Episode Synopsis:

If someone walked up to you and asked, “What is the gospel?, what would you say?  If you cannot come up with the answer immediately, then please carefully consider what follows.  The definition is given us in a concise form by the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:3–5.  The gospel is called “good news” because it is the proclamation of a set of particular historical facts—Jesus suffered on a Roman cross, died as a payment for our sins, was buried, and then was raised from the dead by God after three days as proof that his death turned aside God’s wrath toward sinners.  And all this, Paul says, is in accordance with the Scriptures (the Old Testament).  The gospel is a nonnegotiable and fundamental article of the Christian faith.  To deny it is to reject the Christian faith.

When Easter rolls around, I often look at the flyers and social media from neighborhood churches to examine the sermon topics for Easter Sunday.  I am amazed and saddened by how many local churches virtually ignore the biblical emphasis on the empty tomb and the bodily resurrection of Jesus, which is both a fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith and an objective fact of history.  Instead, many churches focus on the so-called “Easter experience” of the apostles.  If the meaning of Easter is the experience and change of heart felt by Jesus’s apostles—who at first did not believe, but then later did so—then Easter is yet another experience that we can share with the early followers of Jesus.  For these folks, Easter is a time of new beginnings, a time to change our life’s course.  Sadly, it is not the account of a crucified savior raised from the dead who came to save us from our sins. 

But to remove the resurrection from ordinary history and proclaim it as an example to follow, or to downplay or ignore the fact that Jesus was crucified, dead, buried, and was then raised bodily to life for the forgiveness of our sins, robs the resurrection of any redemptive-historical and biblical significance.  The first Easter is not about an experience the apostles had in which we can share; rather, it is the apostles’s account of Jesus being raised bodily from the dead.  The empty tomb tells us that Jesus’s death was the payment for our sins, the new creation has dawned, and God has conquered our greatest enemy, death, by overturning the curse.  Easter is not an experience in which we share; the bodily resurrection of Jesus is both a fact of history and a biblical doctrine that we must believe.

For show notes and other recommended materials located at the Riddleblog as mentioned during the Blessed Hope Podcast, click here: https://www.kimriddlebarger.com/