Key Life Network

Steve Brown: Did Jesus really die on a cross? Let's talk on Key Life. If you've suffered too long under a do more, try harder religion, Key Life is here to proclaim that Jesus sets the captives free. Steve invited Pete Alwinson to teach us this week. Pete is a former pastor, founder of forgestruth.com, and the author of Like Father, Like Son.

Steve Brown: Thank you, Matthew. At the end of the broadcast, I wanted you to tell us the story of that book that was written by Morrison. Who moved the stone?

Guest (Male): Yeah.

Steve Brown: We're talking about the resurrection, by the way. And we're spending the whole week till we get to Friday, and then we're going to talk about the crucifixion and the resurrection. But this is Easter Week. And we're sitting here so pleased with the evidence that God has given us about the resurrection, which we're going to share with you, or at least some of it. And what that means to us personally.

Guest (Male): Yeah.

Steve Brown: You and I both yesterday talked about how it changed our lives. But it changes the world. It changes everything. Tell us about that book.

Guest (Male): It really does. You know, Frank Morrison was a man who was a lawyer and he was a skeptic of Christianity and the thing that bothered him the most was all this talk about resurrection. So he said, let's, let me just once and for all disprove it. And so he set out to disprove the resurrection.

Steve Brown: Write a book and destroy Christianity.

Guest (Male): Yeah. Yeah. There's been numbers of people that have said the Bible's going to die. We're going to destroy Christianity and they've tried. Well, he was one of them. And so he studied it and then ended up becoming convinced by the empty tomb and all of what we're talking about this week that it's real. Just like you said, it's real and it's changed everything.

Steve Brown: It really does.

Guest (Male): And so, so he wrote a book, Who Moved the Stone. He became convinced of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and became a follower himself. It's powerful.

Steve Brown: That is powerful. Would you share those verses with us, at least the first ones that we started with?

Guest (Male): You know, in First Corinthians 15, Paul gives a really systematic explanation of the resurrection and only in verses 3 through 3 through 7. He gives what many scholars believe was an early creed of the church. He says in First Corinthians 15:3, "I delivered to you as a first importance what I also received."

Guest (Male): And that's why these scholars believe that this was a creed that was extant when Paul was converted. By the time Paul was converted, probably as early as 35 to 38 AD, just a few years when he's in Damascus. And remember he spent those 14 years in training and ministry before he really got connected in Jerusalem. But it's interesting and it sounds like a creed. He says, he says, "Christ died for our sins in accord with the scriptures."

Guest (Male): Second line, "that he was buried." Third line, "that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures." Fourth line, "and that he appeared to Cephas then to the 12." That's why scholars say, boy, that that's the most simplest creed that you could ever look for. First, he died, then he was buried, then he was raised, and then he appeared.

Guest (Male): And that may have been, other than Jesus is Lord, one of the first creeds of the church.

Steve Brown: That that means that at the very heart of the Christian faith.

Guest (Male): Yeah.

Steve Brown: The bedrock is that.

Guest (Male): Totally. And it was historically founded. Notice, there's nothing in spiritual ease on this. This is all empirical. It's all eyewitness stuff.

Steve Brown: Yeah. That's so good.

Guest (Male): Yeah. I think.

Steve Brown: And listen, we, we need to, let's talk about some of the things that people say about the resurrection.

Guest (Male): Yeah.

Steve Brown: You know that unbelievers don't like talking about it.

Guest (Male): They really don't.

Steve Brown: Because this gets them in an area they don't want to go. They want to be God and you can't be God if there is one. And if a dead man got up and walked, it's a pretty good indication that some outside power that is bigger than they are. So they say silly things like Jesus swooned.

Guest (Male): That's right.

Steve Brown: The whole book was written about that one time.

Guest (Male): That's right. Boy, in fact, there were several of them. You know, the the whole idea of the swoon theory began in the late 1800s. And even D.H. Lawrence in 1929, said, "Jesus ran to Egypt." In 1965, Hugh Schonfield, "The Passover Plot."

Steve Brown: Oh yeah, that's the one I, I know that book.

Guest (Male): Yeah. But I didn't know that it went back that far. It went back to the really the late 1800s. It was first put forward by a couple of, as we would imagine, German skeptics.

Steve Brown: Now, the swoon theory is that he didn't die on the cross.

Guest (Male): Right, right.

Steve Brown: And he got a bicycle and went somewhere else and then once he healed up, he showed, right?

Guest (Male): He showed up. Which which doesn't fit any narrative and and it's silly. But, you know, the the the Passover plot was an interesting idea that came out in 1965 that that Jesus was was going to be led off the cross. But they stuck a sword in him a spear in his side and accidentally killed him. And so that that messed up that plot. And then in 72, The Jesus Scroll by Donovan Joyce. He talks about it. 82, 90. This goes on and on and on.

