1. "No, death was not the end of Jesus’s bodily life. We Christians understand the physical resurrection of Jesus to be every bit as important as his physical birth in Bethlehem and his physical death at Calvary. And as stunning a claim as that may seem to some, we have these witnesses here that I pray will help and encourage you in your understanding of Jesus and your faith in him this Christmas season."
2. "Favor with God and favor with man may not always go together. Sometimes we have to choose."
3. "That such a plainly prominent man identified himself with Jesus underscores the fact that Jesus’s death is part of public history. This was not something done in a corner, but something done publicly."
4. "But now this open tomb opened Peter’s mind."
5. "I can remember as a teenager realizing that I was assuming a kind of materialism, a naturalism, when reading the Gospels that I didn’t really know was true. And so I read and reread the Gospels; but when I realized what I was doing, I read them again, this time allowing that they could be true in what they were teaching—even the miraculous. There is that moment of unsteady balance when, leaving your old worldview, you’ve not yet settled down in the new one, and so you feel really and truly unsteady and uncertain. New thoughts crowd into your mind with no place yet to sit down."
6. "The inescapable fact in all of this is the emptiness of the tomb; that wasn’t up for debate—it was a brute fact. Jesus’s body had been laid there, and it was there no more. Why? That becomes the burning question."
7. "What Peter boasted he would do, these women did. They never left him; they kept following him—literally. They were the son who said no but then went and did it, as opposed to Peter, the son who said yes and didn’t do it."
8. "No, friends, the stone wasn’t moved to let Jesus out, but to let the women in."
9. "‘Why do you seek the living among the dead?’—what a haunting question that is. We need to hear that as it echoes through many of our lives. Friend, if you’re not a Christian, don’t seek for life among the perishing honors and powers and health and wealth and success and pleasures of this world; they will deceive you, and they will pass."
10. "Without the resurrection, the incarnation is pointless and the cross is tragedy. Without Easter, there’s no point in Christmas."

Observation Questions

1. Luke 23:50–51 — Who was Joseph of Arimathea, what council did he belong to, and how is his character and hope (“looking for the kingdom of God”) described?
2. Luke 23:52–53 — What did Joseph specifically do with Jesus’ body, and why does the detail about a “new” tomb matter in this account?
3. Luke 23:55–56 — What did the women from Galilee see at the burial, and what did they prepare afterward?
4. Luke 24:1–3 — What two unexpected things did the women find at the tomb early on the first day of the week?
5. Luke 24:4–7 — What did the two men in dazzling apparel say to the women, and how did they connect the empty tomb to Jesus’ prior words?
6. Luke 24:10–12 — Who reported the news to the apostles, how did the apostles initially respond, and what did Peter see when he ran to the tomb?

Interpretation Questions

1. Considering Luke 23:52–53, why is Jesus being laid in a new, unused tomb theologically and historically significant for establishing the reality of the resurrection?
2. In Luke 23:55–24:3, why does Luke emphasize the women’s careful observation of the burial and then their discovery of the empty tomb—what does this suggest about reliable witness?
3. Reflect on Luke 24:5–7: What is the force of the question, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” and how does remembering Jesus’ words move perplexed hearts toward faith?
4. How does Peter’s marveling in Luke 24:12 illustrate the journey from confusion to conviction, and why is that pathway pastorally important for skeptics and saints alike?
5. Connecting Luke 24 with Romans 1:1–4 and 1 Corinthians 15:1–20, how does the resurrection confirm who Jesus is and why our justification depends on His rising?

Application Questions

1. When facing grief (especially around holidays), what is one concrete way you could speak or practice resurrection hope this week (e.g., a Scripture to read at a visit, a hymn to sing, a note to write)?
2. Where might you, like Joseph, choose favor with God over favor with people? Name one specific situation and one faithful step you could take in the next seven days.
3. What is one assumption or personal doubt you will re-examine by reading the Gospels with openness to Jesus’ teaching (pick a passage and a time to read it this week)?
4. How will you “remember His words” more consistently? Identify one practical pattern (e.g., memorize Luke 24:6–7, set a daily reading plan, share a verse with a friend midweek).
5. In light of the first day of the week (Luke 24:1), what is one small but real way your Sunday can more clearly reflect resurrection reality (worship attendance, Sabbath rest, family prayer, serving)?

