Easter And The Resurrection

Easter spells out beauty, the rare beauty of new life.
( S.D. Gordon )

Archaeological discoveries continue to support the Bible’s historical accuracy.
We tend to forget that the Gospels and book of Acts are eyewitness accounts of the life and death of Jesus.

Be this our resurrection day.
The singing Easter of the soul.
O gentle Master of the Wise.
Teach us to say, “I will arise.”
( Richard Le Gallienne )

Easter is not a time for groping through dusty, musty tomes or tombs to disprove spontaneous generation or even to prove life eternal.
It is a day to fan the ashes of dead hope, a day to banish doubts and seek the slopes where the sun is rising, to revel in the faith which transports us out of ourselves and the dead past into the vast and inviting unknown.

Easter is the demonstration of God that life is essentially spiritual and timeless.
( Charles M. Crowe )

Three Years Of Intense Study.
Dr. Frank Morrison (a rationalistic lawyer) decided to take three years off from his law practice in order to try to disprove the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
After three years of intense study, he found that the sheer weight of the evidence compelled him to conclude that Jesus Christ actually did rise from the dead.
As a consequence, he wrote the famous book entitled, “Who Moved the Stone?”
Though the resurrection of Christ does not depend on evidence, it has stood up to investigation of its evidence for almost 2,000 years.

Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven.
That, after all, is what the Lord’s Prayer is about. 
( N.T. Wright )

The Story Of Easter.
To teach all of us the meaning of love,
The Lord sent His only son from above.
But those in charge wanted Him out of the way,
So nailed Him up high on a cross one dark day.
But He rose again, as the Lord God had planned,
And now He sits there at His Father’s right hand.
As amazing today as when it was first told,
The story of Easter will never grow old.

The great gift of Easter is hope – Christian hope which makes us have that confidence in God, in his ultimate triumph, and in his goodness and love, which nothing can shake.
( Basil Hume )

Easter says you can bury truth in a grave but it won’t stay there.

God proved His love on the Cross.
When Christ hung, and bled, and died, it was God saying to the world, ‘I love you.’
( Billy Graham )

A Masterpiece Of Design.
Those who believe in God cannot prove he exists.
Those who don’t believe in God cannot prove he doesn’t exist.
The theory that life (and nature) came about from chaos, confusion and chance, is very improbable.
Things as complex as life do not happen by chance.
A book needs an author, a painting needs an artist, a building needs an architect to design it and builders to construct it.
Every item, big or small, from motor cars to skyscrapers, from computers to bridges, are all designed and built by engineers and craftsmen.
The human body is a masterpiece of design.
So too with our world, the sun and the moon, all perfectly located for our existence.
Someone, or something, far more intelligent and powerful than our little selves planned all this.
And put it all together.
( Rose Winfold )

Tomb, thou shalt not hold Him longer.
Death is strong, but Life is stronger.
Stronger than the dark, the light.
Stronger than the wrong, the right.
( Phillips Brooks )

Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present. 
( N.T. Wright )

The joyful news that He is risen does not change the contemporary world.
Still before us lie work, discipline, sacrifice.
But the fact of Easter gives us the spiritual power to do the work, accept the discipline, and make the sacrifice.
( Henry Knox Sherrill )

Witnesses To Christ’s Resurrection.
The holy women eye-witnesses are further proof that the Gospels are accurate historical records.
If the accounts had been made up, no ancient author would have used women for witnesses to Christ’s resurrection.
Women were second class citizens in Bible times.
Their testimony was not even allowed in court.
Yet the Bible says the risen Christ first appeared to Mary Magdalene and other holy women.
Even the apostles did not believe Mary when she told them the tomb was empty. 
The male Gospel writers had no choice but to report this embarrassing act of God’s favour, because that was how it happened.

The name of Jesus is the one lever that lifts the world.
When Jesus comes, the shadows depart.
( Doris Fenlow )

He changed sunset into sunrise.
( Clement of Alexandria )

No man can follow Christ and go astray.
( William H.P. Faunce )

Easter tells us that life is to be interpreted not simply in terms of things but in terms of ideals.
( Charles M. Crowe )

Paul Refused To Deny His Faith.
The conversion of Paul records the most drastically changed life in the Bible.
As Saul of Tarsus, he was an aggressive persecutor of the early church.
When the risen Christ appeared to Paul on the Damascus Road, Paul became Christianity’s most determined missionary.
He endured five floggings, three beatings, three shipwrecks, a stoning, poverty, and years of ridicule.
Finally the Roman emperor Nero had Paul beheaded because the apostle refused to deny his faith in Jesus.

And He departed from our sight that we might return to our heart, and there find Him. For He departed, and behold, He is here.
( St Augustine )

Let the resurrection joy lift us from loneliness and weakness and despair to strength and beauty and happiness.
( Floyd W. Tomkins )

Once more to new creation Awake, and death gainsay,
For death is swallowed up of life,
And Christ is risen today.
( George Newell Lovejoy )

There would be no Christmas if there was no Easter.
( Gordon B. Hinckley )

Atheist Turned Christian.
J. Warner Wallace is a cold-case detective in Southern California and a faculty member at Stand to Reason.
Although he was an atheist until the age of 35, he eventually became a Christian after studying the evidence of the New Testament gospel accounts.

