Disciples 3 Resurrection Product Key Torrent 2
Eliora Shopbell
From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that He must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. (Matthew 16:21 ESV)
It was right after that confession that Jesus let the disciples in on the rest of the plan and what it really meant for Him to be the Christ. This foretelling of His own death and resurrection served to help them see Him as Christ rightly, because to confess Him as Christ and deny Him the cross would be to have misguided expectations.
Matthew intentionally tells the rest of the story under the shadow of the cross of Christ, which of course is cast by the light of His glorious resurrection. We not only read the recorded exchange between Jesus and His disciples, but as we read the story our eyes too are turned toward the cross and resurrection. Matthew engages us in the story so that we can make the confession along with Peter, that Jesus is the Christ, as our attention turns toward the acts of Jesus that have made that a reality for us.
It is my hope that as we spend a few weeks between Christmas and Lent, these few passages will help draw our gaze intently toward the cross and the resurrection of Jesus. As we see Jesus more clearly as the Christ, the Messiah, the Savior, may we see that for any of that to be true He had to go the way of the cross.
The followers I've made disciples lose their halo when resurrected, but if I read their minds they still have the disciple trait, but I never see them pray at the special disciple shrines for crusade bonuses and I can make them disciples again with the ritual.
Shouldn't they stay disciples forever? I'm I the only one having this problem?
For 40 days after His resurrection, Jesus gave His followers the opportunity to engage with Him in community before He returned to Heaven. He proved Himself in the ways they needed: He ate, drank, and spoke with them. He reminded them of where they had been, and where they were headed. He revealed to them how Old Testament scripture had been fulfilled by His grisly death and glorious resurrection. He even pushed back his sleeves and opened His robes to reveal His wounds to Thomas, the doubter on record who asserted to the other disciples:
I would not say that it is a highly popular theory, but it has been put forward by a few scholars today. The hallucination theory is one of a number of naturalistic theories that have been proposed in an attempt to account for the well-accepted historical data concerning the resurrection of Jesus. By a naturalistic theory, I mean a theory that does not appeal to any supernatural events.
Now, you will notice that one of the minimal facts that I mentioned is that the disciples of Jesus had experiences that they truly believed were appearances of the risen Jesus. This is a crucial fact that, in conjunction with the other minimal facts, makes it hard to deny that the best explanation of these facts is that Jesus really did rise from the dead. So, to get around the strong evidence for this particular fact, some have proposed the possibility that the disciples, in their grief, had hallucinations in which they believed that they saw the risen Jesus. The idea is to account for the strong evidence that the disciples sincerely believed that they saw appearances of Jesus alive after His death without admitting that Jesus really rose from the dead.
The hallucination theory first became popular in the 1800s when many other naturalistic theories became popular. These include theories like: the theory that Jesus might have fainted on the cross and was taken off the cross alive and later revived and left the tomb to appear to people; the theory that the disciples stole the body of Jesus from the tomb (this one was actually first proposed by the Jewish authorities in Mt 28); the theory that the followers of Jesus may have gone to the wrong tomb and found the tomb empty; and the theory that there may have been legendary development surrounding the life of Jesus over time so that He was a legendary figure like Paul Bunyan.
To make it more plausible that collective hallucinations may explain the group appearances of Jesus, Lüdemann has argued that details of the group appearances reported in the Bible that do not fit at all with these appearances being collective hallucinations (e.g., Jesus eating with the disciples and touching them) are found in the Gospels rather than in the writings of Paul. The claim is that Paul, who is the earliest source who mentions group appearances and provides strong reason to believe that these appearances were part of the early Christian tradition, does not provide specific information about the nature of these appearances that conflicts with collective hallucinations whereas the Gospels, which were written later, indicate details that do not fit with the group appearances being collective hallucinations. So Lüdemann suggests that maybe the early group appearance traditions (which are widely accepted by scholars) originally sprung from collective hallucinations (which would explain why group appearances were part of the early tradition), but then the nature of what the hallucinators allegedly saw was altered over time (explaining why the accounts of the group appearances described in the later Gospels do not fit with collective hallucinations).
Finally, I give the key argument of the paper, showing how the repeated themes in the Gospels that involve Jesus delivering new information to the disciples and eating with them during his postmortem appearances cannot be squared with the collective hallucination hypothesis that is put forward by Lüdemann.
Since the disciples and the early church are the only candidates for adding the themes and neither is viable, it is best to conclude that the themes are not plausibly added. Since the themes are not plausibly added and could not be hallucinated, the collective hallucination hypothesis fails.
If the disciples had a collective hallucination, the tomb would not be empty. The corpse of Jesus would still be in the tomb. So then you would have to conjoin another naturalistic theory to explain away the empty tomb.
Ultimately, no naturalistic theory has been embraced by a large number of scholars. No naturalistic theory explains all of the widely accepted historical facts concerning Jesus as successfully as the theory that God raised Jesus from the dead. That is what makes the historical argument for the resurrection of Jesus so powerful.
I have written before about how Jesus developed His disciples during His earthly ministry (link), but today I want to focus on how Jesus led His disciples after His resurrection from the dead. Those days immediately following the resurrection further teach us about the character of Jesus and also how to effectively develop and deploy others. Here are six ways Jesus led His disciples after His resurrection:
One day Jesus appeared to His disciples while they were fishing, and He involved them in another miracle. He invited them to cast their nets to the right side of the boat, where they caught so many fish that they could not pull the nets in (John 21:6). Jesus still involves us. Jesus does not need us, but because He loves us, He chooses to include us.
On this same day, when the disciples came ashore, Jesus had breakfast ready for them. Rather than demanding they serve Him, the King who conquered the grave made breakfast for His disciples (John 21:9). The essence of the Christian faith is not that we serve Him but that He has served us.
After feeding His disciples, Jesus pursued Peter to restore Him. Peter had denied he even knew Jesus. Instead of ostracizing, Jesus pursued him with a question: Peter do you love Me (John 21:15)? Thankfully, Jesus still pursues His people.
How Jesus led His disciples and how He leads us should impact how we lead others. We should descend to others and meet them where they are. We should involve others and include them. We should serve others instead of demanding they serve us. We should restore others because we love them. We should challenge others to give their lives to what matters most. And we should empower those we lead to lead others. Because Jesus is alive and lives within us, we can lead others the way He has led us.
As I was reading the book of Matthew, and I was studying how Jesus was preaching the gospel. I know that Jesus preached messages that apparently people didn't understand. If the gospel is about the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, or at least in part, it is the main source of the Gospel -- the good news. Why would Jesus preach about his death, burial, and resurrection while he was still alive -- a message that people in that time period for the most part would not understand because not even his disciples understood until after his resurrection?
The fact that the disciples didn't understand what Jesus discussed meant that they could not cause the prophecies to be fulfilled. But they understood later. "He is not here, but He has risen. Remember how He spoke to you while He was still in Galilee, saying that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again." And they remembered His words" (Luke 24:6-8).
The good news is that God came into this world. "And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth" (John 1:14). His death and resurrection provided atonement for our sins. "By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins" (I John 4:9-10). Thus, God gave us eternal life through His Son (Romans 6:23). And the Gospel shines forth the glory of Christ (II Corinthians 4:4).
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