The Testimony About Life After Death

Today, we are in Acts 25. We're gonna read that very shortly. We have seen that we have started this long transition of Paul's imprisonment. He was captured in Jerusalem, and now he's on his way to Rome. And there is a period of not just weeks and months, but years of this progress towards Rome.

And throughout this, we see this repeated opportunity for Paul to give a defence for the faith, the gospel message that he was proclaiming. We're gonna see another context in which Paul does this and the central message of this defence he gives. So last week, we looked at the story where Paul was a prisoner to the governor Felix, a man who was widely known for his corruption, his favouritism, and his self-absorbed lifestyle. Paul was fighting for his life as his future lay in the balance. On the one hand, he was defending himself as having done nothing wrong, that he was innocent of any punishment.

And yet, on the other hand, he would say, I count my life as nothing, so that I may declare the good news of Jesus Christ to the world. This morning, we come to look at chapters 25 and chapter 26, which really forms one scene in the story of Acts. And what I'm gonna try and do, hopefully, is to summarise what happens in these two chapters. But basically, what we find is Paul is on trial here before another governor, a governor that replaced this Felix, a governor called Festus, and then to the Jewish king, King Agrippa the Second. The first thing we will notice is that two years have moved on from our sermon last week.

Two years, Paul has been a prisoner in Caesarea. For two years, Paul was kept prisoner without trial, without charge, without formal conviction, and he was kept in jail because some people had accused Paul of being a blasphemer in Jerusalem. In chapter 24, we see how Felix would take Paul out as sport, out of prison. He would drag Paul up to come and speak to him and his guests, to listen to Paul preach the gospel like a monkey on a chain. For two years, Paul kept preaching the gospel when he had the opportunity.

At the end of these two years, beginning of chapter 25, Felix is replaced as a governor by a man called Porcius Festus. As bad as Felix was, Festus wasn't much better. Archaeology tells us that he was well known as being brutally efficient at quelling unrest and uprisings. And since there was a growing unrest between the Jews and the Romans, he was sent to the province of Judea to suppress any revolts happening there. Amazingly, after only two weeks as governor, Festus decides to hear Paul's case.

During his hearing in chapter 25, Paul defends himself again for the hundredth time. And the Jewish religious leaders who wanted Paul dead all along appealed that he be taken back to Jerusalem, to be put on trial there. But with this plan in mind, that while Paul was travelling back to Jerusalem, they would lay in ambush and kill Paul without trial. In hearing about this plan, Paul appeals to have his case heard by none other than the Roman emperor himself, the highest authority in the Roman empire, by Caesar. As a citizen of Rome, Paul has this right to appeal.

In chapter 25, we find a brilliant move that is made by him because it meant that no one could touch him. Festus couldn't touch him. The Jews couldn't touch him, and Paul bought more time to do what? Not to really save his life. My life, I consider as nothing, but to keep proclaiming the gospel.

And so, he has royal protection against all these plots. After the court is adjourned in front of this governor, Festus, the Jewish king, King Agrippa the Second, specifically Herod Agrippa the Second, came to visit Festus to congratulate him on being the new governor. Typical royal diplomacy and parties ensued. And while King Agrippa and his wife, who was also his sister, was there, Festus mentioned to King Agrippa this perplexing prisoner named Paul. And in chapter 26, Festus brings Paul up again from the dungeon, like a puppet, to speak to the king of the Jews, so called.

And Paul, once again, gives a defence for why he is in chains, that he is innocent, and what must be done with this message of Jesus. Luke tells us in Acts that King Agrippa comes in with great pomp. He sits in the court to listen to Paul again, but it's all a show. The king is there with his entourage and people blowing trumpets as Paul stands in the middle of the court to speak again. Paul gives his defence, and chapter 26 finishes by telling us that after Paul was questioned by Agrippa, the Jewish king says, I can't find this man guilty of anything.

This man has done nothing that deserves death or imprisonment. That is a summary of these last few chapters. What I want us to do this morning, however, is to read from Acts 25 verse 13 to 22, and what we find is Festus explaining the case to King Agrippa, and we find what he understood to be the central issue that was at play here. Namely, that Paul believes in the resurrection of a man named Jesus. That is the sticking point.

Let's have a look. Acts 25 verse 13. Now when some days had passed, Agrippa the king and Bernice his wife arrived at Caesarea and greeted Festus. And as they stayed there many days, Festus laid Paul's case before the king saying, there is a man left prisoner by Felix. And when I was at Jerusalem, the chief priests and the elders of the Jews laid out their case against him, asking for a sentence of condemnation against him.

