Five Witnesses to a Risen Christ

Picture a courtroom. The judge is seated. The gallery is full. The case before the bench is the most important case ever tried, because the verdict decides the eternity of every soul in the room. The question is simple. Did Jesus of Nazareth rise from the dead?

If He did not rise, Christianity is a fraud, your faith is empty, you are still in your sins, and nothing waits for you on the other side of the grave but judgment. Paul says so himself a few verses later in this same chapter. But if He did rise, everything is different. Sin is paid for. Death is broken. And the gospel is the most important news any human being will ever hear.

Paul knows what is at stake. So in 1 Corinthians 15, before he ever argues for our resurrection, he proves the resurrection of Jesus. He does it like a lawyer. Witness after witness. He puts them on the stand one by one and lets them testify.

Paul calls five witnesses. The Church, the Scriptures, the eyewitnesses, Paul himself, and the common message preached across the world. Five witnesses, one verdict. Hear from each in turn.

I. The Witness of the Church

Paul is writing to a real church in a real city. Corinth was a wicked place. Idolatry on every street corner. Sexual sin baked into the culture. Philosophy and pride at every dinner table. And in the middle of that city, there was a local body of believers. Paul calls them brothers. He recognizes them as fellow Christians. They had received the gospel, they were standing in it, and they were being saved by it.

That church was a miracle. Men who had bowed at pagan altars now broke bread together. Women who had no hope now sang of a risen Lord. Slaves and free, Jew and Greek, brought into one body. You cannot explain that church without the resurrection. A dead Jesus does not change Corinth. A risen Jesus does.

The church gives that testimony in two specific ways. Both ordinances preach the resurrection. When we baptize a believer, we are not just getting them wet. Romans 6 says we are buried with Christ in baptism and raised to walk in newness of life. Every baptism is a sermon on the resurrection. And when we come to the Lord’s Supper, yes, we proclaim His death, but we proclaim it “until He comes,” as 1 Corinthians 11 says. The Supper looks back to a cross and forward to a return, and you only have a return if you have a resurrection.

Bring this home. Sovereign Grace Baptist Church exists. We are here. Every Sunday we gather. Every member sitting in this room is a living exhibit in the case for the resurrection. Buddha died and stayed dead, and his followers admit it. Mohammed’s tomb is in Medina, and Muslims visit it to mourn, not to celebrate. But the church of Jesus Christ has been gathering for two thousand years to celebrate that her Lord is alive. Churches in Nigeria, in China, in North Korea, in the Middle East, in Brunswick, Georgia. All bear the same witness. He is risen.

Application

Beloved, do not take this lightly. Your membership in a faithful local church is no social club. It is a witness stand. When you walk in those doors, you are testifying that Jesus is alive. When you give, when you serve, when you sing, when you sit under the preached Word, you are saying to the watching world that Christ rose from the grave.

But Paul also gives a warning here. Verse 2 says, “if you hold fast the word, unless you believed for nothing.” He is not saying a true believer can lose his salvation. He is saying that some who profess Christ never really had Him. Judas was an apostle. Judas was a treasurer. Judas was a church member. And Judas went to his own place. Jesus warned of seed that springs up and dies, of tares among the wheat, of bad fish in the same net as the good. An intellectual faith that walks in a building, nods at the right doctrines, and never bows the heart is a useless faith.

So examine yourself. Are you a witness, or a hypocrite? Are you holding fast, or holding on by your fingertips with no real grip on Christ at all?

II. The Witness of the Scriptures

Notice that little phrase, repeated twice for emphasis. According to the Scriptures. Paul is not making this up. He is not improvising. He says, “I delivered to you what I also received.” From whom did he receive it? Ultimately from the Lord Himself, but he is pointing the Corinthians back to the written Word of God.

Here is something we cannot miss. When Paul says “the Scriptures,” he is talking primarily about the Old Testament. That is mostly what the early church had. He is saying the Old Testament itself testifies to the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The case for the resurrection was being made centuries before Jesus was ever born in Bethlehem.

Three things are nailed down in these two verses, and we must not miss any of them. First, Christ actually died. Not a swoon. Not a trance. Not a substitute, as the gnostics and later the Muslims claimed. It was Jesus, and He died a real death. Second, His death was substitutionary. “He died for our sins.” He took the punishment we earned. He stood in our place. Third, He was buried, and He rose on the third day, all of it according to the Scriptures.

Look at how Jesus Himself appealed to the Scriptures. On the road to Emmaus, He rebuked those two disciples and said, “O foolish men and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken,” and beginning with Moses and all the prophets, He explained the things concerning Himself. When the Pharisees demanded a sign, Jesus pointed to Jonah. As Jonah was three days in the fish, so the Son of Man would be three days in the heart of the earth.

The apostles followed His pattern. On the day of Pentecost, Peter did not freelance. He preached from Psalm 16. When Philip met the Ethiopian eunuch, the man was reading Isaiah 53, and Philip did not say, “Oh, put that Old Testament away, let me tell you about Jesus.” He started right there in Isaiah and preached Jesus to him from that very passage. When Paul stood before King Agrippa, he said he was saying nothing but what Moses and the prophets had said would come.

