These six consequences sharply reveal the inner connec-
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divided the Christians from the gladiators and prompted the hostile Nero to illumine his garden with human torches.
The resurrection of Jesus is radical in the original sense of the word. It touches the radix, the "root" of the Christian faith. Without it, Christianity becomes just another religion designed to titillate our moral senses with platitudes of human wisdom.
The apostle Paul spelled out the clear and irrefutable consequences of a "resurrectionless" Christianity. If Christ is not raised, he reasoned, we are left with the following list of conclusions (1 Cor. 15:13–19):
1. Our preaching is futile. 2. Our faith is in vain. 3. We have misrepresented God. 4. We are still in our sins. 5. Our loved ones who have died have perished. 6. We are of all men most to be pitied.
These six consequences sharply reveal the inner connection of the resurrection to the substance of Christianity. The resurrection of Jesus is the sine qua non of the Christian faith. Take away the resurrection and you take away Christianity.
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The biblical writers do not base their claim of resurrection on its internal consistency to the whole of faith, however. It is not simply a logical deduction drawn from other doctrines of faith. It is not that we must affirm the resurrection because the alternatives to it are grim. Resurrection is not affirmed because life would be hopeless or intolerable without it. The claim is based not on speculation but on empirical data. They saw the risen Christ. They spoke with Him and ate with Him. Neither His death nor His resurrection happened in a corner like Joseph Smith's alleged reception of special revelation. The death of Jesus was a public spectacle and a matter of public record. The resurrected Christ was seen by more than five hundred people at one time. The Bible presents history on this matter.
The strongest objection raised against the biblical account of Jesus' resurrection is the same objection raised against other biblical miracles, namely, that such an event is impossible. It is ironic that the New Testament approaches the question of Christ's resurrection from exactly the opposite direction. In Peter's speech on Pentecost, he declared: "God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it" (Acts 2:24).
To set forth the principle stated here, I must indulge myself with the use of a double negative. It was impossible
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for Christ not to have been raised. For death to have held Christ would have required the supreme and unthinkable violation of the laws of death. It is viewed by modern man as an inexorable law of nature that what dies stays dead. However, that is a law of fallen nature. In the Judeo-Christian view of nature, death entered the world as a judgment on sin. The Creator decreed that sin was a capital offense: "In the day that you eat of it you shall surely die" (Gen. 2:17) was the original warning. God granted an extension of life beyond the day of sin, but not indefinitely. The original sanction was not completely rescinded. Mother Nature became the paramount executioner. Adam was created with both the possibility of death (posse mori) and the possibility of avoiding it (posse non mori). By his transgression, he forfeited the possibility of avoidance of death and incurred, as judgment, the impossibility of not dying (non posse non mori).
Jesus was not Adam. He was the second Adam. He was free from sin, both original and actual. Death had no legitimate claim on Him. He was punished for the sin imputed to Him, but once the price was paid and the imputation was lifted from His back, death lost its power. In death, an atonement was made; in resurrection, the perfect sinlessness of Jesus was vindicated. He was, as the Scriptures assert,
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raised for our justification as well as His own vindication.
Hume's probability quotients discard the resurrection because it was a unique event. He was right on one count. It was a unique event. Though Scripture relates other resurrection accounts, such as the raising of Lazarus, they were all in a different category. Lazarus died again. The uniqueness of Jesus' resurrection was tied to another aspect of His uniqueness. It was tied to His sinlessness, a dimension of the person of Jesus that would be even more unique if uniqueness were capable of degrees.
For God to allow Jesus to be bound forever by death would have been for God to violate His own righteous character. It would have been an injustice, an act that is supremely impossible for God to commit. The surprise is not that Jesus rose, but that He stayed in the tomb as long as He did. Perhaps it was God's condescension to human weakness of unbelief that inclined Him to keep Christ captive, to ensure that there would be no doubt He was dead and that the resurrection would not be mistaken for a resuscitation.
The resurrection sets Jesus apart from every other central figure of world religions. Buddha is dead. Mohammed is dead. Confucius is dead. None of these were sinless. None offered atonement. None were vindicated by resurrection.
