The Empty Tomb

While we may think of anti-religious bias as a new phenomenon, the most important event in history went ignored or under-reported in its time, and it continues to be denied, misunderstood, unappreciated, and under-reported, two thousand years later.  Jesus Christ rose from the dead!

Reasonable people - be they Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or atheist - do not deny that Jesus Christ was a great moralist and moral figure, who lived in the Middle East two thousand years ago.  Yet leaving garbage like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code in its proper place, it is undeniable that Jesus Christ made the claim to be God incarnate! What sort of moralist or moral figure makes such a claim? To claim to be God, when one is not God, absolutely disqualifies one from being a moral teacher or even being called moral!

In The [New] Evidence Which Demands a Verdict, Josh McDowell summed it up: Either Jesus was telling us the Truth, or He was delusional, or He was a charlatan! Logic leaves no fourth choice.  And Jesus not only claimed to be God, but He offered evidence! Most astounding were predictions of His resurrection!

The powers that be of Jesus' time minimally wanted Him to be discredited or to just go away.  After torturing and executing Him, the last thing which Rome - the world's most powerful empire - wanted was for Jesus' followers to claim He had risen from the dead!  So, they fortified the tomb and stationed an armed guard. Somehow, the tomb was empty on that first Easter morning! 

Finding the tomb empty, Rome certainly wanted a quick end to the incident and a return of the body. Two thousand years later, the tomb is still empty!  To posit that Jesus’ sheepish intimates somehow snatched and forever hid the body defies logic. Only after encountering the risen Christ did these scaredy cats come out of hiding to be transformed into powerful witnesses; most suffered martyrdom. 

In our own time, we need to let Christ's Resurrection transform us from scaredy cats to stand up for the Truth in the public square!  As per Bishop James Conley,

"[Our] culture...believes that personal happiness is the highest possible human aim, and that it ought to be pursued by all possible means....suffering will be relieved when courageous men and women proclaim Jesus Christ, and witness to the real dignity of human lives made for eternity with Him."