Resurrection Evidence; Resurrection Bodies, Luke 24:30-45

We are in Luke this morning, so turn with me to Luke 24:32-45. We will look at John 19, not a whole lot but a little bit.

When we were in DC representative Louis Gomer from East Texas. He has spoken here at this church in the past, and he is a strong defender of the Constitution and is a solid believer. He is one of the few congressmen who do not maintain a separate residence in Washington DC. He sleeps in his office, he showers down in the in the gym that's provided there for congressmen. He flies home almost every weekend and on Friday, flies back Sunday night, and he teaches the Sunday school class.

I had arranged this back in the early fall and it was just us, but in the meantime there was another church came along and was going to be there for the same reason—to go to the Museum of the Bible—and they wanted him to give him a tour. It's his home church from Tyler and so they were with us on the trip. So that was great. And also some folks from Dan Ingram's church joined us, and one of his deacons, the chairman of his board, is Scott Craig, a graduate of Texas A&M, and one of his classmates and close buddies with Louis Gomer. So it was kind of an old home week, lot of people renewing acquaintances and friendships there, and Gomer gave us a a great tour of the Capital building. It was four hours long. His knowledge of the history of the capital, knowledge of history, is really tremendous, and we had a great time.

But one of the things he brought out was the hall called Statuary Hall is just to the south of the rotunda is a room that is has statues all around it. Every state is able to have two statues in the capital. Texas' two statues are Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin. But this room was not always a room to place statues. The Senate actually met there at an early stage in the use of the capital, but what most people do not know and would be surprised to hear is that this room started to be used to years before the Congress met there, when it was first used as the meeting place for a church, starting in 1795.

It was approved to be used by a church by both the House and the Senate. Thomas Jefferson at the time was the president of the Senate. He was the vice president at the time but he had already been elected president. What is significant about this is that Thomas Jefferson is the one who wrote the letter to the Baptist Church in Danbury several years later, where he used the phrase separation of church and state, which is been co-opted and distorted by the liberal Supreme Court to indicate that there would be a wall of separation, and many people think that that's in the Constitution. But by looking at Jefferson's actions we come to understand what he meant. He wasn't protecting government from the influence of the church; he was protecting the church from the influence of the government. He believed it was totally consistent with his views that a church could meet on government property. The church met in the capital building for number of years before the war of 1812.

The Capital was partially burned by the British during the war of 1812. After it was restored the church met there from 1816 until sometime in the 1870s. In 1856 the size of the church was 2000. Two thousand Christians met there every single Sunday, and by that time there were many other churches. When the church first started there, there were no other churches in Washington DC. The initial part was because there was no other place to meet. They needed a church and then later there were many more churches in DC, but that continued to be there.

Then went to the Museum of the Bible, but we found out while we were there that there was another exhibit in the Capital area. At the National Geographic Museum there was an exhibit called The Tomb of Christ, which fits with what we have been studying with the crucifixion and the resurrection.

I thought I would say little bit about this. I pointed out when we studied about the crucifixion, the location of the crucifixion, and we studied about the resurrection and the tomb, that these are now enclosed within the confines of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. And there is a tremendous, historical and archaeological validation for that being the site of the crucifixion and the resurrection. That's where the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea was located, right near that sight.

But in 1808 there was a fire that destroyed whatever had previously covered the tomb area, so it was replaced 200 years ago with what is called an aedicule, which looks like a tent but it's a solid structure. It is inside the one of the domes of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. It has fallen into bad repair and so two years ago they sent in teams of archaeologists and others who work with a lot of ancient things and restoration. They use thermographic imagery, ground-penetrating radar, infrared; every tool they have available today to scan almost every atom in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. More was found out about it than has really ever been known and discovered.

I have been told by numerous people what has been widely held: that when the tomb of Christ area was destroyed by a Caliph in 1009 it was just leveled to the ground. And that is not precisely true. They took down a lot of it but enclosed in the masonry of the aedicule are the remains of the original wall of the tomb, up to about four or 5 feet in height. They are enclosed and there's one place inside the actual tomb itself where they put a glass panel in the wall, and you can actually look around and see part of the original cave wall.

