The Resurrection is the key

I've had plenty of doubts about Christianity and lots of unanswered questions. There's a lot of mystery, some of it good that leads me to awe and wonder and some of it strange that causes me to doubt. At times these doubts have been pretty strong and I've noticed they are often accompanied by trials which make me wonder, really wonder, whether this effort of living for Christ is worth it or is it just one big waste of time?

In the face of evolutionists, materialists, atheists, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jews, in the face of untold suffering, pointless pain and death, in the face of my own strong desires to just do what I want, why cling so tightly to a man from Nazareth?

All this goes some way to explaining why 1 Corinthians 15:16-19 may not be my favourite verses in the Bible nor the ones I think about the most but why they are probably the most important.

I've read all the arguments against the resurrection, I've considered the angles, looked at the best cases I can find and they all have one thing in common - they are unconvincing. They lack the 'ring of truth'. At times the thread to which my faith has clung has felt thin but when all other strands have given way, the Resurrection has to me proved unbreakable (see Mark Meynell for some of the apologetics). No other explanation seems to do justice. In the words of Sherlock Holmes, "Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth."

I was struck by this quote from Richard Dawkins after a debate with John Lennox,

"Yes, well that concluding bit rather gives the game away, doesn’t it? All that stuff about science and physics, and the complications of physics and things, what it really comes down to is the resurrection of Jesus. There is a fundamental incompatibility between the sophisticated scientist which we hear part of the time from John Lennox - and it’s impressive and we are interested in the argument about multiverses and things, and then having produced some sort of a case for a deistic god perhaps, some god that the great physicist who adjusted the laws and constants of the universe - that’s all very grand and wonderful, and then suddenly we come down to the resurrection of Jesus. It’s so petty, it’s so trivial, it’s so local, it’s so earth-bound, it’s so unworthy of the universe."

(HT: Mark Meynell)

Dawkins doesn't understand Jesus. Like those wanting the warrior Messiah, Dawkins rejects the idea of a humble carpenter, a suffering servant. Jesus is not nearly magnificent enough it seems (Philippians 2:8-12).

But what sort of humble God is this that would become earth-bound, local and limited? What sort of God would want to become human? The answer is found in Jesus, his life, his death, his resurrection. When he died the sky went dark, the earth mourned but when God raised him to life, I believe the angels sang something to the effect of 'The universe is unworthy of this kind of God.'

This blog post is part of the slipstream resurrection synchro blog.