HARD FACTS: Is The Claim Jesus Rose From The Dead Just Another Fairy Tale Like The Easter Bunny?
The grave is empty. How do you explain it? (Photo by Bruno van der Kraan on Unsplash)
It’s Easter week, the most important seven days on the calendar for the billions of people around this Earth who call themselves Christians. That’s because the single most important event in history happened during this period.
That event is the central claim underlying their faith — that Jesus was crucified dead and buried on Friday, then rose again on Sunday and appeared to hundreds of people in the following days before ascending back to Heaven from whence He came. He will return some day and every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that He is Lord and Savior.
But how can someone who is genuinely open to hearing all of the evidence for and against this central claim of Christianity know what to accept as logical and true and what to reject as baseless claims? Every day this week on HillFaith we will consider this question from a variety of angles, beginning today with the following video produced by the Impact360 Institute:
Thank you so much, Mark, for your posts! We’ll be sharing them and pray that they help point the way to faith in Christ.
[…] HOLY WEEK PRESENTS AN OPPORTUNITY TO CONSIDER THE BIBLE’S CLAIMS. HARD FACTS: Is The Claim Jesus Rose From The Dead Just Another Fairy Tale Like The Easter Bunny? […]
You know, more and more I think that the key to apologetics is in John 3. But not so much the 16th verse but the passage beginning in verse 19.
The Light came into the world but people choose darkness because they think the Lord cannot see what they do in the dark.
I know it’s true of me. There was a moment many years ago when I saw that the consequence of being a believer was not so much deciding to do this, not that, but rather literally bowing before Christ. Giving up my autonomy. I became an atheist instead.
Thank God he did not decide to not believe in me.
What he will do in responding to the heartfelt prayer of despair that will come as a result of living apart from him will shake your faith in comfortable unbelief. Then it’s up to you. He will put in a special play to get you across the goal line: 3 tight ends, full-back, even the QB will throw a block. What he will not and cannot do, addicted as he is to our freedom to choose, is to throw you in the trunk of his car and drive you over the goal line.
“What he will not and cannot do, addicted as he is to our freedom to choose, is to throw you in the trunk of his car and drive you over the goal line.”
So you’ve discovered something that an omnipotent God cannot do? An omniscient God has already predetermined your actions. It’s one or the other. Either God is omnipotent and omniscient, or man doesn’t have free will. You can’t have a square circle; you can’t have both.
Can He make a burrito so hot even He can’t eat it?
If He can create the universe out of nothing, making it in such a way that our freely chosen decisions within time reflect His sovereign ordering of things from outside of time is no big deal. As for that sizzling burrito, you are posing a play on words, not a genuine question. Perhaps you would find reading “What Time Is Purple” to be instructive.