If Jesus Wasn’t God, Then He Deserved an Oscar/Program 6

By: Dr. John Ankerberg; ©2006

When Jesus claimed to be God, what proof did He offer that His claim was true? What evidence would lead a thinking person in the 20th century to believe that Jesus really rose from the dead?

Introduction

Dr. John Ankerberg: Today on the John Ankerberg Show, recent surveys show that people are confused about what they believe about Jesus Christ. They think He was a great man, but are not sure about what He taught, who He claimed to be, and the purpose of His life. Through the years I have spoken to students on university campuses, to people in large gatherings, to conferences, and churches about the facts and evidence that can lead a person from skepticism to belief in Jesus Christ? Together let’s examine the evidence that can lead to a clear understanding of who Jesus is, resolve your doubts and answer your questions, and possibly lead you to faith in Him. Join me for this special edition of the John Ankerberg Show.

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Welcome to our program. I’m glad you joined me. This is the sixth program in this series where I’m taking you step-by-step through the facts and evidence that can lead a person out of skepticism to belief in Jesus Christ. In our first program we addressed those who claim to be atheists or agnostics, and began to lay a factual foundation that shows Christianity is totally based on a real man by the name of Jesus Christ who lived in real history. The reason we know Jesus lived is not only because of the emergence of the Christian Church, but because of seven authors who gave us historical information about his life. In programs two and three, we answered the question how do we know that these authors gave us reliable historical information? Why do we believe that the four Gospels and other New Testament books came out during the lifetime of the apostles, as well as the friends and enemies of Jesus who had witnessed his life? In program four and five, did Jesus ever claim to be God? Did the friends and enemies of Jesus testify that Jesus lived a perfect life and never sinned? And today, what proof did Jesus offer people in his own day that his claim to being God was true? Come with me, to Boca Raton, Florida, where I answered this important question.

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Excerpt from Boca Raton

Jesus called the shots ahead of time. He said in advance, “I’m going up to Jerusalem. They’re going to kill me. And then three days after that, after I’ve been in the grave, I’m coming forth again.”

Right. Nobody believed Him on both sides. You read the account. Nobody believed Him. He went up to Jerusalem. The religious leaders took Him. He went through seven trials. Monkey trials. He was crucified on a cross. A spear was put through His side. The blood and water came out. He was taken down off of the cross. He was pronounced dead. He was wrapped in cloth, the Jewish cloth, and inside every layer of the cloth they put spices to the tune of 75 pounds of spices. Just like a mummy. Then they took that body, all wrapped up, and they put it into a tomb. And then they sealed the tomb. And Jesus was pronounced dead and He was gone.

And yet, just a few days later, those crazy disciples that had run when Jesus was crucified were standing in that very town that had watched Him murdered and they were saying, “Listen, Jesus is alive. He’s the Messiah. You killed God’s Messiah! You need to accept Christ as your Savior. He’s the One that God sent!” And they believed them, to the tune of 3,000 at one meeting and 5,000 more in the same city at another meeting. How did they get away with that? Why did people believe?

There are two facts that nobody can explain: one is the empty tomb. Empty tomb. They couldn’t have been preaching that Jesus was alive if you could walk two blocks over to the tomb where He was buried and His body was still there, right? I mean, that would have been too easy to disprove. What happened to the body? The body wasn’t there. First of all, the religious leaders were the first ones to say that the body was gone. Do you realize that? Wasn’t the disciples. The soldiers were guarding the tomb. The religious leaders said, “Look, let’s put a guard at the tomb.” They got permission to do so.

They put a Roman centurion with his little group to watch the tomb. Do you know the qualification for being a Roman centurion? If you read Tacitus, if you read some of the other people, you find out that the qualification to be a Roman centurion was at least 20 years of valorous duty to the Roman army. You were put in charge of people that had three or four different languages. Why? Because they didn’t want you to all have the same language so you could conspire together. But this man would be able to communicate to all of them. But the only penalty for failure to do your job was what? Death. And that cuts into your schedule. So the fact is, this fellow didn’t want anything to happen to that tomb. He was there with the other soldiers and these were the men that after they had been put there to guard the tomb came to the Jewish leaders and they said, “The tomb is empty.”

And they persuaded the Jewish leaders to come to the tomb. They investigated it, and after they investigated, what did they do? They cooked up this story. “Listen, we’ll take care of you with the government. We will pay them off. And the fact is, we will give you a little money and we want you to present this story. Now let’s think what the story’s going to be.”

