The Credibility of the Cross

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Hope Beyond a Feeling

When I was a kid, one of my favorite songs that we would sing in church, usually around Easter, had a chorus that ended by saying, “You ask me how I know He lives. He lives within my heart.” I love the song. I love the message of that song. But somewhere along the way, I realized that by itself, that is not enough, because we can feel all sorts of things in our hearts, and those feelings can be wrong.

If everything is only about subjective feelings, what happens when those feelings change? What happens when life gets difficult, and we need hope that we can actually hold on to? When you are facing a lost job and a foreclosure, you need to know that there is hope beyond what you feel in your heart. When you are diagnosed with cancer, or when you are watching a loved one at the end of life, you need hope beyond a feeling. When relationships fall apart, when life gets messy, and when life gets hard, you need something solid. You need an anchor. You need a rock.

You need actual hope, not just a feeling. You need to know that there is someone who is there for you, and you need to have some reason for why you believe that. Over the next few weeks between now and Easter, I want to talk with you about some of the evidence for how we can be sure that Jesus actually rose from the dead, just like He said.

When we say that our hope is in Jesus Christ, and when we say that our hope is in a Savior who conquered death, conquered hell, conquered sin, conquered the grave, and conquered all the things that plague us, we need to know that this hope is more than a fairy tale. In those dark times in the middle of the night, when you are all alone and facing something you cannot handle, you need to know that hope in Jesus Christ is more than a story somebody made up.

It seems like hardly a week goes by that I do not hear some commentary from somebody, whether it is a talking head on television, a smart mouth on the internet, or even someone I am having an actual conversation with, who says that Christianity is a fairy tale. They say that everything we believe is just made-up stories about somebody in the sky. But I am a fairly skeptical person. I want to see the evidence. I want to hear the arguments. I have looked at it, and I am as convinced of the resurrection of Jesus Christ as I am of any other fact in ancient history.

This is a topic that we could delve into for years. Over the next four weeks, I want to scratch the surface with you of a case for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. I want to give you some of the evidence and, hopefully, help you be persuaded in your own mind that it is more than something we know is true in our hearts. It is something that is actually true in the real world. It is a historical event. It is something we can hold on to. And maybe it will give you some evidence that you can present, not to win an argument, not to twist somebody’s arm and browbeat them into heaven, but for those you encounter who genuinely wonder how you know. You can give them something to think about that the Holy Spirit can use to point them toward the risen Savior.

The Case Begins with the Cross

The case for the resurrection starts with the death of Jesus Christ. That is basic logic. He cannot have risen from the dead if He never died. If He never died, then He is just still alive. For Him to come back from the dead, He first had to die.

There are people who will say that Jesus never existed and that He never died. Of course, you have to exist in order to die. But most of the people who say that are not scholars who have seriously studied the subject. Almost all of the historians who look at this, even those who do not believe that Jesus was the Son of God, will acknowledge that He was a real historical person who died just as the Bible said He did.

His death is important. The fact that the crucifixion is a historical event matters to us today. You may be saying, “I did not come here for a history lesson. I did not come here for a study of evidence and forensics. What does this have to do with what I am going through today?”

The fact that the death of Jesus Christ is a historical event matters because He foretold His death during His life. His followers record Him as having foretold His death, and He said that when He died, it would be for us. If we can conclude on the basis of evidence that Jesus Christ really did die, then that has implications for whether we believe there is a sacrifice for our sins. It has implications for whether we believe there is a way to be reconciled to a holy God. It has implications for whether there is any hope for us today.

Jesus told us that He would die, and He told us that His death would be the payment for our sin. In Matthew 17, He said, “The Son of Man is about to be betrayed into the hands of men and they will kill him. And the third day he will be raised up.” He told His disciples, “I am going to be killed. I am going to die. And I am going to be raised again.”

He also explained why He would die, why He would be killed by the hands of wicked men. He explained this in Mark 10 when He said, “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.” He said that when He gave His life, it would be as the payment for our sin.

