimers of the gospel—the message that Jesus had come to the earth and taken on the form of a man, that He had died, and that He had been raised to life again through the power of God.
While there is strong historical documentation that Jesus died by crucifixion, some still wonder if Jesus only appeared to die and all the sources got it wrong. What if Jesus merely fainted (or “swooned”) on the cross and the soldiers mistook Him as dead? What if Jesus then resuscitated in the tomb, escaped, and convinced His disciples that He had been resurrected from the dead?
In recent years, doubt concerning the historicity of Jesus’ life and death has increased among the general populace. In 2015, the Barna Group and ComRes found that “four in 10 (40%) of all adults in England either don’t believe or aren’t sure, that Jesus was a real person who lived on earth. Among younger adults the percentage grew to 46%.
“It is a fundamental revelation of Scripture that the Holy Spirit is a person in the same sense that God the Father is a person and the Lord Jesus Christ is a person. The Holy Spirit is presented in Scripture as having the same essential deity as the Father and the Son and is to be worshipped and adored, loved and obeyed in the same way as God.”[1] Personality, John Walvoord explains, “is commonly defined as containing the essential elements of intellect, sensibility, and will.”[2] We shall briefly look at each of those elements.
In the Introduction to her book Jesus in Me, Anne Graham Lotz says, “I’ve heard the Holy Spirit spoken of as an ‘it,’ a feeling, a dove, a flame, a…
In his excellent book Forgotten God, Francis Chan makes this statement: “As I thought about this chapter, I realized how ludicrous it would be for anyone to say they were going to explain the Holy Spirit. The Bible says we cannot fully understand God, and I am certainly not the exception to that rule. There are things about God that are mysterious and secret, things we will never know about Him. But there also are things revealed, and those belong to us…
The evidence for the existence and activity of Satan and demons in the Bible is formidable. Seven books in the Old Testament specifically teach the reality of Satan (Genesis, 1…
