Is the Resurrection Real? The Evidence That Still Stands

From the sermon preached on April 5, 2026

The resurrection of Jesus Christ isn't a legend that got bigger with the retelling — it's a historically grounded claim that has withstood direct investigation by skeptics, scholars, and people with every reason to want it to fall apart. If you've carried quiet doubts about whether any of this is real, you're not alone, and the doubts aren't disqualifying. The evidence is worth a honest look.

Long before Jesus of Nazareth was born, the Hebrew prophets laid out a specific and detailed portrait of the one who would come. He would be born in Bethlehem, in the lineage of King David, preceded by a forerunner like John the Baptist. He would be betrayed for exactly thirty pieces of silver — the price of a slave, not an exaggeration that grew over time, but a specific number written in the prophecies of Zechariah hundreds of years before it happened. He would live without sin, be crucified (a form of execution that hadn't yet been invented when Psalm 22 described it in striking detail), and rise again.

Scholars who have counted carefully estimate over three hundred prophecies in the Hebrew scriptures that point toward a single person. The probability that any one human being would fulfill even a fraction of those predictions by coincidence is not a rounding error — it's statistically incoherent unless the whole thing was being orchestrated from outside human history. What Jesus fulfilled were not vague generalities. Many of them — where he was born, who betrayed him, the manner of his death — were details he had no personal control over.

That specificity matters. A fish story grows because the storyteller adds color over time. What happened with Jesus is the opposite: the earliest records, written within decades and in some cases months of the events, contain the full claim. He was crucified. He was buried. He rose on the third day. That's not a legend that accumulated slowly. That's the core of what the first witnesses said from the start.

Some people have argued — with genuine seriousness — that Jesus didn't actually die on the cross. That maybe he was taken down still alive and recovered somewhere. Lee Strobel, a Yale-trained investigative reporter and legal journalist who worked for the Chicago Tribune, set out to prove exactly this when his wife converted to Christianity in the early 1980s. He was angry and skeptical, and he approached the resurrection the way a prosecutor would approach a crime scene: looking for every weakness in the evidence.

What he found in the medical and historical record changed his mind entirely. Before Jesus even reached the cross, he had sweated blood in the Garden of Gethsemane — a documented medical condition called hematidrosis, in which extreme psychological distress causes blood vessels in the skin to rupture. His body was already compromised before the scourging began. The Roman flagrum — a whip embedded with bone and metal — would typically strip skin to the muscle and sometimes expose the spine. Matthew 27 records the darkness over the land, the cry of dereliction, the yielding of his spirit. When the Roman soldiers pierced his side, blood and water flowed out — which medical analysis identifies as fluid from the pericardium and pleural cavity, consistent with death by cardiac rupture. Even Josephus and Tacitus, secular historians with no stake in Christian theology, recorded that Jesus died under Pontius Pilate.

Then there is the empty tomb. The Romans had every military reason to produce a body — it would have ended the movement in a day. Instead, the authorities paid the soldiers to spread the story that the disciples had stolen the body while the guards slept. That explanation inadvertently confirms the one thing that mattered: the tomb was empty. The body wasn't there, and nobody — not Rome, not the Sanhedrin, nobody — could produce it.

Romans 5:1 — written by Paul of Tarsus, a former violent persecutor of Christians who encountered the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus and spent the rest of his life under constant threat of imprisonment and death for saying so — puts it plainly: "Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ."
That word, peace, carries more weight than it might sound like. It doesn't mean a feeling of calm. It means the active hostility between a holy God and a sin-carrying human being has been resolved — fully and finally — through what Jesus did on the cross and confirmed by the empty tomb. The sin debt doesn't just get deferred. It gets paid. And the one who paid it didn't stay dead.

Lee Strobel, after two years of deliberate investigation, concluded on November 8, 1981, that the evidence pointed one direction. He stopped fighting it. He placed his faith in the risen Christ and found what his wife had found. Over the last two thousand years, scholars estimate seventy million people have given their lives rather than renounce belief in the resurrection — not because it was a story they'd been told and never questioned, but because they became convinced it was true. The disciples who ran from the Garden of Gethsemane in fear became people willing to die rather than deny what they had seen. That kind of transformation doesn't come from a legend.

One honest step to take today: read Romans 10:9-10 slowly, without rushing to conclusions. Just sit with what it actually says — that the requirement for salvation is belief and confession, not performance. That's the whole offer.

Watseka isn't a place where people make a lot of noise about their doubts. You carry what you carry, you show up, you get through the week. If Easter has always been somebody else's holiday — if the memories from it are complicated, or if the whole thing has always felt like it was for people whose lives were more together than yours — that's exactly where this message lands. Trinity Church has people in Watseka, Ashkum, Gilman, Clifton, Milford, Cissna Park, and across Iroquois County who showed up with the same quiet questions and found something worth staying for. Not a performance. Not an expectation that you have it figured out. Just an honest look at what the evidence says, and a place to sit with it.

The resurrection isn't the end of a story. It's the thing that makes everything that came before it mean what it means. Good Friday is the cost. Easter is the confirmation. Romans 10:9-10 says that the peace available through confessing and believing in the risen Christ is not conditional on your track record — it's available to anyone who believes in their heart that God raised Jesus from the dead. That's the offer on the table.

If you're ready to take a next step, we'd love to welcome you at Trinity Church — at our Ashkum, Goodland, or Watseka Campus. Plan a visit at the button below.

And if you're not quite ready for that, you can still connect and let us know how we can pray for you. Take the next step here at one of our campuses, or connect here to reach out privately.