The Resurrection at the Heart of Faith
Illustration★★★★The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. 1 co. 15:26 At the center of the Christian faith, there is the resurrection of Jesus. Some moderns have objected to the amount of space in the New Testament devoted to the Easter story.
Why not spend more time discussing the life and teachings of Jesus? they say. Their assumption is that we are encouraged to spend too much time on what is secondary and we neglect the most important part of the Gospel. But such thinking is wrong.
Those early Christians knew that the heart of their message was an announcement that the power of God has raised Christ from the dead. Admittedly, they did not know just what happened and some of their accounts seem confused. They could not find the precise words to express it and they fell back on symbolism to suggest their meanings. But the central truth of the experience they never doubted and they made it the center of their message.
Christians can never explain the resurrection because it is the resurrection that explains them. The rationalistic interpreters of Christianity can never find reasons convincing enough to be substituted for the resurrection. Their logic always has a gap in it. The whole Christian movement demands the resurrec- tion in order to account for it.
It is much more of a strain on our credulity to believe that our Lord was raised from the dead. I am frank to confess that I do not know the details of what happened on the third day. But I have been driven by the inadequacy of all other explanations, to believe that the Gospel which I have been called to proclaim, is rooted in Jesus Christ’s victory over death.
The point
The resurrection of Christ is the center of Christian faith and defeats death; it is the central truth that explains the Christian movement and gives hope beyond rational argument.