Transcript
Stephen: Following his death, where are the disciples? They're found in an upper room in Jerusalem, hiding. They're living in fear of the Jews.
Then you roll forward maybe about 40 days or so. You get to the day of Pentecost. Where are the disciples now, and what are they like?
Well, they're in the middle of a crowd, in the middle of Jerusalem, in the middle of the Jews, and they are boldly associating with Jesus, and they're boldly preaching in his name. It's this complete transformed scene. So what do we make of it all?
Joel: Because if you don't accept the resurrection, you need an alternate historically plausible explanation of that data—that this message went out from the city where Jesus Christ was crucified. These people previously ran from suffering. Now they embrace it. They're willing to die for this message. What changed in their thinking?
Well, the resurrection is an adequate explanation—that they genuinely had encounters with the risen Jesus Christ. I've not heard another suggestion that would adequately explain what accounted for that transformation.
Sometimes we can be guilty in a modern world of what C.S. Lewis called chronological snobbery. We look back and think these societies were primitive. People were unintelligent. They're really superstitious and would believe anything. That's just not true. That's wrong.
Stephen: Thomas is an example.
Joel: Yeah. Thomas, and Paul when we do a separate episode on Paul.
Thomas was deeply skeptical. Paul was openly hostile to the belief in the resurrection. When he became a Christian, he was on his way to imprison Christians and put Christians to death.
So what brought that about if it wasn't the resurrection?
The truth is that Christianity was born into the least ideal conditions that you can think of. It was not a society that you were expected to be conducive to the message that was preached. Yet somehow the Christian gospel, the message that we now find in the Bible, transformed that ancient pagan, brutal society through conversions, through individuals being confronted with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
There's a verse later on in Acts where the disciples are accused of, through their preaching, turning the world upside down. That's kind of what they did, because the gospel message changed, and continues to change, the world to this day.
How did that happen? Well, the message turned the world upside down because it transformed the people inside out. Whenever they understood the implications of the death and resurrection of Christ, the people were radically, utterly, at the core of their beings, completely changed and converted.
Stephen: There was a video recently by Babylon Bee at Easter time. It was basically playing that scene out where people would say, "Well, this was just a lie. This was just made up by the disciples."
It's like, "Here guys, here's a good idea. Let's all say that Jesus rose from the dead."
Some other disciples said, "Okay, what's in it for us?"
It's like, "Well, we're going to suffer and we're going to die."
Everyone's like, "Yay, let's go for it."
And this one guy's going, "Wait a second. Are you sure?"
The point is, when you read through Acts, and that's not the end of the story for the disciples, but even in the text of Acts, these early disciples lose so much, or they suffer so much.
Within the first five or six chapters of Acts, they're threatened by the religious leaders. They're in prison. They're in prison again. They're beaten.
If you go up to chapter 12, James, one of the apostles, is killed. Peter is then taken, and he's the next on the list.
They're facing, and often suffered, the ultimate cost for the message of the resurrection.
So this is an incredible movement from running to save their life to, as you said, embracing suffering.
We read this verse the second time after they're imprisoned. It talks about how they went away rejoicing to have suffered shame for his name.
I think the core of that is they believed in the reality of the risen Christ. They believed in resurrection as a thing. They believed that suffering was temporary and there's eternal glory beyond. All these things make sense only because of the fact that it's all true. Christ rose from the dead.
Joel: Absolutely.
Wes Huff was on Steven Bartlett's Diary of a CEO podcast recently. Steven was asking him about some of the things that we were discussing, and he said, if I remember it correctly, "Liars make bad martyrs."
People will die for the truth. Occasionally they will die for lies that they believe to be the truth, but no one dies for a lie that they have made up themselves.
That response to suffering is one of the things... there's nothing more Christlike than confronting, embracing, enduring suffering that leads to joy.
That's one of the things that really brought transformation, because people heard the gospel. They didn't just hear a list of commands to fulfil. They didn't hear an interesting story. They saw something that made a difference in people's lives.
One of the examples of this is in Acts 16.
Paul and Silas are imprisoned for preaching the gospel in the city of Philippi. There's a jailer in that prison. It's likely that he's a former Roman soldier. He's seen some stuff. He's probably done some stuff. A lot of brutality.
Paul and Silas come to him. They've been viciously beaten. They've been unrighteously imprisoned. He throws them in the stocks.
At midnight, they're singing and praising God.
This man had seen suffering, but he hadn't seen a response to suffering like that.
That is one of the things. The evidence of the power in the message is not just the factual basis for Christianity, and that's really important. Without evidence, there's no possibility of faith.
The power that's in the message is also seen in the transformation of the lives of the people who embrace that message, who believe it.
Stephen: Yeah, absolutely. We want to continue this theme of transformation. We'll look at that in the next couple of episodes—just how the gospel transformed individuals and groups of people.
