The Big Picture of the Bible: Chapter 11 The Resurrection Provides Proof and Power

11 THE RESURRECTION PROVIDES PROOF AND POWER. Most everyone believes that Jesus was a great moral teacher, but of course the New Testament presents Him as much more. Throughout the four gospels, we have thirty five different miracles seeking to prove that Jesus had powers beyond our own human limitations. His power over nature provided strong confirmation of His divine claims. The hundreds of prophecies of the Messiah in the Old Testament were all fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth. And that goes beyond mere coincidence. We don’t in any way want to diminish the importance of that kind of evidence, but all claims of Jesus stand or fall with His resurrection from the dead. Without His resurrection His claim to be the Son of God, deity in human flesh vanishes into thin air. Without the resurrection His death as payment for our sins is meaningless. Without the resurrection we are wasting our time. The importance of the resurrection was immediately recognized by the apostles. And we find statement after statement in the New Testament empathizing the importance of Jesus’ full and complete victory over death. In the words of Paul from 1 Corinthians 15, “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith… Continued by book author Kenneth W. Craig