And they got together and they said, “Look, tell them this: While you were sleeping,” a Roman centurion sleeping? He’d be killed for that! No way! “While you were sleeping, the disciples came and stole the body away.”

Justin Martyr, about 150 AD, reports that story was still being spread around that the disciples stole the body away. Schonfield in The Passover Plot said something similar to that. Others down through history have said the disciples came and stole the body away.

But listen, why doesn’t that make sense? Couple of reasons. Number one, they cooked up the story so fast that they didn’t even realize they made a logical error. They said that while the soldiers were sleeping the disciples came and stole the body away.

Well, listen to this, if your next door neighbor is Bill and you tell me last night somebody robbed my house and it was Bill, I would say,

“Well, how do you know that?” “Well, I was sleeping on the couch and all of a sudden, while I was sleeping, Bill came in and stole my TV set.”

I’d say, “Now, wait a minute. If you were sleeping, didn’t you have your eyes closed? How did you know it was Bill?”

If you’re sleeping, you’re not awake watching. If the soldiers were sleeping, how did they know it was the disciples? It would have been easy for them to say, “Listen, you know, we were there and we woke up and Peter put up a great fight. Tom over here got a black eye and this guy here, he was killed. I mean, those guys were great fighters.” That would have been evidence. But they didn’t present that.

“While we were sleeping the disciples came and stole the body away.” Didn’t think about what they’re saying. They’re saying the disciples came and stole the body away. Disciples who were the cowards! When Jesus was taken, who were the ones that ran away? It was the disciples. They weren’t fighters. They weren’t expecting a resurrection. What happened to the body? What happened to the body? What do you think happened to the body? That is something that has to be explained. Something happened to the body and we know that the body wasn’t there. The tomb was empty.

But just a few weeks later the disciples were standing in the very city of Jerusalem and they said, “The answer to the riddle of what happened to the body is, Jesus rose from the dead. He appeared to us. We believe it. We don’t care if you kill us. Here we are!” That’s what changed the disciples. That’s the only thing that makes logical sense.

The second thing that you have to explain is the people who said that they saw Jesus alive after He was crucified. Paul says there were more than 500 people at one time that saw Jesus. In other accounts, you can find ten different times, that Jesus appeared to different people along the way. Now, what is the theory that accounts for what these people were saying?

The main theory today of what was happening was hallucination. These people were hallucinating. They were imagining something as if they were seeing it, but there really wasn’t anything there. They were just imagining it.

Now, in group psychology today we know a couple of things about hallucinations. Number one, we know that if one person here is having a vision and the other person is having a vision, most likely, they’re not having the same vision at the same time. You don’t have stereo vision, okay? Because it comes out of your subconscious. It comes from your background and so you’re not going to have the same vision.

Secondly, it is among people that expect it to take place. For example, if one of the accounts said that Peter and John and James were with Mary and the other women and they were in a little hut, and they had all the blinds shut, the door locked, and they were all sitting around. It was dark inside there and this is one of the places that Jesus hung out before. The fact is, while they were sitting there the candle was kind of glowing and all of a sudden the wind blew up and the drapes went up and the candle went out.

Suddenly, Mary says, “I see Jesus. I see Jesus.” And Peter says, “Yeah, there He is!”

Now, see, that would be a little bit of a problem for me. Wouldn’t it for you? You see, they had to be expecting it. They had to be in one of those spots where Jesus was near and dear to them before and if that was the case, then we would have a big problem. Maybe they were hallucinating.

But where did Jesus show up? Where did Jesus appear? It wasn’t in those kind of places. It was on a busy road to the city of Emmaus. It was down at the beach in the morning. He had lunch with the guys a couple of times. He appeared on the top of a mountain to 500 people. The hallucinations took place in spots where hallucinations do not take place. Think of 500 people that saw Jesus at one time. If those people were hallucinating, then you have to say there is such a thing as group hallucination. Five hundred people all tuned in to the same vision. No. They were eyewitnesses and this is what changed their life. Changed their life.

I want to close with something that maybe you haven’t heard about before. There are also, I feel, about five different reasons that you have to account for that go right back to the resurrection.

