“Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart, since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God; for ‘All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever.’ And this word is the good news that was preached to you.” (1 Peter 1:22-25) 

Peter preached the certainty of the resurrection as the foundation for faith and holy living. Most people in the contemporary world do not share this belief. Many think that Jesus’ resurrection is essentially a myth that is meant to convey the idea that death is not the end of life; that we will continue to exist in another form. And yet, as evidenced by this current pandemic, millions across the world live in the fear of death because they have no assurance other than their own opinions, hopes and desires of what will happen to them after death.

Consequently, these poor folks lack the real comfort we Christians share in the certainty of the Resurrection. They have all chosen not to disregard the claims the Word of God makes about who Jesus is. They do not think He is God as he claimed but perhaps, at best, just a good man. They do not believe then what the Bible says He has done for mankind, or about sin or the wrath of God. They do not think that Jesus did all that the Bible claims He did. They maintain and preach that all the events recorded in the gospels are greatly exaggerated or made up, even many who call themselves Christians. They claim that Bible is a collection of religious stories made up to explain life, stories that are not the Word of a sovereign God, not facts or history, but fables and legends, superstitious nonsense created by over-anxious and uneducated minds. Thus, the worldly religious experts, psychologists and philosophers all tell us that our faith is blind for it has no basis in reality. This allows millions to comfortably yet blindly reject Christianity as the only true faith. Our religion, they say is no better than any other and in fact may be worse because Christians are so intolerant.

But the Bible is not a bunch of made up stories. It is not myth. The accounts regarding the events of the resurrection as told by the gospel writers are not fiction. They are based on eyewitness testimony of the very people who experienced the events of Jesus life, and resurrection. Their testimony carries great weight despite the fantastic and supernatural character of the events they describe for it is quite vivid and passionate. These witnesses are reliable because they believed what they said. They believed it so passionately that most of them suffered martyrdom for their faith. They were absolutely certain of the truth they believed, saw, and experienced. And so, we can trust that what they had to say happened as they said it did for it has been given to us under the authority of the Word of God.