No Bones About It!

Not a Sermon - Just a Thought, April 6, 2007

The Lost Tomb of Jesus aired on March 4, 2007, on the Discovery Channel. The documentary asserts that five bone boxes found in southern Jerusalem in the early 1980’s are the mortal remains of Jesus and his family. If the claim is true, it has the potential of upending the claims of Christianity about Jesus and his bodily resurrection, a belief which is central to the faith.

There is too little time here to critique the documentary from a scientific, archaeological, or historical view – after all, this a thought, not a sermon. I’ll leave that to other scholars who have done it exceedingly well because here’s the bottom line for me: You can’t prove the resurrection.

We can take a cue from the historical claims of those who witnessed the living Jesus after the event of the cross. But even the historical claims of the gospel writers and historians are not enough to completely fill in the blanks of this story.

Sure, lots of writers like Lee Strobel (The Case for Christ) make an intelligent and investigative claim that Jesus lived, died, and came to life again. But Strobel and the gang are nothing more than the opposite side of the coin to The Lost Tomb of Jesus, The DaVinci Code, or The Bible Code. They all aim to prove or disprove something that people of faith take as the work of God, something that we take on faith, not as head knowledge.

It all comes down to a person’s experience with the resurrected Jesus. It is a spiritual thing that surpasses objective knowledge. I take the central teachings of Christianity as true, not because a great scholar proved it to me, but because I once was a sinner who did not know about forgiveness and eternal life. But I had a religious experience that I can only describe as mysterious yet real. I can only tell you that I believe in the resurrected Jesus because I have personally experienced the resurrected Jesus.

We all lose our faith from time to time – I pray that this weekend’s celebration of the resurrection will be a resurrection of things dead or dying in your soul. I’ll be preaching a sermon from Matthew 28.1-15 entitled No Bones About It in worship at Willow Meadows Baptist Church this Easter Sunday. We gather at 9am and 11:10am and you are invited to join us.

Faithfully,
Pastor Gary

Not a Sermon – Just a Thought is a weekly e-column by me, Gary Long, pastor of Willow Meadows Baptist Church in Houston, Texas. You can subscribe or unsubscribe by emailing me at glong@wmbc.org.