EWhen Peter Hitchens was on Q & A in 2013, he said the most dangerous idea in human history remains ‘the belief that Jesus Christ was the Son of God and that he rose from the dead’. When asked to elaborate, he said the Christian message ‘turns the universe from a meaningless chaos into a designed place in which there is justice and there is hope, and therefore we all have a duty to discover the nature of that justice and work towards that hope’.
But can we believe the resurrection really happened? Well to begin, the tomb was guarded by hardened soldiers, who faced the death penalty for failure. It would take more than a few timid disciples to scare them off; i.e. angels. Second, the Jewish authorities had a vested interest in debunking the resurrection but could never produce a body. Third, the New Testament accounts tell of over 500 people who witnessed the risen Jesus; accounts that many could have refuted at the time, but never did. And finally, the resurrection turned those timid disciples (who ran away at Jesus’ arrest) into men who were willing to give their lives to declare the resurrection really happened.
Those who deny the resurrection have their work cut out for them, for as any court judge will declare, ‘I don’t believe it happened’ is not a valid argument against the evidence. To this day, no one has produced enough evidence to prove that it didn’t occur.
The reason the resurrection is so dangerous is it declares that God intervened into human history in a cataclysmic way on that first Easter Sunday. In that miracle of miracles, God declared that Jesus really is who he said he was; the Judge of all the earth. Furthermore, it shows that Jesus’ sacrifice of atonement was accepted by the Father, and that if we put our faith in Jesus, our sins really are taken away, and that we too will one day rise, like Jesus, never to die again.
