April 20, 2025, Message by P. Kevin Clancey
Transcribed by Beluga AI.
Christ is risen. When I say that, you have to say, he’s risen indeed. You know, we have liturgy here. We have liturgy.
Christ is risen. He has risen indeed. It’s like a Catholic bishop and anybody who grew up Catholic, grew up Catholic, and we would always say, the Lord be with you. And Karen, and the Congress responded, “Also with you.” So the bishop gets up there, big hoopla.
He’s up there, and he’s saying the Mass, and all of a sudden the mic goes out. He’s trying to get the mic to work, and people can’t hear him say the Mass.
So he looks back to the sound booth, and the guy realized he just accidentally flipped the switch. Simultaneously, the guy flips the switch back on, and the bishop says, there’s something wrong with this mic. To which the congregation just intuitively responded. And also.
So I’m going to read 1 Corinthians 15. I’m going to trip over that stool.
1 Now I want to make clear for you, brothers and sisters, the gospel I preached to you, which you received, on which you have taken your stand 2 and by which you are being saved, if you hold to the message I preached to you unless you believed in vain. 3 For I passed on to you as most important what I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, (1 Corinthians 15:1-4, CSB)
So that’s the gospel that Paul first received, he says:
6 Then he appeared to over five hundred brothers and sisters at one time; most of them are still alive, but some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as to one born at the wrong time, he also appeared to me. 9 For I am the least of the apostles, not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. 10 But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. 11 Whether, then, it is I or they, so we proclaim and so you have believed. 12 Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say, “There is no resurrection of the dead”? 13 If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised; 14 and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain, and so is your faith. 15 Moreover, we are found to be false witnesses about God, because we have testified wrongly about God that he raised up Christ whom he did not raise up, if in fact the dead are not raised. 16 For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. 17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins. 18 Those, then, who have fallen asleep in Christ have also perished. 19 If we have put our hope in Christ for this life only, we should be pitied more than anyone. 20 But as it is, Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. (1 Corinthians 15:6-20, CSB)
God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock, our Strength, and our Redeemer. Amen.
So this couple had been married for a long time, about 30 years. They wanted to go to the Holy Land, they wanted to visit the Holy Land. And they made plans to do it. This couple had had struggles in their marriage and the struggles weren’t of their own making. The struggles were that the wife’s mother, the mother-in-law to this man was a really rotten person. She was a bad mother-in-law. Okay, I hope none of you ever, you know, I had a wonderful mother-in-law. I hope you have wonderful mother-in-laws. But this woman was an old bitty. She would criticize everything her son in law ever did. He could never be good enough for her.
And then she would even criticize her daughter. You know, her daughter could never be good enough. She was always complaining and always whining and always criticizing. She was a total, you know, butinsky. She was always into their lives and messing things up. Quite frankly, they were just hoping, you know, she’s getting older one of these days. Bye. Bye.
So now they’re going to make this trip to the Holy Land. The wife comes to her husband with this devastating news. Mom wants to come with us.
And he’s like, no, no, no, she can’t. Come on, she’s getting old. We can go another time after she’s gone.
She’s never been. Maybe it’ll be good for her. Maybe, you know, it’ll soften her a little bit. We gotta take her.
He’s like, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but okay, you know, we’re gonna be walking the steps of Jesus. You know, this is my cross.
So they bring this old gal to the Holy Land, and she complains about the airplane flight, she complains about the food, she complains about the weather, she complains about the people.
And then about three days into the trip, she died. Just dropped over and died.
And so they take her to the undertaker, and the undertaker says, here’s the deal. We can bury her here. Cost you about 10,000 bucks.
But if we load her on a plane and fly her back to the states, because of all the regulations, the red tape, the cost of travel, and everything, it’s going to cost 10,000 or it’s going to cost 30,000 bucks.
So 10,000 here. $30,000 to take her home. The guy says, we’re taking her home. His wife said, Honey, that’s 20,000 bucks. Come on, we’ll bury her. It’ll cost us less to bring the kids out to Israel and have the funeral here. We’ll just bring the family out and do it here.
He goes, no, we’re going to take her back. We just got to do that. I know you didn’t like her very much, but this is above and beyond that. You want to honor her and take her home, $20,000. We don’t have that. We don’t have that kind of money in our retirement. You can’t bring her back. We got to take her back. And I don’t understand.
