Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 32:128 (Oct 1875)
Article: Jesus And The Resurrection
Author: Laurens P. Hickok

BSac 32:128 (Oct 1875) p. 593

Jesus And The Resurrection

Rev. L. P. Hickok

The doctrine of the resurrection of the dead body is essential to the validity of Christianity. Christ was crucified, dead, and buried; he passed within the unseen world; and, aside from the verification of his own assertion that the third day he should rise again, his resurrection is necessary to our faith in him as a present and eternal Saviour; and in his resurrection we have the promise and pledge of our own.

The Jew had from his sacred books historic evidence that the dead had been made to live again, and in the days of Christ and his apostles he had the present experience of such occurrences. To the Jew, therefore, the doctrine of a resurrection was familiar, and though the sect of the Sadducees disbelieved all spiritual existence, they well knew the prevalent faith of their nation to be that the spirit lived after death, and at a coming day would reanimate the body long separated from it. But to a heathen hearer of the first preaching of the gospel, nothing could give greater astonishment than to be called on to believe that the dead bodies of all past generations should rise again. A Socratic philosopher, a speculative Platonist, and even an Aristotelian, who comprehended first and final causes in his dialectics, might-accept the doctrines both of pre-existence and a future state

BSac 32:128 (Oct 1875) p. 594

for the spirit; but a philosophy resting alone upon the uniformity of nature, and the prevalent convictions of mankind from common experience, could recognize nothing in the teaching of Christ’s raising the dead body but an incredible absurdity, to be met only with contemptuous rejection. Accordingly, when Paul preached the gospel first at Athens, “Jesus and the resurrection” was the setting forth of “strange gods” and “new doctrines”; and the Epicureans and Stoics encountered him by the derisive inquiry: “What will this babbler say?” And so with modern pagan people, who have been instructed only in the mechanical forces of nature and the laws of matter, the same incredulity appears. The educated, English-speaking Hindus feel the strongest repugnance to Christianity, on account of its two fundamental doctrines of the divinity of Christ and the resurrection of the dead; and, but for these doctrines, many of them do not scruple to say that it would be a desirable thing that the gospel should be preached to the whole world. Yet, as a plan of salvation for the lost, the gospel must go to the heathen nations with the truth of Christ’s divinity, tested by Christ’s resurrection, and that of his second coming to raise the dead and judge the world; for, stripped of these doctrines, its preaching would lose all power to change the heart and life.

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