Men living in the shadow of death in the contemporary world find it increasingly difficult to avoid confronting the dire problem of their ultimate fate. Almost daily we are bludgeoned with the horror of death through on-the-spot television coverage and graphic news reports and sometimes through personal experience. My memory frequently plays back a recent experience of seeing three men die in a drugstore gun battle reminiscent of an old James Cagney movie. Death has been painfully close to many of us recently as we have wept over the loss of loved ones. All of us have shared the grief of national tragedies in the past decade. During this tumultuous period, beloved American leaders were assassinated. Forty thousand men lost their lives in Viet Nam. Over half a million citizens were killed on our highways, and an alarming number more died through criminal acts, race riots, and natural catastrophes. We have been stunned and appalled by North Vietnamese atrocities, the My Lai massacre, starving in Biafra, and other tragedies of war. The brutal procession of death in our day no longer allows us to avoid thinking about it; modern men must squarely face death in all its horror.
As men in our generation are driven to confront the fact of death, Christians have an unprecedented opportunity to assert afresh the triumphant message of Jesus Christ’s resurrection. Increasingly great numbers of people are no longer mesmerized by materialism. Eager to reach beyond finitude and experience life’s transcendental dimensions, many are pursuing the false and irrational phantoms of Eastern mysticism, astrology, spiritism, and reincarnation myths. Others crave a solution that does not require the abandonment of reason. For such people, the biblical message can become a live option—if Christians declare it clearly, accurately, and boldly in the power of God’s Spirit.
The Christian Gospel honestly recognizes the horror of death. In the biblical message, death is not a beautiful anteroom that leads to the blissful realm of immortality. The grave is the inevitable destructive consequence of man’s willful rebellion against God. Death at the end of life results from death in the midst of life. Man’s proud egocentricity has separated him from God, the source of life, and made him an agent of hatred and violence and bloodshed. His sinful nature and sinful behavior have confounded his quest for nobility, made his existence anxious and empty, and brought upon him spiritual and physical death. Death is a fearful enemy; it crushes the deepest desires of man created in God’s image: to live on in a world he loves, to maintain unbroken relationships with people he loves, and to find a state of wholeness in fellowship with a God who loves.
Few of us can pretend to follow Epicurus’s formula: “While I am, death is not; and when death is, I am not. Therefore, death is no concern to me.” Death does concern modern man. Professor Hans J. Morgenthau describes three principal ways in which men of the nuclear age try to give meaning to the scandal of death. First, a man may make himself the master of death, within limits, by ending his biological existence whenever he wishes. He can commit suicide. He can choose to die sacrificially for a desired cause and thereby triumph over death, however incompletely. He controls not the inevitability of death, but the time of its coming.
Second, a man may deny death’s reality by believing in an immortality that posits biological finiteness as only apparent and life in the body as continuing in another world. Or in another view of immortality, he may believe that his soul will live forever, either separated from his body or reincarnated in another’s. Morgenthau writes, “This belief in personal immortality in defiance of the empirical evidence of the finiteness of man’s biological existence is, of course, peculiar to the religious realm.”
Third, a man may substitute immortality of the human race or personal immortality. He may seek to be remembered by his successors, to live on in his sons, to create long-lasting tangible monuments, or to contribute works of art that will remain as a vital part of the life of mankind. But the present possibility of the nuclear destruction of all humanity diminishes this form of hope.
Understandably, many men, facing the finality of existence with no sound intellectual basis for belief in life after death, conclude that life is absurd and seek to wrest meaning from it through strictly existential pursuits. By intense involvement in the pressing demands of the moment, they hope to gain some satisfaction that will make life tolerable. But these men have no adequate foundation for life. Neither do those whose only consolation is their contribution to the ongoing human race, nor those whose hope rests in irrational abandonment to false ideas of immortality.
Theologian Oscar Cullmann in his Ingersoll Lecture of 1955 shows how decidedly different is the Greek view of death and immortality, exemplified in the death of Socrates, from the Christian view of death and resurrection, shown in the experience of Jesus Christ. For Socrates, death was the great liberator; it loosed the soul from its prison in the body and led it back to its eternal home. Thus death was a friend. Socrates was able to drink the hemlock and die peacefully. Death held no terror for him.
But for Jesus death was a fearful experience. The night before his death as he knelt in the Garden of Gethsemane, “distress and anguish came over him.” He had a natural fear of death and cried out to God, for he did not want to confront it alone. He viewed death as an enemy (Paul calls it “the last enemy” in First Corinthians 15:26); he knew that to die was to be forsaken. Nevertheless, as the obedient and sinless Son of God, Jesus willingly submitted to the ultimate horror on the Cross of Calvary, was utterly forsaken by God and men, and entered the realm of God’s great enemy. His suffering unto death brought unimaginable pain and terror. In God’s amazing plan of redemption, Jesus was bearing man’s sin and entering death in order to destroy it. Cullmann writes, “Whoever wants to conquer death must die; he must really cease to live—not simply live on as an immortal soul, but die in body and soul, lose life itself, the most precious good which God has given us.” Jesus’ death was actual and complete—not a mere separation of the soul from the body. For him to come back to life, a divine creative act was necessary. On the third day, Jesus arose bodily from the dead. His resurrection was the supreme miracle of God in history. Death was swallowed up in victory. Through the man Christ Jesus, new life—resurrection life—became a reality.
The Christian view of death and resurrection thus is not an unrealistic acceptance of death as a thing of beauty; it does not deny the importance of man’s bodily existence or teach that his soul is translated into an illusory state of immortality. Rather, it sees death realistically as a destroyer. It offers men new life in a new kind of “body-spirit” existence lived eternally in fellowship with the triune God.