I answered them that it was not the custom of the Romans to give up anyone before the accused met the accusers face to face and had opportunity to make his defence concerning the charge laid against him. So when they came together here, I made no delay. On the next day, I took my seat on the tribunal and ordered the man to be brought. When the accusers stood up, they brought no charge in his case of such evils as I supposed. Rather, they had certain points of dispute with him about their own religion and about a certain Jesus who was dead, but whom Paul asserted to be alive.

Being at a loss how to investigate these questions, I asked whether he wanted to go to Jerusalem and be tried there regarding them. But when Paul had appealed to be kept in custody for the decision of the emperor, I ordered him to be held until I could send him to Caesar. Then Agrippa said to Festus, I would like to hear the man myself. Tomorrow, said he, you will hear him. So far our reading.

Within this small snippet of a speech, a conversation between this governor, Festus, and Herod Agrippa the Second, we see a non-Christian summarising what this whole case was about. Festus says that he expected to charge Paul with a serious crime. What deserves the punishment of death? But his accusers wanted him dead for this particular point. There were some small disputes about their religion, verse 19 says, and the fact that a man named Jesus, who was dead, Paul claims to be alive.

Ask yourself the question, why would you argue a case for someone to receive a death sentence for believing someone has come back from the dead? Why would you say that because Paul believed and preached that a man from Nazareth rose up from the dead, that this man claiming these things deserved to die? It seems insane. In today's court system, if it's a case that was ever brought before the judge or the court, the judge would not hear it. If you were to go to the Southport Magistrate's Office and someone, your accuser, said, this person believes someone I know died and is now back from the dead, the accuser would be told that he's wasting the court's time, and the defendant would be excused for being mentally unwell.

And yet, here we are. Paul in prison for two years, giving a defence before governors, kings and queens. Why? Simply for the reason that a man came back from the dead and that man's enemies who put him to death, foaming at the mouth in rabid anger at claims that he was alive. Ask yourself the question, why does the resurrection of Jesus evoke such a response?

It's because the resurrection of Jesus has massive implications. Not just for Paul, not just for the Jews at the time, but for everyone. The resurrection of Jesus in the proclamation of the gospel of Paul is at the very centre of all that the apostles and the early church preached. Without the resurrection of Christ, there is no Christian message. Without the resurrection, there is no reason to believe in Jesus.

And so here's the rub. If the Jewish accusers could discount Paul and his preaching of Jesus and his resurrection, if they could somehow neutralise his proclamation, silence the evidence of this resurrection, then they would be striking a fatal blow to Christianity. Christianity, as we know it, would cease to exist. And for Paul, the turning point between Judaism and Christianity turns not simply in a man named Jesus who lived, but this Jesus who died and rose again from the dead. So what we see across these few chapters is a glimpse of Paul speaking and laying a defence out to Festus, to Felix, and now to King Agrippa.

He says, for example, in verse 8 of chapter 26 to the king, why is it thought incredible by any of you that God raises the dead? He's saying, King Agrippa, you are a Jew. You know the Old Testament. You know the character of our God. You know the miracles of the people during the time in Egypt.

You know the power of our God. Why would you reject the notion that God could raise Jesus from the dead? He says, in fact, if you know your bible, if you know the scriptures, you would understand that the Messiah had to experience all these things in order to be the Messiah, to be the one who saves Israel. So this morning, I want us to think about the centrality of this resurrection point that kept Paul in prison and that he refused to budge on. The resurrection of Christ is the linchpin for the good news message of salvation.

And what I wanna do is look at seven implications of the resurrection. The first point is that the resurrection of Jesus Christ, in it, we see the clear demonstration of the power of the living God. Ephesians 1:19-21 tells us that the resurrection of Jesus is the power of God. It is the power of God that raised Him from the dead. Someone coming back from the dead is a pretty amazing event.

It's a massive thing. No one can just beat death. A hundred per cent of people who die stay dead. Right? Something or someone significantly powerful then has to intervene to prevent death from continuing its natural course.

But in the resurrection claim of Christianity, the power of the one true living God is witnessed. There is power at work here. And this is the first point. In Jesus coming to life, we see God intervening. But it's one thing to see power behind this event.

The next logical question is, why would God want to intervene to resurrect this Jesus? That leads us to the next point. The resurrection proves that Jesus Christ is God Himself. The reason people put Jesus to death in the first place, the reason Jesus was dead is because they thought He was a blasphemer. The reason they thought He's a blasphemer was that He claimed to be equal with God.