He says, well, listen, I’ve been here a week, and I’ve been hearing a lot of stories about a man who died 2000 years ago here and got up from the dead. I don’t know if it’s in the soil or what, but that’s a chance I’m not willing to take.
Two thousand years ago, it wasn’t in the soil, but a man did get up. This is the heartbeat of the Christian faith. This is our historical building block. The whole thing hinges on whether or not Jesus rose from the dead.
If he didn’t, then all he is is a great moral teacher and another tragic story of what happens to good people. But if he rose from the dead, he’s everything he said he was. Not only that, but he has changed history once and for all.
He’s the first fruits of the resurrection. What does that mean? We’re the next fruits of the resurrection? Turn to somebody next to you and say, you’re looking fruity. We’re the next fruits of the resurrection. We then join him by our faith in resurrection life. We have eternal life.
We are raised with him. And that resurrection starts not just when we die and go to heaven. It starts when we put our faith in him. Heaven invades earth. In us, resurrection, there’s a new kind of life on planet Earth. It’s the life of the raised Jesus Christ living now through his church. It changes everything.
So did Jesus literally, historically, actually get out of the grave? Did a dead guy get up?
And I want to look at the biblical and historical evidence tonight for that assertion, because if he did, then I would say Christianity is true. And if he didn’t, it’s false. It’s as simple as that.
And so Paul says this. He says three things, and all these things are important to the resurrection. First of all, he said Christ died. Well, why is that important to the resurrection? Well, obviously you can’t.
But one of the theories put forth to disclaim the resurrection of Jesus is called the swoon theory, that he didn’t really die on the cross; he just passed out. If you’ve seen the Princess Bride, he wasn’t fully dead. He was just, you know, mostly dead. And that in the tomb, he revived and got back up.
This theory has some problems. First of all, the trauma of crucifixion is so severe, even if he didn’t die, he would have died in the tomb. He’s not going to heal in the tomb after losing that blood.
His body being whipped and mangled, and his bones are all out of joint. He wouldn’t have appeared to his disciples as one full of life even if he came out of the tomb.
You know, the Roman guard said he’s dead. Well, he wasn’t a medical doctor. No, he was a Roman soldier. I would venture to say that a Roman soldier, sadly, knew more about death than a doctor. A Roman soldier, a centurion, had probably seen death many times. He knew dead when it was dead.
The other thing is, they took a spear, they pierced his side, said blood and water came out. The water is an indication of the fluids that are gathering in the lungs of a person whose circulation has stopped.
In other words, when that spear went in, not only did blood come out, but the liquid that’s accumulating in the lungs came out saying what? He’s dead. He’s dead. The heart has stopped beating. There’s no more brainwave activity. He’s dead.
And so Christ died. Second, he was buried. Here’s another theory.
Another theory is that the Romans, when they crucified people, would typically just throw the crucified bodies in a big open grave and then later cover them all up. Crucifixion was a punishment death. It was meant to humiliate the victims, and so they wouldn’t even dignify the victims by giving them a proper burial. They would just dump them all together and then throw some dirt over them later.
However, though they crucified lots of Jews, in archaeology and in history, there is no evidence that the Romans did that kind of burial for Jews.
The Jews were more religious than other people. They were more devout. They honored their dead. And it seems like the Romans, so as not to cause problems, more problems than they already had with the Jews, honored them and let them bury the dead.
Not only that, but we have the account of Joseph of Arimathea going to Pontius Pilate and saying, I want to give him my tomb. I want to bury him in my tomb. I can just imagine Pontius Pilate saying, Joseph, that’s one of the most expensive tombs in Jerusalem.
You spent a lot of money on that tomb. How can you just give it to Jesus? And Joseph said, oh, it’s only for a couple of days.
So he gives him the tomb and then it’s sealed. And history records that the Pharisees went to Pontius Pilate and said, you know, they’ve spread a rumor that this guy’s going to raise from the dead. We don’t want the disciples. The very thing that people say, that the disciples stole the body, they said, we don’t want the disciples to steal the body. Set guards over that tomb.
So the idea was if they had thrown him in an open grave, the disciples could have just come and stolen the body. But now they sealed him in a tomb with a huge stone and probably up to 16 Roman guards to guard the tomb.
So the theory that the disciples stole the body doesn’t hold much weight. The disciples, if you remember when Jesus was captured, what did those brave souls do? Ran away and hid. John snuck his way back and was there with Mary.