I don't agree with their diagram completely here, on the basis of what other archaeologists and maps and other things show, but they do have some things here. There is the tomb area, which was the garden tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, and this is where Golgotha was located.

They discovered a number of other tombs, so this whole area was the original rock quarry. That started during the early phase of Herod's rebuilding of the Temple Mount, and it was not solid stone so they just abandoned it, at which point it became an area for a graveyard. They cut tombs into the side walls of that quarry.

What we have looked at so far after the resurrection of Christ is His first appearance, which was to Mary. Then He apparently ascended to the Father before the second appearance, which was to the other women who had gone to the tomb. Then we looked at his appearance to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. We know He appeared to Peter. This was when He forgives Peter. It must've been an extremely poignant moment for Peter meeting with the Lord, and then he appears to the ten.

We saw that the Mark passage just summarizes this appearance on the road to Emmaus. He appeared in another form to two of them as they walked and went into the country, and they went and told it to the rest but they did not believe them either.

The point I keep making is, the disciples were not ready to accept the resurrection. They didn't believe it when the body was not found, when they discover the tomb was empty; they thought the body had been stolen. They were not in a position where they were trying to put forth a hoax; they didn't believe it at all. Even when Jesus appears they don't expect it; they think it's a ghost. They don't think it's the resurrected Jesus because this is not something that they're ready to accept yet, and He had to demonstrate, as Luke says in Acts chapter one, through many convincing proofs that He had indeed been resurrected and raised from the dead.

We saw the setting. Two of them were traveling to a village called Emmaus, which is about 7 miles from Jerusalem. And as they're going along these two men are trying to process everything that has happened during the last week of the crucifixion. They are extremely disappointed because they believed Jesus was the Messiah, and now that has been shattered and they have lost their hope in the redemption of Israel.

What we learn is that Jesus appears to them and talks to them, but they don't see anything distinctive about that body. They don't recognize Him, but His resurrection body doesn't appear to be anything distinctive. So the first thing we learned about it resurrection body was that it appears to be a normal human body and had all of the functions of the normal human body. As Jesus goes along He begins to ask them questions. What are you talking about? Why are you so upset? What's going on? The first one to answer Jesus is Cleopas, and he is incredulous: "You don't know about the things that have happened there?"

Jesus responds in verse 25 after they describe their hope for Jesus, who He was and what it happened. "He says to them, O foolish ones". Biblically a foolish person is someone who does not pay attention to the word of God, or learn from the word of God. And so He says, "O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe…" They have believed that Jesus was the Messiah, but they haven't believed in the resurrection yet. They are saved, but like many believers, they are growing. They come to the Scriptures and they read things and hear things, and they don't quite comprehend it yet. They don't believe it, but that doesn't mean they're not saved. At this point they are just confused and are trying to put everything together.

Jesus now emphasizes what He will repeat when He appears to the ten: "Ought not the Christ to have suffered these things and to enter into his glory?" Notice that what He is doing as He is addressing their confusion, doubt, disappointment, and sorrow that they are feeling, is focus them on what the Scripture says, because it is the Word of God which stabilizes us and gives us answers. Then He gave them a Bible class on Christology—what the Old Testament taught about the Messiah.

In verse 27 He began with Moses and then all the prophets, meaning He went through all of the Old Testament, and He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself—not just the death, burial and resurrection, but all the things. He gave them a complete course and they are astounded with His ability to handle the Scripture.

What would you focus on? How would you summarize what the Old Testament taught? What were the key events that you would go through? What passages would you go through? I gave you ten prophecies last time to think about. Put that together out of over a hundred prophecies. It is important to be able to synthesize things down in the Scriptures so that you can help people who don't know the Scriptures very well to understand. That's part of what the Museum of the Bible has done. There has been criticism—I think not fair—of the fact that they don't go into a lot of detail on what is in the Bible. They are not a Museum of Christianity; they are not a museum of Christ; they are talking about the Bible to hit, primarily, the history of the Bible, the impact of the Bible.