In their eyes, He was either a liar or a lunatic, and He needed to be silenced. And so if He remained dead and buried, they were right. He was just another lunatic or He was just another impostor, and that was the end of the matter. But because of the resurrection, Jesus is God because God cannot die. Because Jesus Christ came back to life, that demonstrates the truth that He is who He said He was.

But Jesus' resurrection isn't simply a sideshow to prove His divinity. Jesus doesn't go to the grave and to come back to life just to prove that He is God. He could have done anything else to have proved that. There's a specific reason. He had to die.

And that leads us to the third point. Humanity's salvation depends on the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Romans 10:9, we are told how humanity is rescued, is saved from a terrible fate. It reads that if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, Jesus is King, Jesus is God, and you believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. That's a statement that seems very formulaic, algorithmic.

It is an equation. If you believe, then this happens. Believing in Jesus saves you. But it is an equation with this particular emphasis to fix the complex problem of sin. A simple equation to fix the complex problem of sin.

Believing in Jesus and that He came back from the dead after dying for your sin means you receive a victory over that sin yourself. In other words, the resurrection of Jesus secures your salvation. Paul writes earlier in the book of Romans. He says in Romans 4:25, Christ died for our sins, and He was raised for our justification. So in the resurrection, we believe Jesus paid for our sin in His death, but His resurrection life secured my vindication.

It sealed my righteousness. It guarantees my forgiveness. It locks in my perfect standing with God. That is what the resurrection proves to me. Fourthly, the resurrection of Jesus demonstrates to us that all of Jesus' teachings are true and worth applying to our lives.

In the gospel accounts of Matthew or Luke or Mark, we are shown a teacher who talks about all sorts of stuff in life, marriage, how to use our money, how to love the people around us, how to honour God and love Him. But He also talked about the fact that He would be killed, and three days later, He would rise again. Many times, in fact, Jesus talked about that. And at the time, no one knew what He was talking about. But the fact that Jesus came back from the dead proved that He knew what He was talking about.

And because those things were true, everything else He said about marriage, everything else He said about honouring God, about loving my neighbour is also true. You cannot take His death and His resurrection and forget everything else that He said. The resurrection of Jesus demonstrates to us that all His teachings are true. Fifth, our own resurrection depends completely on the resurrection of Jesus Christ. If you read 1 Thessalonians 4:14, you're told that we believe that Jesus died and that He rose again.

And so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in Him. Fallen asleep is a euphemism to say those who have died. 1 Corinthians tells us, and we read from that chapter earlier, verse 20, Christ has been raised from the dead because He is the first fruit of those who have fallen asleep. The resurrection of Jesus proves that God can raise life after death. But it goes beyond that to prove that the saving power of the death and the resurrection of Jesus.

Not only is God able to bring people back from death, but He will do so. He's inclined to do so because eternal life has been won for us. Six, our second last point, the power for our Christian life in the present life is found in the power of the resurrection. If you read Ephesians 1, as well as Romans 6:4, we are told, we were therefore buried with Him through baptism into His death in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may now have life. Now.

We will have life now. Because of the resurrection, we have a new life. Because our resurrection is so secure, being proved by the resurrection of Jesus, our eternal, never fading, righteous future starts today. It has started that moment we believed. That's why Christians look forward to that new life, that new hope, this righteousness that we keep talking about, leaching into our lives right now.

That kingdom that is our hope, that is our goal, and we're so envious, we're so desirous of it, that life of the kingdom is coming into our lives right now. We are being transformed by its virtues right now. And that is why Christians, because of the resurrection of Jesus, can look forward to being empowered to living godly, holy, righteous lives now. All the virtues of our future, our freedom from sin, is experienced in part now. The last implication of the resurrection of Jesus to which Paul was in chains and remained wilfully, willingly in chains, is that the resurrection of Jesus Christ demonstrates that Jesus is going to be appointed judge of all the people in the world.

We looked at this passage a few weeks ago, but in Acts 17:31, Paul tells the Greeks in Athens, God has set a day when He will judge the world with justice by the man He has appointed, and He has given proof of this to all men by raising this man from the dead. It means that the resurrection of Jesus means that He has been given the special position of King and Judge over all mankind. He is the firstborn. He is the leader of all of us, whether we believe in Him or not. And we will one day come before Him, and we will be weighed up.

