← Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey
Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey
BONUS | The Facts Confirm Jesus’ Resurrection. Here’s the Reason People Still Deny It | Wes Huff
00:26:11
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
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B
Thanks so much for joining us again. Okay. You've been all over the place. I follow you on Instagram on X. It seems like you've been traveling the world. I saw you on Diary of a CEO where you got to share the gospel. So I just want to hear a little bit from you. I'm sure the audience does too. What has that been like, getting to share the gospel with these huge, huge audiences?
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A
Yeah, I've been very privileged to be able to get around and people in venues where the gospel and the reliability and truthfulness of the Christian faith might not otherwise be communicated. So I'm just very humbled and appreciative of continually being asked to do things. It might seem like I'm doing a lot. I'm actually trying to mitigate my schedule as much as possible and I'm saying no to a whole lot of things. But actually just got back yesterday from a trip in Washington D.C. i was leading a group through a VIP tour of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Museum of the Bible. And then my colleague Andy Steiger with Apologetics Canada, we did a couple of talks there. So, yeah, busy took my family, which was great. We were able to run around Washington D.C. and introduce my Canadian children to some American history, which is always fun.
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B
So did your kids get to play at that little play area at the Museum of the Bible?
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A
Oh, yeah, it's great.
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B
That's the best. That's the best. We've done that too. Also. Yes. Social media really does kind of seem to like amplify and multiply all the places we go and things we do. People say all the time, oh my gosh, you're traveling constantly. Like I'm actually not. Social media makes it seem like that, but same kind of thing. You have to be super selective in what you do, but you're doing a great job. So I'm just very grateful for your apologetics and your boldness and sharing the gospel. I want to get into the Resurrection because this is coming out right before or right on Easter weekend. We haven't quite decided yet. And I want to hear from you. What do you think is the best evidence of the bodily resurrection of Jesus?
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A
Yeah, you know what? I'm really fan of looking at somewhat of a two step approach that the Gospels go back to the eyewitnesses and through that content and the context, lies, lies are ruled out. Right. So if it goes back to early eyewitness testimony, then the accusation of embellishments and this adding of something like the resurrection after the fact, I Think really doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It seems that the gospel authors get the details right, the small details, things like geography and name correlation and even plant life in some instances. And so if they get the small details right, I don't think it's that big of a leap to say that they get the big details right. And then ultimately I think that what we're dealing with, if we are dealing with eyewitness testimony, which I think is very well attested to, is that we have these testimonies of these early disciples of Jesus. And either the disciples were deceivers, they were deceived, or they were telling the truth. And I think when you start to stack up the evidence of what's going on, I don't think they were deceivers, I don't think they were deceived. And I do think that everything points to their life radically changing in a powerful way because they encountered their rabbi getting murdered and then rising from the dead.
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B
Yeah. What do you make of this accusation that the Gospel of Mark, it's the oldest account of Jesus's life. And I've heard Muslims and people just skeptical of the resurrection, say that Mark didn't originally include Jesus's resurrection, therefore it must have been something added later.
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A
Yeah. So there is what's called a textual variant issue with the longer ending of Mark. If you go to the very end of your Gospel of Mark, you'll see that if you're reading a modern translation like an ESV or an NIV or an nlt, that there will be a citation note saying something to the effect of that the earliest manuscripts and the most reliable manuscripts do not include that last sort of sec section in chapter 16. I think that is actually true. However, I don't think that means that the resurrection isn't there. It's obviously there. Before that instance, you have the women showing up to the tomb and they encounter an angel who says, why are you looking for the living amongst the dead? Jesus is not here. He is risen. And so I think there. There's some questions, there's some sort of ancient noise about the different versions of the longer ending of Mark that we have. However, at chapter 16, verse 8, it ends and says that the women were scared and tell no one. And I personally think that's where Mark meant to leave it off in that. Well, they obviously told someone because Mark is writing it down. But also I think Mark is being purposeful and he's saying, what are you going to do with it? And this is too good not to tell somebody. Don't be like those women. Go out and preach the gospel.
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B
Is there anything in the account of Jesus's crucifixion or the resurrection that you think people miss? That as you're reading these accounts stand out to you either is something that adds veracity to the stories or just as something theologically significant.