Guest (Male): But I think what what thinking Christians have said is is several things. They've said, number one, the torture pre-cross just about killed him.

Steve Brown: Yeah.

Guest (Male): You know, the the the the anxiety in the Garden of Gethsemane where he sweat drops of blood. I I've never been, have you ever sweat drops of blood?

Steve Brown: Never that bad.

Guest (Male): But he did. And and there's a medical term called hematohidrosis where if you are under incredible stress, the the capillaries burst and bleed into the sweat glands.

Steve Brown: Oh man.

Guest (Male): It's this happens. It's rare but it happens. So he was under the kind kind of stress I've never been under. And and then and then of course, we see the flogging, the crucif the flogging, which was absolutely brutal. So the pre-cross torture was so bad. I mean, his leather thongs with bone and metal embedded in them and he, you know, they they were supposedly given 39 lashes but often it went more and more.

Steve Brown: Yeah.

Guest (Male): And many people often just died. They never got to the cross to be crucified on because the flogging, scourging killed them.

Steve Brown: Yeah. Yeah.

Guest (Male): And and and what it does is is it leads them into what's called hypovolemic shock where the loss of blood, the loss of fluid makes the heart start pumping harder to get to get fluid through and the blood pressure drops and the kidney stop producing anything and you're so thirsty and he experienced that on the cross even. The thirst. He made it to the cross. But the shedding of but but the scourging almost almost killed him right there and killed a lot of people.

Guest (Male): And then the agony of the cross.

Steve Brown: Plain agony. Do you have you if you've seen The Passion, the movie.

Guest (Male): Yes.

Steve Brown: That you know.

Guest (Male): The Mel Gibson one?

Steve Brown: Yeah.

Guest (Male): Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Brown: I only once. I don't want to see it again. Some people have it in their homes. But that accurately portrays and if you if you believe that Jesus got on a bicycle and left.

Guest (Male): That's right.

Steve Brown: You're an idiot.

Guest (Male): That's right.

Steve Brown: There's something wrong with you.

Guest (Male): It it just there's there's there's there's an anti-supernatural bias that is is inserted there to try to reinterpret the the historical narrative.

Guest (Male): Yeah. Because when you it just they they can't accept that he was really dead. And then so so then the the bleeding and then they finally did uh spread him out on the cross beam.

Steve Brown: Yeah.

Guest (Male): And nailed through the wrists which then the median nerve and I don't even know what the nerve but I know nerves. Have you ever hit your funny bone?

Steve Brown: Oh yeah.

Guest (Male): couldn't run your day.

Steve Brown: Yeah.

Guest (Male): Well, apparently the median nerve runs right through the wrist and so both wrists, boom. And then and then and then when they hauled him up on the cross, his shoulders would have would have uh breathing. They the breathing would have been next to impossible. But the shoulders would have dislocated.

Steve Brown: Yeah.

Guest (Male): And and then and then they nailed his feet again through the nerves. And and then and then the breathing. That's what kills you is asphyxiation, the inability to breathe and and um and then you finally give up. And what happens is is what builds up around your lungs and your heart is is fluid. And uh and so we know that when he breathed his last, um one medical scholar would say, "Really what what killed him? He he gave up his spirit. Yes, but it was cardiac arrest. His heart stopped functioning."

Guest (Male): Yeah. And and and so all that fluid built up and then when they thrust the spear in his side, all that fluid came out. Uh and it was separate showing that that his heart had had died. I mean, it was he was dead.

Steve Brown: You know, I know some of you as you listen to this think, what are you doing this for? And I don't particularly like sermons that overly uh specify exactly what happened. But you need to do it in the face of people who say really shallow, uninformed things about the resurrection of Christ.

Steve Brown: And as you said, people have been saying he swooned, healed, came back, but he didn't die and raised and and the resurrection is not a fact.

Guest (Male): That's right.

Steve Brown: We all know that. No, we don't all know that.

Guest (Male): That that's right. I think you're right. I think a lot of Christians uh need to need to push back some on that. And for me, what I see all this and this idea that they took him off the cross, not dead and in put him in a cool tomb with no air and that somehow he managed to come uh and survive. Um no, he was dead when they took him down. That's why they didn't break the legs break his legs.

Steve Brown: Didn't have to.

Guest (Male): Didn't have to. But I think personally, uh as as a follower, that he that my sin was far is far worse than I thought. And then his death was far greater than I could ever imagine. And he did that for me and for you and for all those he called uh to be his children.

Steve Brown: So true. Oh man. So Jesus, don't let anybody kid you. Was dead as a doornail. He was a corpse just like your great-grandfather is a corpse. They put him under. Put him in a tomb and closed it up and walked away. And you don't get the power of it unless you realize the death. You think about that. Amen.