Additional Bible Reading

1. 1 Corinthians 15:1–28 — Paul explains the centrality of Jesus’ bodily resurrection for the gospel and for our future hope, reinforcing the sermon’s claim that without Easter our faith is futile.
2. Acts 2:22–36 — Peter proclaims that God raised Jesus, quoting Psalm 16 to show prophetic fulfillment and establishing apostolic witness to the resurrection.
3. Luke 9:18–27 — Jesus foretells His suffering, death, and third-day rising and then calls disciples to follow Him, aligning with the angels’ reminder to “remember how He told you.”
4. Matthew 28:1–15 — The women meet the angel at the empty tomb and the guards’ report circulates, complementing Luke’s account by highlighting both divine witness and attempted suppression.

Sermon Main Topics

I. What Jesus' Birth Has to Do with Death (Luke 23:50 - 24:12)
II. Joseph Buried Jesus’ Body (Luke 23:50-56)
III. Peter Confirmed that the Tomb Was Empty (Luke 24:12)
IV. The Women Witnessed to the Resurrection (Luke 24:1-11)
V. The Resurrection: The Essential Truth that Begins a New Age

Detailed Sermon Outline

This past Christmas, our church experienced an example of why some are not so excited about Christmas. Herb died on Christmas Day. He had been born on Christmas Eve in 1919. He came to Christ as a child, moved to DC in his 20s during World War II, joined this church, and faithfully served here as long as health would allow him, as long as he was able to attend. And then, though he had lived a long life, on Christmas Day, Herb died.

Christmas, of course, finds its origin in Christians making a big deal about the birth of Jesus. Thus some of the hymns and songs that are so well known that we've been singing, songs especially we sing at this time of year about the birth of Christ and the larger significance of Christ's his birth and his life. We rejoice because of who it is that's born. The preexisting Son of God is born in a manger. Thus the ironies that we sing of in songs that we just sung even moments ago.

And we sing about what he's come to do. So for example, in Hark the Herald Angels Sing, we just sang in that last verse, Mild he lays his glory by, born that man no more may die. Born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth. If Christ died, that man no more may die, then how are there still deaths, even among Christians, even on Christmas Day?

What is Jesus' birth?

Have to do with Herb's death. Well, in our passage in Luke's Gospel this morning, we find three witnesses to lead us to conclude that Jesus' death that we saw in our last study in Luke's Gospel, Jesus' birth, rather, did in fact result in breaking death's hold on all of Adam's helpless race. Our text is Luke chapter 23, beginning at verse 50 and going through chapter 24, verse 12. So you'll find it on page 884 in the Bibles provided, page 884. In this passage, there are three witnesses that are brought forward by Luke, the Greek-speaking investigating doctor who's writing this account.

They're an unlikely trio of witnesses to help us understand what happened to Jesus after His crucifixion. First, there's a wealthy, prominent national leader.

And then we'll look at a slow to understand leader of the disciples that we find at the end of our passage. And then most centrally and prominently there are the women. So let's consider each of these in turn and see if they can help us to conclude that though Jesus was in fact crucified, as we considered in our last sermon, Jesus' death was not the end of the story. And to be clear, I'm not saying that there was a faith that Jesus engendered in his teaching so that after his death some could say Jesus lives on in our hearts, like we might say of those we've known and loved, like Herb, those of us who knew Herb, or even great people from the past, Frederick Douglass or Abraham Lincoln. No, death was not the end of Jesus' bodily life.

We Christians understand the physical resurrection of Jesus to be every bit as important as his physical birth in Bethlehem and his physical death at Calvary. And as stunning a claim as that may seem to some, we have these witnesses here that I pray will help and encourage you in your understanding of Jesus and your faith in Him this Christmas season. So let's begin by reading the passage. Remember, we've just had the account of Jesus' crucifixion and death. And now we read this beginning at Luke chapter 23, verse 50.

Now there was a man named Joseph from the Jewish town of Arimathea. He was a member of the council, a good and righteous man who had not consented to their decision and action and he was looking for the kingdom of God.

This man went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then he took it down and wrapped it in a linen shroud and laid him in a tomb cut in stone where no one had ever yet been laid. It was the day of preparation and the Sabbath was beginning. The women who had come with Him from Galilee followed and saw the tomb and how His body was laid. Then they returned and prepared spices and ointments.

But on the first day of the week at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared, and they found the stone rolled away from the tomb. But when they went in, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus.

While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel, and as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here. But has risen. Remember how He told you while He was still in Galilee that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise. And they remembered His words.

And returning from the tomb, they told all these things to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary, the mother of James, and the other women with them who told these things to the apostles. But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.

But Peter rose and ran to the tomb, stooping and looking in. He saw the linen cloths by themselves. And he went home marveling at what had happened. So friends, I want us to look at three witnesses here that Luke gives us to what happened to Jesus after the resurrection. We'll look at Joseph at the beginning of the passage first, and then Peter at the very end of the passage second, and then we'll look at the women there in the middle of our passage, all right?

