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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell. The Romans created the word excruciare to describe the intense pain of crucifixion. The pain was so severe that the Romans needed a new word to describe it. This is where we get our modern word excruciating from and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living.
My wife and I love watching reruns of Friends. In season three there’s an episode where a lie on Joey’s resume puts him in a compromised situation. Here’s the setup. Joey is an aspiring actor and he’s auditioning for a Broadway musical. He passes the singing portion of the audition and receives a call back for the next round, which will involve dancing.
The director assures Joey that he should have no problem with the dance requirements because of all the experience he believes Joey has. You know, those lies on his resume. When Joey arrives for the call back, the choreographer is absent. The director has to leave, so he quickly shows the routine to Joey and asks him to teach it to the rest of the actors.
Later that day the director returns and asks to see the group perform the routine. As you can imagine, the routine they perform looks nothing like the one the director taught Joey. Joey tries to deflect the director’s frustration by claiming it was the best he could get out of them.
So the director instructs the group to focus their attention on Joey and asks Joey to show them the routine one more time, hoping a redo will yield better results. Joey quickly tries to figure out what to do. He knows that the claims he’s made about his dancing background is a complete lie, and he’s now trapped. All eyes, including the director’s, are on him.
The music starts up and just as Joey is supposed to begin the routine, he turns, sees the door is open, and makes a run for it. He realizes that escape is better than facing his lie. The look of panic on Joey’s face and watching him head for the exit makes me laugh every time.
It’s an interesting scenario to think about. What would you do? You’ve created a false reality based on something you know is a total fabrication and now it’s caught up with you. What if it were a life or death situation? What if the claims you’d made were so big that you were given the choice to reveal the truth or be killed? Would you choose death, or would you choose to acknowledge the lie? I think all of us would choose to expose the lie rather than die for the lie.
Let me put it this way, all the way back in episode 23 I told a story about my childhood. In that story, I found myself home alone after school and decided it would be fun to catch some toilet paper on fire. I thought I’d covered my tracks, but my dad found evidence of it. He knew that it could have gone wrong and burned down the house, and only my brother or I could have been responsible for it.
My brother had no idea what had happened and said he didn’t do it. I didn’t want to get in trouble, so I lied and said I didn’t do it. And so my dad began spanking us. After a round of spanking, he gave us each a chance to own up to the truth. Again, we each denied it, and so another round of spanking ensued. This went on for a couple of more rounds until my dad broke his paddle.
My brother and I still talk about the incident. In fact, we were just laughing about it about a month ago. But here’s the thing. If my brother had known the truth, he would have ratted me out in a second rather than face my dad’s paddle. He WISHES he’d known the truth so he would not have had to face the punishment he did. Sure, I was lying through my teeth, but getting paddled by my dad can’t be compared to facing certain death. Even I would have gladly told the truth if that had been the punishment I faced that night.
With this in mind, let’s consider the resurrection of Jesus. Easter is coming up in a couple of weeks, and it’s an important day for the Christian faith. Most of you listening fall into one of three categories, and I’m writing this episode with each of you in mind. So I hope you’ll continue listening to the episode with an open mind and heart.
Some of you are already Christians. For you, I hope this episode teaches you something new, reminds you of something you’d forgotten, and helps you grow in your faith.
Some of you have stepped away from the faith for a variety of reasons. I hope this episode causes you to reconsider picking up that Bible, going back to church, and taking action to grow in your faith again.
Some of you are not Christians. You’re atheists, agnostics, or just non-religious. Perhaps you even believe Christians are fools following a made up religion designed to take advantage of people. For you, I hope you’ll listen and consider this episode objectively, and then pursue other resources to further examine the evidence for the resurrection.
Let’s start by looking at the disciples of Jesus. Judas took his own life after betraying Jesus to be arrested and crucified. That leaves 11 disciples. When Jesus was arrested, every single one of them scattered. They fled to various parts of the city hoping they wouldn’t also be arrested. After Jesus was killed, they got together and were hiding in a room with the door locked, again fearful that they might be next.
But what happened after they learned the truth of Jesus’ resurrection? Let’s take a look, and as a warning, some of this is graphic and not suitable for young ears.
Paul, while not one of Jesus’ disciples, was one of the earliest converts. He went from killing those who believed Jesus was the messiah, to being converted to Christianity and writing most of the New Testament. Paul and Peter were each martyred in Rome about 66 AD under Emperor Nero. Paul was beheaded. Peter was crucified upside down at his request since he did not feel worthy to die the same way as Jesus.
Andrew went to what is now the Soviet Union. He also traveled to modern-day Turkey, and Greece, where he is said to have been crucified on an X shaped cross. Thomas traveled to areas like modern-day Syria and India. He died by being pierced through with the spears of soldiers.