If we stagger with unbelief before the fact of resurrection,
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we would do well to consider the plight of the two walking to Emmaus that weekend. Luke records the event for us (Luke 24:13–35.). As the two men were walking away from Jerusalem, Jesus joined them incognito. They presumed to inform Jesus about the events of the crucifixion and showed obvious impatience with His apparent ignorance of the matters. When they related the report of the women concerning the resurrection, Christ rebuked them:
"O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?" And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.
When the two had their eyes opened and they recognized Jesus that night, they said to each other, "Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?"
A Christian is not a skeptic. A Christian is a person with a burning heart, a heart set aflame with certainty of the resurrection.
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The Ascension of Christ
My graduate work in theology in Amsterdam provoked a crisis in my Christian life. The crisis was triggered by a technical study of the doctrine of the ascension. Like most Protestants, I had neglected this theme, considering it an unscientific postscript to the life of Christ, not worthy of special commemoration like Christmas and Easter. The event is described only twice in the New Testament. I am now convinced that no single event in the life of Jesus is more important than the ascension, not even the crucifixion or the resurrection. It is dangerous business to assign relative values to the episodes of Christ's life and ministry, but if we underestimate the significance of the ascension, we sail in perilous waters.
What could be more important than the cross? Without it we have no atonement, no redemption. Paul resolved to preach Christ and Him crucified. Yet without the resurrection, we would be left with a dead Savior. Crucifixion and resurrection go together, each borrowing some of its value from the other. However, the story does not end with the empty tomb. To write finis there is to miss a climactic moment of redemptive history, a moment toward which both Old and New Testaments move with inexorable
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determination. The ascension is the apex of Christ's exaltation, the acme of redemptive history to this point. It is the pregnant moment of Christ's coronation as King. Without it, the resurrection ends in disappointment and Pentecost would not be possible.
My crisis experience in Holland was provoked by a study of one obscure statement from the lips of Christ. On an occasion when Jesus told His disciples of His impending death, He said, "Where I am going you cannot follow me now" (John 13:36), and, "Yet a little while and the world will see me no more" (John 14:19). Jesus continued His discourse by explaining, "It is to your advantage that I go away" (John 16:7). Here Jesus was making a value judgment about His departure. The thrust of His comment was to suggest that His absence was better for His disciples than His presence. This must have strained the understanding of His friends to the uttermost limits. Prima facia, it is unthinkable that under any circumstances people could benefit more from the absence of Jesus than from His presence, save for those unfortunate ones who face His judgment and would welcome a respite from Him. The Christian longs for the abiding presence of Christ. The contemporary Christian grows wistful imagining what it must have been like to have seen and known the incarnate Christ when He
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walked the earth. Millions travel annually to Palestine just to see where He lived and ministered. Surely the church has either failed to grasp the import of Jesus' words or has simply been unable to believe them. We live as if there had been no ascension.
The disciples were slow in grasping the expediency of Jesus' departure. They resisted His determination to go to Jerusalem and took umbrage at His announcements of His coming death. Between the resurrection and the ascension, new light dawned on them as they began to undergo a remarkable change of attitude. The culmination in the change was evidenced by their immediate reaction to Jesus' visible elevation into heaven. They did not exhibit the normal human reaction to such a departure. The record says the disciples "returned to Jerusalem with great joy" (Luke 24:52, emphasis added). Parting may be sweet sorrow, but the normal measure of sweetness is unable to turn sorrow into rejoicing. When men ship out for war or sailors go to sea, there are more tears than smiles on the faces of loved ones left behind. I remember tugging at my father's duffle bag when he started for the troop train at the end of a furlough during World War II. There was no joy in it. I remember the end of Christmas vacation and the ritual that took place at the Greyhound
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bus terminal during my college days, when I would put my fiancée on a bus to return to school after we had enjoyed a brief interlude together. I did not return to my school rejoicing.
To be sure, the disciples had to be prodded by an angel to leave the spot where Christ departed on the Mount of Olives. They stood there transfixed, savoring the vision of the glory cloud enveloping Jesus. They were rooted to the spot, spellbound by the vista of majesty surrounding them. Their reverie was broken by the words of the angel: "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven" (Acts 1:11).
They returned to Jerusalem. They must have been giddy: laughing, skipping, and singing the whole way. They recalled the words of Jesus in the upper room of the promise of another Comforter who would come. They were glad in heart because they finally understood where Jesus was going and why He was going there.