So first Joseph, we see he buried Jesus' body. Look again up at chapter 23, verse 50. Now there was a man named Joseph from the Jewish town of Arimathea. He was a a member of the council, a good and righteous man who had not consented to their decision and action, and he was looking for the kingdom of God. This man went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus.

Then he took it down and wrapped it in a linen shroud and laid him in a tomb cut in stone where no one had ever yet been laid. So immediately after Jesus was crucified, Joseph asked for custody of the body. Sometimes people get hanged in crucifixion for days. Jesus died quickly by those standards. And Joseph went and asked for the body.

Normally part of the fate of those who were crucified by the state for an act of rebellion was to have their bodies treated dishonorably even after the crucifixion, even in death. They would be thrown out on a pile left to be exposed to the elements devoured by wildlife, just simply thrown out randomly. In fact, that's why that place was called Golgotha, which means skull. The Latin is Calvaria, Calvary, just skull, because of these desiccated bones that were there in great number. So Joseph generously comes forward to honor Jesus' memory by placing Jesus' body in his newly made tomb, newly made in the sense that it was not yet used.

Now, these tombs wouldn't be like holes in the ground like ours. They would be more tunnels dug in the side of a hill. A first chamber would be made for the most recently deceased member of the family, and behind that would be catacomb-like spaces with shelves for bodies. And as a member of the family died, you would move the one that was on that front shelf back into the back, and then the one most recently deceased you would put on that front shelf. One other implication of this situation meant that there would be no confusion between Jesus' body and another one because his was the only occupant of the tomb.

Joseph's doing this was standing up to the rest of the Sanhedrin and making a bold statement. While they were complicit in Jesus' execution, Joseph was making a public statement, at least to those who that he lived and worked with and to the Roman governor Pilate, that he was one who was looking for the kingdom of God and he did not agree with their decision to crucify Jesus. He seemed to be more a believer in Jesus than Jesus' own discerTing disciples had been. So far was he from denying that he knew Jesus, Joseph was willing to put his reputation on the line in order to honor Jesus. Goodness and righteousness did not make Jesus popular, and goodness and righteousness would not make Joseph popular as he followed Jesus and honored him.

I pray that God give us as Christians today wisdom as we are brought to hard situations. Favor with God and favor with man may not always go together. Sometimes we have to choose. All four Gospels mention Joseph, leading one to conclude that he must have been publicly prominent among the Christians, or at least among these early churches where the Gospels were written. That such a plainly prominent man identified himself with Jesus underscores the fact that Jesus' death is part of public history.

This is not something done in a corner, as the expression is. But this is something that was done publicly. John even lets us know that Nicodemus, another member of the Sanhedrin, that asked Jesus the famous question in John 3 about how he could have eternal life. Nicodemus joined Joseph in caring for Jesus' body, bringing some of the myrrh that we sang about in an earlier hymn along to anoint Jesus' body. So Joseph's request for and burial of Jesus' body It puts a public spotlight on Jesus.

It distinguishes the fate of his body from all of those thrown aside unceremoniously and shamefully and exposed to the elements and the animals. Even considered alone, Joseph of Arimathea's action transferred Jesus' fate from private to public. From the anonymity of an ever-changing pile to the clarity of being the only occupant, so to speak, of a newly carved tomb. Joseph action puts our attention on what happens to Jesus' body. Even from groups of those who reject God, God calls some to follow Him.

Even from those who had cried for His crucifixion, there were some from that very group. Who ended up being faithful disciples of Jesus Christ. Let's never be a church that writes off someone simply because of the group they come from. Praise God that he has his people everywhere.

Joseph buried Jesus' body. He deposited Christ's corpse in a tomb he had made for himself. Maybe you think of that word from Isaiah we heard read to us last week from Isaiah 53, and they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man.

In his death. But now let's go to the other end of our passage. If you look down in chapter 24, that last verse of our passage, verse 12, and the other end of the social spectrum, where we find Peter, who confirmed that the tomb was empty. Look at chapter 24, verse 12.

But Peter rose and ran to the tomb, stooping and looking in.

He saw the linen cloths by themselves, and he went home marveling at what had happened. So Joseph's newly cut tomb is the setting. Has Peter regained his courage after the Lord looked at him? Do you remember when Peter had denied the Lord three times and then the Lord looked at him?

Perhaps now, Peter, hearing this story from the women, Regardless of how uncertain he was, at least he would not just dismiss it, at least he would investigate it. He would put himself out there. He ran to the tomb, wondering, what could this be?