Philip traveled to North Africa and Asia Minor, where he converted the wife of a Roman proconsul. In retaliation, the proconsul had Philip arrested and put to death by hanging. Matthew traveled to Persia and Ethiopia. Some reports say he was not martyred, while others say he was stabbed to death in Ethiopia.
Bartholomew traveled to India with Thomas and then back to Armenia, Ethiopia, and Southern Arabia. There are various accounts of how he was killed as a martyr for the gospel, some saying he was flayed to death with knives. James, son of Zebedee died in AD 44 after being beheaded by King Herod I. He was the first of the disciples to be martyred.
James, son of Alphaeus, is believed to have ministered in Syria. The Jewish historian Josephus reported that he was stoned and then clubbed to death. Thaddaeus was martyred in Persia by being shot with arrows.
Simon traveled to minister in Persia and was killed after refusing to sacrifice to the sun god.
Matthais was the apostle chosen to replace Judas. Tradition says he traveled to Syria with Andrew and he died by being burned.
John is the only one of the apostles believed to have died a natural death from old age. He was the church leader in the Ephesus area. During Domitian’s persecution in the middle ’90s, he was exiled to the island of Patmos.
It’s remarkable how each of these men, once scattered, afraid, and hiding in a locked room, found the boldness to travel the world to tell others about the resurrected Jesus, suffer for the name of Jesus, and in most cases, even willingly die for it.
Here’s what I learned.
You may be thinking, “Darrell, people die for their religious beliefs all the time. Their deaths don’t prove anything.”
It’s true, people DO die for their religious beliefs all the time. If someone were to come into my home and put a gun to my head and tell me to renounce my beliefs in Jesus or die, my choice to die is not the same as those of the disciples.
I believe based on info preserved and passed down to our current time. That wasn’t the case of the disciples. In his book, The Case for Christ, former atheist Lee Strobel puts it this way:
“People will die for their religious beliefs if they sincerely believe they’re true, but people won’t die for their religious beliefs if they know their beliefs are false. While most people can only have faith that their beliefs are true, the disciples were in a position to know without a doubt whether or not Jesus had risen from the dead. They claimed that they saw him, talked with him, and ate with him. If they weren’t absolutely certain, they wouldn’t have allowed themselves to be tortured to death for proclaiming that the resurrection had happened.”
The resurrection is everything. Paul put it this way, “if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.” So it’s understandable why those who believe in Jesus place it in such high esteem that we celebrate it on Easter. And it’s also understandable why those opposed to Christianity challenge it with such passion.
After all, if a man who claimed to be God, received worship as if he were God, forgave sins claiming he had the authority of God, claimed that he would die and three days later be raised from the dead, and claimed that he was the only way to God, actually supernaturally rose from the dead, wouldn’t that give credibility to everything he said and claimed? Indeed it would.
I find the actions of the disciples to be extremely compelling, even convincing enough on its own to be sufficient proof of Jesus’ resurrection. Others of you need more. Perhaps you may believe the disciples were fooled, were part of a cover up, or something else. Perhaps you believe that the claims that Jesus rose from the dead were birthed out of legend and myths that formed only after many years had passed and those who witnessed it were long gone.
For the sake of time, I can’t cover all of these objections here today. But I again urge the skeptic and believer alike to dig into Strobel’s book, The Case for Christ and the cited research it’s based on. There’s a lot of historical and reliable evidence available on the reality of Jesus’ existence, the resurrection, the reliability of the Bible, and the beliefs of the early church.
I’ll be covering the reliability of the Bible in an episode later this year. But there are passages claiming Jesus as God and resurrected that have been proven to date to within the lifetime of many, many eyewitnesses. In fact, new archaeological evidence was also found within the last year supporting this.
Other historical sources outside the Bible also support the historical accuracy of Jesus and the Bible’s claims about him. The Romans were masters at crucifixion and knew without doubt when a person was dead. The Bible’s description of the event, when examined through the expertise of medical examiners, shows without doubt that Jesus was dead when he was taken down from the cross.
Weeks after Jesus ascended back to heaven the early church was rapidly growing as many Jews and non-Jews became believers in Jesus. When considering what to do with the disciples, one of the highly respected rabbis of the time, Gamaliel, said, “if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God.”
Jesus’ death and resurrection served to reconcile God with all of mankind. If you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. My hope is that each of us would be moved to action by these words, and that this Easter season would be one where we seek God with all our hearts and trust him with everything.
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
I want you to be a part of the next Monday Mailbag on June 30th! Monday Mailbag is your opportunity to Share what YOU’VE learned, so that other listeners and I can learn from YOU. It can be a message as short as 30 seconds or several minutes long. It really doesn’t matter just as long as it’s something that will benefit others. You can send in questions or responses to my SILY episodes, and I’ll respond to them via Monday Mailbag episodes.You can participate in Monday Mailbags by visiting the Golden Spiral Media listener feedback page.