1 John 5:6 This is he that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by water and blood… It is natural to ask, What is the evidence that Christ did really rise from the dead? St. John says, "It is the Spirit that beareth witness." St. John, indeed, is speaking immediately of that faith in our Lord's eternal Sonship which overcomes the world. But since the resurrection is the main proof of our Lord's Divinity, it follows that the Spirit must also bear witness to the resurrection. And He does this in two ways. It is His work, that those historical proofs of the resurrection which have come down to us, and which address themselves to our natural reasoning faculties, have been marshalled, recognised, preserved, transmitted in the Church of Christ. He bears another witness, as we shall presently see, by His action, not so much on the intelligence, as on the will of the believing Christian. I. IN ORDER TO KNOW THAT OUR LORD DID REALLY RISE FROM THE DEAD, WE HAVE TO SATISFY OURSELVES THAT THREE DISTINCT QUESTIONS CAN BE ANSWERED. 1. Whether Jesus Christ did really die upon the Cross. The wonder is not that He died when He did, after hanging for three hours in agony, but that, after all His sufferings at the hands of the soldiers and the populace, before His crucifixion, He should have lived so long. Yet suppose that what looked like death on the Cross was only a fainting fit. Would He have survived the wound in His side, inflicted by the soldier's lance, through which the blood yet remaining in His heart and the water of the pericardium escaped? But suppose, against all this evidence, that when Jesus was taken down from the Cross, He was still living. Then He must have been suffocated by Joseph of Arimathaea and Nicodemus when they embalmed Him. The Jews carefully inspected and sealed His tomb: they had sentinels placed there; and were satisfied that the work was thoroughly done. To do them justice, the Jews have never denied the reality of our Lord's death; it is impossible to do so, without paradox. 2. Whether the disciples did not take our Lord's dead body out of His sepulchre. (1) They would not have wished to do it. Why should they? They either believed that He would rise from the dead, or they did not. If they did believe it, they would have shrunk from disturbing His grave, as from an act not less unnecessary than profane. If they did not believe in it, and instead of abandoning themselves to unreflecting grief, allowed themselves to think steadily, what must have been their estimate of their dead Master? They must now have thought of Him as of one who had deceived them, or who was Himself deceived. On either supposition, why should they rouse the anger of the Jews, and incur the danger of swift and heavy punishment? (2) But had they desired, they surely would not have dared it. Until Pentecost, they were, by their own account, very timid men. (3) And, once more, had they desired and dared to remove our Lord's body from its grave, such a feat was obviously beyond their power. The tomb was guarded by soldiers. 3. The amount of positive testimony which goes to show that Jesus Christ did rise from the dead. (1) The witness of all the apostles. They gave their lives in attestation of this fact. Their conduct after the day of Pentecost is throughout that of men whose trustworthiness and sincerity of purpose are beyond dispute. (2) The testimony of a large number of persons besides the apostles. Take the case of the three thousand converts on the day of Pentecost. They had unrivalled opportunities for satisfying themselves of its being a reality or a fiction. Yet at the risk of comfort, position, nay, life, they publicly professed their belief in its truth. Or consider the case of the two hundred and fifty and more persons still living when St. Paul wrote the First Epistle to the Corinthians, who had seen the risen Jesus on one occasion during the forty days. Five hundred persons could not be simultaneously deluded. Their testimony would be considered decisive as to any ordinary occurrence, where men wished only to ascertain the simple truth. II. THE FORCE OF THIS BODY OF TESTIMONY IS NOT REALLY WEAKENED BY OBJECTIONS WHICH DO NOT DIRECTLY CHALLENGE IT, AND WHICH TURN ON ACCESSORY OR SUBORDINATE POINTS. 1. For instance, it is said that the evangelical accounts of the resurrection itself, and of our Lord's subsequent appearances, are difficult to reconcile with each other. At first sight they are; but only at first sight. In order to reconcile them two things are necessary: first, patience, and secondly, a determination to exclude everything from the narrative which does not lie in the text of the Gospels. The differences are just what might be expected in four narratives of the same event, composed at different periods, by different authors, who had distinct sources of information at command. Each says what he has to say with blunt and simple directness, without an eye to the statements of the others, or to the possible comment of hostile critics. 