Peter sees the tomb, and we read here that he saw the body within was missing. And Peter, we read, marveled. That is, he wondered what was going on. Now, this marveling is not believing.

But it's not denying. No, it's not confusing an idea, it's being confused. So Peter, seeing the tomb and seeing the linen shroud empty was not what he had woken up that morning expecting to see. This was not in his thoughts. What happened?

Grave robbers would have had little incentive to go to this tomb. You wouldn't want to rob a new grave with only one occupant, and that a poor man who'd only been there a couple of nights. I mean, we're talking low probability here. They would hardly extract a profit from that. And they wouldn't pull the body out of the enwrapping linen like that.

That would have no purpose, let alone leaving it set aside neatly as John's gospel let us know that it was. No, it didn't have the signs of a grave robbery at all. What was going on? The unexpectedness of the empty tomb clearly scrambled Peter's thoughts. He had thought it was all over and done with.

Done at the crucifixion.

But now, now this open tomb opened Peter's mind.

He began to consider perhaps to understand things that he had not before. I wonder if you've ever had that experience of needing to have your old familiar assumptions confused before you arrive at new revolutionary conclusions. The emptiness of the tomb was draining assumptions that Peter had made out of his mind. Friends, I can remember as a teenager realizing that I was assuming a kind of materialism, a naturalism, when reading the Gospels that I didn't really know was true. And so I read and reread the Gospels, but when I realized what I was doing, I read them again, this time allowing that they could be true in what they were teaching, even the miraculous.

There is that moment of unsteady balance when leaving your old worldview, you've not yet settled down in the new one, and so you feel really and truly unsteady and uncertain. New thoughts crowding into your mind with no place yet to sit down.

That was Peter's experience. I think, as he took in that empty tomb. The inescapable fact in all of this is the emptiness of the tomb. That wasn't up for debate. It was a brute fact.

Jesus' body had been laid there, and it was there no more. Why? That becomes the burning question. It was taking through this very question of how you get from the execution of Christ to the transformed disciples at the day of Pentecost that basically founding the Christian church from what? From their confidence, their certainty in what?

Thinking about that led to my own transformation from a fairly confident agnostic to a convinced Christian. What caused this transformation of the disciples from scared and scattered to joyful and publicly proclaiming this same strange news of Jesus resurrected? These disciples are obviously sincere. They give their lives lives for telling this story. Why did these Jews suddenly start meeting on Sunday morning in a way that we still are meeting on Sunday morning?

Why are we doing that? What did happen to the body of Christ if it was not raised? I found myself wondering how I could be so sure that it hadn't happened. Teenagers, if you're sitting here somewhat indifferent to Christianity, just having been brought along Sunday after Sunday after Sunday, Think about this. What happened if Jesus is really raised from the dead, if he rose from the dead, what difference does that make?

What difference should that make in your life?

Then when I began to consider the possibility that I didn't know that it couldn't have happened, I quickly became convinced that it did happen.

If you're here and you're not a Christian, I encourage you to look very carefully at the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. You may find it changes your life. I know it did mine. There'll be pastors at the doors on the way out if you want to talk about this. There's nothing we'd rather do after this service than to talk to you about finding that truth about Jesus.

Because Peter here confirmed that the tomb was empty. The central part of our passage is that the women witnessed to this. And they did this in four ways we wanna look at. So if you're a note taker, the sermon would basically have three points, Joseph and Peter, and now the last point, but it's most of the sermon, the women, the women witnessed to this. In four ways, all right?

So we're just walking through the passage in order now, in the middle of it. The women were witnesses to this in four ways. First, they saw where Jesus' body was laid, and this is important in setting up the argument, because maybe they got the wrong tomb. They did not get the wrong tomb. Look here at the end of chapter 23.

Women have a central role in Luke's gospel and in our passage. Jesus came to save whoever would repent and believe. So even when Jesus is going to the cross, if you look back up in chapter 23, verse 28, you see that as He was going along, He was met with women who were wailing and lamenting, and instead Jesus wailed and lamented for them and for the fate that would fall Jerusalem. And those people would not be believers, those women who would just stand for all the inhabitants of Jerusalem. But look down in verse 49, the verse right before our passage, and you see Luke refers to these women as believers, those who knew Him, who had followed Him from Galilee.

Praise God for such faithful women. It was these women, after all, who were among Luke's sources for the crucifixion. And also, it seems, in the last few verses of this chapter, for the burial. Look there at chapter 23, verse 54. It was the day of preparation, and the Sabbath was beginning.