Application

Brethren, we must be a people of the Book. The Scriptures are not a launching pad for our own ideas. They are the testimony of God to His Son. Every group, every movement, every preacher who has drifted from the Bible has eventually shipwrecked on the gospel. Every time. No exception.

So when you sit under preaching, ask whether the man behind the pulpit is delivering what he received, or whether he is making it up. When you read the news of the religious world, hold every claim up against the Word of God. And when you open your Bible at home this week, do not just read it for inspiration. Read it as the witness of God Himself, telling you that His Son died for your sins and rose again.

Jesus said it Himself in John 5.

Do not just know the Word. Know the God of the Word. Know the Living Word.

III. The Witness of the Eyewitnesses

In any honest court of law, the testimony of reliable eyewitnesses is one of the strongest forms of evidence there is. So Paul takes us from the writings of dead prophets to the testimony of living men. He calls four sets of eyewitnesses to the stand.

Cephas

That is Peter. It is no accident Paul names him first. Peter had denied his Lord three times in a courtyard, with cursing and swearing. Peter was the disciple who failed publicly. And the risen Jesus appeared to him personally, before appearing to the rest. Why? Peter did not deserve it any more than the others. But Peter sure needed it.

What did Peter do with that grace? Picture it. Fifty days earlier, Peter had stood in a courtyard around a charcoal fire. A servant girl pointed at him, and the rough fisherman who had walked on water shrank down and said, “I do not know the man.” He said it once. He said it twice. The third time he cursed and swore he had never heard of Jesus of Nazareth. Then the rooster crowed, and Peter went out and wept bitterly.

Now picture him fifty days later. Same city. Same Peter. But now he is standing in front of thousands of Jews, many of them the very crowd that had screamed “crucify Him” weeks before. This time Peter does not shrink. He does not deny. He lifts up his voice and says, “This Jesus, whom you crucified, God has raised up.” Three thousand souls were saved that day. What changed Peter? Not therapy. Not a pep talk. Peter had seen Him alive.

The Twelve

They are still called “the twelve” even though Judas was gone, because that was their name. Jesus appeared to them in a locked room. He showed them His hands and His side. Luke records that He ate broiled fish in front of them. These men became the foundation of the church. Ephesians 2 says we are built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Himself as the cornerstone.

The Five Hundred

More than five hundred brothers at one time. Five hundred. Most of them, Paul says, were still alive when he wrote this letter. He is essentially saying, “If you do not believe me, go ask them.” That is not the language of a man inventing a religion. That is the language of a man inviting cross-examination.

James

This is almost certainly James the half-brother of Jesus. Think about that. John 7 tells us that during Jesus’ earthly ministry, His own brothers did not believe in Him. By the time of the early church, James was so respected that Paul calls him a pillar in Galatians 2. What changed his mind? His brother appearing to him, alive from the grave.

Then Paul says, “then to all the apostles.” Luke summarizes this in Acts 1, saying that Jesus presented Himself alive after His suffering by many “convincing proofs.” The Greek word Luke uses there appears only this one time in the New Testament. It means “many criteria of certainty.” God Himself reserved that word, and He pinned it to one event: the resurrection of His Son.

Application

Christian faith is no leap into the dark. It is a step into the light. We are not asked to believe in spite of the evidence. We are asked to believe because of it. The first Christians did not whip themselves into an emotional frenzy and convince themselves Jesus was alive. They saw Him. They touched Him. They ate with Him. Then they went out and most of them died for that testimony.

So when the world tells you that faith is for the weak and science is for the strong, stand up straight. You believe in a religion grounded in evidence. And when doubts come, as they do for every Christian at some point, do not run from your Bible. Run to it. The witnesses are still there in the text. Cephas. The twelve. The five hundred. James. Still testifying every time we open the book.

IV. The Witness of Paul

Paul could have lumped himself in with the other apostles, but he sets himself apart, and he does it for a reason. He is a special witness, a unique one. He calls himself “one untimely born.”

Think about how strange that is. He was not one of the original twelve. He had not walked the dusty roads of Galilee with Jesus. He was not in the upper room. He was not among the five hundred. By the time the resurrected Jesus appeared to Paul, Jesus had already ascended to the right hand of the Father. Every other appearance was during those forty days between the resurrection and the ascension. Paul’s was after.

Before all of that, Paul was not just an unbeliever. He was a hateful unbeliever. He was breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord. He was on the road to Damascus to drag Christians in chains back to Jerusalem when a light from heaven knocked him to the ground and a voice said, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?”

That was the day Paul was saved. That was the day he saw the risen Christ. And it was not the only time. Acts 18 tells us that in Corinth, the very city he is now writing to, the Lord stood by him in a vision and told him not to fear. Acts 23 tells us that in Jerusalem, after he had been beaten and arrested, the Lord stood by him again and told him to take courage. In 2 Corinthians 12, Paul tells us he was caught up to the third heaven and saw things he was not permitted to speak about.