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A
Hmm, that's a really good question, I think. You know, what I always find interesting about the crucifixion account is that the Gospel authors are very purposeful to make sure that the audience understands that Jesus was truly dead and that that matters and that, that the. When Jesus prophesies and the people want things like miracles and he says, you're just going to get the miracle of Jonah, the sign of Jonah. Just as Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights, so the Son of man will be in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. And it's really interesting that if you go back to the story of Jonah in the book of Jonah in the Old Testament, Jonah's prayer from the belly of the great fish was, he says, I cry out from the depths of Sheol. What is Sheol? Sheol is the realm of the dead. There's actually a, A, a string of interpretation within ancient Judaism that Jonah was actually dead in the fish and that when he was spat up, he was resurrected. Now it could mean, you know, he's in the depths of despair. It's like he's in the place of the underworld. He might as well be there because he's in the bottom of the ocean in the belly of a fish. But I think, you know, it's interesting to look at that, that the ancient Jews probably would have understood Jesus. I mean, if they had understood him correctly, which they continually don't do, but if they'd understood him correctly saying, you know, I'm going to be dead. I'm going to be really dead. And then something radical is going to happen just as Jonah is then put onto the shore to, to preach the good news to people who are undeserving of it, I'm going to be the better Jonah. I'm going to come and I'm going to do it. And I'm not going to, you know, be running from God. I'm going to be fulf what God has actually planned. But you know, on top of that, Ali, I think it's really interesting after that that in all four Gospels, in Matthew 26, in Luke 15, in John 19, and in Mark 15, you have this instance of Pentecost where the Holy Spirit is. Just a few weeks after Jesus's crucifixion, it comes on them. And then you have the martyrdom of Stephen, which is a warning shot for the disciples. Now they know it's costly. One of their own has died for this proclamation. And then what do they do? They go back to Jerusalem. They go back to Jerusalem and they proclaim the good news of the kingdom. Now Jerusalem, that's like ground zero, right? That's where this whole thing happened, right? It's so interesting to me that they go back to the place where Jesus was crucified, where there would have been eyewitnesses who would have seen his body dead, hanging on a cross. And yet that's where they go to proclaim this news. Knowing that friends of theirs have lost their lives for this message, Knowing that people would have been able to say, say we know where the tomb is, right? That Joseph of Arimathea guy, apparently he's buried in his family tomb. There's so much at stake here. And yet the disciples know that there's too much not at stake to not preach this message. If they were lying, if they were deceiving people, go out into the broader, you know, countryside, go to the places where people would not have been able to say, hey, wait a minute, Jesus, I saw Jesus die. And so I think just the, the concreteness of Jesus truly died. That's a historical fact. This historical character, this Jewish itinerant rabbi, he was dead. He was crucified on a Roman cross. The Romans knew exactly how to do that very, very well. And then he appears to his disciples alive again. That's a historical question. Dead, buried, oh, seen alive. What do we do with that? How do we answer that historically? And I think there needs to be given an account for the disciples actions afterwards. They saw something and it completely radically changed their world.
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B
And the reason why it's important for us to emphasize that Jesus really died, some people may not know that that's a claim that skeptics will make, that Jesus didn't really die, that he came close to death on the cross and that I guess maybe he was in a coma or he was just chilling in the grave for three days and then he felt better and he decided, I don't know, to move the stone away or something and then walk out of the grave to try to deny this kind of miracle of the resurrection. But I remember you talking about this on Joe Rogan, that if there's one thing that the Romans were really good at, it was crucifixion and making sure that people suffer and die. Right?
- [09:44]
A
Yeah, it's true. There are skeptics, it's sometimes called the swoon theory, that argue that Jesus survived the cross and then somehow recovered in the tomb. I've heard Muslims articulate it by saying he recovered in the cool of the tomb, as if, you know, it's such a restorative place in a. In a crypt. I think the skeptics who say that are not the skeptics who are actually evaluating the evidence academically or I even, I think, honestly, it's a, it's a radical minority position that Jesus survived crucifixion because all of the evidence, you basically have to throw out all of the historical and all of the medical evidence about what we know happens within a Roman crucifixion. Every Roman guard, centurion, soldier who was responsible for Jesus's death would have been on the hook if he did not die, and their lives would have been forfeit. And so this is not something that Roman soldiers, you know, just do glibly. The Romans crucified hundreds, if not thousands of people. They were very, very good at. They didn't invent the process of crucifixion, but they certainly then made it what it was. They kind of brought it into its fullness in, in as a torture mechanism and device. But it was. It's just. It's just, it's foolish at best to posit that Jesus did not die on the cr.