But the others, as best we know, Peter had denied Christ three times. They were hiding out, fearing that the Romans were coming for them next.
So these are the guys who got it together, mounted an attack. Twelve against sixteen. Twelve fairly poorly armed Galilean fishermen against sixteen well-trained Roman guards. Overpowered them, though no guards were found dead at the scene. I guess just knocked them all out. You know, like TV movies, they just hit them over the head, knocked them all out, rolled away the stone, and stole the body.
Okay, we got another problem with that. They began to preach that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. If they had stolen the body and this was a big conspiracy, what did they gain from it? They didn’t gain money, they didn’t gain fame, they didn’t gain women. You know, they weren’t like groupies, like rock stars.
What they gained was persecution. They were chased out of Jerusalem. Many of them were. All of them. But John was martyred. He was exiled.
Now, here’s the deal.
Conspiracy theories only work when everybody involved in the conspiracy steadfastly sticks to the same lie. But conspiracy theories exist because the conspirators have something to gain from the conspiracy. You follow?
They had nothing to gain if they had stolen Jesus’ body. And it’s like, all right, James, we’re going to kill you. We’re going to cut off your head unless you deny Jesus rose from the dead. Every single time the disciples said, kill me, he rose from the dead. Not one. Not one broke the conspiracy. It makes no sense. They lost everything and gained nothing.
But they believed that in holding to this truth, in fact, they were going to lose nothing and gain everything.
So he was dead and he was buried. He was at the tomb, and then he rose from the dead. The stone was rolled away. The tomb was empty.
The empty tomb is a big piece of evidence because, again, the disciples began to teach that Jesus had risen from the dead. If there was a body to be found, all the detractors had to do was produce a body. He didn’t rise from the dead.
Here we’ll display his corpse. But they couldn’t find a corpse. The tomb was empty.
People say, well, the women went to the wrong tomb. Highly doubtful. Since the women were there when he was crucified. It’s most likely they followed him to the tomb. All right. And even if they had gone to the wrong tomb, we went to the tomb and it was empty. Well, which tomb did you go? Oh, no, no, it’s the one two tombs down. They’d have gone back and found the right one. No, they went. It was empty. And they were amazed.
The women were amazed. Peter and John were amazed. They didn’t know what to make of it, except the women did. They saw that Jesus had written. They went and told the disciples, we saw them. We talked to them. They didn’t believe the women, but the tomb was empty. Nobody ever produced a body. Nobody ever said, here he is.
The accounts in the Gospels are accurate, but not harmonized. What do I mean by that? I mean, in one account it says, the sun. The women went while it was still dark.
In another account, it says, early in the morning after the sun had risen. Well, that’s not harmonized. People say, well, see, the Bible’s in error. What was it? Dark or the sun had risen?
Well, duh, they got up. You ever get up when it’s still dark and 10 minutes later the sun rises? Right early in the morning, while it’s still dark, they got up. They slammed down whatever the first-century Jewish equivalent was to coffee. They hydrated, they gathered up the spices, they got together, they started walking to the tomb.
And on the way, as they were walking to the tomb, the sun rose. Now, if the disciples had been making up this story, they’d have been careful to harmonize the details.
Another piece that’s not harmonized, but easy to explain. They saw two angels in Matthew’s Gospel. In Mark’s Gospel, there was an angel. Well, how many angels were there? Was it one or two? Well, obviously when they wrote this, the disciples did not decide to clean that up. They simply reported what the women had told them.
Well, what does that mean?
One woman saw an angel, another woman was cross-eyed, another woman saw two angels. There are all sorts of accounts in the Bible where one person sees an angel and another person doesn’t. Again, it’s messy but explainable. And this actually verifies the accuracy of the accounts.
Police officers will tell you if they come upon a scene of a crime or a scene of an accident, and everybody’s story is exactly the same, immediately red flags go up. This has been what, rehearsed. They’ve gotten together and they’ve all agreed upon a lie.
But if you could, if you come to a traffic accident and the cop goes and talks to one witness, like, oh, yeah, that van was going 85 miles an hour. And the other one was that van was probably going about 70 miles an hour. And the green car turned its signal on, but the van didn’t stop.
Well, the green car kind of just went in there. I don’t think the signal was on. Right.
And there’s all sorts of differing details, but the one thing you’re sure is, oh, there was an accident that involved a green car and a van. That’s what emerges.
