Lazy and Moronic

If Christ has not been raised; our preaching is useless and so is your faith. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men. (1 Corinthians 15:14, 18-19, NIV 1984).

My Musings – The hope of Christianity does not lie merely in an empty tomb, but in a resurrected Christ. For it is conceivable for the tomb to be empty, without a resurrection. The Jewish religious leaders asserted as much. “When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, ‘you are to say, His disciples came during the night and stole Him away while we were asleep.'” (Matthew 28:12–13, NIV 1984).

But that is not what happened. For the Roman guards were the first to witness the resurrection and “went into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened.” (Matthew 28:11, NIV 1984). Yet this lie (stolen body), among others (e.g., He did not really die), “[have] been widely [believed] to this very day.” (Matthew 28:15, NIV 1984).

If “Christ has indeed been raised from the dead,” (1 Corinthians 15:20, NIV 1984), as numerous eyewitness accounts have substantiated, then what Jesus claimed about Himself was validated. “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me,” (John 14:6, NIV 1984), making it impossible for any other religion to be equally valid. Incidentally, that would be true even if Christ had not been raised. They may be able to “coexist” culturally and legally, but not in reality.

My Advice – Don’t take my word for it. Seriously investigate if for yourself. Comedian Jeff Allen once told a Christian acquaintance that he was an atheist and did not “believe in that garbage.” When asked what about the Bible he didn’t think was true, he replied, “I don’t know, I never read it.” The Christian acquaintance’s response was classic.

“Well, you’re not an atheist. You’re a moron! A true atheist is not only a Biblical scholar but is scholarly in all the faiths of the Earth and after a long intellectual journey has come to the conclusion that there is no God of the universe. You, on the other hand, want to circumvent the entire intellectual process and just come to the conclusion that there’s no God. That’s lazy and moronic.”

The same is true about all faiths being equally valid. Don’t be lazy or moronic. Take the intellectual journey. For if “Christ has indeed been raised from the dead,” and you reject it, you “are to be pitied [above] all.”