The Bible's Story: Resurrection, Paul, and Faith

The story of the Bible, the reason we have the Bible, is because Jesus's followers discovered that his tomb was empty, and they assumed initially that someone had stolen the body. Nobody assumed a resurrection. But later that same day, the women and his closest male followers saw Jesus, and suddenly, there were Jesus sightings all around Jerusalem, the very city in which he had been arrested and tried and eventually crucified. [00:02:24]

And once Jesus rose from the dead, and once people knew that he rose from the dead, suddenly, instantly, the story of Jesus became very, very, very important. But it wasn't until the resurrection, and that's why we said throughout this series, if there had been no resurrection, there would be no Bible, because the story of Jesus would not have been worth telling. [00:02:51]

When Gentiles, when non-Jewish people, became enamored with Jesus, they became enamored with the sacred texts that told of his coming. We would call it or they would call it the Hebrew Bible, or we would call it the Old Testament. But they called it the Law and the Prophets. And so, the early church got really interested in this book, not because they were interested in Judaism, but because they were interested in Jesus, and this was the backstory to his story. [00:04:01]

The apostle Paul explains the relationship between the parts of the Bible. In fact, if you ever get confused about how does the Old Testament and the New Testament work together, why does it seems to say one thing here and one thing there, the apostle Paul is your guy. He explains how Christians should view and how Christians should use the Old Testament, and he should know, because he was an expert in the law. [00:11:45]

The apostle Paul had extraordinary, extraordinary, extraordinary clarity about the relationship between the Jewish scriptures and what would eventually be called the New Testament. This is the Jewish scripture. This is my Greek New Testament from seminary. I will confess, this got a lot more use than this, because Hebrew is such a difficult, difficult language. But the apostle Paul knew this backward and forward, and it would eventually be used to write much of this. [00:12:34]

The second piece of advice to us, I think, would be this: you should take your application cues from Jesus's new covenant command. Then when it comes to application, you get inspiration and motivation here, and the stories are fascinating, and it points in the direction of Jesus, but when it comes to knowing how to live your life, how to manage your money, how to manage your marriage and your relationships, the apostle Paul clearly teaches that we should take our application cues from Jesus's new covenant command. [00:14:54]

As I have loved you, you are to love one another. In fact, by that unique kind of love, the entire world will know that you are my follower. In other words, don't love as you've been loved by others, and don't even love others the way you want them to love you. That's the golden rule. We're moving beyond that. This is the platinum rule. I want you to treat people that you meet, I want you to treat people in your family, I want you to treat people at school and at work and at play, I want you to treat every single person you are ever eyeball-to-eyeball with, face-to-face with, I want you to treat them in light of the way that your heavenly Father treated you through me. [00:16:12]

The apostle Paul authenticates the most important event recorded in this book. The apostle Paul authenticates in a way that no one else does the most important event in the Bible, because the most important event in the Bible is the reason we have the Bible. It's the resurrection. Again, if there was no resurrection of Jesus, there would be no Bible. [00:23:27]

Paul's letter, Paul's letter to Christians living in Corinth, Paul's letter to Corinthian believers is indisputable evidence that Jesus's resurrection was accepted immediately, immediately after it supposedly happened, not eventually, that just because this one letter in I Corinthians is indisputable evidence that the Jewish community in Jerusalem immediately, not the Jewish community, the Christian-Jewish community in Jerusalem, accepted the idea of Jesus's resurrection immediately, not many, many, many years later. [00:25:42]

If the Christian community created and fabricated the life and the message of Jesus, and if they fabricated the story of the resurrection, then how in the world did the apostle Paul know about it so close to the time of the resurrection? In his letter to Christians living in Corinth, he said there are, he writes to them. He says there are currently hundreds, hundreds of people in the city of Jerusalem that saw Jesus alive from the dead. So again, belief in the resurrection was immediate, not eventual. [00:27:36]

The Bible, as fabulous as it is, did not create Christianity. The Bible did not create Christianity. Christianity, the Christian faith, is the result of an event that launched or created a movement that produced texts that were collected and protected and bound into a book. Christianity is the result of an event, the resurrection, that created a movement, the church, that produced texts, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, the epistles of Paul and Peter and others, that were collected to the years and protected through the years because they were considered so valuable, and then eventually bound together into a book that we call the Bible. [00:38:26]

The story of the Bible reminds us that the most important question is this: are you at peace with the God who sent his Son into this world to die and to pay for your sins so that you could have what Jesus promised, eternal life, and a relationship with your Father in heaven, because that's where the story of the Bible intersects with your story, and that is the story of the Bible. [00:40:17]