Number one, you have to account for the origin of the Church. Here we are. We’re a Church. Where did it come from? Well, somebody started it. Who started it? Well, a Christian. Where did he come from? Well, another person won him to the Lord. Well, where did that person come from? And you go on back in history and you finally come down to the start. Where is the start? Right about the time of Jesus. Right at the time of Jesus. Now, why did the Church start? It’s because they had said they had seen Jesus Christ alive and He had shown them that He was God and He had told them as God to go out and tell everybody that He had risen from the dead, He had conquered death, He had paid for the sins of the world. He was the Savior. He could forgive their sin and that’s what they preached.

You look at the sermons all through the book of Acts and you will find that’s what the fellows said. “We saw Him alive. We are witnesses of His resurrection from the dead.”

That’s how the Church started. That’s the message that started the Church. What in the world caused this? Could only be the resurrection of Jesus. That’s what they said.

There’s something else. Do you realize that right at that time we went to Sunday worship? And who went to Sunday worship? Orthodox Jews changed the day that they worshipped from Saturday to Sunday. Why? That’s an earth shaking event.

They kept it for over 1500 years in the Old Testament and all of a sudden one day they woke up and said, “We’re doing it on Sunday, not on Saturday.” Why? Cause there was nothing else to do?

They said, “We want to commemorate this day as the Lord’s Day. This is the day that He rose from the dead. We will gather together. We will worship on this day.” You give me any other reason that beats that one for why all of a sudden they started worshipping on Sunday. There is none.

Where did this thing called baptism originate? The ordinance of baptism, where did that come from? What is it? Baptism is a pictorial display of what? Of Jesus going down into the grave and you’re identifying yourself with Him, that I die to myself. And then what? When you come out of the waters, it’s coming out of the waters into newness of life with Christ to serve Him. That’s the resurrection. That’s what baptism means. Where in the world did that originate? Why did it originate? It originated right at that time and they said because this is what Jesus wanted and it teaches what He did. He was buried and He arose from the dead. That’s what baptism is all about. And it goes right back to that time.

How about communion? What’s communion? The Christians got together and they decided to celebrate what? “The Lord’s death until he comes.” Why would you celebrate somebody’s death? Because He’s not dead anymore. He died for us to pay for our sins and He arose from the dead and He’s coming back to get His Church. Communion, baptism make no sense unless there’s an actual physical resurrection from the dead and it goes right back to the time of Jesus. That’s when it started. All the scholars admit that. And what is it based on? It’s the resurrection.

And I’ve got another one. What about Jesus’ own family? Do you remember His family? I’m talking about His brothers, now, not His mother. His own brothers did not believe in Him during Jesus’ lifetime, did they? What were they like? Mark 3:21. Just listen. You don’t have to turn there. When His family heard about this—Jesus and His claims that He was God—they went to take charge of Him for they said, “He is out of His mind!”—Mark 3:21. John 7:3-5.

Jesus’ brothers said to Jesus, “You ought to leave here and go to Judea” and they said this tongue-in-cheek, “so your disciples may see the miracles that you do. No one that wants to become a public figure acts in secret.”

Why did they want Jesus to go up to this area and do miracles? “Since you are doing these things, show yourselves to the world,” and it says “for even His own brothers did not believe in Him.” Why did they want Him to go up there? They were trying to goad Him into a death trap.

If He showed up at the Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem, they thought that the authorities would take Him and kill Him and so they were saying, “Jesus, why don’t you go on up to Jerusalem and do a few miracles up there and make a few statements up there?” And they would have been rid of Him. Those were His brothers. Nice family, huh?

Now, we don’t hear very much about Jesus’ brothers until Acts 1:14. But surprise, surprise! These fellows that did not believe in Jesus and actually tried to kill Him show up in Acts 1:14 where it says, “They all joined together constantly in prayer,” talking about the first Christians, “along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus and”—goodness sakes’ alive—”His brothers.” What were they doing there? These guys had tried to kill Him. Didn’t believe in Him. Why were they there right before Pentecost?

In Galatians 1:19 Paul reports that when he visited Jerusalem three years after his conversion he did not see any of the other apostles except James, the Lord’s brother, which seems to imply that James was not an apostle. The Jewish historian Josephus records that the Jews illegally and brutally stoned James to death for what? For his faith in Jesus Christ, sometime around 60 AD.

In 1 Corinthians 9:5 Paul mentions not only James but Jesus’ other brothers became believers. He says, “Do we not have the right to be accompanied by a wife, as the other apostles and” what?—“and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?” These guys got converted. What changed His own brothers from not believing in Him to becoming apostles that went out and got killed for their brother?

