Key Life Network

Steve Brown: The jury threw up their hands because there were so many witnesses. Let's talk on Key Life.

Guest (Male): This is Key Life. We're here to let you know that because of what Jesus has done, God will never be angry at you again.

Guest (Male): Pete Alwinson is a former pastor, founder of forgedtruth.com and the author of Like Father Like Son. And he's been teaching us all this week.

Steve Brown: Thank you, Matthew. If you're just joining us, Pete Alwinson and I are just sitting down and we're talking about the resurrection of Christ. What it implies, what it means, what difference it makes in our lives, and what a difference it makes in the world.

And we've been looking at some of the comments made by unbelievers to escape the reality of looking at truth in a rational way and deciding as Morris did in that book that this really happened. One of the things that Paul says in that Corinthian passage is that there are 500 witnesses.

Pete Alwinson: Yeah.

Steve Brown: If one if one person tells me they've been down to the graveyard and they've seen a dead man get, I'm going to call people in the white coats.

Pete Alwinson: That's right. That's right.

Steve Brown: If three come in and tell me that, they're they're making a joke. If 10 come in, it's a conspiracy. But if 500 people say that they've seen a dead man walking around, I'm going to check the graveyard.

Pete Alwinson: Oh, really.

Steve Brown: You know, let me as an aside, tell you a funny story. We had a guy in a church in East Dennis on Cape Cod where I was the pastor, who was the head of Parks and Recreation for Dennis East Dennis. Which meant he cleaned the gravestones and kept the graveyard mode.

That's it. That's all his job description did. He got tickle one time telling me that this guy, that in fact, he was the guy, he was cleaning a gravestone and the grave had been made before they put the metal covering over the the coffin. And that made the land kind of weak and it gave way under him.

Pete Alwinson: Oh.

Steve Brown: And he fell in up to his waist in this in this grave that went back to the 18th century.

Pete Alwinson: Right.

Steve Brown: And he said there was somebody driving through the graveyard at that time, looked over and saw him half in and half out. And he he got so tickle telling me, and I did too. He said they thought I was coming out of a grave.

Pete Alwinson: Oh, my goodness.

Steve Brown: He said, Steve, you have never seen anybody leave a graveyard faster than they did.

Pete Alwinson: Oh, that is great.

Steve Brown: Let's go back to those witnesses. 500 of them.

Pete Alwinson: You know, First Corinthians 15, the Apostle Paul said that he that he appeared to Cephas, then to the 12, then he appeared to more than 500 brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive when Paul wrote between 55, maybe in 56 A.D. So that they could still be checked with, eyewitnesses.

Steve Brown: You know, the first century, you know, they had an advantage over us. They had the witnesses to question.

Pete Alwinson: That's right.

Steve Brown: And you know, if that witness had not stood, we wouldn't be talking about this.

Pete Alwinson: Especially, you're right, and especially in Jerusalem because there's a a little passage that also says that the souls of many of those people who had died were raised in Jerusalem. And that and that's what this is a reference to. So that happened in a in a major way.

So Jerusalem really became the center of the resurrection. It became the place that people could come and find those 500 and plus people and say, really? And and bump, oh yeah, down at the marketplace. Go down to the market and and they're there. Yeah, I was there. It happened. And and then and then he appeared to James, and the apostles and last of all to me.

He appeared he appeared to Paul and he appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus. And there were other people around there who didn't understand the phenomena that was taking place.

Steve Brown: But they knew something had happened.

Pete Alwinson: Something radical had happened. Yeah, yeah.

Steve Brown: So, so, you know, the witnesses are amazing when you and we're witnesses today.

Pete Alwinson: That's right.

Steve Brown: As we look at these kinds of things and realize the truth of it, we that brings me to something else. The witness in the book of Acts, there is no these are not people who found who are entrepreneurs who are sophisticated and educated that you would choose to start a movement.

These are fishermen, motorcycle gang members, doubters. I mean, they're the kind of guy you meet at a bar. And I wouldn't have picked them if I'd been Jesus. I'd have found somebody who was at least a graduate of a rabbinical school.

Pete Alwinson: That's right.

Steve Brown: But these ragamuffins changed the world.

Pete Alwinson: They really did.

Steve Brown: And when you see the early growth of the church, it blows you away.

Pete Alwinson: Oh, man. It it really does. And as they began to spread out and preach the resurrection, read the book of Acts again and you'll see that every evangelistic sermon in the book of Acts goes back to the resurrection.

Steve Brown: Yeah.

Pete Alwinson: Because you can't talk about the forgiveness of sins unless you know that the sins were literally paid for and that God has accepted the sacrifice for those sins, which is Jesus. And and that's and so the resurrection says, hey, all of this is absolutely true.

