Exercises in Futility

Did you hear that the communist government of the People's Republic of China has declared it illegal for the Dalai Lama to reincarnate without their express permission? Not that I believe in reincarnation; I don't, not one iota. But imagine the government of antichrist passing alien immigration laws to prevent the Second Coming of Christ. Is a law in the natural going to stop a promise of supernatural proportions?

The High Priest of Israel and his cronies thought so when they went to Pilate on Thursday and asked for a guard at the tomb of Jesus. Even they knew about his promises.

Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it again.

As Jonah was three days and three nights

in the belly of the whale,

so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights

in the heart of the earth.

They're going to kill me, but after three days I will rise again.

"This deceiver," they reported, "Said that he would come back to life after three days. Now we know this won't happen, but we need to place a guard at the tomb so that his disciples won't be able to steal his body and then falsely claim that he rose from the dead." Pilate assented to their request, but I wonder if he was growing tired of these people who continued to resist a dead man. The priests had the tomb sealed with the governor's imprint, and guards were placed there. No one was getting through to steal this body.

Remember what I've written before: Jesus rose from the dead sometime after sundown on Saturday evening, so it is likely that the soldiers stood watch all night over an empty tomb. Then at dawn, the great angel appeared in heavenly glory and rolled back the stone. And earthquake shook the locale, all the graves burst open, and Pilate's brave men fell down as dead at the sight of the angel. But the only reason he was rolling back the stone was to reveal the emptiness and futility of what they were doing. When the Son of God rises from the dead, there's nothing you can do to keep him in the grave!

Afterward, the priests paid the soldiers to say they had been overwhelmed by the disciples, who broke into the tomb and stole the body...a story repeated for decades following the event. But here are some observations.

The disciples were basically cowards. If they had indeed stolen Christ's body and hidden it away, I don't believe for a moment that they would have died as martyrs proclaiming that He had risen from the dead.

The Priests and Pharisees were basically opportunists. If they had taken the body, they would certainly have presented it to prove that Christ had not risen from the dead.

The Romans were basically indifferent. But if they had been attacked by a band of Jews in the night, hundreds of Jews would have been punished as a result. This was the reputation of Pontius Pilate anyway, and yet there was no retaliation.

Instead, the eye-witness accounts preserved in Scripture testify to one unrefuted fact: On the morning after the third day, by sunrise on the First Day of the Week, the tomb was empty, and the burial clothes had been left behind. To this day, no evidence of fleshly decay of any kind has ever been found in the garden tomb. No body has ever been produced. Even the recent expose produced by James Cameron on the Jesus Family Tomb failed to provide any shred of evidence that Jesus did not rise from the dead.

But we know that Christ is risen from the dead, for He was seen...