Out Our Way: There's a lion in town - 1 Corinthians 15:1-8

Out our way, you do hear and see some strange things. Like some friends of mine who claimed a mountain lion had gotten into their backyard.

"Seriously? Come on, you guys live in the middle of town. There is no way a lion would be in your backyard!"

Yet they insisted it was true.

Well a few years later I was out at the stable where I kept Doc and Babe - which is also in town - and as I was grooming Doc, he started getting agitated. I couldn't figure out what his problem was until I turned around, and about 200 feet from us stood a cougar watching us both. I stopped being so skeptical about my friends' claim of the lion in their yard.

Well, as Easter rolls around, the skeptics who roll out their old claims that the Resurrection is a myth - a hoax played on the gullible - and that there are even some "biblical scholars," who usually remain nameless it seems, who say there was no resurrection and even question whether Jesus was real. Sort of like me and the idea of lions in town.

Well, good news, skeptics. You have a "patron Saint" who was even more skeptical than you and indeed got the authorities to authorize him to stamp out all this ridiculous talk of Jesus being the Messiah - Christ - and especially the end this nonsense about Him rising from the dead. The man's name was Saul, an up-and-coming scholar and expert who was determined to nip this growing faith in the bud. If you think you reject the Gospel and the Resurrection accounts, take a gander at Saul of Tarsus. This guy was deadly serious - and I do mean deadly - about ending all this talk of Jesus and the empty tomb. But then he met the Risen Christ (Acts 9).

No hallucinations or mass hysteria as some critics of the Resurrection accounts try to claim. He was a sworn enemy who became an Apostle, changing his name to Paul. And he was not the only one. Read the 1 Corinthian 15 text. Most were persecuted, imprisoned, and many executed - as was Paul - for declaring Jesus had risen from the dead; and none ever recanted. And it did not end with the Apostles and the first generation of believers, for the Gospel continued to spread across the Middle East, into Asia, Africa and Rome itself. In fact, read of the conversion of Emperor Constantine to the faith when even mighty Caesar acknowledged Jesus Christ as Lord. The message of the Risen Christ continues to spread around the world and, as in the beginning, there are those who seek to stamp it out and call it nonsense. But like lions in town, whether one wants to accept the report or not doesn't change the facts.

He is risen. He is risen indeed.

Be blessed and be a blessing.

Brother John