And what emerges from the gospel accounts is one angel, two angels, sundown, sunup, three women, two women. When did Jesus appear to the women? Which one did he talk to? Mary Magdalene first and then to the others? And how did this all play out? And it’s kind of like, okay, what’s the timeline of all this?
And scholars have worked that out and they’ve harmonized it, said, okay, here’s how it kind of flowed. And it seems reasonable.
But the thing that I want to draw your attention to is the fact that these accounts are not harmonized. Actually adds to their veracity. Does that make sense? They’re more believable.
What it says is the disciples were so intent on telling the story as it was reported, they didn’t clean it up. Another thing is that the women were the first witnesses.
Big deal is in the first century, ladies, in the first century, if you witnessed a murder, you wouldn’t be allowed to testify in court because you’re just women, and you’re all flighty and emotional, and you can’t think straight, and you don’t know details.
I know it’s unfair that people used to think that way. We’re doing better now, aren’t we? A little bit. All right. But that was the prejudice of the time.
And so the fact that the disciples did not leave out the part that the women were the first witnesses and that they were right would not have been a selling point in the first century. People would have been, oh, yeah, well, just women. But again, it attests to the veracity of the account that disciples say, yeah, it was the women who told us.
By the way, ladies, if you want to be a preacher, the first preachers in the gospel are women. First preachers in the Gospel are women. They’re the first ones to say.
They’re the first ones to proclaim what the church has been proclaiming for 2000 years. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. All right, so you go, girls. Women as first witnesses.
Finally, there’s a school of thought out there that Jesus was a great moral teacher and a prophet and a philosopher, and that later this myth, this legend evolved to make him into the resurrected Son of God. That that’s a later occurrence in the history of the church, 200, 300 AD.
The problem is, when we get to 1 Corinthians 15, what does Paul say?
1 Corinthians 15, one of Paul’s earliest letters, written, by the way, before the Gospel accounts were written. Paul says, I pass on to you what was passed on to me, that Christ. This is probably one of the first. This is probably the first Christian creed ever. Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures. He was buried, and he rose from the dead according to the Scriptures, Gospel. That is the earliest tradition in Christian writings, just years after Jesus’ death. That’s not a myth that evolved into a legend a couple hundred years later.
Very early on, Christians are saying Jesus Christ rose from the dead. Other religions, when you try to prove their faith, they simply say things like this: Well, you just have to take it by faith. Mohammed heard from an angel. How do I know? Well, you just have to believe it.
Jesus rose from the dead. How do I know? There’s 500 witnesses. Most of them are still alive. Paul said, well, I’ll tell you how I know. Jesus rose from the dead. He knocked me off my dang horse on the road to Damascus.
He knocked me to the ground and appeared to me. And James, the head of the church of Jerusalem, Jesus’ older or Jesus’ younger brother, excuse me, he appeared to James.
The first time we see James in the Gospels, he’s not mentioned as James. He’s just mentioned as part of Jesus’ family. And it says they thought he was crazy and wanted to take him home. James was not a believer. Paul was not a believer. Jesus appeared to both of them. He appeared to Peter. He appeared to 500 people. He appeared to all the apostles.
Paul is begging people to prove him wrong. You don’t believe me? Go talk to some of these people. They’re not trying to say, yeah, well, you know, he just appeared to a few of us. And you have to believe it. They’re like, it’s out there. It’s out there.
And so you have 500 witnesses. You have James and Paul, as I already said, coming to Christ. And then finally, you have the changed lives of the disciples.
What took this group of men who ran away from Jesus the night he was crucified, and a month and a half later are now preaching in Jerusalem boldly that Christ has been raised from the dead?
And when they’re brought before the Sanhedrin and the Sanhedrin threaten them basically with the same punishment that Jesus had, they look at them and say, well, who do you want us to obey, you or God?
They haven’t. If you read through the Book of Acts, one of the things that will strike you.
It’s one of the things that strikes me is the incredible courage of the early disciples. Just they have this incredible. And. And Paul says, what? When the Spirit of God comes upon you, time and time again, it says they were filled with boldness, they were filled with courage.
What changed these disciples? An encounter with the resurrected Christ and him filling their lives with himself, the person of the Holy Spirit. These disciples were changed. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is something these men believed.
They could have been mistaken, but they believe Jesus had risen from the dead.