But what they want to do in their goal and objective is to create an environment that stimulates curiosity for those who come who don't know anything about the Bible, so that they go and read the Bible. I compare it to what happened at the beginning of the Reformation: that the Bible was translated into the vernacular of the people. They now had a German Bible, they had an English Bible, and they had a French Bible, and other languages—the Bible in their own language. People begin to read it for themselves in their own language, and that was part of the spark that ignited the Reformation. People learned the gospel. And that's the idea of the founders here. They are they are not trying to hammer people with the gospel. Initially, I think they did have an evangelistic purpose. But you have to understand that when they first started they were going to have a little small Museum that was going to be in Dallas, and then they began to think, "We have more; we have to go bigger; we have to think grander; we have to refine what our purpose and our goal is". And as they did that they came up with their stated goal to get people to engage with the Bible.

So one of the things that they have done is have an Old Testament section, which has different rooms that you walk through, and they do a very good job of what we used to call a walk through the Bible, which was a very good tool. I went through several of these after I went out of seminary, and they were very good for synthesizing the major events and to give people that big picture of how all the events in the Old Testament fit together so that when you read it you have a framework within which to put the details.

Then they have another display that's about the world of Jesus and what it was like in Nazareth. It was very similar. If you have been to Israel and gone to the Nazareth village was similar to that. Then they had a New Testament film that began with John the apostle in a cave writing the Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word …" And he recites key verses from the first chapter. He doesn't explain the gospel, but he cites some gospel verses there that are present. The clearest expression of the gospel at the museum was a display in the section on the Bible in American history—a display and a good film that they had on George Whitfield. It was animated and they had a lot of quotes and they would put all the quotes up on the on the screen. One of the statements Whitfield makes in a sermon, and the verse they put up on the wall is, "Unless you are converted you will not see the kingdom of God". That was the clearest gospel presentation in the museum.

But it had many other things. It gave a good synthesis of Acts in the film on the New Testament, and so it summarized that. It's important to be able to have those kinds of synthesis type structures so that you can plug the details in. It's like if you had a big closet and you didn't have any coat hangers, all the details in the closet, all your clothes would just be on the floor. You have to have key points by coat hangers to hang your clothes on and to organize things. That's what you are doing in this kind of synthesis.

Now we are going to move on beyond what Jesus said. They still don't know who He is, and He is acting as if He is going to continue on his journey. Verse 28: And they approached the village where they were going, and He acted as though He were going farther. [29] But they urged Him, saying, “Stay with us, for it is {getting} toward evening, and the day is now nearly over.” So He went in to stay with them.

They have been just overwhelmed I'm sure with what He had said. And as they describe it later in verse 32, “Were not our hearts burning within us while He was speaking to us on the road, while He was explaining the Scriptures to us?”

"Our hearts burned within us" is an idiom that they were just overwhelmed with what He was saying. The heart refers to their thinking, and that He was just stimulating there their thinking as he went through all the Old Testament passages related to who He was. But they still haven't recognized Him. They implore Him to abide with them. The day is far spent it's about to be dark. It's not safe to travel and come stay with us eat with us. So He is invited to come in and He sits at the table with them.

In verse 30 we read, "When He had reclined {at the table} with them, He took the bread and blessed {it,} and breaking {it,} He {began} giving {it} to them".

He takes the bread is going to give a traditional Jewish blessing. He is acting as if He is the host, as if He is the one who is in charge, and they are allowing Him to do that. He would have recited the typical Jewish blessing over the bread: "Blessed are you O Lord our God, King of the universe who brings forth bread from the earth". That is the pretty standard blessing that you will hear few go into a Jewish home, especially the Orthodox. This is what they will recite. It is a blessing that has its origin back before the time of Christ. And notice that in their blessing of the food they are not asking that God would bless the food; they are blessing God. That doesn't mean that they are telling God something. The word "bless" means to give something beneficial, something gracious, something good to someone. Of course, we can't give anything like that to God.

But it is also an idiom for praise. So when it says in the Psalms, "Blessed are you, O God", we should understand that to mean, "Praises should be to you, O God. May you be praised". That's the idiom. When God is the object of the verb to bless, it means to praise Him. In the blessing for the food, "Blessed are you, O Lord our God," they are praising God; and one form of praise is to give thanks. They are giving thanks to God because He has brought forth bread, food from the earth and provided for them. In Jewish thought one does not bless the food, nor ask God to bless the food; one blesses God who has provided the food.

