Because He Lives
by Robert Mitchell
The Scriptures offer some intriguing clues about the truth of Christ’s resurrection.
My earliest introduction to the resurrection of Jesus Christ was sitting on my grandmother’s lap as she flipped through her Bible and showed me photos of medieval paintings depicting the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.
While I was only about 5 years old, she explained how Jesus Christ had died on the Cross for the bad things I had done in my life and then rose from the dead three days later. The graphic images left an indelible mark in my young mind; I often think of them even to this day. My grandmother died a few years later, and I sadly wasn’t raised in a Christian home.
Looking for ways to make money as a preteen, I mowed lawns, and my life forever changed the day I stumbled upon an overgrown yard along my route. The elderly woman who lived there, Esta Storm, invited me in for lemonade when I finished cutting the grass and asked me if I knew anything about Jesus Christ. “Not much,” I said with a shrug. She went on to explain how I was a sinner and deserved to go to Hell. Any works of righteousness I might do wouldn’t get me to Heaven, but because Jesus died on the Cross and rose from the dead, I could have eternal life through faith in Him.
I bowed my head at her kitchen table and welcomed Christ into my heart that day, but I didn’t investigate any of the claims about His resurrection. I only cared about sports and the other things boys did at that age. She started taking me to church, and I heard many sermons about the empty tomb and Christ’s post-resurrection appearances. I became a firm believer that the Resurrection was true.
When I got older, I went on to become a journalist and decided to investigate the claims of the Resurrection for myself. I was no Lee Strobel, a journalist and avowed atheist who set out to disprove Christianity and later became a Christian, but I approached it with an open mind.
Trained to be skeptical in journalism school, I became obsessed with devouring every book written on Christian apologetics. I talked to many pastors and experts and skeptics. I also read the gospel accounts over and over and over. What keys were there in the Bible itself?
Dying for their faith
Long story short, the evidence was overwhelming from a historical standpoint. I studied the objections and the alternative theories, but I kept coming back to one thing: the dramatic change in the apostles.
The apostles lived with Jesus for three years and heard every sermon. When trouble came in the Garden of Gethsemane, they fled like cowards. Peter denied knowing Him multiple times. When Jesus was crucified, only the disciple John stood at the foot of the Cross, along with Jesus’ mother and many of His female followers.
Where were the rest of His disciples? Hiding behind locked doors. They were scared. The man they had put all their hope in was gone, and they were marked men and afraid they would suffer the same fate if the Romans found them.
A funny thing happened a few days later. John and Peter, after getting the news from Mary Magdalene that Jesus had risen from the dead, ran to the tomb and found it empty. The disciples also claimed the resurrected Jesus appeared to them. The Apostle Thomas, who originally doubted, said he would only believe if Jesus appeared, and he could put his fingers in the nail holes and Jesus’ side. He got his wish, declaring, “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28).
The change in the apostles was remarkable. This ragtag group of misfits, empowered by the Holy Spirit, boldly changed the world. They traveled far and wide preaching His message, and all but John died a martyr’s death, many crucified like their Savior.
Peter was crucified upside down, Matthew was impaled by spears, James the son of Zebedee was beheaded, Simon the Zealot was cut in half with a saw, Philip was hanged, Bartholomew was flayed to death with knives, Thomas was speared to death, and James the Son of Alpheus was stoned to death. Knowing human nature, that convinced me that what the apostles claimed was true. How else do you explain it?
Could they all have been delusional liars? That didn’t make sense given how they died. Someone would have recanted and exposed the whole thing if it was all just an elaborate hoax.
Eyewitnesses
Christian author Charles Colson, the infamous Watergate figure and later the founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries, was a firm believer in the Resurrection based on human nature.
“I know the Resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me,” Colson famously said. “How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren’t true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world—and they couldn’t keep a lie for three weeks. You’re telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible.”
Major Martina Cornell, the administrator of The Salvation Army’s Ray & Joan Kroc Corps Community Center in Dayton, Ohio, saw the same thing I did.
“What really convinced me was what I read about how the apostles lived and how they died,” she said. “Many of them lived very difficult lives teaching the gospel and died horrible deaths. When I really thought about this, I found it highly unlikely that they would live and die this way for something that they knew was a lie, or at least weren’t sure was true. This fact tells me that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is real.”
“Again and again, under varying circumstances and before increasing numbers of impeachable witnesses, Jesus showed himself until the last vestige of doubt that their Lord had risen vanished from the disciples’ minds.”
I found more convincing proofs in 1 Corinthians 15, one of the Bible’s most compelling chapters. Paul quotes one of the earliest creeds of the Church dating to just after the Resurrection: “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.”
