Matthew 28:6

He is not here; for he is risen, even as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay.

"He is not here" is a message worthy of angelic transmission and is the most important fact, outside the resurrection of Christ, and is itself an essential portion of it. The empty grave is the one incontestable proof which has confounded every futile effort to cast doubt on the resurrection, and is an impregnable rock of truth upon which every attack of skepticism has invariably been shattered. What became of the body of Christ if he did not indeed rise from the dead? Let any candid mind examine the question honestly, and it will be seen that there is no satisfactory alternative. The theft of any dead body would require motivation, but there was no possibility of any such motivation relative to the body of Christ. IF the disciples stole, would that last one of them have then proceeded to go up and down the earth preaching his resurrection, denying every worldly consideration in order to do so, and suffering at last martyrdom and death to seal a lie with their blood? Indeed, THAT would have been a greater miracle than the resurrection. Did his enemies steal it? If so, they would have produced it to confound his disciples and put an end to the doctrine they hated.

"He is risen!" The risen Christ belongs to the realm of history.

The Christian church exists and has existed and grown since the year of the crucifixion. So enormous a fact cannot be explained without an adequate cause, and it is impossible to find an adequate cause if the resurrection of Christ from the tomb is rejected as fiction.[5]

To all insinuations against the historical Christ, it is replied that we know more about the last week of Christ's residence upon this earth than is known of the last week of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy all put together! Christ belongs to history, and is indeed the center of history, and so does his resurrection. We know his ancestry, where he was born, where he lived, the craft he learned, the names of his parents, brothers, and kinspeople, the names and motivation of his enemies, the names and successes and failures of his disciples, their weaknesses, sins, and even their fears. Monumental evidence of the historical Christ is more impressive than that of Rameses II, or Julius Caesar, or Napoleon. The Lord's Day, the Lord's ordinance of baptism, and the Lord's Supper are great and universally observed historical monuments to the historicity of Christ, more convincing than any that ever existed to honor the memory of any other. Those great memorials, to say nothing of the New Testament itself, flow down through history in an ever-widening stream of influence; and it is simply unbelievable that they were set in motion by a lie! As for the suggestion that Christ is a myth, such a presumption dies in the light of the genealogy of Jesus which is given both in Matthew and in Luke, one of them through his mother Mary (Luke) and the other through his legal father, taking his ancestry back to the very gates of paradise. Now, will someone give the genealogy of Santa Claus? or of Beowolf, or of Paul Bunyan? Advocates of the "myth" hypothesis have far more to deal with in Christ than will ever fit into any such monstrous and evil supposition as making the record of Jesus of Nazareth to be a mere myth. There is far too much to fit into such a small thimble.

Moreover, the testimony of the calendar is irrefutable. The dates inscribed on buildings, the dates of newspapers, legal documents, letters and the agendas of parliaments, congresses, and legislatures, as well as the chronology of kings and presidents throughout the world and throughout history, are all intelligible only when related to the Christ and the number of years since he appeared among men. Here is a mountain fact so high that all the infidels on earth, standing on top of each other, cannot see over it. Whatever the date, it is "The Year of Our Lord," (Anno Domini.) Oh yes, there are other methods of reckoning time. There were the Olympiads, and the Chinese Calendar, and the Jewish Calendar; but, for example, in that stronghold of international Jewry which is New York City, the synagogues along Fifth Avenue make the Jewish dates inscribed thereon intelligible to modern man only by writing the equivalent (Anno Domini) underneath; and so it is for the Chinese Calendar, and the Olympiads, and every other method.

He is risen! Yet we know that Christ died. We know the name of the man who signed his death warrant. We know how he died, and what were his last words, and how they mocked him, and how his side was pierced, and how Joseph of Arimathea took the body and where he laid it, and how it was wrapped, and in what spices, and that the grave was sealed and a watch posted. And we know that an angel of God announced his resurrection, that at first his disciples did not believe it, and that later, after they had seen him, they truly believed, and that they sealed their testimony with their blood. We know that he was seen after his resurrection, that he appeared no less than ten times to a wide variety of persons in different places, and that it was the overwhelming certainty that Christ was alive again that motivated the early church and impelled it in a world-girdling revolution of religious zeal and fervor. Never was a more important word spoken to men than that of the glorious angel who said, "He is not here; he is risen, even as he said"!

Even as he said! Christ made at least three grand prophecies of his death and resurrection (Matthew 16:21; Matthew 17:22,23; Matthew 20:17-19), besides many other detailed references to it. See notes on those passages. The true gospel is not merely that Christ arose, but that he did so "even as he said, and according to the Scriptures" (see 1 Corinthians 15:3,4).

Come see the place where the Lord lay. That admonition indicated something profoundly important and observable was to be seen in the tomb, and such is a necessary inference from an angel of God in calling attention to it. See more on the undisturbed grave-clothes under the title of "Phenomena Attending the Crucifixion," as outlined in the preceding chapter. Those undisturbed grave-clothes were themselves incontrovertible evidence that Christ had risen through them and through the tomb to life again.