In 1 Timothy, which is really the basis for our giving thanks as New Testament Christians for food, Paul writes: 1 Timothy 4:4, 5 For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with gratitude; for it is sanctified by means of the word of God and prayer.

So when we pray before meal the focal point is to give thanks to God. That is blessing God. That is what was going on, in a Jewish prayer of blessing.

Sanctified is the Greek word HAGIAZO, which means to be set apart to God. We are thanking God. We pray that he would sanctify the food, that is set it apart for us to strengthen us and give us the nourishment we need in order to serve Him in every area of our life—with our work with our recreation with all the different things that we do in life. We are to be servants of God, and so we give thanks to Him for giving us the food and strengthen nourishment in order to serve Him.

It was normal in a Jewish home for the host to be the one to break the bread and to pray. So this is completely out of order. Jesus takes it upon Himself, and they allow Him to because He has functioned as a rabbi, basically along the way, as one in authority, opening up the Word of God to them. As a result of that He has demonstrated His wisdom and His understanding of the Scripture. So, as the as the text says, He took the bread, blessed it, and He broke it.

What we see a little later on when they go to the disciples, they say in verse 35, "They {began} to relate their experiences on the road and how He was recognized by them in the breaking of the bread". It's not as though all of a sudden God removes the blinders. What happens is that when Jesus in a position of authority gives thanks for the bread, and then breaks it, there is something in the way He did this that all of a sudden makes them realize who this is in front of them. At that that point they recognize Him.

In Jewish tradition it was taught that the one who recites the blessing before eating stretches forth his hand first to partake of the food. But if you wish to give the honor of partaking first to his teacher, or to one who is greater than he in the mastery of Torah he may do so. In other words, though the host has the responsibility to do this, if they want to allow someone else to do it, it would go to someone who's a master of the Torah who has taught them Scripture. So this shows that this fits within Jewish custom.

The second thing we learn here about the resurrection body is that in His resurrection body Jesus is able to eat. He is going to do it twice in the passage we are looking at. He eats with them and then when He appears in the appearance to the ten disciples, He is going to eat fish again. He is demonstrating that this resurrection body functions in many ways like our normal flesh and bone body today.

When they see Him break the bread, Luke says, "Then their eyes were opened and they knew Him, and He vanished from their sight". This brings up a third observation on the resurrection body: that it is able to materialize, and dematerialize at will. While it looks and appears and can function in many ways like a normal human body there are capabilities that go beyond our normal human body today.

We see the reaction now of these two disciples after Jesus vanishes. They said to one another in verse 32, “Were not our hearts burning within us while He was speaking to us on the road, while He was explaining the Scriptures to us?” In other words, "Our brains were on overload, we were processing and going through so much, it was amazing."

As I was studying on this the other day I thought about when I had gone to that exhibit at the National Geographic Museum. For the next three or four hours after I went to that I was just amazed, it just kept going over and over in my mind, replaying it, and I just learned so much. It was phenomenal. That's what happened. You've gone through that. You just feel overwhelmed with the content of something that you've learned. They are overwhelmed, the eyes have been opened to the truth of the Scripture and they are so excited about it.

They got up and immediately went back to Jerusalem 7 miles. That's about two hours. They were in a hurry to get there before it got too late and to find the eleven and those who were with them.

Here it says the eleven. This is one of those things that people get a little confused about. Who are the eleven? Some people say it's all but Judas. Judas has already hung himself. But then that would include Thomas, and we know that that is the next appearance. That's the seventh appearance, when Jesus appears to Thomas. I believe that the title that you hear all the way through the Gospels, even after this—John will use it as well, after Judas has gone. He still calls them the twelve; that was the name of the team. Even when there weren't twelve they were still called the twelve, but when Judas was gone Luke changes it and calls them the eleven. That doesn't mean all eleven are there, but that's the team. Thomas wasn't there, so I think that best explains that the shift in terminology that we see the difference in the Gospels.

What will happen is they find the eleven minus Thomas and those who are with them gathered together. So it's not just the original disciples who will become apostles, it's others and they are going to tell their story. But as Luke tells it we learn of the fourth appearance, and that is to Peter. Apparently either before or after Jesus appeared to the two on the road to Emmaus He appeared privately to Peter.

