There is nothing I can say to you that will prove beyond a shadow of doubt what we Christians call the reality of the Resurrection. Ultimately, as you know, it is a matter of faith and of the willingness to believe and trust in something that can be experienced or theorized but not proven.
Occasionally we get an example of this even from science. This January, for instance, I was fascinated by an article in the New York Times about two scientists from the California Institute of Technology who posited the theoretical possibility of a new planet in our solar system which they refer to as “Planet Nine”. The mass of this new planet, they said, was ten times that of the Earth. It is located in the far outer regions of space, some 50 billion miles from earth and 20 times further from the sun than Neptune, the most distant planet known to us. What especially caught my attention in the article was the statement that even though the scientists had no direct evidence that the planet existed, they were sure that it did. “It must be there,” one of them said, because we’ve observed the way objects in the outer part of the solar system move, and “nothing else could exert such influence”.
Perhaps someday Planet Nine will be seen by one of our advanced telescopes and thus its existence will be proven, but for now, and this is my point, the only evidence we have of its existence is the influence it has on the objects around it.
So it is also with the Resurrection. We cannot go back in history to prove it. Nor will it ever be seen by the most advanced telescopes on earth. Yet this does not mean that the Resurrection never happened. We know of it and believe in it because of the influence it had and continues to have on those who follow Jesus.
Jeffrey Kolbo
Pastor
Occasionally we get an example of this even from science. This January, for instance, I was fascinated by an article in the New York Times about two scientists from the California Institute of Technology who posited the theoretical possibility of a new planet in our solar system which they refer to as “Planet Nine”. The mass of this new planet, they said, was ten times that of the Earth. It is located in the far outer regions of space, some 50 billion miles from earth and 20 times further from the sun than Neptune, the most distant planet known to us. What especially caught my attention in the article was the statement that even though the scientists had no direct evidence that the planet existed, they were sure that it did. “It must be there,” one of them said, because we’ve observed the way objects in the outer part of the solar system move, and “nothing else could exert such influence”.
Perhaps someday Planet Nine will be seen by one of our advanced telescopes and thus its existence will be proven, but for now, and this is my point, the only evidence we have of its existence is the influence it has on the objects around it.
So it is also with the Resurrection. We cannot go back in history to prove it. Nor will it ever be seen by the most advanced telescopes on earth. Yet this does not mean that the Resurrection never happened. We know of it and believe in it because of the influence it had and continues to have on those who follow Jesus.
Jeffrey Kolbo
Pastor
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