By Kayla DeKraker
Easter is just a few days away, and theologian Jeremiah Johnston wants you to remember the power of the resurrection.
“John 14:19 is the greatest passage,” he told Kirk Cameron on the actor’s TBN show. “It’s the greatest promise in the New Testament. The promise that we’re given with more frequency than any promise comes right out of John 14:19. Jesus said, ‘Because I live, you will live also.’ And He didn’t mean we’re going to be ghosts someday or we’re going to be some kind of phantom or apparition. He meant we would live again physically, bodily.”
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Johnston, the president of the Christian Thinker’s Society, continued by recalling his experience visiting Lazarus’s tomb.
“I was in the tomb at Bethany in Lazarus’s tomb, 1.8 miles from the city center of Jerusalem,” he said. “And I yelled in the tomb, because I wanted to be like Jesus, in Greek, ‘…Lazarus, come out. Come forth.’ In fact, a lot of us joke that if Jesus hadn’t have said Lazarus’s name, everyone who was who was dead at the time would have just come out of their graves at the time.”
He added, “It is so vital that we understand the central importance of a Christian worldview as it relates to resurrection belief.”
Jesus speaks frequently about the resurrection in the Gospels.
“[Jesus] was constantly bringing up this resurrection power that Paul says, ‘Hey, this same power that raised Jesus from the dead, it can be alive in you and it’s alive in me,'” Johnston explained. “And that’s what makes us unstoppable Christians. And so, is it a real body? Yes. Read 1 Corinthians 15. I talk about in the book. Someday we’re going to have a body in Christ that never needs upgrading.”
The evidence for the resurrection is astonishing, as journalist Lee Strobel pointed out earlier this week.
“Without question, the amount of testimony and corroboration of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances is staggering,” he wrote on Instagram. “To put it into perspective, if you were to call each one of the witnesses to a court of law to be cross-examined for just fifteen minutes each, and you went around the clock without a break, it would take you from breakfast on Monday until dinner on Friday to hear them all. After listening to 129 straight hours of eyewitness testimony, who could possibly walk away unconvinced?
Because Jesus rose from the dead, those who believe in Him know that they will one day live again. Revelation 21:4 tells us, “He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever.” Because of Jesus, we have hope.
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