The women who had come with Him from Galilee followed and saw the tomb and how His body was laid. Then they returned and prepared spices and ointments. We don't know exactly what the 11 disciples were doing after the crucifixion, but these women who had been following Jesus ever since Galilee never left him. They kept following him, literally. What Peter boasted he would do, these women did.

They were the son who said no but then went and did it, as opposed to Peter who's the son who said yes and didn't do it.

They prepared to honor Him even in His death. The day of preparation, it mentions here in verse 54, was not an annual holiday. It's just the way you describe the Sabbath, the day before the Sabbath. So it's the Friday, the day to prepare things for the Sabbath. It was you realize these righteous women who knew where Jesus' body was, because they followed Joseph and they saw where Joseph had laid Jesus' body.

We even read here in verse 55, it says, They saw how his body was laid, perhaps a reference to such details as where in the tomb and how it was laid out, and even the use of the linen shroud and the face cloth. Luke seems to have been a careful historian. This is typical of his gospel, that he finds out details. Joseph of Arimathea had done some preparation of Jesus' body, but the women here spend their Sabbath making more preparations to perfume Jesus' body, to overcome the the smell of corruption and decay. They clearly had no expectation that Jesus would rise again.

Now again, if you're not here and you're, sorry, if you are here, because if you're obviously here, the little logic to wake you up early in the morning with a logical problem. If you are here and you're not a believer, this is a little test I would just leave for you. If you've thought that maybe Christians were just those people that Jesus had told for years, I'm gonna rise from the dead, I'm gonna rise from the dead, I'm gonna rise from the dead.

And so were they sitting around, you know, singing Kumbaya, holding hands, just trying to imagine after Jesus died that he was going to rise again and then seeing, you know, the great pumpkin coming up over the pumpkin patch or something. It was nothing like that. None of these people were expecting this. You know, these women were actually spending their day and probably a good bit of resources to prepare, to perfume a body that they assumed was there and would be decaying. And would continue to decay.

There's just... there's no evidence that there was anyone, even though they should have, who was expecting Jesus' resurrection.

Part of the interest of the story is that they're going to prepare him for his funereal rest forever in that body, in that tomb. So the women continue on without this expectation. They knew the Lord Jesus was dead. They were preparing to do due honor to him in his memory. By surrounding his decaying corpse with spices and ointments which would, among other things, provide pleasing fragrances to dispel the smell of death.

But the important point here is that the women knew where Jesus' body was. There would be no question of mistaken tomb. They were multiple eyewitnesses to the internment of Jesus' body and they themselves thereby became a good reliable source for knowledge about where Jesus' body was to be found. Because you could have gone to a hundred places that morning and say, Jesus' body is not here. And that would be no evidence for just an unbelievable account, the resurrection of the dead.

But this one spot, this one spot mattered because so many people had seen Jesus' body being put exactly there. Luke is establishing that here in verse 55, making sure that we see that Jesus' body was deposited in a tomb and that the women had seen this and they had even seen how Jesus' body Jesus' body was arranged there. All of this is really preparation for those of us reading this gospel to accept their testimony for the coming Sunday morning. They are knowledgeable and therefore reliable as witnesses. They will not misdirect our inquiring gaze.

These women bear witness to where Jesus' body was laid to rest. That's the first way they're witnesses, but a second way They are about to be the primary witnesses to something even more than where the body was laid. The women witnessed as the very first ones to see that Jesus' body was gone and the tomb was empty. Look at chapter 24, verse 1. But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared.

And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb. But when they went in, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. So the fact of our passage is that Jesus' body on Sunday morning was not where it had been on Friday night. The women could have gone as soon as the Sabbath ended at sundown on Saturday night, but that would have been impractical, it was dark. So you see them here eagerly at early dawn going to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared.

Again, their intention was to honor Jesus. They fully expected to find his dead body there. But verse 2 is where the story turns. Two things were out of place. The heavy entrance stone was rolled away and Jesus' body was nowhere to be found.

The tomb was empty. Let's just consider each one of those for a moment. This is the point at which they find this heavy stone, a stone that would be made deliberately heavy to impede grave robberies, usually taking multiple people, usually strong men, to open it. We know from Matthew's gospel that an angel did this. He needn't have done it to let Jesus out.

The resurrected Jesus was clearly not operating with the same kind of physical limitations we know. Other accounts show that he could enter a space where the doors had been locked. No, friends, the stone wasn't moved to let Jesus out, but to let the women in. The stone was there because God wanted them to be witnesses The stone was out of the way because God wanted them to be witnesses of the fact that the body of the Lord Jesus was not there. That is, it was not in the very place where they themselves knew it had been laid.

And that is the second and central fact: the tomb was empty. When they go inside, the body is missing. What happened to the body?

