Second, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is good news because it came after an apparent defeat. A victory is always good news. But news of victory after news that a battle has apparently been lost is even better.
Let me illustrate this by the way in which news of the battle of Waterloo first came to England. There were no telegrams or radio sets in those days. But everyone knew that a great battle was pending and was anxious to hear what would happen when Wellington, the British general, faced Napoleon. A signalman was placed on the top of Winchester Cathedral with instructions to keep his eye on the sea. When he received a message, he was to pass the message on to another man on a hill. That man was to pass it to another. And so it was to go until news of the battle was finally relayed to London and then across England. At length a ship was sighted through the fog which on that day lay thick on the channel. The signalman on board sent the first word—”Wellington.” The next word was “defeated.” Then fog closed in, and the ship could no longer be seen. “Wellington defeated!” The message was sent across England, and great gloom descended over the countryside. However, after two or three hours the fog lifted, and the signal came “again—Wellington defeated the enemy!” Now England rejoiced.
In the same way, when Jesus died, that fact plunged His friends into sadness. It was an apparent defeat. But then on the third day He rose again. When Jesus died men might have cried, “Jesus defeated, wrong has triumphed, sin has won.” But then after three days the fog lifted, and the full message came through to this world: “Jesus defeated the enemy. Jesus is risen.”
Third, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is good news because of all that it proves. What does it prove? It proves all that needs to be proved. It proves the essential doctrines of Christianity.
In the first place, it proves that there is a God and that the God of the Bible is the true God. Reuben A. Torrey, who often spoke and wrote well on these themes, put it this way:
Every effect must have an adequate cause,… and the only cause adequate to account for the resurrection of Christ is God, the God of the Bible. While here on earth, as everyone who has carefully read the story of his life knows, our Lord Jesus went up and down the land proclaiming God, the God of the Bible, “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” as he loved to call him, the God of the Old Testament as well as the New. He said that men would put him to death, that they would put him to death by crucifixion, and he gave many details as to what the manner of his death would be. He further said that after his body had been in the grave three days and three nights, God, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, the God of the Bible, the God of the Old Testament as well as the God of the New Testament, would raise him from the dead. This was a great claim to make. It was an apparently impossible claim. For centuries men had come and men had gone, men had lived and men had died, and as far as human knowledge founded upon definite observation and experience was concerned, that was the end of them. But this man Jesus does not hesitate to claim that his experience will be directly contrary to the uniform experience of long, long centuries….
That was certainly an acid test of the existence of the God he preached, and his God stood the test. He did exactly the apparently impossible thing that our Lord Jesus said he would do…The fact that Jesus was thus miraculously raised makes it certain that the God who did it really exists and that the God he preached is the true God.1
1R. A. Torrey, The Uplifted Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1965), 70-71.