Earlier, Christ had said, "No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven" (John 3:13). He was speaking of Himself. These words placed the ascension squarely in the category of the unique event. In His ascension, Jesus displayed again that He was in a class by
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Himself. No one before or since has "ascended" to heaven. The prerequisite for ascension was a prior descent. As the only-begotten incarnate Christ, Jesus was singularly qualified for this event. Others had gone to heaven. Enoch was "translated" and Elijah was "taken up." One could "ascend" a ladder (Jesus had told Nathanael that he would see angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man, and Jacob beheld a ladder in his midnight dream at Bethel) or one could "ascend" to Jerusalem, moving to a higher elevation from sea level. The term could be used figuratively to refer to the elevation of a king to his royal office. But no one ever had "ascended to heaven" in the sense in which Jesus was speaking.
The ascension of Jesus was the supreme political event of world history. He ascended not so much to a place as to an office. He departed from the arena of humiliation and suffering to enter into His glory. In one moment, He leapfrogged from the status of despised Galilean teacher to the cosmic King of the universe, jumping over the heads of Pilate, Herod, and all the other rulers of the earth. The ascension catapulted Jesus to the right hand of God, where He was enthroned as King of kings and Lord of lords. Here the political "expediency" of His departure stands out in bold relief.
The implications of this event for the church are
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staggering. It means that though we suffer persecution and the scorn of hostile power structures—though we groan under the demeaning status of an unwelcome minority—our candidate sits in the seat of sovereign authority. The kingdom of God is not an unrealized dream or religious fantasy. The investiture of our King is a fait accompli. His reign is neither mythical nor illusory. It corresponds to a real state of affairs. At this very moment, the Lord God omnipotent reigns with His Son at His right hand, in the seat of imperial authority. To be sure, the kingdom is yet to be consummated—that is future. However, it has been inaugurated. That is past. He reigns in power, possessing all authority in heaven and earth. That is present. His kingdom is invisible but no less real. It is left to His church to make His invisible kingship visible.
Christ's ascension to the right hand of God is inseparably linked to the coming of Pentecost. In a certain sense, Jesus lacked the authority to dispatch the Spirit prior to His ascension. One of the first acts of authority He exercised after His enthronement was to endow His church with power from on high. His disciples were given a great commission, a mandate to penetrate the whole world bearing witness to the kingdom. These were and are to be the authentic witnesses of Yahweh. However, no border was to be crossed or mission undertaken until first the Spirit came down. The disciples
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returned to Jerusalem rejoicing for the purpose of their wait; they were waiting for Pentecost. When the new King of the cosmos sent the Holy Spirit, the power of the kingdom was unleashed on the world.
Christ's elevation was not only political, it was also sacerdotal. He assumed not only the scepter of the King but the garments of the High Priest as well. In His ascension, Jesus entered the sanctuary as well as the palace. Not only does Jesus sit at the right hand of God, He kneels. He has entered the sanctus sanctorum, the Holy of Holies, to make daily intercession for His people. We are a people whose King prays for us by name.
Do you wonder, then, at the disciples' joy? Once they understood where Jesus was going and why He was going there, the only appropriate response was celebration. They danced back to Jerusalem. His physical presence was gone, but His spiritual and political presence was enhanced. His words console his "absent" bride: "And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age" (Matt. 28:20).
About the Author
Dr. R. C. Sproul is the founder and chairman of Ligonier Ministries, an international multimedia ministry based in Lake Mary, Florida. He also serves as senior minister of preaching and teaching at Saint Andrew's in Sanford, Florida, and his teaching can be heard on the daily radio program Renewing Your Mind.
During his distinguished academic career, Dr. Sproul helped train men for the ministry as a professor at several leading theological seminaries.
He is the author of more than sixty books, including The Holiness of God, Chosen by God, The Invisible Hand, Faith Alone, A Taste of Heaven, Truths We Confess, The Truth of the Cross, and The Prayer of the Lord. He also served as general editor of The Reformation Study Bible and has written several children's books, including The Prince's Poison Cup.
Dr. Sproul and his wife, Vesta, make their home in Longwood, Florida.