Acts 17:18

HISTORICAL CERTAINTY OF THE RESURRECTION

‘Jesus and the Resurrection.’

Acts 17:18

It is of vital importance, and especially at a time such as the present, to realise that the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ can be shown to be an historical fact as certain and indisputable as any event that holds a place in the annals of the past. When, then, plainly asked why we believe that the Lord rose from the tomb in which human hands had laid Him, we reply thus:—

I. Because this Resurrection was proclaimed from the very first by men who had not only seen the Lord with their own eyes, but on one occasion (unless we are prepared to reject every attempt to reconcile the narrative of St. Paul with the narrative of Matthew) had seen very many others see Him, and testify by their outward act of adoration that they did see Him, and did realise His veritable presence, even though there were some then present who doubted it.

II. Because though confessedly an incredible story, and though confronted on the part of the Jews by a counter-story, it was nevertheless believed in from the very first.

III. Because the proclamation of the Lord’s Resurrection was made the basis of the whole evangelical message.

IV. So persuasively and so widely was the Gospel preached, that we may be shown by four Epistles of St. Paul about the genuineness of which no reasonable doubt can be entertained, the belief in the Lord’s Resurrection as a fact, and as that to which after the death of the Founder the Church owed its continued existence, had spread, within thirty years, to all the great centres of learning and civilisation in the ancient world. And of this universality of belief two abiding witnesses have come to us from those earliest ages down to the present time.

(a) The one, the fact that the day of the week on which the Lord rose is the pre-eminently holy day of the Christian week.

(b) The other, the fact that the celebration of the Holy Eucharist, and the showing forth of the Lord’s death until He come, has stood in close and uninterrupted connection with the first day of the week from the very first Easter Day down to the present time.

Bishop Ellicott.

Illustration

‘The two scenes before the Sanhedrim have ever seemed to me to indicate with unmistakable clearness that many of those seventy-two men, though they might not have definitely believed that the blessed fact was a fact, were, so to say, standing at gaze. The miracle performed on the lame man at the Beautiful Gate, which they plainly said they could not deny, had shaken them, and left in the background of the mind the feeling of the possibility of the mightier miracle being true after all. Their action on this occasion, and still more so on the second occasion of the Apostles being brought before them, when they ultimately accepted the counsel of Gamaliel, though at first they had all but come to the resolution of stopping the story of the Apostles by killing them, has never seemed to me in harmony with any clear conviction on the part of the whole of the Council that the declaration of St. Peter and the Apostles was utterly and absolutely unworthy of belief.’