Gabe Fluhrer

The guy who taught me Old Testament in seminary, we read a book one year that was so powerfully transforming to me to understand this, that the Bible has a concern for history beginning in the Old Testament that no other world religion has.

And that is so important so that when you get even outside the Bible, you'll see that the scriptures didn't make this up.

This really happened.

And if you search high and low in other world religions, there's not this same focus on facts, historical reality, all in service of convincing us of the truth of what God is telling us.

One more example, this from a sympathetic person.

writer, not a hostile opponent like we just read, from Ignatius of Antioch.

He lived AD 35 to 107, discipled by the apostle John.

We have seven letters that he wrote as he made his way to Rome to face martyrdom.

And in one of those letters, he said this, quote, "'For I know and believe that after the resurrection, he was in the flesh.

And when he came to the people around Peter, he said to them, "'Take, handle me, and see that I am not a bodiless phantom.'"

Close quote.

Isn't this interesting that, again, within the first century, he's essentially quoting from Luke's gospel in a shorthand.

So that gives us evidence that that gospel was probably in circulation by the time he's writing this.

And then he says so plainly and makes it a point to put it like this, that the resurrection happened in the flesh.

This wasn't a hallucination.

This wasn't a ghostly appearance to them.

No, it actually happened.

So that when we take the two strands of evidence before us, that in the Scriptures, those outside the Scriptures, and we could mention many more, they combine to form a tapestry of truth for us, my friends, that the resurrection of Christ really happened.

that it's a historical verity just as much as July 4th, 1776, to use an example from America, would be a historical verity, that it was an actual event in space-time history.

And given the available evidence, the resurrection of Christ, therefore, is an invitation, my friends, to a world in which God reigns and Jesus wins over