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April 23, 2025
While they were going, behold, some of the guard went into the city and told the chief priests all that had taken place. And when they had assembled with the elders and taken counsel, they gave a sufficient sum of money to the soldiers and said, “Tell people, ‘His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ And if this comes to the governor's ears, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” So they took the money and did as they were directed. And this story has been spread among the Jews to this day. -Matthew 28:11-15
Skeptics often argue that the resurrection of Christ cannot be verified, citing the claim that He appeared only to His disciples. But this overlooks a remarkable detail: some of the first eyewitnesses to the resurrection were not sympathetic followers, but Roman soldiers stationed at the tomb to thwart any schemes of deceit. What they observed was extraordinary—blinding light, a stone rolled away, an angelic proclamation, and an empty grave. These men had neither motive nor incentive to fabricate such a tale, and the sheer number of witnesses lent weight to their report. The chief priests, faced with an inconvenient truth, did not contest the account. They simply silenced it—offering bribes to the guards and concocting the fiction that Christ’s disciples had stolen the body. For those hostile to Christ, an empty tomb is not a mystery to be solved, but a scandal to be suppressed.
This raises a pressing question: why does the resurrection provoke such fierce opposition from the unbelieving? Many religions comfortably accept Christ as a historical figure, a teacher, even a prophet. But when it comes to His resurrection, the mood shifts. Why the hesitation? The answer is theological, not historical. The resurrection is not a vague spiritual metaphor—it is a definitive proclamation that Christ alone is the true and living God. The founders of other religions are all dead; Christ alone rose. To admit this is to declare all rival creeds and philosophies false. That is a truth too costly for many to bear. God’s enemies grasp, perhaps better than His friends, that if Christ is risen, their idols are dead. Those who build their lives on lies will always see the truth as a threat. Christianity, uniquely, asserts an absolute moral standard—one that exposes sin, condemns pride, and offers a freedom not of man’s making. To embrace the resurrection is to confess guilt and to kneel. And for many, pride prefers a tomb.
Faith is not opposed to reason; rather, it is reason rightly ordered under grace.
The guards, the chief priests, and the elders did not reject Christ for want of evidence. They had more than enough. Their unbelief was not intellectual, but willful. No quantity of proof could quench their resolve to erase both the memory and the meaning of Christ. Their loyalty lay not with truth, nor the good of the people, nor even with the Scriptures they claimed to defend. Under the guise of guarding against blasphemy, they conspired to crucify the very Author of life—dulling their own sense of justice, honour, and integrity in the process. Their unbelief revealed not a lack of reason, but the very essence of atheistic dogma: the refusal to bend the knee.
Atheism, after all, is not born of evidence, but of enmity. It is the fruit of a heart intent on suppressing the truth—a moral revolt rather than an epistemic one.
This raises another necessary question: if the real obstacle is spiritual blindness, what role does evidence even play? And does faith demand a leap into the void—or does it, in fact, see more clearly than unbelief ever could?
The Christian faith is not a flight of fancy but an allegiance to truth—and truth, by its very nature, invites evidence. The New Testament authors consistently appeal to both the regenerating work of the Spirit and the empirical grounding of the resurrection. Faith is not opposed to reason; rather, it is reason rightly ordered under grace.
The Apostle Paul makes his case not by emotional appeal, but by invoking historical fact, eyewitness testimony, and divine revelation: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.”
Peter echoes this insistence on factual grounding. Christianity, he declares, is no “cleverly devised myth” but a faith rooted in the eyewitness experience of divine majesty: “For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,’ we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain. And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”
It is, in truth, impossible to conceive of a world in which Christ did not rise. His resurrection is not an isolated marvel of religious history—it is the axis upon which the world turns.
What makes these accounts all the more striking is the nature of the men who penned them. They were not predisposed to believe—they were, at first, skeptics, cowards, even enemies. Peter, who once trembled before a servant girl and denied his Lord three times, was preaching Christ with unflinching boldness within weeks. Paul, a Pharisee and fierce persecutor of the Church, was undone by an encounter with the risen Christ—and remade. He would go on to become the Church’s most prolific theologian and tireless missionary. These men were not merely messengers of the resurrection; they were themselves its evidence. Their transformation was not the product of religious nostalgia but the result of divine interruption. Christ, the Lord of life, redemption, and resurrection, had taken hold of them. Dead men don’t speak—yet these men lived and preached as those brought back from the grave. The risen Lord had lit a fire in their bones, and no power on earth could put it out.
It is, in truth, impossible to conceive of a world in which Christ did not rise. His resurrection is not an isolated marvel of religious history—it is the axis upon which the world turns. It shapes our reckoning of time, grounds the meaning of love and vocation, undergirds justice, and breathes life into education, enterprise, and economy. It is the fountainhead of peace and joy, the rationale for sacrifice and redemption, the spine of civilization’s most profound moments of flourishing. It is the reason some wars are worth fighting, and others worth ending. It is the unseen architecture beneath human dignity and hope beyond the grave. Even those who reject Him do so while walking on the very ground His resurrection secured. This is Christ’s cosmos. It has a King—one who is reconciling all things to Himself, who answers evil not with compromise but with conquest by good, who gathers the nations like grain into His storehouse, and who will, in time, return in glory.
