This next week diverse people groups from different nationalities, races, and cultures around the world will celebrate an event in history that defines their faith and unites them… that being the resurrection of Jesus Christ. So real was the resurrection of Christ for Christians at that time that they declared their faith could be either validated or falsified based on whether or not Jesus actually resurrected from the dead (1 Corinthians 15:3-6, 14-15). For them, the credibility of their testimony before the world was simply a matter of Christ’s critics finding his dead body. If it was found, there would be no Christian faith and they would have walked away claiming it was a fake.
But quite the opposite occurred, three days after Christ was crucified, His followers and the Roman authorities stood by the sealed tomb that held Christ’s dead body, staring at a vacated empty tomb (Luke 24:1-6; Matthew 28:1-6). They were amazed because no single human could have opened it, and Christ’s followers were too despondent to try. It ended up being more than a few men and women who witnessed Christ’s resurrection. In the days that followed it was recorded that many saw Jesus; on one occasion over 500 people witnessed Him alive, resurrected from the dead. Nothing less than what they witnessed could have kept their faith alive. Their message was a simple and profound truth statement… HE IS RISEN! Jesus said… “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he dies, yet shall he live,” (John 11:25) PMC