If Jesus did not die on the cross, then He did not rise from the dead. If He did not die on the cross, then our sins are unforgiven. The resurrection itself becomes a fictional story. We have no hope for eternal life, and there is no basis whatsoever for Christianity. Everything falls apart without the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

John’s Account of the Crucifixion

John 19:31-37 outlines some of the reasons we can have certainty that Jesus died and died for our sins. I want to be very clear in case you walk away saying, “That is it? That is all the evidence?” No, it is not. But this passage outlines some of the evidence for Jesus’ death.

John 19, starting in verse 31, says, “Therefore, because it was the preparation day, that the bodies should not remain on the cross on the Sabbath, for that Sabbath was a high day. The Jews asked Pilate that their legs might be broken and that they might be taken away. Then the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and of the other who was crucified with him. But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and immediately blood and water came out. And he who has seen has testified, and his testimony is true. And he knows that he is telling the truth so that you may believe. For these things were done that the Scripture should be fulfilled. Not one of his bones shall be broken. And again, another Scripture says, they shall look on him whom they pierced.”

Jesus’ death on the cross is not a fairy tale. It is a fact. When we want to know why we believe what we believe and why we do what we do, it all centers around Jesus’ death and resurrection. They are not made-up stories. They are facts. I want to give you some of the reasons why this morning.

First of all, we need to know that God promised Jesus’ death. God promised it before it ever happened. I met a lady one time who said, “I believe Jesus died, but I do not think it was God’s plan. I think God just looked at it and said, ‘I can make something good come of that.’”

But God never wakes up in the morning and says, “That caught Me by surprise. I did not see that coming.” First of all, God does not sleep, so He does not wake up in the morning. But God never looks at the circumstances of our lives and says, “I did not see that coming.” And God certainly did not look at the life of Jesus Christ and say, “Who anticipated that?” This was part of God’s plan. It was part of what He had promised all along.

God Promised the Death of Jesus

To say that Jesus never died is to ignore thousands of years of scriptural evidence leading up to that point. Even John, in verses 36 and 37, says that His death was the fulfillment of prophecy. He says even the minute details of His death fulfilled prophecy.

John points to the fact that His bones were not broken. When Jesus died, they came to make sure that these men were dead so that they could take the bodies down off the cross and not offend the Jews by leaving bodies up there on the Passover. They came to break the legs to hasten the deaths, but they realized Jesus was already dead. So they did not break His legs.

There are pictures and prophecies throughout the Old Testament that speak of salvation coming through someone whose bones were not broken. Exodus 12 and Numbers 9 describe the Passover lamb, and Jesus is described in the New Testament as our Passover lamb. The Passover lamb was offered at Passover, and its bones could not be broken. If you broke the bones in the process, it could not be your Passover lamb.

So it is fitting that Jesus, as our Passover Lamb, would have no broken bones. But the Scriptures go even further when Psalm 34 applies the same kind of language to the Messiah and says that His bones would not be broken. John includes that detail so that we understand that even this small part of the crucifixion is consistent with what God had said all along about the Messiah.

His betrayal was foretold in Psalm 41 and Zechariah 11. It was foretold that He would be betrayed by someone very close to Him. Zechariah says that He would be betrayed for thirty pieces of silver. It is no accident of history that this is the exact amount they paid Judas to betray Jesus.

The brutality of the crucifixion was foretold in Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53. If you read Isaiah 53, you might almost think it was written about Jesus after the fact. But there is evidence from texts going back hundreds of years before Jesus, confirmed in things like the Dead Sea Scrolls, that the book of Isaiah was written about seven hundred years before Christ. It describes His crucifixion in great detail, and it does so before crucifixion was being used in Israel.