Luke 24:34, when the two from Emmaus get there and tell them that they saw the Lord, the eleven that are there say, "Yes, the Lord is risen indeed and has appeared to Simon". And then the two are from Emmaus told about the things that happen on the road and they're all excited talk about everything that they have learned.

The only other reference to this private appearance to Peter is in 1 Corinthians 15:5, and there it simply says that He appeared to Peter. This is the fourth appearance. And what must that appearance have been like? For Peter had betrayed the Lord. He had sworn three times that he would never do it. "It won't happen Lord, not me"; and yet he did. He betrayed the Lord. He must have felt overwhelming guilt. The Lord appears to him in private. We can surmise what happens. He confesses his sin and the Lord forgives him, because the next time we see the Lord and Peter together it's when Peter is fishing up in Galilee. That comes in later on in John 21.

We learn something for that, that this intimacy that occurs in confession. Confession and forgiveness is private. Sin is between us and the Lord; and forgiveness is between us and the Lord. But there's one thing that came to my mind as I was contemplating this. That is what is Peter learning here? He is learning about forgiveness. Some people have a hard time with forgiveness. Maybe you think, some people have done some things to me and it's just I don't know that I can ever forgive them. I think Peter was like that. Because Peter is the one who asked the question of the Lord back in Matthew 18:21 when the Lord was teaching about forgiveness, and Peter said how many times do I have to forgive these people? Once or twice, maybe, but if they keep doing the same thing and they keep on sinning against me, how many times do I have to forgive them Lord? Seven times? Peter is thinking that ought to be enough, and the Lord said in Matthew 18:22, "I do not say to you, up to seven times but up to 70×7." That's an idiom. Seven is the number of completion; 70×7 means indefinitely. You forgive them and you forgive them until you are out of this life. You never stop forgiving them and it may be the same thing.

Now remember, there's a difference between forgiveness and absolving people of consequences. We live in a culture where they don't always understand that. This always happens when some Christian or someone who has become a Christian in prison is about to be executed for murder. The family says, well I forgive them. That's wonderful. But they have violated the law and there's a legal penalty; there are consequences. Sometimes those consequences can be commuted. God forgave David of his sin with Bathsheba and his conspiracy to murder her husband Uriah the Hittite. The penalty under the law for what he did was death. God reduce the sentence to a fourfold punishment. It all would affect David's family. The baby was going to die. He had one son who was going to come rape his half-sister, and then the third level of punishment was Absalom would kill the brother who had raped the half-sister. Then Absalom himself would rebel against David. So there were consequences. Was David forgiven? Yes, were the consequences removed? They were reduced; God gave him grace to handle it.

In life there are times when there are people who have done things to us, and may continue to do things to us, and we are to forgive them. We are not to harbor mental attitude sins; we are not to be angry; we are to treat them with grace and kindness whenever we have the opportunity. But that doesn't mean that you continue to put yourself in a position where they're going to take advantage of you. There may be consequences.

I think of the situation this is usually brought up in the case of a marriage. A woman is being abused by her husband, physically abused. So she forgives him? She goes back and gets beaten over and over again? No, she forgives him and lives somewhere else. There are consequences. She forgives him because she's not going to harbor bitterness and anger and resentment against him, but neither is she going to put yourself back in a position where she's going to be abused and beaten and physically harmed or possibly killed. There are other things, it's complicated situation, but it doesn't automatically mean that we just become somebody's punching bag because we are forgiving them. Forgiveness and consequences are different things.

Peter learns this at that time because he has committed what he thinks is a horrible sin. It was; he'd betrayed his Lord, and Jesus forgave him. He comes to understand what grace is, and that will shape Peter's ministry for the rest of his life.

And then we come to the fifth appearance, which is when Jesus appears to the ten, not including Thomas. There's a lot in this section. It's introduced in Mark 16, simply summarize. Later He appeared to the eleven as they sat at the table, and He rebuked them for their unbelief. This wasn't a friendly meeting. He rebuked their unbelief and hardness of heart because they did not believe those who had seen him after He had risen.

What we learn here is that the disciples are not expecting a risen Savior; they're not expecting resurrection. They have to be convinced. There's nothing wrong with having to be convinced.

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