Paul saw Jesus. Repeatedly. The man who hated Christ became the man who suffered most for Christ. The only explanation is that the resurrected Christ really did appear to him.

Application

There is hope here for the worst sinner in this room. Paul says, “I am the least of the apostles, and not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am.”

Maybe you are sitting there this morning thinking, “My life is too far gone. I have done too much. God could not save someone like me.” Beloved, the chief of sinners is now the chief of apostles. The man who held the coats while Stephen was stoned wrote half the New Testament. There is no sinner that grace cannot reach.

There is something here for the saint too. Paul says, “His grace toward me did not prove vain; but I labored even more than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God with me.” Grace does not make us lazy. Grace makes us labor. If you have been saved by the resurrected Christ, you ought to be the hardest working soul in town. Not to earn anything. Not to pay Him back. Because grace, when it lands in a heart, sets that heart on fire.

V. The Witness of the Common Message

Verse 11 is short, but do not pass it by. Paul is making a final point, and it is one of his strongest. No matter who was preaching, the message was the same.

Whether it was Paul, or Peter, or any one of the twelve. Whether it was a prophet, a missionary, a pastor, a deacon, or one of the five hundred. The message did not change. Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures. He was buried. He was raised on the third day.

There were not some preachers running around in the first century saying Jesus rose and others saying He did not. That was not up for debate inside the churches of Jesus Christ. Paul tells us in Philippians 1 that even men who had personal problems with him were still preaching the gospel, and Paul rejoiced for that. There were arguments over many things in the early church, but the gospel was not one of them.

And the message spread. With no central headquarters. No board of directors. No social media campaign. Christianity took root in the Alps and in North Africa and in Asia Minor and beyond, and the same message was preached in every place. Yes, there were a few isolated heresies. But overwhelmingly, the gospel of the risen Christ was the common thread.

And it is still the common thread today. You can walk into a Baptist church in Brunswick, or a Presbyterian church in Edinburgh, or a Methodist chapel in Africa, or a church in Papua New Guinea, and you will hear the same message. Christ died. Christ was buried. Christ rose. We are not comparing notes. There is no human authority telling us what to preach. The Holy Spirit through the Word has produced one common testimony across two thousand years and seven continents.

Application

Some of you reading this were not saved in a Baptist church. Some of you came to faith under a preacher you would not now agree with on every point of doctrine. That is alright. The common message reached you. Christ was preached, and you believed.

That does not mean every church is a true church. It does not mean doctrine does not matter. We will contend for the faith. But it does mean we should rejoice wherever the gospel of the risen Christ goes forward. As Paul said in Philippians, “Christ is preached, and in this I rejoice.”

And the unity of that message is itself a witness. If the resurrection were a lie, the story would have unraveled long ago. Lies do not hold together across centuries and continents. The truth does.

The Verdict

We have heard from five witnesses. The Church, with two thousand years of changed lives. The Scriptures, written centuries before the cross, foretelling the empty tomb. The eyewitnesses, more than five hundred of them, who saw Him alive. Paul himself, the persecutor turned apostle, who saw Him too. And the common message, preached from the Alps to the islands of the sea.

Five witnesses. One verdict. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.

Now the question comes to you. The judge looks down. The gallery falls silent. The question is no longer about the evidence. The question is about you. What will you do with the risen Christ?

For the One Who Has Never Trusted Christ

Hear me carefully. Jesus, the eternal Son of God, took on flesh. He lived a perfect life you could never live. He went to a Roman cross and there bore in His own body the wrath of God against sin. Your sin. He was buried in a borrowed tomb. And on the third day, by the power of God, He came out of that tomb alive, never to die again.

He did not do that for Himself. He did it for sinners. And the call of the gospel comes to you today. Repent of your sin. Turn from it. And believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. Trust Him, not your works, not your church attendance, not your good intentions. Trust the risen Christ. The chief of sinners was saved. The persecutor was forgiven. The thief on the cross went to paradise. There is room at the cross for you. Will you come today?

For the Believer

Here is your charge. Go from this article and live as a person who really believes Jesus is alive. That means three concrete things this week.

First, be in the church. Stand in the assembly that bears witness to the risen Lord. Do not drift. Do not let small offenses or busy schedules pull you away. Your faithful presence is a sermon to a watching world.

Second, be in the Word. Open your Bible this week, not as a duty, but as a meeting. The same Scriptures that testified of Christ to the disciples on the Emmaus road still testify to Him today. Read it. Believe it. Obey it.

Third, be a witness. Open your mouth. Someone in your life this week needs to hear what you have heard. You do not have to be Paul. You do not have to be Peter. Just be the next link in the chain of the common message. Christ died. Christ was buried. Christ rose. Tell somebody.

The atheists, the agnostics, and the skeptics have got nothing. No body, no tomb, no witnesses, no message that has held together for two thousand years. We have all of it. We have a risen Lord. And one day we will see Him face to face, and we will say with John, “amen, come, Lord Jesus.”

Until then, beloved, live like He is alive. Because He is.