People said, well, what about a mat? What about a hallucination? Listen, hallucinations are given on an individual basis, all right? People hallucinate. People see things that aren’t real. But 500 people having the same hallucination at the same time, that’s unheard of even in the 60s. Doesn’t happen, doesn’t happen. I was in the 60s. I know.
Then finally, through Jesus’ resurrection, we have a picture of the Messiah that is inconsistent with 1st-century Judaism’s expectations of the Messiah, but in retrospect consistent with the Old Testament prophecies concerning the Messiah.
Follow me here. All right, follow me here. If that sentence sounded confusing, it sounded confusing when I said it. First-century Jews, including very much so the 12 disciples, believed that the Messiah would come.
They believed Jesus was the Messiah, that he would come into Jerusalem, form an army, be a great general, defeat the Romans, and Jerusalem would be liberated, and they would become the big kid on the block, just like they were when David was king.
They had no concept. Not the Pharisees, not the Sadducees, not the disciples, not the Herodians, not the Essenes. There is no Jewish sect that existed that had this concept, though it is in the Old Testament, that the Messiah would come and suffer and die and rise from the dead.
That was not the Messianic expectation. And therefore, there is no first-century Jew who would have made this story up.
I heard one person say, if I didn’t believe in the Jesus revealed in the Scriptures, I believe in the fishermen who made up this story because it’s transformed the world. Really.
One of the reasons I believe in the veracity of the New Testament accounts is the disciples who wrote the New Testament accounts come across often as muddle-headed, confused, foolish, ignorant. Basically, when people write story, you get a little bit of the John stuff.
I beat him to the tomb, all right, which I’m sure he did, but you get a little bit of the, hey, we knew all along, wink wink. But no, you have Peter writing in the Gospel, you know, I denied him three times. None of us got it. It says time and time again Jesus told them, I’m going to go to Jerusalem, suffer and die, rise from the dead. They didn’t understand. They tell on themselves. We’re good first century Jews. This made no sense to us until when he rose from the dead.
Then we went back to the Scriptures and read Isaiah 52 and 53 and went, oh, there he is, there he is in Isaiah 42, there he is in Isaiah 49, there he is in Isaiah 50, there he is in Jeremiah 34, there he is in Daniel, there he is all over.
There he is in Genesis 3, oh my gosh, he’s all over the place. There he is as the captain of the Lord’s army in Joshua, there he is at the burning bush, talking to Moses. He’s all over our book. And now we see him clearly.
And so this story is utterly unique, but it’s not a story that a first-century Jew would write. Therefore, I think the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is compelling.
The great character Sherlock Holmes. Was it Boyle? Doyle. Who? Something Doyle. What’s the right name? Iko. Don’t just nod your head, tell me the name. Conan Doyle, sir. Conan Doyle. And he wrote, you know, Holmes saying was when all other explanations have been proven false, the one remaining, no matter how unlikely, is true. I get it.
Believing somebody rose from the dead is hard because we’ve all seen dead. Dead doesn’t rise. Dead doesn’t get up. Dead’s dead. But there’s no other explanation. And he’s changed the world.
People, why are we talking about this carpenter? Lots of the Romans crucified thousands of people. Why are we talking about this one crucified carpenter 2000 years later on the other side of the world? Yumping Yimini in Poulsbo, Washington. Sure, you betcha. This little Norwegian village, why are we talking about him tonight? Now I’ll tell you why: a dead guy got up.
I’m going to give you one other piece of evidence tonight. My faith is not based on this evidence. Maybe this thing isn’t true, but I’ve become convinced that in fact the Shroud of Turin.
How many of you have heard of the Shroud of Turin? I’ve become convinced that the Shroud of Turin is the actual burial cloth of Jesus. Now I’m not 100% convinced. Maybe somebody will prove that it’s not. But I think the evidence is pretty compelling that something dramatic happened with this picture.
If you see this, there is an outline of a man.
This is a burial shroud, and there’s an outline of a man. Can you see his head? There are his hands, his feet. On the other side of the shroud, there’s an outline of a man’s back.
And basically, this outline is like a photographic negative imprinted on this burial cloth. And quite frankly, nobody knows how it got there. There is not a scientific explanation for what appears on this cloth. And I’ll get into that.
So the shroud has been believed to be the shroud that covered Jesus.
And that those markings were left by a brilliant flash of light that burnt those markings into the shroud when he rose from the dead. That’s the belief.