2. It is, further, objected that the resurrection was not sufficiently public. Jesus Christ ought to have left His grave, so it is urged, in the sight of a crowd of lookers on; and, when risen, He ought to have hastened to show Himself to the persons least likely to believe in His resurrection — to the Jews at large, to the high priests, to Pilate, to His executioners. (1) Here it is obvious, first of all, that the guards may very well have seen Jesus leave His tomb. Scripture says nothing on the point. But they were terrified, almost to death, at the sight of the angel of the sepulchre. Any number of witnesses who had been present would have been as much frightened as were the guards. (2) Nor is the old objection of Celsus, that Jesus Christ ought to have shown Himself to the Jews and to His judges in order to rebuke their unbelief, more reasonable. Had He appeared to the chief priests, would they have believed in Him? Would they not have denied His identity, or argued that a devil had taken His form before their eyes, just as of old they had ascribed His miracles to Beelzebub? The Jews had ample opportunities of ascertaining that the resurrection was a fact, if they had desired to do so. But as it was, they were not in a mood to be convinced, even by the evidence of their senses. (3) Far deeper than these objections is that which really lies against all miracles whatever, as being at variance with that conception of a rigid uniformity in the processes of nature, which is one of the intellectual fashions of our day. Suffice it to say, that any idea of natural law which is held to make a miracle impossible, is also inconsistent with belief in the existence of God. III. Here, then, we are coming round to the point from which we started. For it is natural to ask, WHY, IF THE RESURRECTION CAN BE PROVED BY EVIDENCE SO GENERALLY SUFFICIENT, IT WAS AT THE TIME, AND IS STILL, REJECTED BY A GREAT MANY INTELLIGENT MEN? The answer to this natural and legitimate question is of practical importance to all of us. There can, I apprehend, be no sort of doubt that if an ordinary historical occurrence, such as the death of Julius Caesar, were attested as clearly as the resurrection of our Lord — not more clearly, nor less — as having taken place nineteen centuries ago, all the world would believe it as a matter of course. The reason why the resurrection was not always believed upon the evidence of those who witnessed to it is, because to believe it means, for a consistent and thoughtful man, to believe in and to accept a great deal else. To believe the resurrection is to believe implicitly in the Christian faith. It is no mere speculative question whether Jesus Christ did or did not rise from the dead; it is an eminently practical one. The intellect is not more interested in it than the will; perhaps it is even less interested. The real difficulties of belief lie, generally speaking, with the will. And nothing is more certain, I may add, more alarming, than the power of the will to shape, check, promote, control conviction. And such is the power of the will that it can give effect to this decision. It can baulk and thwart the action of the intellect; give it a perverse twist, and even set it scheming how best to discredit or refute the truth which but now it was on the point of accepting. And thus we may understand what it is that the Spirit does to produce faith. He does not set aside or extinguish the operations of the natural reason; reason too is a guide to truth which God has given us. But He does change the temper, or the direction of the will. And thus He sets the reason free to do justice to the evidence before it. It is thus that within us the Spirit beareth witness. The evidence for the resurrection was not stronger on the Day of Pentecost than it was on the day before. But the descent of the Spirit made it morally possible for three thousand converts to do that evidence something like justice. And now we can see why St. Paul makes so much of faith — especially in a risen Christ — in his great Epistles. If the understanding were alone concerned there would be no more reason for our being justified by faith in a crucified and risen Christ than for our being justified by our assent to the conclusion of a problem in Euclid. It is because the will must endorse the verdict of the understanding, and so must mean obedience as well as assent, that "by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God." (Canon Liddon.) Parallel Verses KJV: This is he that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth. |
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