As a newspaper reporter, I was never satisfied with secondhand sources. I always tried to get a source as close to the actual events as possible. Ideally, I wanted eyewitness testimony. What jumped off the page to me was Paul telling his readers that Jesus appeared to more than 500 people at one time—and the apostle essentially dares his readers to fact-check the claim. He challenges them by saying, “most of whom are still living.” My reporting instincts kicked in and I got it. Paul was essentially saying, “Oh, you don’t believe me or the word of all these people? Go interview them yourself.” No one would have done that unless they were sure of their claims.
Seeing and believing
Cornell also noted the testimony from 1 John 1:1–2, where the Apostle John writes that the earliest Christians indeed proclaimed eyewitness testimony: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.”
The apostles were again saying: We’re eyewitnesses and we’re telling you what we saw.
“Their encounter with the risen Christ shows that His resurrection is real,” Cornell said. “By sharing this, they invite us to experience the same joy and connection with Jesus. Their story proves that the Resurrection is a true and life-changing event.”
Salvation Army Commissioner Samuel Logan Brengle, in his book Resurrection Life and Power, says the eyewitness testimony recorded in 1 Corinthians 15 is crucial evidence for the Resurrection.
“Again and again, under varying circumstances and before increasing numbers of impeachable witnesses, Jesus showed Himself, until the last vestige of doubt that their Lord had risen vanished from the disciples’ minds,” Brengle wrote.
Brengle also mentioned how the apostles, though they were poor, unlearned, despised, and hated, were not scattered like John the Baptist’s followers after his death. Jesus’ apostles banded together to build His Church, which stands to this day.
“Such an institution as the Christian church could not have been built upon a falsehood,” Brengle wrote.
Brengle goes on to say that “in the presence of Jesus’ resurrection, all other miracles pale like the stars before the rising sun. It is the crowning evidence that He is the Son of God.”
Connecting the dots
The reality of God’s power convinced Captain Shakai Drigo of the Resurrection.
“I thought, if Jesus claimed his Father is the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all of Israel, and that same God created the heavens and the earth, it was easy to believe that God’s power could resurrect His son,” said Drigo, who leads The Salvation Army’s Ray & Joan Kroc Corps Community Center in Boston.
Nearby in Salem, Mass., Major Ruth Thomas commands The Salvation Army’s North Shore Corps. What helped her believe in the Resurrection was “connecting the dots” found in Scripture: “Reading about Jesus foretelling his death, the struggle of getting there, and then it does happen,” she said. “Even after He returns to His disciples, there was a doubting Thomas. It brings home the idea of having a choice. To choose to believe in Him and all of His promises.”
It’s sometimes easier to make those connections when you see where Jesus walked, lived, taught, died, and rose from the dead. Several Salvation Army officers have traveled to Israel to witness the words of the Gospels come alive.
For Major Lydia Pearson, the USA Eastern Territory’s education secretary, a trip to the Holy Land wasn’t necessary for her to believe, but she enjoyed seeing the homeland of Mary Magdalene and other sites.
“I’ve actually never doubted the Resurrection because I’ve heard about it since I was 4 years old,” she said.
Still, a compelling passage for Pearson is Acts 4:13, where Peter and John testify to the Resurrection and the power of God before the Sanhedrin. The Jewish leaders recognized the apostles were unschooled, ordinary men, acting through the power of the Holy Spirit.
“To me that shows you don’t have to have a lot of knowledge or education, but being in Jesus’ presence makes a difference in a person’s life,” Pearson said. “That’s powerful to me.”
Walking in His steps
To Major William Furman, seeing where Jesus lived, walked, and taught was an opportunity to affirm his faith in the death, burial, and Resurrection.
“That’s a belief and conviction I hold in my heart and I’m sure and certain of it because not only does God’s Word say it, but it’s been evidenced by believers in the body of Christ for years,” said Furman, the USA Eastern Territory’s assistant personnel secretary and a Christian for 50 years. “It’s more of a personal and private celebration of what I’ve always believed in.”
Furman has been to Israel four times. Whether it was at the Garden of Gethsemane, in the city of Capernaum, or standing along the shores of the Sea of Galilee, he said it was easy to envision Jesus healing the sick and preaching to large crowds.
“Once you start walking in these footsteps, you start to realize exactly what it meant for Jesus to be committed to His Father’s will,” he said.
“You don’t have to go to Israel to believe in any of this, but while you’re there, I think everybody has these personal reflections that bring to bear what they’ve long believed in, what they see, and what they start connecting within their own spirit and soul.”