Other cultures may have nailed people up on cross-shaped objects before that, but the Romans are the ones who brought crucifixion to Israel. For Isaiah to know those details ahead of time is remarkable. Psalm 22 is similar. There are pictures of Jesus all throughout the Old Testament, pictures of a Savior who would be sacrificed for His people.

Jesus is pictured in the Passover lamb. He is pictured in the sacrifices. The book of Hebrews talks a great deal about how the sacrifices apply to Jesus Christ and how they set the stage for us to understand Him. He is even pictured in the Garden of Eden when God told Satan that he would be at war with the seed of the woman.

Jesus is the only person who has ever claimed to be biologically descended from only a woman and not a man. Jesus is the seed of the woman. God told the serpent, God told Satan, that his seed would be at war against the seed of the woman. Satan would strike at His heel, but the seed of the woman would crush his head. At the cross, Satan thought he had inflicted a fatal blow on Jesus, but it was really the destruction of Satan’s plans for us.

God promised His death all throughout the Old Testament. Some skeptics ask why God did not make it clearer. Why did God not put a neon sign in the sky that said, “Jesus saves”? First of all, if God did that, people would still find some reason to explain it away. But I think there is a simpler reason why there was no neon sign pointing to the crucifixion and pointing to Jesus.

If God had made it that clear leading up to all these events, if God had made it unmistakable that Jesus was His Son and that Jesus was coming to be our Savior, it might have interfered with the crucifixion. That is why Jesus so often told His disciples, “Do not tell anybody what I just did. Do not tell anybody about the miracle I just performed.” For this plan to come to pass, enough people had to reject Him so that He would be crucified for us.

So there was no neon sign that would have interfered with God’s plan, but there was enough evidence for those who were paying attention. People like Simeon and Anna, who saw Jesus when He was about forty days old and was brought into the temple to be dedicated to the Lord, recognized Him as soon as they saw Him. People who searched the Scriptures diligently and understood them properly knew who Jesus was because they were familiar with the promises of God.

When Jesus died, it was not an accident of history. It was not some random event that came out of nowhere. It was the fulfillment of thousands of years of what God had been promising to His people. John alludes to that with these prophecies in verses 36 and 37. This was not something the disciples made up. His sacrifice was rooted in thousands of years of prophecy.

Rome Ensured the Death of Jesus

Not only did God promise Jesus’ death, but the Romans ensured Jesus’ death. They made sure. They made absolutely sure that He was dead.

Verses 31 and 32 tell us that the Romans knew how to speed up the deaths of their prisoners. With crucifixion, we might assume that a person died from blood loss. But the actual cause of death was typically suffocation. The body would be put into a stress position, with the arms stretched out and lifted in such a way that pressure was placed on the diaphragm, making it difficult to breathe. After a while, the person would weaken to the point that he could no longer push himself up to breathe, and he would suffocate.

So as the Sabbath was approaching, as sundown was approaching, they would come and break the legs of the prisoners. That way the prisoner could no longer push up on the bottom nail to raise himself enough to breathe. Death would come much more quickly.

The Romans were very good at their jobs. Their job was torturing people right up to the point of death without killing them, and then killing them when it was time. They knew what they were doing. But verse 33 tells us that they did not break Jesus’ legs because He was already dead. Or at least He appeared to be dead, and they wanted to make sure.

That is why verse 34 says, “But one of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear, and immediately blood and water came out.” John was describing what he saw. It was not literal water; that was his descriptive word for what he saw. Medical experts have explained that he was likely describing blood along with the pleural effusion, the fluid around the lungs, and the pericardial effusion, the fluid that collects around the heart. Those things would have been released when the spear was thrust up through His side, piercing the lung, piercing the pericardium, and rupturing the heart.

That matters for at least two reasons. First, it tells us that John was writing accurately about things he saw. A fisherman in that day would not necessarily have had medical expertise. He would not have known that, because of the stress of crucifixion, fluid would pool in these areas. He did not have access to medical journals to study what would happen in a hypothetical crucifixion.