The Christian’s privilege and responsibility is to declare the biblical message that decisively answers the problem of man’s sin and death with the truth of Jesus Christ’s vicarious death and triumphant resurrection. The Gospel is no fanciful legend that asks men to believe apart from reason. The saving acts of God in Christ are solidly anchored in history. In the first century Christ’s apostles and disciples turned their world upside down with a message that stressed Jesus’ resurrection as an event in history that they had witnessed. On this basis they called men to repent and trust Christ as Lord. The Apostle Peter, speaking to men in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost, proclaimed: “God has raised this very Jesus from the dead, and we are all witnesses to this fact.… Turn away from your sins, each one of you, and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, so that your sins will be forgiven; and you will receive God’s gift, the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:32, 38). The Apostle Paul, addressing men of Athens, asserted that God “has fixed a day in which he will judge the whole world with justice, by means of a man he has chosen. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising that man from death!” (Acts 17:31). The Apostle John, writing to the seven churches in Asia, referred to “Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the first-born Son who was raised from death, who is also the ruler of the kings of the earth” (Rev. 1:5).
The literal, bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead was the central proclamation of the early Church; it must also be the Church’s central proclamation in our death-filled day. The Gospel today rests on the same evidence that the historian Luke asserted in the first century: “For forty days after his death Jesus showed himself to them many times, in ways that proved beyond doubt that he was alive; he was seen by them, and talked with them about the Kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3). Christians must become well grounded in the historical basis of the Gospel and vigorously advance its truth so that men seeking an answer to death can recognize the necessity of examining the hope Christ offers.
Our testimony to the reality of Christ’s resurrection must include the following biblical proofs:
1. The transformed lives of the apostles can be adequately explained only by the resurrection of Christ. Christ’s followers were utterly distraught by the execution of this one who they hoped would become the religio-political ruler of Israel, and they feared for their own safety because of the violence of Christ’s enemies. Yet in a matter of days these discouraged and frightened men were amazingly transformed. They openly and fearlessly proclaimed Christ alive from the dead; their belief in his resurrection motivated them to give themselves completely to the mission of making the risen Christ known to all men. So strong was their belief that they submitted to persecution and death rather than deny their Lord.
Had these unlearned men cunningly devised a fictional message (a scheme for which they had no discoverable motive), it would be reasonable to assume that sooner or later one or more of the eleven (not to mention other followers) would have confessed the subterfuge under the pressure of numerous threats of death. But none did. Their witness never wavered. Rather, they experienced an amazing power that even enabled them to perform miracles! The lives and message of these men changed the course of human history. No reasonable explanation has ever been given to account for their transformed lives except their own: they had seen Jesus alive from the dead.
2. The diversity of appearances by the risen Christ provides substantial historical proof for his bodily resurrection. The four Gospels relate at least ten post-resurrection appearances of Christ. He appeared to individuals (both men and women), to small groups (two, three, seven), to larger groups (ten, eleven), and to a crowd (over five hundred). He exhibited his wounded body, spoke intimately to those who knew him, ate in their presence, taught them, directed their activities, and gave instructions about their future witness. His first appearance was to women—hardly likely had the story been invented by Jewish men. He appeared to his followers to assure them of his triumph over death and to prepare them for their worldwide preaching ministries. These various appearances to different people in different settings cannot reasonably be explained as hallucinatory experiences. The best explanation is that given by the reliable writers of history and theology in the New Testament: the risen Lord actually met with his followers.
3. The empty tomb can be explained only by the supernatural power of God in raising Christ. After the crucifixion, the obviously dead body of Jesus was anointed, wrapped in linen, and placed in a new tomb sealed with a great stone and guarded by Roman soldiers. His adversaries, knowing he had predicted he would rise from the dead, took pains to prevent any possible plot for a simulated resurrection. Yet the Sunday after his death, the stone was rolled away from the tomb, revealing no corpse but only the body wrappings undisturbed and the head cloth rolled up in a separate place.
How was the body removed? Jesus’ enemies would not have taken it—the last thing they wanted was the suggestion of a resurrection. Furthermore, they could not produce the corpse later to refute the apostles’ claims that he had arisen. The friends of Jesus were in no position to steal the body: they were grief-stricken after his rejection by Israel and crucifixion by Rome and feared they too might be killed. And his disunited disciples certainly did not have the power necessary to carry out such a plot in view of the Roman military guards who stood watch over the great stone that sealed the tomb. If Christ’s enemies wouldn’t have removed the body and his friends couldn’t have done it, what possible answer is left? Only that the supernatural power of God was the means by which the body was removed and the tomb opened to reveal its emptiness. Attempts to explain the empty tomb by claims that Jesus never really died but swooned and then revived, or was merely drugged, fly in the face of the biblical evidence and create far more problems than they solve.
These arguments for Christ’s resurrection are not all the important ones that can be advanced, nor are they developed as completely as they might be. They do, however, point to some of the rational support for Christ’s resurrection that any honest truth-seeker must consider.
Christians must boldly and persuasively assert the biblical evidence for Christ’s resurrection. But they must remember that argument alone cannot win their hearers. A man can be completely convinced of Jesus as the risen Lord only when saving faith and the revelatory and regenerative work of the Holy Spirit become a reality for him. Personal knowledge of the living Christ involves both a rational and a moral decision. After his resurrection Jesus did not appear to the world at large to force it to acknowledge him as the Messiah. He came only to those who placed their faith in him. Only men who recognize their sin, turn from it, and trust Jesus Christ will gain personal knowledge of his living presence. The rational decision to believe in the reality of God’s redemptive acts in Christ must be accompanied by the moral decision to submit to his Lordship. Jesus Christ reveals himself fully only to those who trust him.
Death is a gruesome fact of existence. Its horror continues unabated. But there is hope in the midst of horror, because Jesus died and arose. Only this can remove the sting of death for dying men.