Lots. Now, in the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church was heavily involved in what we call relics. And most of it, to my understanding, was Hui, alright. That’s a term I learned in seminary. It means phony baloney. It means silliness.
You know, we have a strand of Mary’s hair. There’s one they said they had some of Mary’s breast milk, like, yeah, that lasted 1300 years, you know.
And John Calvin said, there’s so many fragments of the cross out there, if you put them all together, they could build a ship. And so, because of the exaggeration about holy relics that the Catholic Church put forth to prove the Protestants wrong, the Protestants reacted and said, it’s all nonsense.
But here’s the problem. If most of it is nonsense, that doesn’t mean all of it’s nonsense. Follow. Right, you have to look at each thing, case by case, and it actually led. That’s the way history works, right?
One group falls off one side of the horse, the other group gets over, overreacts, and falls off the other. That’s actually how cessationism started. Cessationism is the belief that the miraculous gifts have ceased, that you no longer have prophets and apostles, and you no longer have signs and wonders and miracles, that those have ceased now that we have the Bible.
That’s a Protestant doctrine that rose up to argue against the Catholics who are saying we have all these miracles in our history. So we’re right and you’re wrong.
And the Protestants looked at those miracles and said, they’re all a bunch of, again, theological term hui. And we’re right and you’re wrong.
But in fact, the Catholic miracles and relics and all that throughout history is much muddier than all right and all wrong. There are legitimate incredible miracles in that and stuff that’s just fabricated, and it takes work to sort it out.
And so people have kind of dismissed the Shroud and kind of said, well, it’s just a Catholic thing, it’s another relic, but it’s kind of like the empty tomb.
Nobody has an answer for this. Nobody says, how is it that a photographic negative has appeared on an ancient piece of cloth long before photography was ever invented?
Now, we know the Shroud goes at least back to the Middle Ages. So most of the debunkers say it’s a Middle Age forgery, you know, meant to bolster the Catholics’ case against the Protestants. And in fact, in 1988, there was a carbon 14 test of the Shroud, and sure enough, it came back that it was 12th or 13th century.
However, in 2022, that was a very secretive study.
Scientists did. It said, well, this is what we found out. Case closed.
Well, there’s some problems with the Carbon 14 test. First of all, we’ve discovered Carbon 14 testing isn’t quite as reliable as we once thought. It was very sensitive to changes in the environment. The shroud survived several fires. The corner they cut was damaged by one of the fires. That could affect the Carbon 14 test. Not only that, but it possibly was repaired. And so the Carbon 14 test might not be on the original shroud at all.
It might be on a band aid that came from the 11th or 12th century. There have been five other tests not using carbon 14. And I’m not a scientist. People, read the books, read up on it yourself. But there’s been five other tests done on the shroud, including X-ray testing, and they all have dated the shroud to come from the first century. So carbon 14, the one test, says no, it didn’t. Five other tests have said, yes, it does.
Second, there are blood stains on the shroud, and those have been analyzed and have been found. Do you see the blood stains? Oh, go back, go back, Otz. See where the wrists are and the head, where possibly a crown of thorns were. You see a little bit of the feet, those dark stains? Those are blood stains.
The back of the shroud has stains also of somebody who has been scourged, somebody who’s been whipped. They have analyzed those stains, and that has been concluded to be human blood, in fact, type AB.
Alright, so they even know the blood type. It’s not animal blood, it’s not paint, it’s not dye, it’s human blood. There is also beryllium in the blood. And beryllium shows up in the blood when the blood has been traumatized, as in a beating. All right? And so that’s a chemical that is released during high stress.
Now, one of the interesting things is we have the stains, right? And the stains are where Jesus’ wounds were: head, hands, feet, back.
But if you’ll notice, again, if you notice, if you did notice that the blood, that the stains were in the wrist. Now that’s very interesting because in the Middle Ages, as we look at Middle Age art, all the pictures of the crucified Christ have the nails were in the palms, right?
Still today, you know, they said they put nails in his hands, but the Greek word for hands actually could mean forearm.
And in fact, science will tell us that if somebody’s body weight is hung by nails in the hands, the hands are not strong enough to support that and would simply tear through. But there are two bones right here, and you can put nails through those two bones and, therefore, could support the body weight.
And so it is likely that the nails were put in Jesus’ wrist. That’s where the bloodstains appear. Nobody in the Middle Ages making a forgery would have put the bloodstains there. That’s a modern theory of where the nails went.
