Let me ask you a question: what kind of thing is Christianity? Or maybe you say, “Okay, that's obvious — it's a religion.” Or maybe it is. Maybe that's a helpful label; maybe it's not.
Some people helpfully point out that religions generally are about the human race trying to climb up a ladder towards God, whereas Christianity is about God coming down from heaven to reach us. So in some ways, the label “religion” is not helpful when applied to Christianity. This is something different from anything else called a religion.
But let's, just for the sake of argument, allow the label: Christianity is one of the world's religions. But let's still push — okay, what kind of religion is Christianity? What is it that you are holding onto and trying to keep going with? When your friends ask you why you believe the things you do, what is it that you are defending? When you share what you believe with others, what is it that you are spreading? What kind of thing — what kind of religion — is it?
If you're here this morning as somebody still investigating and looking into the claims of Jesus, let me say how very welcome you are. We love having people who are here to do that. What kind of thing is it that you are looking into and researching?
Just suppose a car manufacturer releases a new model — brand new model of car comes on the market — and they have to try and tell people that this thing is good. There's kind of a number of ways to think about that — what that means.
So one of them: is it a good car? Means, does it look good? Does it drive well? Does it handle corners nicely? Is it the kind of car that, once you've driven it out of the showroom, you think, “This is a good car”?
But also you're wanting to know: is it reliable? Will it break down on you, leaving you stranded on the A64 where there's no mobile phone signal? Will it turn to rust four years after it's first released? Or put a crash test dummy in it, line it with sensors, deliberately drive it into a brick wall — and will there be anything of the car, or more importantly of the dummy, left?
Is it a good car at the level of “good to have”, but is it a good car at the level of, if you poke it, prod it, crash it, scrape it, there is still something left at the end of the day?
It's the same with the Christian faith. Do you have confidence that the Christian faith stands up to scrutiny? If you prod it, poke it, scratch it, and push it around a bit, there is still something left at the end of the day.
But that's not the only thing we mean by “is it good?” We also mean: is it the kind of thing that is good, that if you have it, you go, “That is wonderful”? This is something worth talking about, worth holding on to.
If you're sharing your faith with others, asking whether it stands up to scrutiny means not “can you answer every question that your friends might ask?”, but “are you at least confident that there are answers to those questions — if only you knew what they were?”
And if you're sharing it with your friends, then “is this a good thing to have?” means: is this a good enough thing to be worth passing on to others?
And if you're still looking into the Christian faith, you want to know: is the Christian faith that you are investigating — is it coherent, and is it good?
Well, as we look at this episode — the next episode in Paul's life in the city of Jerusalem — as we work our way through these chapters of Acts together, I'm going to tell you three things from these verses about the kind of religion that Christianity is that will help to answer those questions for us.
Christianity is a respectful religion
So, number one: Christianity is a respectful religion. It is a respectful religion.
What do I mean by that? Well, let me tell you what Luke means as he writes the book of Acts.
So we see, on the one hand, Rome's respect for Paul. In this section of Acts generally, it is increasingly the case that the religious leaders are becoming hostile to Paul and against him, but the Roman authorities are increasingly becoming sympathetic. And we start to see that unfolding here as the Roman commander, when he discovers that Paul is a citizen of Rome, seeks to protect him and ensure that the due process of law and a fair trial is applied — who repeatedly, when the religious authorities would rip him apart, rescues him into protective custody to keep him safe.
We're watching the early stages of the Romans concluding that this man Paul — this religion, Christianity, this Jesus that he preaches — is no threat to a civilised government. Civilised governments have nothing to fear from the gospel.
But we also see Paul's respect for the high priest. Now, the Sanhedrin was the Jewish ruling council, and it may well have been corrupt in the way it went about its business. They command that Paul be struck on the mouth — which was against the law — and that's just the beginning. As we keep reading these chapters of Acts, we're going to find that same body of people complicit in a plot for attempted murder. There is a great amount of corruption there.
But Paul does not respond in kind. He knows that the high priest occupies the office he does with God's authority, and he respects that.
Paul's enemies consistently attempt, in these chapters, to pit Paul against Judaism so that the charges brought against him at the very beginning, when he was arrested in chapter 21 verse 28, were these: “This is the man who teaches everyone everywhere against our people and our law and this place.” He's anti-Jewish. He's against the Jewish law.
But no — Luke shows us here that Paul respects the Jewish law. Acts 23 verse 5 quotes from the reading that Susan brought for us: “Brothers, I did not realise that he was the high priest; for it is written: Do not speak evil about the ruler of your people.” The law shapes Paul's behaviour, and when he unwittingly finds he's broken the law, he instantly apologises.
Paul has a great respect for those in authority, even if they conduct their role in a way that is not entirely good.