- [11:20]
B
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A
I would. And you know what? We see even skeptics within the New Testament themselves coming to terms with the evidence. Thomas at the end of John's gospel, John 20:25, says, Unless I see in his hands the marks of the nails and place my fingers into the marks of those nails and place my hands into his side, I will never believe. This is a skeptical kind of reaction. In John chapter seven, it says that not even Jesus's own brothers believed him. And then we have Paul writing to Timothy in 1 Timothy 1:13 through Though formerly I was a blasphemer of Christ. Paul says, a persecutor and insolent an opponent. He says, but I've received mercy because I have had acted ignorantly in my unbelief. It's interesting that word we translate as unbelief is actually the same word that we would translate as not trusting, not putting faith in. And so we see even in the New Testament itself, examples of skepticism and doubt of what's going on. I think sometimes people look at this and they say, oh, that's, you know, 2,000 years ago. These were just ignorant people. This is what CS Lewis calls chronological snobbery. You know, that we would believe ali something like the virgin birth. Well, you know what Mary's objection to the angel was? Hey, I know how babies are made. I fail the minimum requirements for having a baby. How can this be? She says, that's a scientific objection. These weren't stupid people. They knew exactly how the world works. Sure, they had more of a supernatural understanding of things, but just because it was a few thousand years behind us doesn't mean they were dumb. And I think the same goes with the resurrection. They weren't dumb. Thomas knew that dead people don't rise from the dead, and that's why it's so amazing.
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B
And what do you think the significance is? This is just a question that popped into my mind of Jesus maintaining his wounds because even if he had resurrected bodily, he could have healed himself. He could have had this perfect, woundless body. But of course, as you just said with the account of Thomas, he still did have the nail holes in his hands. Why do you think think that is?
- [15:15]
A
That's a really interesting observation, isn't it, that Jesus had at least some degree of the physical marks of the crucifixion. I think what's probably going on there is that, you know, in John's letters, he says that God is love. And if love is the greatest ethic, then the greatest example of the greatest ethic is self sacrifice. And there's something very profound about the Son of God who stepped off his throne in eternity and lived a simple life in humanity and going to the cross voluntarily as the second person of the Trinity, taking on our depravity, then in eternity as the eternal God, man in glory, having the physical representations of that particular event. I think it's meant to be a reminder to us that for all eternity Jesus is going to bear the marks of the glorification of the Godhead, how God is truly glorified. The cross wasn't a contingency plan. It wasn't a mistake. God didn't create people and go, oops, they rebelled. What am I going to do? No. In both Peter's letters and in Revelation, it says that before the foundations of the world were lain, the Lamb was slain. This was the plan, all from the beginning, that the God who is the exempl, the example of love is going to then exemplify that in the greatest possible ethic, which is self sacrifice. And Jesus does that willingly.
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B
Amen. What do you think the significance is of the resurrection of the bodies of believers? I mean, we read that this is necessary for us to believe. It's necessary for us to believe in the resurrection of Jesus. Or else our faith is just foolishness. It's not anchored on much. But we also have to believe that we are going to be resurrected one day. And I think that's a passage that confuses a lot of Christians. It's not like, preached about or talked about a lot because a lot of people are confused about it. But obviously this concept of bodily resurrection is really important within Christianity. Why do you think that is?
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A
It's a sign of restoration, Ali. It's a sign that when Jesus says, you know, I'm making all things new in the book of Revelation, that that's a promise that we understand that the world was not created to be the way that it is, that it was created. Good. We see that very first pages of the very first chapter of the very first book of the Bible. God creates the world and it's good. And he continually says, it's good, it's good, it's good, it's good. And then for the thick people in the original audience, at the very end, it says, and it was very good. It's a reminder that this is. This world, it's marred by sin, but it was meant for so much more. And that's going to be restored. We're going to see how God makes all things new. And Ali, you and I, we're not spirits that have a body. We are fully physical and spiritual. And there's a. There's something about that, about the way that we live our life here, about the way that we treat our health, about the way that we treat those around us, that I think we need to not forget that the hope, the goal is not just to float away and be some sort of ethereal spirit in the clouds. We are meant to in. In like our resurrected Savior, have a physical body, a glorified body, which means something that exemplifies the beauty of the creation in the way that God originally meant it to be.