Our case will be weighed up based upon what we did with this revelation of His death, of His resurrection, of His saving work on our behalf. Since He is the judge and the ruler, He's been given the task of measuring out the benefits of His saving work to those who believe and showing those who didn't trust in that work the door. And so we find at least seven, and there are perhaps many more, implications for why someone like Paul would be unwilling to move from his position, even as he languished in prison for that long. What does this mean for you and I? Well, firstly, it means that you need to believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

You cannot be a Christian without believing that Jesus literally, physically, factually had His heart beat again after being literally, physically dead. There are Christians who will try to claim that this was some sort of spiritual event. This was something that is a metaphor of a new life that we can somehow have by just being more obedient to God. If you haven't believed that this was an event that personally impacts you, I wanna encourage you to turn back. Repent from that position.

Believe in the resurrection. Believe that Jesus Christ is that God who cannot die. Believe that He is the judge, the King, the ruler who reigns as God and will come to judge all of us based on our faith in Him and what He accomplished on the cross for us. But then there's a second application. When we look at Paul's witness before Felix, and then Festus, and then Agrippa.

The book of Acts tells us about this defence and this witness of Paul in order to instil a hope in us that will drive us to stand on the shoulders of the likes of Paul and Peter and the apostles. And that is a hope centred on this idea that because Jesus lives, I will live also. In that sense, we become witnesses to the resurrection. Now listen and hear me well. Luke, as the author of the book of Acts, never implies that we can ever be witnesses in the same foundational aspects that the apostles could.

There are no more apostles today. The apostles were the ones who were the eyewitnesses of Jesus and His resurrection. And so Christians today are neither eyewitnesses nor earwitnesses in the way that they were. And yet, on the other hand, Luke shows that Christians converted through the testimony of the apostles could share in the task of testifying to the resurrection of Jesus and in God's saving plan through Him. In that way, they become secondary witnesses.

Luke himself is a witness by pointing in his book to the eyewitness experience of the apostles. Likewise for us, the authoritative witness of the apostles has become for us the inspired basis, our inspired guide for our testimony, for our witness. We are therefore second hand witnesses. And this clarifies what I was talking about last week when I said that our testimony matters. When we talked about the idea of a testimony last week of sharing the testimony, today we understand what the content of that testimony needs to be.

Authentic Christian witness cannot simply be a matter of sharing one's own subjective understandings of Christ. It is about, whether that is about, you know, what I think Jesus did for me last weekend. The testimony of a Christian is the witness of Jesus Christ who has come back from the dead after paying for my sin, of after setting me free. Fundamentally, witnessing as Christians means people using the apostolic witness found in scripture to persuade others of the need to believe in the hope found in Jesus. This is what it means for us to witness then, to bear testimony.

People need to know that Jesus is alive, that He once died for our sins, that He was raised to life for our justification, and they need to know that only in Him is their hope for eternal life. Now, at the end of these trials, at the end of chapter 26, after Festus has heard Paul speak to Agrippa again and made his case again, Festus says to Paul, verse 24, you are out of your mind. Your great learning is driving you out of your mind. But Paul's logic, friends, is rock solid. The resurrection stands at the heart of the Christian hope, the heart of humanity's hope.

The implication of the gospel and the resurrection of Jesus is massive. And we, as Christians, are actively working to cause this eyewitness testimony of the apostles to be heard by everyone who has an ear to hear. And so it is right that men like me should be called to declare this as their full time job, and it is right for us as Christians, members of a church, to be giving towards the church to encourage that to happen. And it is just as right and good for us as Christians to share with our family members, to share with our friends. Not what me and Jesus did last weekend, but what Jesus has done once and for all in His death and in His victorious resurrection.

That is our witness. That is our testimony. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for your Son, Jesus. And we thank you for the great, glorious, majestic thing you did in raising Him from the dead.

And with Him, you raised our eternal hope. Justification is ours forever. Righteousness is covering us forever. And we pray, God, that we may never become distracted from this central teaching. That whatever we have counted as gain, whatever we strive towards to build up and to strengthen our lives, Lord, will fade into insignificance in light of what you have done for us.

And so, Lord, help us to understand and see this great and very humble task we have of simply being one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread, where to find life, and that is in Jesus. We thank you for your servant Paul. We thank you for your servant Luther. We thank you for the men and the women over the years who have resisted to the point of death the temptation to give up on this one central hope. And Father, as we are challenged daily in our lives by friends and family who don't understand, who will say to us, you are out of your mind.

Lord, help us to find great comfort and hope in the life of our Saviour. And so, we also pray for the witness of this church in this part of the Gold Coast to this part of the world that you have given us. We pray, Lord, that there may be an incredible bringing in of people who respond to this message. Create ears who are willing to hear, hearts willing to repent and believe. But in us, Lord, begin the work of causing courage and genuine faith to believe that all of these things are actually true.

Help us to believe that this life is real. We pray it in Jesus' name. Amen.