LOGIC

I am not normally one to be accused of being too “churchy” or religious. To me, religion is very logical. It makes sense... especially when you consider this day. Today is a day celebrated by billions around the world. It is the one thing that separates a belief in Jesus from all other faiths. Most reputed religions possess some degree of wise teaching and a wise leader. Jesus, however, is the only leader who appeared in bodily form, whose body is currently not decaying in a tomb.

From a classic, Josh McDowell’s More Than a Carpenter:

“Dr. Simon Greenleaf was one of the greatest legal minds we have had in this country. He was the famous Royall Professor of Law at Harvard University, and succeeded Justice Joseph Story as the Dane Professor of Law in the same university. H.W.H. Knotts in the Dictionary of American Biography says of him: ‘To the efforts of Story and Greenleaf is ascribed the rise of the Harvard Law School to its eminent position among legal schools of the United States.’ While professor of law at Harvard, Greenleaf wrote a volume in which he examined the legal value of the apostles’ testimony to the resurrection of Christ. He observed that it was impossible that the apostles ‘could have persisted in affirming the truths they had narrated, had not Jesus actually risen from the dead, and had they not known this fact as certainly as they knew any other fact.’ Greenleaf concluded that the resurrection of Christ was one of the best supported events in history, according to the laws of legal evidence administered in courts of justice.”

(For the record, famous Harvard law graduates include Rutherford B. Hayes, Barack Obama, 5 sitting Supreme Court justices, and even notables such as the former NBA player Len Elmore and Basil O’Connor, the former polio research advocate and president of the American Red Cross.)

But the point is this, again borrowing from the articulate McDowell:

“...What do you think of the empty tomb? After examining the evidence from a judicial perspective, Lord Darling, former Chief Justice of England, concluded that ‘there exists such overwhelming evidence, positive and negative, factual and circumstantial, that no intelligent jury in the world could fail to bring in a verdict that the resurrection story is true.’”

That truth makes following Jesus quite logical.

AR