Paul says, in a nutshell, in 1 Corinthians 15:7, the reason why they got converted. After Jesus was seen to be murdered on a cross and crucified in front of all Jerusalem, after He was put into the grave, after He arose from the dead, after He started appearing to different ones, Paul makes this little crisp statement in 1 Corinthians 15:7, “Then he appeared to James.” That must have been a meeting.

How would you like to see your dead brother come back and say, “I’m God. Here I am.” There’s nothing else you can attribute to these brothers of Jesus, why they would have changed, except what Paul said. They saw Him after He arose from the dead and they went out and served Him and they got martyred for doing it.

One last one. What do you do with Paul, the old Saul of Tarsus? Saul was one of the Jewish authorities. He was the chief persecutor of the Christian movement. He was an extremely devout rabbi. He did not believe in this Messiah Jesus and he set about to kill His followers. According to Luke in Acts 22:4, Paul did the following: “I persecuted the followers of this way to their death, arresting both men and women and throwing them into prison as also the high priests and all the council can testify.” That’s the kind of guy he was. Something happened to him. And he turned from somebody that was persecuting and hunting Christians down and was adamantly against them; he changed from somebody that gave up the comforts of being a respected rabbi; he took the life of an itinerant preacher. It was a life full of toil, sacrifice, pressure and unimaginable suffering.

Paul, because of his change, was whipped five different times by the Jews, 39 lashes each time. The Romans also whipped him on three occasions. Once he was stoned and left for dead. Three times he was shipwrecked. Once he was afloat in the water for 24 hours. Robbers were there to threaten him along the highway. Jewish and pagan adversaries were seeking to kill him. He experienced hardship. He went without food. He didn’t sleep sometimes. He was poorly dressed. He had no place to stay. And eventually, he was martyred for his changed beliefs. He was one of the most remarkable men who ever lived and it all began right around 35, 36 AD. Why? Paul says the reason that he changed was he saw Jesus Christ alive on that road to Damascus. That’s the only thing he says. That’s what got him.

Now, where did the Church begin? Where did we start with baptism and communion? Where do we get the change in the brothers of the Lord? Where do we get the change of Paul? What do you attribute that to? What would have persuaded these tough nuts to crack? They said, every one of them the same thing, “We saw Jesus Christ alive after He was crucified.” He’s alive and they went out and served Him and they changed the world.

Now, my friend, I want to ask you this: Who do you think that Jesus Christ is? We have historical records about Jesus Christ that you can’t just throw away. That’s solid information, written by eyewitnesses. They came out early among people that loved Him and hated Him. In those records Jesus claims to be God of God. His character was absolutely unique. How do you place this Jesus among all the people that have ever lived? Who do you think that He was? What do you do with the works that He did? His miracles? What do you do with His resurrection from the dead? Who do you think that Jesus was? And the interesting thing is that this man lived 1,900 years ago on planet Earth.

That Jesus is very God and the question, the very important question is this: Do you know Him? Because the Bible says, quoting Jesus, you’re going to stand before Him someday and He’s going to say, “Did you accept my offer? Did you accept my forgiveness? Did you accept what I did on the cross for you?” Do you want to say to Him, “No,” after He’s done all of that? The One who left glory to come and do all of that so we could know for sure who He was and how much He loved us?

My friend, tonight, if you do not have a personal relationship with that Jesus, you can start one very simply because He wants you to have it. This is not something where you’re approaching the King on trembling feet and saying, “Oh, I don’t know if he will like me or not.” He’s already said, “I came and gave my life. God proved His love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ went and died for us.” He already proved He loves you. But He says, “Realize you’re a sinner. Realize you’ve broken my laws.” That’s why I came. I’m the Savior.”

As the angel said, “Unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior.” Didn’t put your name there. You’re not the one to do the saving work. Jesus is the Savior. And when Jesus died on that cross, He paid for your sins and mine. He was put into the grave. He arose again. He’s living now and He can forgive you. He wants to change your life. He’s proved that He’s God. He’s got power to put inside of you the Holy Spirit of God that will live there. And you can change your life from the inside out. He says someday you’re going to say to Him what decision you made. You can make that decision tonight and you can be one of His own. Is there any reason you would turn Him down tonight?