Now there's an important message here for the governing authorities. I'd love the rulers of our own land to be listening at this point very clearly — and actually, the rulers of other nations need to hear at this point too. So, whoever's going to be the next Prime Minister who attends our live stream this morning — welcome! Listen up. This is for you. Luke's included it here for you.
Don't see us as a threat. The Christian church is not a threat to good governments. We're not here to undermine yours or overthrow you. We are here to respect the role that you've conducted. We ask — please, do it well — but we are here to respect you. And we will do that. We are no threat.
But there's a message here to us as well. We have nothing to fear from good government.
Occasionally you hear in the news of Christians who get into trouble with the authorities for one reason or another. Now obviously, it is different if the reason that happens is that you are being a troublemaker rather than a good and faithful Christian — that's your fault, okay? This is not about saying you have a right to immunity from prosecution if you break the law — no.
And obviously, it's different if the government gets it into its head that it's going to try and police people's thoughts and make it a criminal offence to upset somebody — again, I can't help you if that starts to happen. But what this is saying is, if the government makes it its aim to reward good and to punish evil, then faithful Christians have nothing to fear.
So don't be intimidated into thinking — or embarrassed — apologising for your faith as if it makes you automatically a bad citizen because you're a Christian.
And there's another message for us here as well, which is this: Christianity is a respectful religion, so you should be too.
So, by all means protest if you don't agree with the policies of the government. I'm not saying you shouldn't go out on a protest or anything like that — that's fine. But we're not going to be anarchists. We're going to respect the offices held by those in authority.
Christians should not be the people throwing paint at Van Gogh's sunflowers — that's not our style. Because we respect the authority of those in government and in authority, even at those points when we don't agree.
So: Christianity is a respectful religion.
Christianity is a respectful religion
Secondly: Christianity is a coherent religion.
So, the Sanhedrin — the Jewish ruling council — was a fragile coalition of a number of bodies who had representatives on it. And Luke here mentions two: the Pharisees and the Sadducees.
Now, the Pharisees were religiously pure, okay? Now, if you read the Gospels and Jesus clashes with them, you could be forgiven for having a kind of negative bias towards the Pharisees, thinking they were the baddies. Actually, they were really, really good people. They were lovely — so educated, polite, respectful, constructive. They were great people. They were godly people, driven by good motives. They were experts in God’s law, and they felt very strongly that God's people, the Jews in this era, should be self-governing. They'd love to see Jewish kings restored, and they felt that the Romans should not be ruling over the Jewish people at this point.
The Sadducees were different. They were quite happily collaborators with Rome. They could see that life for them was really quite comfortable because they'd kind of brokered a compromise where they got given all kinds of privileges in exchange for accepting Roman authority — and they were quite happy to broker that compromise and enjoy the privilege.
But Luke tells us one really important thing here about the Sadducees in verse 8. He says: “The Sadducees say there is no resurrection, and that there are neither angels nor spirits.” So they believed in no kind of afterlife at all. They didn’t believe the angels existed, and they didn’t believe that there’s a spirit realm. All the stuff we might term “supernatural”, apart from the existence of God himself — they said no, that doesn't happen.
Whereas the Pharisees believed all those things.
Which leads to the very, very cheesy joke that will nevertheless help you remember what the Sadducees believed, okay? The Sadducees did not believe in life after death — that’s why they’re sad, you see. Okay, you're going to regret that I told you that — but you’ll forever remember what the Sadducees do.
Which means when Paul says what he does in verse 6 — “My brothers, I am a Pharisee, descended from Pharisees. I stand on trial because of the hope of the resurrection of the dead” — he has just lobbed a grenade into the middle of the room.
Half the room at that moment thinks that Paul is now even more dangerous than they thought he was before. The Sadducees go, “Oh no — he's one of them,” and they move the fight onto that turf. We have to object to this belief in resurrection.
Trouble is, the minute he does that, the Pharisees suddenly go, “Hey — he's not so bad after all,” and instead of attacking him, they start to attack each other.
Now, what's this got to do with us? What people say often is that Christians are not consistent in our beliefs—that our beliefs are full of holes. Now, this illustrates why the problem with that argument—this doesn't give us the problem with that argument, but it illustrates it very clearly.
Our understanding may be models about God, but let's be clear: God himself is utterly consistent. God has no holes in his own being, and all the things that are true about him we might struggle to understand, but he is totally consistent.
So, our minds might struggle to understand: how can there be one God and yet three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? How can you have three and one at the same time without them undermining each other? I don't get it. Okay, that's fine—you don't get it. But it does make sense, even if we don't understand how. We could talk about that another time. I'm not going to unravel that one for you today.
How is it that God is completely sovereign—he's in control of everything, nothing happens except God says so—and yet you and I make choices on a daily basis that are our genuine choices, such that God holds us responsible for them? How can that both be true at once? Well, again, we could talk about that another time. I'm not going to do that today. But it's in our understanding that we're struggling, not what's actually true.