That would naturally have occurred to the women. The women had not taken the body. They had come to prepare the slain rabbi, assuming his body was there. They had seen where it was put. We need to notice the statement there in verse 3.

They did not find the body is a very clear statement. This is talking about a bodily resurrection. Some have tried to avoid this, but it is undeniable that a resurrection of the physical body of Jesus is what the earliest records present, a resurrection of his body. Roman guards had been placed there, we know from Matthew's gospel, to guard the tomb so no robbers would have gotten to it. Not that that was the kind of tombs I mentioned earlier that they would have tried to rob anyway.

The Romans themselves wouldn't have taken the body because if they had, when they wanted to squash Christianity in the following years, they would have simply produced the body or at least recounted a tale of their having taken it.

Which there never was. They didn't do that. The Jews didn't take the body. No, if you look specifically, they had taken the body, they would have produced it when the followers of Jesus began to be more numerous and began to intermingle with the Gentiles. The disciples wouldn't have taken the body, or if so, they wouldn't have given their own lives preaching and proclaiming the resurrection of Christ all over the known world to almost all of their mortal demise.

Ultimately. No, here on this Sunday morning, the women were confused. They were confused by the empty tomb. They were confused by those linen cloths lying around them with no body for them to be wrapped around. How strange is that?

We have no record at this point of their stopping to hold an academic dialogue on what's going on here. No writer's workshop, no tactician's conclave to decide on what they need to say next publicly. No, to them all this must have seemed beyond comprehension, certainly beyond what they had expected. These women had become the first witnesses to the empty tomb. But they were witnesses also in a third way.

They saw and heard the angels proclaiming Christ's promised resurrection had happened. The bodily resurrection of Jesus would give people a whole new understanding of who Jesus really is. He's called there at the end of verse 3 for the first time in Luke's gospel, the Lord Jesus. And of course, he is the one person who wasn't surprised at the resurrection. He, after all, had predicted it, as these two men remind the women here.

The passage continues. Look at verse 4. While they were perplexed about this, Behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel, and as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, why do you seek the living among the dead? And what a haunting question that is. Why do you seek the living among the dead?

We need to hear that as it echoes through many of our lives. Friend, if you're here today and you're not a Christian, Don't seek for life among the perishing honors and powers and health and wealth and success and pleasures of this world. They will deceive you. They will pass. You'll be as forgotten as a senator elected in 1996 whose name no one now but his grandchildren remembers.

Friends, at this new Sunday as it began here, Jesus Christ died for all who would believe in him, and he was raised. And that's the good news that these women were being the first to hear in this kind of completion that Jesus had died for their sins. But not only that, his resurrection is confirming how Jesus interpreted his own death as he taught his disciples about his coming death, that he was dying in the place of those who had sinned against God. And he would be raised, as Paul later put it, for their justification. Let's keep going with the passage, verse 6.

He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you while he was still in Galilee that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified, and on the third day rise. You see, Jesus had predicted exactly this, that on the third day after the crucifixion, he would rise from the dead. So he not only predicted that he would rise, he even said when he would rise. Now the way the Jews tended to count time, whether it was years or days, they would include a part as a whole.

You see this in the years of reign in the kings in the Old Testament. You also see it here in the days. So the crucifixion was day one, that's Friday. The Sabbath, Saturday, was day two, now starting Sunday, which starts Saturday night with their reckoning, was day three. So on the third day, He rose again.

These women had come at first light of this new day and this new week. These two men in dazzling apparel are called angels in Matthew's gospel. They're the ones who say in verse 6, He is not here, but has risen. So you see once again the angels continue this role that they've had throughout Luke's gospel in declaring. They announced to Zachariah the birth of John the Baptist.

They announced to Mary the birth of Jesus. A choir of angels sings at the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. And now here they are angels introducing and announcing to the disciples the resurrection of Jesus. The angels declare, Jesus is risen. They do this to these women who are described here in verse 4 as perplexed.

Again, the women didn't expect this to be the case. The description of these men in dazzling apparel sounds like Luke is reporting something that one of the women told them, that this is what they looked like. It's a report of the appearance of these beings who are supernatural angels, messengers of God.

And these men didn't just look like angels, they also brought the kind of response by humans that angels often seem to engender in the Bible. So if you look at verse 5, the women bowed their faces to the ground. The women are showing respect to them. But the respect that the men want is that their heavenly message should be heard and believed. And what did they do?

They do what messengers from God do. They pointed back to what Jesus had taught them.

You see in verse 6, they reminded the women that Jesus had taught that He would be raised. And if you take Luke's Gospel and you look back, you find that's the case. In chapter 9, verse 22, Jesus said, the Son of Man must suffer many things. This is like a year before the crucifixion. The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.