So that’s just an interesting piece about the Shroud. There is a head covering. This is one of the reasons initially I didn’t believe the stories about the Shroud, because of John’s gospel.
Are you following me or is this boring to you? What? All right, there’s a head covering and the Bible says when Peter and John reached the tomb, they saw the linen cloth, possibly this, but then they saw a head cover and they thought, well, there’s two pieces. The Shroud is only one piece. So I thought, well, the Bible contradicts this idea of the Shroud.
Not so fast. When people die today and they haven’t put them in a body bag yet, what is the respectful thing that people often do with the body? Cover the head. Right. They put something over the head. And so the head covering, in fact, very likely when Jesus was taken down from the cross, they put this cloth over his head.
Then they took him to the tomb, they removed the cloth, folded it, put it next to the slab where he laid, and then wrapped him in the Shroud.
This makes sense to me for a couple of reasons. We actually have a head covering, believe it or not. We have a head covering called the Sardinum of Oviedo. How’s that for a name? The Shroud of Turin and the Sardinum of Oviedo. This is a head covering that is set, purported to be the head covering of Jesus. We know it existed at least as far back as the 6th century. But it has blood stains that exactly match the stains on the face of the shroud.
If you laid it on the top of the face that’s on the Shroud, the blood matches the stains on the shroud. And so it’s very likely that they put a head covering on Jesus, took him to the tomb, removed it and folded it up. That actually makes sense to me because when it says the head covering was neatly placed off to the side, I thought, really, Jesus rose from the dead and took time to fold the head covering. I mean, that’s one for all you OCD people. Like, yeah, Jesus, you’re one of us.
We knew you were. We knew. But I’m thinking when he rose from the dead, he had too much, you know, he is not about making the bed. And so all of a sudden this became a biblical possibility for me again. It’s like, oh, I get it now.
The head covering was on first, the Shroud was on second. Sixth-century coins have been found in the Middle East that have images of Christ which match perfectly with the image on the Shroud. So if it’s Middle Ages, where did they get those images?
In the 6th century, there’s an 11th-century prayer manuscript in Hungary that also contains the image of Jesus’ face that is consistent with the image on the Shroud.
There have been pollen spores taken from the Shroud of Turin, and these spores are from plants found in the Middle East, not in Europe. The weave of the Shroud is also a weave that was used in the first century in the Middle East. It was an expensive weave.
The Shroud was a very, this piece of cloth was supposedly a very expensive piece of cloth.
People say, well, Jesus was a pauper, there’s no way they would have wrapped him in an expensive shroud. Joseph of Arimathea was rich; it was his tomb. Possibly the burial cloth was already there, and he buried him in the Shroud.
And so it’s a very nice weave, it’s a very nice first-century piece of linen. The marks on the Shroud contain no paint, no dyes, no brushstrokes.
So here’s the problem for the debunkers: they may be right, they may find an answer to this, but they haven’t so far.
They have no, they’ll say this isn’t the burial cloth of Jesus, no way. Okay, how do we get it? How is this forged? A photographic negative before photography was invented, we don’t know, but we know it’s a forgery.
That’s pretty much they’ll debunk some things, say, well, you know, the spores, spores could travel. Those spores, those pollen spores could be similar to ones that are, you know, spore technology is not entirely precise. Yada yada, there’s all sorts of, you know, loopholes which.
Okay, but then there’s no counter explanation for what formed this on the Shroud.
What we have on the Shroud is a 3D image, like a photographic negative. And scientists, I believe this is at Jet Propulsion Laboratories, who examined the Shroud, said that for that image to be burnt into the Shroud and by the way, the image is only on the top of the Shroud; underneath is nothing, it’s just on one side they said for that image to appear on the Shroud, it would need 2, 10 to the 16th power of watts. Boom. That’s a lot of light. That’s a lot of light.
That’s a lot of energy. And for it not to burn the shroud, that light would have to be released in 1/1 billionth of a second. And nobody has another explanation for how these images appear that seem to be a crucified man from the first century. Crucified very uniquely. Not everybody was nailed. Most were tied to the cross.
There’s no other ancient shrouds that contain images like this. They’re just bloody pieces of cloth. And so I think it is highly possible. Again, if this is debunked tomorrow, I will not lose my faith in the resurrection.
My faith is not built on this, but it’s bolstered by this. And it also gives me a picture.