Twas Easter-Sunday.
The full-blossomed trees filled all the air with fragrance and with joy.
( Henry Wadsworth Longfellow )

See the land, her Easter keeping,
Rises as her Maker rose.
Seeds, so long in darkness sleeping,
Burst at last from winter snows.
Earth with heaven above rejoices.
( Charles Kingsley )

Thou art the Sun of other days.
They shine by giving back the rays.
( John Keble )

Angels, roll the rock away.
Death, yield up thy mighty prey.
See, He rises from the tomb.
Glowing with immortal bloom.
( Thomas Scott )

“I Believe In God” Is Not A Meaningless Statement.
A statement is meaningless if we cannot see how it can be verified or shown to be false.
To say: “There is intelligent life on Mars” is not meaningless since we can see how we could verify this once we had the necessary technology.
To say: “I believe in God” is not a meaningless statement, since after death we should be able to find out whether or not this is true.
To say: “God does not exist in any sense that we can understand” is too vague.
It is impossible to see how it can be tested, therefore, this statement is meaningless.
( Rose Winfold )

The dying Jesus is the evidence of God’s anger toward sin.
But the living Jesus is the proof of God’s love and forgiveness.
( Lorenz Eifert )

Remember Jesus of Nazareth, staggering on broken feet out of the tomb toward the Resurrection, bearing on his body the proud insignia of the defeat which is victory, the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God. 
( Frederick Buechner )

Where man sees but withered leaves, God sees sweet flowers growing.
( Albert Laighton )

And in the solemn night I watch, before the Easter morn.
So pure, so still the starry heaven.
So hushed the brooding air.
I could hear the sweep of an angel’s wings.
If one should earthward fare.
( Edna Dean Proctor )

They Are Still With Us.
Although with death we no longer see the one who is in repose, they are still with us.
Around the altar the loving and the dead commune together, we are all alive in Him, for in Him there is no death, nor suffering, nor grief, just eternal love.
And if, for a while, we see no longer the faces of those we have loved yet lost a while, how much more joyful will be that great reunion on the Last Day when we are all raised together.
So, remember your child in prayer, he is in God’s keeping, as you are.
God’s ways are not our ways, and however much we question, no answer will stay our grief.
But if we believe in Him, we remain one in Him, and we have the hope of Him who is the Resurrection and the Life.
( Anglian )

The resurrection gives my life meaning and direction and the opportunity to start over no matter what my circumstances.
( Robert Flatt )

It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.
( Robert H. Goddard )

According to the laws of legal evidence used in courts of law, there is more evidence for the historical fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ than for just about any other event in history.
( Harvard Law Professor Dr. Simon Greenleaf )

There is no historic incident better or more variously supported than the resurrection of Christ.
( Brooke Foss Wescott )

The Hallucination Theory.
A large crowd of more than 500 eyewitnesses saw the risen Jesus Christ at the same time.
The Apostle Paul records this event in 1 Corinthians 15:6.
He states that most of these men and women were still alive when he wrote this letter, about 55 A.D.
Today, psychologists say it would be impossible for a large crowd of people to have had the same hallucination at once.
Smaller groups also saw the risen Christ, such as the apostles, and Cleopas and his companion.
They all saw the same thing, and in the case of the apostles, they touched Jesus and watched him eat food.
The hallucination theory is further debunked because after the ascension of Jesus into Heaven, sightings of him stopped.

But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
My God shall raise me up, I trust.
( Walter Raleigh )

For I remember it is Easter morn.
And life and love and peace are all new born.
( Alice Freeman Palmer )

And now brothers, I will ask you a terrible question, and God knows I ask it also of myself.
Is the truth beyond all truths, beyond the stars, just this: that to live without Him is the real death, that to die with Him the only life?
( Frederick Buechner )

Let every man and woman count himself immortal.
Let him catch the revelation of Jesus in his resurrection.
Let him say not merely, “Christ is risen,”  but  “I shall rise.”
( Phillips Brooks )

Evidence Of The Resurrection.
After rising from the dead and ascending back into Heaven, Jesus was seen by hundreds of eye witnesses, many of whom died unflinchingly for their testimony.
Christ’s earliest followers were willing to suffer and die for their story.
All but one of the New Testament’s writers were executed for proclaiming and defending Christ’s resurrection.
John alone was spared, but forced into exile by the Roman emperor Titus Flavius Domitianius.
What makes the disciple’s martyrdom extraordinary is that these men were in a position to actually know whether or not what they were professing was true.
No one will knowingly suffer horribly and ultimately die a brutal death in order to defend something they know to be a lie.
For example, the September 11th suicide hijackers may have sincerely believed in what they died for, but they certainly weren’t in a position to know whether or not what they believed was true.
They put their faith in religious traditions passed down to them over many generations.
The New Testament’s martyrs either saw what they claimed to see or they didn’t, plain and simple.
Either they interacted with the resurrected Jesus or they didn’t.
Dramatically, these men clung to their testimonies even to their brutal deaths at the hands of their persecutors, and this despite being given every chance to recant and knowing full well whether their testimony was true or false.
Why would so many men knowingly die for a lie?
They had nothing to gain for lying and obviously everything to lose.
Most biblical scholars today agree that both Paul and James were sceptics and persecutors of the early Christian church prior to experiencing a post-resurrection appearance.
Paul and James both willingly suffered and died for their belief that Jesus was the messiah who had died and rose again.
No one suffers and dies for a known lie.
Maybe one lunatic, but not hundreds of eye-witnesses.

There is more evidence that Jesus rose from the dead than there is that Julius Caesar ever lived or that Alexander the Great died at the age of thirty-three.
( Billy Graham )