Easter is this coming Sunday. I hope you are excited about that, I hope you are looking forward to it, and I hope you're using this time - which is somewhat artificial; we put it on a calendar — to reflect on, in an intentional way, the life, death, and work of Jesus, and ultimately his resurrection. I hope you're taking advantage of this time and this season for your own personal spiritual growth and worship.

Today I want to talk some about the resurrection and Easter. I want to talk about this phenomenon that exists out there today in Christianity, in Christian culture, to sometimes distill down the necessary content of what we need to share with someone to just the resurrection, and the historical details of it more so. For instance, there are some today that say we can demonstrate the resurrection from history, and that's all we need. We don't need a "Bible tells me so" type of religion. We don't need a "Bible tells me so" type of evangelistic approach because people don't accept the authority of the Bible. We need to be able to point to history and other things like that in order to make our case. I want to talk about that some today.

You might think, what does this matter? I think it really matters how we talk about God, how we talk about scripture, how we present the Bible. Because sometimes the way we do this either betrays a strong confidence in the power of the Holy Spirit and of scripture or a weak confidence. How we talk about God really matters.

So, can it be demonstrated historically that Jesus rose from the dead after being crucified on a Roman cross? I believe it can be from a certain point of view. I believe you can rule out all of the other explanations, that you can show that all of the evidence we have, both in the Bible and outside of the Bible, is made most probable and makes the most sense by the explanation that Jesus rose from the dead.

However, that only gets you so far. Because now what we have is a man rose from the dead. That doesn't actually prove that he was God. Other people came back to life; they weren't God. Think of Lazarus and that type of situation.

History is not self-interpreting. That's an extremely important point. That is why multiple people can look back at events in the past and have different interpretations. Because, while they both might affirm that that event happened, the event itself and the details of its historical nature don't tell you what it means. When it comes to the resurrection, what it means is extremely important. It has a lot to do with everything about the Gospel.

It's interesting, in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul says this: "Now I want to make clear for you, brothers and sisters, the gospel that I preached to you, that you received and on which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message I preached to you, unless you believed in vain." Here's where he starts giving a summary of the content that he had previously taught them. I don't think this is by far everything Paul means to say is the Gospel, but this is a summary.

He says, "I passed on to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephus, and then to the 12. Then he appeared to more than 500 of the brothers and sisters." He goes on to list more people to whom Jesus appeared.

Now some people say, "See, he's talking about historical details: that Jesus died, that he raised, that he was buried, these types of things." But Paul doesn't separate these from the Bible. He says that "Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried and that he was raised on the t…