3 Evidences for the Deity of Jesus Christ (Part 3)

The Resurrection:
The most incredible proof of Jesus being God is the Resurrection. This is the event that separates Christianity from all religions. The tomb Jesus was buried in was sealed shut with a boulder and guarded heavily by Roman Soldiers. After Jesus had died, the women came to His tomb 3 days later to embalm Him (Luke 24:1-7). But Jesus was not there. Even when the woman came to tell the disciples that He was risen they did not believe them, but thought it was only a story that they had made up, nothing more than non-sense (Luke 24:11). His own brothers, James and Jude, didn’t believe He was the Messiah either (John 7:5) until they saw Him resurrected (Acts 1:14 & 1 Corinthians 15:7). History tells us that the authorities tried to give every other conceivable explanation to explain why His body was missing. For example, they said that the disciples came and stole the body. But they never explained how they stole the body. And no warrants were ever issued to arrest any of the disciples. The soldiers said they fell asleep while on duty but they were never reprimanded for sleeping while on duty, when the penalty for a Roman soldier for such an act was death. Furthermore, what court in the land would take as a credible witness, someone who was asleep while the crime was committed? If Christianity was taken into a court of Law this movement would have had over 500 “eye witnesses” for its defense in the case of the Resurrection. The Bible tells us that there were over 500 witnesses who saw Jesus resurrected from the dead. Because History is decided by legal evidence it would be a great event if we could put Christianity on the stand. We could determine once and for all if it is the truth or a lie. What better test than to have Simon Greenleaf put the Gospel accounts to the test in the court of Law to see whether the claims of Christianity are true or not. Simon Greenleaf was the founder of the Harvard Graduate School of Law and was one of the world’s greatest authorities on evidence. His “Rules of Evidence” are still being used today throughout the U.S. Court systems. Simon Greenleaf was asked to put Jesus and the resurrection to the test. He studied all the testimonies and reviewed all the facts, discarded everything that was inadmissible and concluded that based upon the evidence, the resurrection is as established as any event you can find in history. The most dramatic proof for the Resurrection was the fact that this event literally transformed the disciples from men that were afraid, and hiding behind locked doors (John 20:19), to leaders willing to be persecuted and die for their faith in Jesus (Acts 4). Few men will die for the beliefs, but no man would ever die for a lie.