When I was in college in the early 1980’s, there was a question that everyone was asking: “Who shot J.R.?” In case your memory doesn’t go back that far… It was a marketing catchphrase that CBS came up with to promote their very popular TV series, Dallas. J.R. Ewing was a character on the show. J.R. was one of those characters that everyone loved to hate. In the show’s season finale of their third season, somebody shot J.R. So – everyone had to wait until the fourth episode of the fourth season to find out who shot J.R. It was all everyone was talking about. Seriously! It was on the covers of magazines. It was everywhere!
But I couldn’t have cared less. I never really watched the show, Dallas. In those days, I was more interested in another catchphrase question – this one by Wendy’s hamburgers. “Where’s the beef?” Remember that one? I can still picture those little white-haired ladies looking at that hamburger and asking that question.
It was about that time that I also heard a more serious question. “Is the resurrection real? Did Jesus really die, and on the third day rise again?” As I said, I was a college student at the time, and had been a Christian pretty much all my life. It never occurred to me to ask, “Is it real?” But this guy I had class with asked it. “Of course,” I said. And he said, “How can you be so sure?” I’m don’t remember what I said at the time, but I do remember that it was at that time I first read the book by Josh McDowell entitled, Evidence That Demands a Verdict.
Josh is a Christian author and speaker, who spent most of his life working for Campus Crusade for Christ. He was agnostic when he was a young man, and he decided when he was a college student that he would write a paper that would examine the historical evidence of the Christian faith in order to disprove it. He ended up becoming a Christian, however, because instead of finding evidence against it, all he found was evidence for it.
In Evidence That Demands a Verdict, McDowell quotes a British theologian named Michael Green:
Christianity does not hold the resurrection to be one among many tenets of belief. Without faith in the resurrection there would be no Christianity at all. The Christian church would never have begun; the Jesus-movement would have fizzled out like a damp (firecracker) with His execution. Christianity stands or falls with the truth of the resurrection. Once disprove it, and you have disposed of Christianity.
Christianity is a historical religion. It claims that God has taken the risk of involving Himself in human history, and the facts are there for you to examine with the utmost rigor. They will stand any amount of critical investigation.
Ask all the questions you want to…you will still just end up where Josh McDowell did when he was an angry, agnostic college student…or where I did when I accepted by faith what my childhood Sunday School teachers taught me…that Jesus did indeed rise from the dead.
This coming Easter Sunday, we are not going to be addressing the question, “Is the resurrection real?” Instead we are going to ask three Easter questions connected to John 20: 1-18. See if you can find the questions in this passage.