William is seven years old, but he's been asking tough questions for some time. Questions like, "What makes the wind move?" or "Do I have a step-dad?"
Tonight he asked me, "What if the people who told us about Jesus were liars?" I admit I didn't expect to need my apologetic reasonings this early in Will's life, but I rejoice that he thinking about the gospel I've been teaching him.
I love the way Chuck Colson described how he and about a dozen men committed themselves to a lie in order to protect the President of the United States during the Watergate scandal. These men possessed great political power, prestige, and were afraid of no one. Yet they couldn't sustain a lie for three weeks.
Lets go back a little further in history and consider the disciples of Christ. After the resurrection event, this ragtag bunch of misfits spent the next fifty years turning the known world upside down with a story proclaiming that the illegitimate son of a carpenter had come back from the dead, all while suffering persecution and ridicule from opponents. And when they were faced with the options of changing their story or accepting death, they died without flinching.
These unsure young men not only immerged as fearless defenders of the resurrection story, making Nixon's hatchet men look like kittens, but they had an entire gospel message that seamlessly fulfilled all the Old Testament shadows, themes and prophesies. And don't even get me started on Paul.
The point is this, people die for lie all the time, but they don't die for a lie when they know its a lie. And if anybody would have known that Jesus' resurrection was a fabrication, it would have been the disciples. Yet they poured their lives into the proclamation of this story while under the constant threat of torture and death.
And die they did, never once retracting their testimony that Jesus defeated death.
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