They also did not stab people with spears every time at the end of a crucifixion. We have already seen that they usually broke the legs to hasten death. So when John records the blood and water without fully explaining the medical details, that points to him accurately recording what he saw.

The bigger reason this matters is that, for about the last two hundred years, some people have floated the theory that Jesus somehow survived the crucifixion. Some versions of this are called the swoon theory. The idea is that Jesus appeared to be dead. He was close to death, they took Him down thinking He was dead, they put Him in the tomb, and then He revived in the tomb and came out three days later.

But the idea that someone could be beaten, lose that much blood, suffer those injuries, lie in a dark, damp cave for three days with no medical attention, and then walk out strong enough for anybody to think He was the risen Son of God defies reason. There is no way Jesus survived the cross. We know that because there is no way for someone to survive the injuries that John describes. The Romans knew how to make sure He was dead, and they made sure He was dead. It is impossible for Him not to have been dead when He came down off the cross.

John’s Eyewitness Testimony

God promised Jesus’ death. The Romans ensured Jesus’ death. History also confirms Jesus’ death. John tells us that he saw these things with his own eyes. These were not stories somebody made up. They were not things he heard secondhand or thirdhand. He says, “I saw these things.”

John often writes in the third person. We think that may be because he was writing years later and remembering what he had seen. But he describes himself as the one who saw these things. He describes himself elsewhere as “that disciple” or “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” When he says that the one who saw these things testified, he is talking about himself.

John said in verse 35 that he saw these things as an eyewitness. The fact that he accurately recorded what would have happened when the spear was thrust up through the side tells us that he was doing his best to write an accurate account. As a matter of fact, there are numerous other instances throughout the Gospel of John where scholars have been able to look at little details in his story, what they call corroborating evidence, and confirm those details through archaeology and historical records. Place names, descriptions of places, people, and things going on in the community do not by themselves prove the whole Gospel of John is true, but they do point to the fact that John was writing down accurately what he saw.

What we have here is an eyewitness account. John says, “This is what I saw.” But maybe some are still skeptical about the validity of John’s account. I believe every word of this book, but I understand that not everybody is there.

The Scriptures record at least seven other named eyewitnesses who saw Jesus dead and taken off the cross. That does not even include all the unnamed people, such as the priests, the scribes, and the Roman soldiers. But the people who could have been identified and asked in that day include Jesus’ mother Mary, her sister, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Salome, the wife of Zebedee, and the wife of Cleopas. The Gospels record that all of these, in addition to John, were there and saw Jesus come off the cross. They were eyewitnesses to the things John writes about.

There were enough witnesses at the time that historians of that period regarded the crucifixion as a fact. If someone is still skeptical about what is written in the Scriptures, there is outside confirmation that Jesus died. I will mention just a few examples.

Historical Witnesses to the Cross

The Roman historian Suetonius acknowledged that Jesus was a real person. From what he knew or had heard, he did not seem to think highly of Him, describing Him as an instigator of disturbances. The Roman historian Tacitus wrote about Jesus and recorded that He was executed by Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius. Tacitus also confirms that Jesus existed and died on the cross.

The Jewish Roman historian Josephus records that the Jewish leaders collaborated with Pilate to have Jesus executed on a cross. These are men whose other historical records we generally do not dismiss. I see no reason why we should dismiss what they recorded about Jesus. These were serious historians who did their research and wanted to make sure that what they recorded was true. They said that Jesus was a real person who died as the Scriptures record that He died.

There were also Christian creeds that are dated to no later than A.D. 35. Within two years of the death of Jesus, Christians were already recording as the cornerstone of their faith the fact that Jesus Christ died on the cross. Within two years, there was not enough time for this to become a legend.

If somebody came to you next year and tried to tell you a completely false version of something that happened a year or two ago, you would know better. If someone said, “Do you remember when COVID-19 started and the aliens brought it down and told us to go into quarantine or they would vaporize the planet?” we would all say, “That is not how it happened.” We do not forget and allow legend to develop in two years without people still being there to set the record straight.