That's Luke 9:22. Or if you look at just earlier that week in Luke 18:33, and after flogging him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise. Jesus had taught this. He had taught this explicitly. So friends, notice here that the empty tomb itself brought no insight.

So Peter was not brought to understand merely by seeing the empty tomb. Even the angel's announcement here by itself brought no faith. It would take their eyes being opened. Look down in chapter 24 to verse 31, and their eyes were opened. We're down in verse 45, their minds being opened.

Then He opened their minds. There are both mental and moral aspects of believing and following Christ, aren't there? Our minds and our hearts need to be opened. If we truly believe, we will truly repent. These women got the tremendous blessing of being the first witnesses of the empty tomb.

And the first to hear the announcement that Christ had risen from the dead. A fourth way, final way that Luke points out here that these women were witnesses. They were witnesses in the sense that they first told the apostles of Jesus' resurrection. This is how the apostles first learned of it. Verse 8, They remembered His words.

So they're exhorted to remember the words of Christ and they do. You. And that's always where we have to start. We are so forgetful by nature. We preach a new sermon here every week, always going to the Word, because we assume you haven't memorized last week's, you probably didn't need to memorize last week's, but you do need another one for this week.

Just like you keep eating physical meals, we keep needing spiritual meals. We need to remember, we are so forgetful by nature. The angels did right to point the people back to what Christ had already taught. We in our own following of Christ must again and again go to what God has revealed in His Word. So, my brothers and sisters, give yourself to study and know God's Word.

Remember His promises. Believe them. God was very kind to send angels here to teach them this. You know, he could have been far more indifferent to them. Look how much he'd already done for them.

Let them figure it out. But he sends angels. Messengers from him, specifically to tell them even just to look back at what Jesus already said. Didn't I tell you? And so they do.

They look back. That's one of the main things we do for a church, you know, as a church. We remind each other. We keep telling each other the promises of God. And we keep going on.

Well, let's keep going. Verse 9, and returning from the tomb, they told all these things to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James and the other women with them who told these things to the apostles. But these words seemed to them an idle tale and they did not believe them. So in verses 9 to 11, the women go to report this to the main body of disciples, which is the 11 plus the rest.

I love the way Augustine puts it here. Augustine said, these women were the first preachers of the resurrection of Christ. Luke in verse 10 gives us this list of names of women, presumably so they could be checked at the time to know, yep, she claims that, she claims that. That many of the same women that we read of back in chapter 8 who were faithfully following and supporting Jesus for so long. Again, this is one of those little asides of Luke which caused the whole thing just to ring true historically.

So if you were making this story up out of thin air, I doubt you would baldly refer to the disciples' dismissal of what the women were telling them here as an idle tale. Because in a couple of weeks, Peter is going to be preaching this before thousands. So you're probably not going to be calling it an idle tale if you're making this up. The only reason you're going to put that in there is because that's the truth. That is how the disciples responded when they first heard these women tell them this story.

They dismissed it as an idle tale. Obviously, nonsense. I mean, again, if we were making this stuff up or even just editing it helpfully, wouldn't you want to make the disciples look a little better? If they're gonna be founders of a new religion, they need all the credibility they can get. Don't have them saying something so stupid.

Another way this rings true is simply by the centrality of the women in all this. Friends, if you're gonna make up a story in this culture, you would not have had the key witnesses be women. Women were discounted as witnesses, not even to mention the fact that the message itself was literally incredible, someone getting up from the dead. Entrusting that to the mouth of people who legally in that culture weren't even accepted as witnesses normally is to do something that just seems inconceivable. Some people always think that their own generation is the first to have a kind of natural skepticism, to be not as gullible as the generations before.

You know, the generations before thought everything was supernatural, but now we know nature well enough that we don't need to have the kind of beliefs that our earlier generations had. So we can have skepticism knowing we just don't know nature well enough yet, but we will know nature well enough at some point to explain everything that appears to us now supernatural. But friends, that's no new attitude. I mean, here is skepticism 2,000 years ago. Here the 11 were skeptical of the women's claims about Jesus rising from the dead when Jesus, their beloved rabbi, had taught them that he was going to do this specific thing.

And they were skeptical of them. They were not expecting Jesus' resurrection. They were not wishing for it. They ignored it when he first taught it. They seemed to forget it.

They were hardly in some state of self-induced wish fulfillment. Now again, as a former agnostic, I understand at least my own skepticism. But I also remember being at that point in reading through the Gospels where I realized my own pre-commitment to, my own baseless faith in materialism, and that my agnosticism seemed to be basically a holding place for atheism. And I realized that I didn't know that there was no God. I didn't know that he couldn't have done stuff like this.