Though she has not been to Israel, Connie Correia has always believed in the death and resurrection of Christ, and that belief became “more real and personal to me,” she said, when she accepted Christ at age 16. Correia, an administrative assistant at The Salvation Army in New Bedford, Mass., pointed out that all 66 books of the Bible tell a consistent story told by 40 authors over a span of 1,500 years. The Old Testament predicted Christ’s coming, and the New Testament lays out His life and story, including the Resurrection.
“How can anyone refute that? Jesus fulfilled all prophecy predictions in His life, in death, and in His resurrection,” she said.
“I can sit and debate the issue of the resurrection of Jesus forever, but until one finally meets the risen Savior [personally], and knows within their heart the true reality of a heart set free by this risen Christ, they will never understand, or accept the love, grace, and sacrifice that was bestowed on us by so great a Savior.”
Seeing the power
Growing up, Steve Bussey, now a Salvation Army envoy and historian, never questioned the Resurrection. He always loved going to sunrise services—watching the sun rise to mark the “Son rise.”
“Being brought up in a Christian home, my worldview was shaped by the reality of the Resurrection,” he said. “I always believed God came to redeem humanity, and not only did He die for us, but He was resurrected, and in that resurrection is life and power.
Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; HE HAS RISEN!
—LUKE 24:5–6
“Christ’s resurrection bears witness to the fact that one day, when Christ comes, we will experience the resurrection of our bodies. There will be a work of glorification, and not only will we have a new Heaven and a new earth, but we will have new bodies just like Christ’s resurrected body.”
Like Bussey, many Christians find hope in this life and the one to come through the Resurrection. Major Gregory Hartshorn, the divisional commander of The Salvation Army’s Western Pennsylvania Division, was raised Catholic and said he always believed Jesus rose from the dead. But he often asked, “Why?”
“I learned that I was a sinner, and it was my sin that separated me from God,” Hartshorn said. “The Scriptures revealed to me that Jesus died for my sins—to remove them from me—by taking them on Himself. But the power of God was revealed over my sin because God raised Jesus from the dead, victorious over His death and the death sentence that sin brings. Jesus died and rose again to bring me victory over sin!”
For Envoy Anne Rich of The Salvation Army in Plymouth, Mass., the Resurrection brings renewed hope of eternal life. Believing in the Resurrection has been profoundly personal and life changing for her.
“When I began to understand and believe in the Resurrection, it felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders,” Rich said. “The idea that Jesus conquered death gave me a new perspective on my own struggles and fears. I found hope in knowing that my challenges are temporary and that there is a greater purpose beyond this life.
“I’ve come to see the Resurrection not just as a historical event, but as a living reality that shapes my daily life. It has transformed my outlook, my relationships, and my purpose in ways I never imagined possible.”
Born again
Transformation also happened for Major Mayra Vasquez of the Albany, N.Y., Temple Corps. A native of the Dominican Republic, she would hang out with people who were a bad influence before Christ changed her life and she met the church and eventually The Salvation Army.
“The old Mayra died, and I became who I am today,” Vasquez said. “I had to leave who I was to be close to Him. He was the only one who could pay our sin debt. His shed blood and His resurrection gives us new life. He’s the only one who came back from the dead—the only one. ‘Because He lives, I can face tomorrow.’”
She quoted the famous hymn based on John 14:19. In the Scripture, Jesus says, “Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live.”
“Without Jesus dying and His resurrection,” said Vasquez, “I would not be who I am today.”
Made alive in Christ
Every Resurrection season, like many other Christians, I go back and read 1 Corinthians 15 again and again because there’s so much rich theology to dwell on. In verse 17, the Apostle Paul reminds his readers that “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.” In verse 19, he goes on to say that Christians are to be “pitied.”
Just one verse later, he boldly proclaims, “But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead.” The Resurrection—the empty tomb—is the heart of the Christian faith, and we serve a risen Savior.
I never forgot Mrs. Storm over the years as I married, moved to New York, and raised children. I returned to my hometown church in Indiana in 1992 and asked around, assuming the woman who pointed me to Christ had passed away. Some of the old-timers told me she was very much alive but suffering from Alzheimer’s. I got the phone number of her daughter, who was thrilled to hear from me, and we met for breakfast the next morning.
The Alzheimer’s had taken its toll and I’m not sure she recognized me, but I got to say “thank you” to the woman who cared enough to lead me to Christ.
It didn’t seem likely that day I cut her grass, but the seeds Mrs. Storm planted within me took hold. I’ve taught Sunday school and youth programs in my church for decades and introduced many children to the resurrection of Jesus Christ for the first time.
As the Apostle Paul might say, whatever else I do in this life I consider rubbish.
About the Author: Robert Mitchell