Within two years, history tells us that the Christian church was already basing its faith on this creed that says Jesus was a real person who died and rose again, which we will talk about in the coming weeks. There is plenty of evidence that Jesus died as the Bible records.

Sometimes skeptics will ask, “Why is there not more historical evidence? Why is there not more archaeological evidence?” But Jesus never commanded an army. He never ruled over a country. He was not born into wealth and privilege. As far as the world was concerned, He was a carpenter from a backwater town on the fringes of the Roman Empire. How much would we expect to be recorded about Him? How many monuments would we expect to be built?

Even with my own great-grandparents, doing genealogical research from only a hundred years ago, there is very little written record. There may be a tombstone and a couple of census records. In some cases, there is more record of the life of Jesus than there is of my own great-grandparents.

It has only been in the last fifteen years or so that we have felt the need to record everything we do for posterity, every meal we eat on Instagram. They did not do that. The amazing thing is not that there is so little evidence of Jesus. Considering who He was thought to be by the world at that time, the amazing thing is how much evidence there is. Name any other carpenter from Galilee two thousand years ago whose name anybody still remembers.

There is plenty of evidence if we are willing to look and see it. Jesus Christ died on the cross just as He said He would. That is my position after having looked at the evidence. But each of us has to consider for ourselves whether we believe that Jesus actually died. Did He die on the cross as the Scriptures say He did? Did He die on the cross as prophecy indicated ahead of time? Did He die on the cross as the Gospel writers describe in a medically accurate way? Did He die on the cross as historians record? Or are we going to refuse to see the evidence?

I cannot answer that question for you. That is something you have to consider for yourself. Think through the evidence. Did Jesus die as God’s Word says He did or not?

Why the Cross Matters

Jesus said His body and His blood would be sacrificed for us. What I have presented this morning is just a small selection of the evidence. But here is why it matters: if Jesus died as He said He would, if He died as the evidence indicates that He did, then you now have a choice to make. You have to decide whether you believe His claim that He died for you.

Those who knew Him best were not in doubt. To be clear, they had their moments of doubt, as many of us probably would. After the crucifixion, there were moments when they thought everything was over. They hid. They were not planning a hoax. They were trying to figure out how to get themselves out of the situation because everybody wanted to kill them.

They denied Him. Even when the story went out that the tomb was empty and He was alive again, they did not believe it at first. But afterward, they saw Him alive again. We will talk more about that in the coming weeks. They saw something miraculous enough to change their entire perception.

Then they remembered what they had seen of His crucifixion. They remembered what He had told them His death would mean. And after seeing Him alive again, they were in no doubt about that death. That is why the writer of Hebrews, who was either one of the apostles or one of their close associates, said, “As it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment, so Christ was offered once to bear the sins of many.” Just as surely as Jesus died, He died to bear our sins.

He died to pay for our sins. He died so that those sins could be forgiven. He was bearing the punishment that we deserved. So if He died, you have to decide whether you believe that it was for you.

If we cannot take Him at His word, who can we believe? Where can we find salvation? Where can we find hope? I submit to you that not only does the evidence show that Jesus Christ died as He said He would, but it also gives us every reason to believe what He said about why He would die.

He died to pay for your sins. If you have never trusted Christ, but you realize that He died and that He died to pay for your sins, then you need to understand that His death was not an accident of history. It was not something He merely got Himself into. It was not the punishment for something He had done wrong. He was on that cross because He was bearing responsibility for your sins so that you could be forgiven.

This morning, all there is for you to do to have that salvation and that forgiveness is to cry out to God. Admit to Him that you have sinned, that you have disobeyed Him, and that you need a Savior because you could not save yourself. Acknowledge to Him that you believe Jesus died for your sins and rose again. Then ask His forgiveness, and He has promised it.