And so I read through the gospels as if all the supernatural matters, especially Jesus rising from the dead, was true. And brothers and sisters, by God's grace, I believed it and was saved. If you're here today and you're not a Christian, I would happily talk to you more about this at the door this afternoon or talk to you in person. You can talk to another person that you brought you, that you came with. There's encouragement for all of us here, I think.

The unlikely can be useful to the Lord. The most favored among us can get it wrong. We have to be careful to remember and heed what God has already committed to us. It's a fitting tribute to these dear sisters that every one of the apostles could forever after that, as they went around telling the gospel throughout the Mediterranean world, they could remember first being told of the resurrection by one of their beloved sisters in the faith. The sisters had discipled the disciples.

And the disciples went on to tell the gospel to the world. Praise God for how he has used and continues to use faithful sisters in getting his gospel out around the world. So these women were the first witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Well that's it. It's a revolutionary, a straightforward passage.

This past Thursday morning we had our final fall 2023 CHBC intern discussion for this class. The last book we always assigned to be read and was written by Ian Murray back in the year 2000. It's called Evangelicalism Divided. The author is now 92 years old and is a remarkable servant of Christ. He's caring for his wife Jean who's ailing.

But I phoned him the day before the discussion to ask him if I could call him the next day so that the interns could hear him. And he very graciously said he could. So I called him and then I put the phone on speaker so we could all hear him. And at one point, as he was talking about someone he's been writing a biography of, he reflected that he's considering afresh some of the observations he'd made of his life, realizing perhaps that some of the things were going on were part of God's preparing him for eternity. And when he said that, I think I and a number of us in the room were struck.

I think of the Lord doing things in this life, even letting hard things happen, preparing us for usefulness in this life. I don't often reflect on how the Lord, by things he allows to happen to us in this life, may be preparing us for eternity with him.

But as he said that, I know that for me it was like he'd opened a new window on the real world. It helped me to see everything else within a slightly different light. And that's a good thing to remember that there's more going on in this life than is contained within the borders of this life. That God is at work for bigger purposes. Not all of which are evident to us immediately.

Maybe that's a little bit of your experience this morning or this Christmas season as you've come to understand more of who Jesus is, of why He came to be born in Bethlehem, of what He's done by dying on Calvary or being raised to new life. That's a good thing, a good thing to understand what He calls you to do. Do based on what he's done. My Christian brothers and sisters, we're in the last chapter of Luke now. We'll be here for a couple more weeks.

And let me just say there, every chapter of Luke's Gospel is good, but you could get rid of a number of chapters in Luke's Gospel and while it would be a loss, we would still be okay. You can't get rid of this chapter of Luke's Gospel without catastrophe to Christ's message.

This chapter is utterly essential. Without the resurrection, the incarnation is pointless and the cross is tragedy. Without Easter, there's no point in Christmas. Paul says to the Corinthians that if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile.

You are still in your sins. Paul described Jesus to the Roman Christians as to whose human nature was a descendant of David and who through the Spirit of Holiness was appointed to be the Son of God in power by His resurrection from the dead. Peter himself, who was marveling in the tomb, trying to understand, was just a few weeks later proclaiming to thousands, God raised Jesus from the dead, freeing Him from the agony of death because it was impossible for death to keep hold on him. And then Peter quoted Psalm 16 that we sang in our preparation music this morning. Seeing it is fulfilled in Christ's resurrection.

Seeing what was ahead, David spoke of the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to the grave, nor did his body see decay. God has raised this Jesus to life and we are all witnesses of the fact. In these next two Sundays we'll cover how Peter became a witness to the fact not just of seeing the empty tomb, but of seeing the risen Christ Himself. So is the resurrection important for us to believe? Yes.

As Paul said, He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification. The resurrection is our evidence that Christ's work for our justification has been completed. The very day that we're met together here this morning is only because of this morning we've read of today, when these women made their way to Joseph's tomb and found on the first day of the week, Jesus Christ had risen from the dead. So the opening of each new week now reminds us of the opening of the new age in Christ, because he has opened up the tomb to free the dead, spiritually now and physically, finally and forever. Friends, I pray that this new week finds you in the new age, that the Lord Jesus has begun, when He rose from the dead that Sunday morning.

Let's pray together.

Lord God, we pray that you would pour out your Spirit on our hearts, that we would hear and see in your Word and believe in our hearts. We pray that you would bring many to yourself and that you would strengthen us in our faith. We ask in Jesus' name, amen.