Theological Implications of the Resurrection #1

Driving home: Christianity is a historical religion. And a Christianity wholly unrelated to historical occurrences is no Christianity at all.

Martin quotes B.B. Warfield's sermon, 'Remember Jesus Christ Risen from the Dead,' to emphasize that Christianity is a historical religion, not merely a set of religious ideas, and that its substance lies in historical facts.

And those events had a divinely designated significance and those very events have a divinely interpreted meaning. And put that all together and that's what Christianity is. The stuff of which the Christians, the Christian faith is composed is the stuff of the real historical facts pertaining to Jesus of Nazareth. In a marvelous sermon based upon the text Remember Jesus Christ Risen from the Dead, B.B. Warfield, that great defender of the Christian faith of a previous generation wrote, Christianity is a historical religion. And a Christianity wholly unrelated to historical occurrences is no Ch...

6:03 - 7:20 Read in full sermon

In this part of the sermon: The second implication is that the empty tomb is the crowning revelation of Jesus's personal identity as the Son of God. Martin distinguishes between official and personal…

Martin uses the analogy of meeting a four-star general in uniform (official identity) versus meeting him in his garden in putter pants (personal identity) to illustrate the distinction between Jesus's official identity as Messiah and his personal identity as the Son of God.

He is not here. See the place, where they lay. And as we, in faith, place our feet in their footsteps, place our ears where we hear what they heard, hearing it not by the direct voice of an angel, but by the very voice of God's scripture, we need not doubt that our Savior is all he claimed to be as God's Messiah, because the empty tomb is to Jesus Christ, himself, the ultimate validation of his official identity. So, let me finish with reference to the theological implications of his� empty tomb. It is, not only to, our Lord, the ultimate validation of his official identity, but it is the crow...

31:24 - 32:45 Read in full sermon

The point: Behold our Lord standing and say with Thomas, 'Lord Jesus raised from the dead, you are worthy of my trust, my highest devotion, my strictest obedience, because you are the son of the living God.'

Martin uses the analogy of an evacuation during war or a toxic spill to explain that the empty tomb was Jesus's 'glorious evacuation' from his state of humiliation, never to return.

We know that he is none the less, or he is nothing other and nothing less than the son of the Lord. The living God. We are privileged then to go to that closed room, behold our Lord standing and say with Thomas, Lord Jesus raised from the dead, you are worthy of my trust, my highest devotion, my strictest obedience, because you are the son of the living God. But then thirdly and finally, this is what the empty tomb meant to Jesus, not only the ultimate validation of his official identity, the crowning revelation of his personal identity, and here I struggled for words, and this is the best I'v...

48:25 - 49:52 Read in full sermon