Like we’re reading this book, Imagine Heaven with near-death experiences. It gives me a picture of what happened in that tomb. And that picture seems so consistent with the descriptions we have of God in the Bible that Jesus is there on the stone. And all of a sudden, in an instant flash of incredible energy and brilliance and light, boom. And he’s on top of the shroud and he’s alive. And he leaves this image laying there.
And then there’s a big, well, it says there’s a big old rock, right? Who rolled the stone? It says the angels rolled the stone. I don’t know if they rolled it away then, or I don’t know. Jesus, you know, he walked through walls, maybe just walked through the rock, but boom, he appears.
The Roman guards, they’re passed out. Is it God’s glory? I don’t know what it is, but they’re done for. And Jesus Christ is alive, but he’s alive in a new way.
He’s still got this body, but there is energy and light and power and glory in it. And dear ones, that’s what awaits us. That’s us. Death, where is your victory?
I love Bill Johnson. He says, you know, you can’t threaten me with heaven. you’re going to die. I know. Yay. Yeah. I tell you what, people, the younger you are, the worse that sounds, like I got a lot of living to do. The older you get, it’s like, yeah, okay, my back going to hurt there? Nope.
Am I going to have to get up from chairs going, okay, here we go, there we are? Nope. Am I going to have to deal with the heartache and brokenness and drama anymore? Nope.
There’s something about getting closer to the finish line that isn’t scary. It’s kind of glorious. Why? Because of this? Because Jesus Christ rose from the dead.
Whether the shroud is his burial cloth or not, I don’t know. I think it is. I think it’s just another piece, another witness to the amazing thing that happened in the first century.
But whether or not that’s the truth, the truth is the tomb was empty. They saw him. He’s alive. He’s changed the world. He’s still changing the world.
And you know what else? I have one more piece of evidence and so do you. He changed me. I love apologetics. I love this stuff.
My dear wife, I gave her CS Lewis book, Mere Christianity. You got to read this. This is the best book written of the 20th century.
She started reading it and she goes, why does this guy just keep going on and on trying to convince me of stuff I already believe? Well, why doesn’t my wife need apologetics to believe? I didn’t either. I mean, I came to faith before I read apologetics. It just strengthens my faith. It doesn’t do that for everybody. Doesn’t do it for her. She’s like, yeah, yeah, whatever, Kev, that’s interesting.
You know, I’ll tell you why she can do that. The same reason I can to an extent. This is objective science, theory, history.
But I have a subjective. I know he’s alive because he lives in my heart. I talk to him, he talks to me. He’s changed me. He’s changed me.
I was 16 years old and I was a mean, angry, hurting, sarcastic, smart aleck, foul-mouthed, woman-chasing 16-year-old boy. Totally selfish, totally just wanted to play sports and wanted, want to use people and pick on people. Scared. And now I’m a little bit better than that. Amen.
Thank you, Sophia. Thank you. I haven’t been mean to you, have I? All right, good, good.
I picked on Sidney a little bit, but you know, she sticks her tongue out at me, so asking for it.
I have a subjective experience of the resurrected Christ. And if you have asked Jesus into your life, if you become a believer, you too have had a subjective experience.
How do I know he lives? He lives. How do I know he lives in my heart? That’s good enough for Ms. Jill, it’s good enough for me.
But I like this stuff. I like this stuff. And there’s some people. I believe people don’t really come to faith too much through apologetics, but for some people, it blows away their excuses and gets down to the nitty gritty.
Because when people say they can’t believe, trust me on this one. Can’t lives on Wont street. They don’t want to believe. Fair enough. Fair enough.
But there is more evidence for the Christian case than any other worldview out there. We have the best worldview spiritually, philosophically, historically, and scientifically.
And so if it helps you, use it. If not, there’ll be another sermon next week.
Dear ones, Jesus Christ rose from the dead. And because he did, we have resurrection food. We have heavenly food.
Tonight, it may look like bread, juice, and wine, and in fact, physically, that’s exactly what it is. But not spiritually. Spiritually, we’re strengthening our life in Christ. We’re feeding on Christ to become more like him.
And so, dear ones, your sins are forgiven and you’re invited to Jesus’ table. Come and be strengthened. Who wouldn’t want to be strengthened with the food of heaven?
If you’ve ever gone to a health food store.
Anybody ever gone to a health food store? Yeah, me neither. Never even crossed my mind. This is the healthiest food you’re ever going to eat, so come and eat.
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