Now, you made an interesting comment there that these are ragamuffins, but when the gospel began to spread in in Jerusalem, there were a lot of God-fearers. Roman soldiers, Centurions who were already had already been convinced that the polytheism of their Roman background was foolishness and silliness and myth and that the Jews had the ethical superiority.

A lot of these guys became Christians, who had already accepted and these were Roman soldiers and Roman leaders, like Centurions, not just not just the rank and file. They were leaders. And so they they find their way back to other reassignments and then to Rome, so that when Paul gets there and other Christians get there, the Pretorian Guard eventually that protected Caesar.

Steve Brown: So there were Christians already there in some of those places.

Pete Alwinson: Already because of the reassignments and all that. But so so what happened is is because Jerusalem was the center for the resurrection and the center of all those 500 witnesses, a lot of others that we might call today military leaders and influencers were convinced. They were convinced and began to spread the the gospel as well.

Steve Brown: Oh yeah. And the church absolutely exploded.

Pete Alwinson: Completely. It really did. You cannot explain why Christianity became so powerful and eventually dominated the Roman Empire apart from the resurrection.

Steve Brown: And you know, you can ask the question today too. You know, we talk about how Islam is growing and other but the largest religious institution in the universe is the body of Christ.

Pete Alwinson: It is. It is.

Steve Brown: I mean, it's not even close. Second isn't even close.

Pete Alwinson: It isn't even close. Yeah.

Steve Brown: And and you can compare Islam spread and Christianity spread and they spread completely different.

Pete Alwinson: That's true.

Steve Brown: Islam spread after 620 A.D. It it spread with the sword and with hordes of military. Turn or burn.

Pete Alwinson: Yeah.

Steve Brown: We we are the results of truth and a gospel message, a good news message that only had the power of God to reinforce it.

Pete Alwinson: That's right.

Steve Brown: And there's no explanation for that.

Pete Alwinson: Other than that, other than that.

Steve Brown: It really wasn't. This should not have happened.

Pete Alwinson: That's right.

Steve Brown: It really should not have happened. But they went out throughout the world. And listen, you you know, the good thing about Easter and talking about these subjects is that we get to the very essence of the Christian faith.

Pete Alwinson: Mhm.

Steve Brown: You know, we've put layer upon layer upon layer upon layer and that's not in all cases a bad thing, but you need to sometimes if you're in a factory and you make rubber ducks, you got to go back and say, why did we make rubber ducks in the first place? And who are we selling to? And all that stuff.

And that's what Easter does for us. It reminds us that the apostles and the preachers went all over the world and they said, anybody here want to live forever?

Pete Alwinson: Mhm.

Steve Brown: And that was the basis of their message.

Pete Alwinson: Boy, you are so right. And that Easter really is the beginning of the Christian year and the Christian calendar. Christmas didn't come till much later in terms of celebrating the incarnation of the eternal Son of God. That came much later. But Easter shaped worship in the church from the get-go. Worship then they would worship on the Sabbath, but then they would worship on the first day of the week.

Oftentimes before work in the in the early church. And then when Christianity became legal under Constantine, uh, Sunday was considered a holiday. So you're right. I mean, it it changed everything.

Steve Brown: You know, I was once and I've told you this before, a member of a church that on Easter did something that was really unusual. They had a big screen. They had people go to the graveyard. You could see it on the big screen.

And and when we came to church, everything was black and dark and they had the windows covered and and I said to Anna, when we said, this is too much, I'm leaving. I'm not dealing with this. They sang sad songs. And then on the screen, they showed these people, these ladies, going to the graveyard and it was an empty hole. Uh and and it blew them away. Where's the body?

Pete Alwinson: Yeah.

Steve Brown: And then they saw Jesus. And the film showed them coming back to the church and just as they got to the door of the church, you could hear them knocking on the door. They walked in and the ushers ripped the black off the windows. And uh and the organ began to play resurrection songs.

And these women started jumping up, shouting, he's risen. And I thought, I've died. This is the most exciting thing I ever experienced.

Pete Alwinson: Wow.

Steve Brown: And I loved the way they did it. But that, in fact, is the way we ought to feel about Easter.

Pete Alwinson: That's right.

Steve Brown: The way I felt then when they took the covering off the windows and started shouting, he's risen, I realized he really has. He's alive. And that makes our worship different, makes our witness different, makes our lives different, makes us different.

Pete Alwinson: Yeah. Oh. And so when people would say see each other, Christians would see each other and say, he is risen.

Steve Brown: Yeah.

Pete Alwinson: He is risen indeed is the response. Oh, that is so powerful.

Steve Brown: You know, there's a story about a Russian who was talking about his atheism and there were students in a university and they asked the Christian to respond and he said one thing. He is risen. And all of the students joined in and said, he is risen indeed. And the atheist walked away sad. That's what it's about, guys. And we're going to talk about the cross tomorrow on Good Friday. Meanwhile, you think about what we taught you.