Jesus is Alive!
By John Earp
The most important core truth of the Christian faith is that Jesus Christ was resurrected from the dead by the power of God. The Son of God was crucified for our sins, died, was buried, and on the third day, rose again triumphant over death, hell and the grave. Understandably, those who deny the truth of the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ want to claim it was all simply a hoax concocted by the apostles for some kind of gain on their part. History reveals that all the apostles except John died a martyr’s death precisely because they insisted that Christ had risen from the dead. Does anyone willingly submit to being put to death for something they KNOW to be a lie?
Not only did Christ rise from the dead, He also poured out His Holy Spirit upon the 120 disciples gathered in the upper room as told in Acts chapter two. The apostles bore witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus with great power, as this new Jesus Movement began to spread in the first century. The gospel has great power, and is truly humanity’s only hope. The materialistic, atheistic ideas that are often held to in our day can give no real hope for anything if you think them through. All is meaningless if there is no God. Morals are just personal preferences without a divinely inspired reference point (the Bible). I recently had occasion to speak with an individual who claimed that the Bible was full of errors, that King James had supposedly changed the Scriptures in thousands of places, and that all of the passages in the Bible that speak of divine judgment for sin are just man-made ideas and are not true. The great 18th century reformer and revivalist, John Wesley said it so well, “If you only believe the parts of the Bible that you want to believe, you don’t believe the Bible at all. You believe in yourself.” Indeed, if it is true as one of the Greek philosophers once said, that man is the measure of all things, then subjectivist relativism is all that is left.
The inspired word of God found in the Old and New Testaments reveals the problem (sin), the solution (salvation in Jesus) and the final judgment to which all are heading whether they want to believe it or not. On that day, all mankind, the rich, the poor, the powerful, the weak, shall all stand before their Creator to give an account of the life they have chosen to live, whether good or evil. All their works shall be tested in the fires of God’s judgment, and only those whose works are characterized as “gold, silver and precious stones,” will endure the heat of God’s perfect and righteous judgment. The Scriptures reveal as well that the only means by which you may escape the righteous judgment of God for your own sins is through repentance (a change of heart and mind about sin) and faith, trusting in the Lord Jesus to deliver you from your sins.
Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Your heart is either an evil heart of unbelief or a good, pure heart, made clean by the blood of the spotless Lamb of God, Jesus Christ the Lord. He died to demonstrate the righteousness of God, so that God might be just and the justifier of the one that has faith in Jesus. Many think, like the old philosopher, Voltaire, that “Of course God forgives; that’s His job isn’t it?” But the truth is, God doesn’t have to forgive anyone and will only forgive you or me or anyone of our sins if we meet His revealed conditions for salvation; namely, turning from sin to God in faith, asking Jesus to be the LORD of your life, and pursuing the holiness (that results from repentance and faith) without which no one shall see God, according to Hebrews 12:14.
Make the very best, most important decision you can make today—Turn your life over to Jesus, surrendering to Him as LORD and teacher. That is the first step in the life of the Christian. God has made a way for you to not only be forgiven and cleansed from your sins, but also for you to find the divine purpose of your life, the reason God knit you together in your mother’s womb to begin with. That purpose is that you should be made like Jesus, loving God supremely and your neighbor as yourself, and from that core purpose, all the smaller details will be worked out and revealed to you.