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B
Just to end this conversation, can you talk a little bit about heaven and also the new heaven and the new earth? For those who might not know, maybe they're exploring Christianity. I mean, that is the hope of victory that we have, that is claimed through Jesus's death and resurrection. So I think it's good for people to have a pict of what that hope actually looks like.
- [19:03]
A
Yeah, I think we often have this understanding that the. Our end goal is to get to heaven, that we die and we leave this mortal coil and that's it, and we're trying to escape. That's actually an ancient pagan idea. The ancient Platonic philosophers and the Gnostics believed that the physical was bad and the spiritual was good and that our spirits are really trapped in these meat prisons and the goal is to get away from this all. And, and that's why when you look at Paul's preaching on Mars Hill, they're tracking with him in the. In the Areopagus at that place, that meeting place for philosophers to speak in public. They're tracking with them pretty well until he drops the word resurrection. And then. And then they're no longer. Then they start saying, he's crazy. He's drunk.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Because that is their understanding, right? That, that. That you are meant to be a spiritual, ethereal being and that you are limited by this physical body. And I think we swallow something that's false when we think of heaven as the final goal. What we read about and what, you know, you see within the Old Testament in the hope of the resurrection is that all of the created order is going to be aligned and made new and restored. And that's going to be beautiful. The same beauty that we marvel at when we see a sunrise, when we see the mountains, when we see the ocean, when we just look at Creation and it just sings to us of God's glory, that's going to be restored to what it was meant to be. We're going to be in awe once again at mountains, at stars, at oceans, at valleys, at, you know, forests, at deserts. These things are going to continue to bring us into awe in eternity, because God is going to resurrect us in a body that is, I think, although I don't know exactly, probably analogous to something that we have here on Earth, but much, much better. Much, much more just what it was meant to be. But heaven, Ali, Heaven is the layover. It's. It's going to be a great layover. It's going to be amazing layover, but it's not going to be the end goal. We can still hope in heaven for the restoring of all things, for when, as you read in Revelation, heaven and Earth come together and we dwell with God, and he is the presence that gives us that hope and that restorative newness. I'm really looking forward to it. And I have to continue to remind myself, because it's so easy to forget. This is a promise. It's not an if. It's not a maybe. Ali, you and I are going to stand in the new heavens and the new Earth, and we are going to glorify our God and our Risen Savior Year in a way that I don't think we can ever fully understand, but I'm looking forward to it. And something like Easter, as Paul says, that's the first fruits. It's just this little taste. It's like a. A taste test for a meal that we can't even imagine how good it's going to be.
- [22:06]
B
Amen. Amen. I think it'll feel something like, although you Know, we really can't fully even comprehend what it'll feel like to step to the other side of eternity and heaven and the uniting of heaven and earth. But a weak, maybe earthly analogy is, you know, when you've been traveling as you have for the past couple of days, and just imagine the most stressful travel days that you've ever had, and you don't even realize it, but you're holding tension in every part of your body. Your immune system is shutting down. You're worn down, you're aggravated, and then you finally get home, you get to sleep in your own bed that night. All the tension is released. You feel restored. And I just imagine that is a small taste of what it'll be like in heaven. We don't even realize the weight on the burden of sin, our own sin, and the sin of the world that we are carrying through this life. And to feel just the relief of the freedom from sin and the effects of sin forever. I think we can't even imagine the joy that we will experience in that moment. And as you said, it's not just an escape from the bad things of this world. It's about glorifying God forever. And that's where we find our joy. But it is a gift also that we will get relief from the sin that has been binding us for so long. And you're right. We see that in the resurrection that death couldn't hold him, that sin can't hold us, and that we get to defeat death with Jesus in eternity by going to heaven and spending forever with him. Thank you.
- [23:36]
A
That analogy hit a little bit too close to home after traveling for a number of hours with four kids and getting home last night. But you're exactly right.
- [23:43]
B
That's exactly what it feels. I know exactly how you feel. Well, Wes, thank you so much. You are a blessing to the body of Christ. And I am so incredibly grateful for just how God has equipped you and how you are using those gifts to serve the body. So thank you so much.
- [23:58]
A
Always a pleasure to be on and chat. Thanks, Allie.
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B
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