God himself is consistent. Jesus said, I am the truth. He is the great consistency. And when your friends push back at what you believe and poke holes in your faith, we can be confident—there are no holes. The only reason that we feel there might be at times is because God is important, our minds are finite, and we're never going to understand exactly how everything fits together.
But that is not so for other worldviews and beliefs. You see, God is not just true—God is the truth. He is the consistent one. So if you move away from God, and even a small way, you're moving away from truth itself, and you will not have a consistent view on life.
Let me illustrate this for you. If you were at Lee's consecration service or watched on the live stream on Friday, you saw lots of people wearing lots of elaborate robes. One of the robes that clergy sometimes wear is called a cassock. It's a black item of clothing. Now, I have one of those at home—I don't get to wear it very often. It has one, two, three buttons that I do. Some clergy choose, for reasons best known to themselves, to wear a cassock—I do know the reason—in which to fasten it from top to bottom, you have to fasten 39 buttons. There is a reason for that, but it must take forever.
If, at the bottom, you start doing the bottom button up and you are one button out, you will get all the way to the top and have to do the whole thing again. Or you're hanging curtains on a curtain rail—if you get that first hook on the wrong one, you go all the way along and you've got blood. Or you're changing the bed and you're doing up the poppers on your duvet cover, and you get—okay, you get the idea, don't you?
It's even been known—other people tell me—with an ordinary common-or-garden shirt, it's possible to start buttoning in the wrong place. Apparently. Couldn't comment. Start one button out—you won't notice until the end before you find a problem.
If you take a little bit of God out of your thinking, you will not be able to button up everything else that you think and it will all fit nicely. You will get other problems elsewhere, because the problem came in at the beginning.
So when people oppose us for our faith and go, “Ha! You've got holes!”—no. But they have. So, people who unite against us won't even agree with each other. That's what we see here with Paul. In fact, any one such person will not agree even within their own head. There will be inconsistencies in their thinking.
Let me give you a little, slightly cheap, slightly underdeveloped example. But for example, some atheists believe that life just boils down to the survival of the fittest—it's how macroevolution works: that the weak will naturally die out, the strong will naturally rise to the top, and so things progress and get better. Most of those people also believe that we should help the weak and the needy amongst us. Why? Aren't you interfering with the evolutionary process if you do that?
Okay, now, it's slightly cheap, because I do kind of know how the game of chess works—I know what they would say next, and I know what I would say next—but I'm not going to play that whole apologetic out for you this morning. But the point is: let's not pretend that everybody else has this beautifully consistent worldview and ours is full of holes. It is the other way around. They attack a God who is fully consistent at every point—who is consistency and who is truth.
Christianity is a consistent and coherent religion.
Christianity is a resurrection religion
Number three: Christianity is a resurrection religion.
Paul's little outburst here is more than just a smart attempt to divide and conquer his opponents (although it is that—you know, it is). In some of the movies where military gets some kind of smoke grenade—lob it into the room, fill the room with smoke—and you can get in, get out, whatever you have to do because no one can see what's going on, right?
He's not just doing that. This is not just a smoke grenade. It's the truth.
So, chapter 23 verse 6:
“My brothers, I stand on trial because of the hope of the resurrection of the dead.”
This is his hope, his message. The reason he's on trial is because he taught two things:
Number one—Jesus rose.
Number two—therefore, we also will rise: a future hope of the resurrection of the dead (plural).
So, for example, if you want to know what Paul preached when he preached to Jews, Luke records one example so we know what he taught on every occasion. It's in Acts 13:16–41, and here is said (verses 32–34 of that):
“We tell you the good news: what God promised our ancestors he has fulfilled for us, their children, by raising up Jesus. As is written in the second Psalm: ‘You are my Son; today I have become your Father.’
God raised him from the dead so that he will never be subject to decay.”
That's what he preached to the Jews.
What did he preach to Gentiles? Well, the one specimen of that we know is Acts 17:22–31. Here's the climax of that speech, verse 31:
“God has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.”
God raised Jesus. That's proof that God will raise everyone.
Or if you want a summary of the gospel that Paul preached, in 1 Corinthians 15 he writes to the church in Corinth and says, “Hold on to the gospel I preached.” Here is the heart of it. And within that chapter—chapter 15, verse 20—Paul says this:
“Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.”
This was the heart of Paul's gospel: Jesus is risen, and therefore there is certainty of resurrection from the dead.
Now, people of Paul's day may have found all kinds of other things they didn't like about him, and they might find all kinds of other things they don't like about what we believe. But at the heart of it—at the heart of Paul's preaching, the reason he's on trial—is because he believed in resurrection from the dead. And this is the hope we are holding out to the world.
Christianity is a resurrection religion.
So just imagine that there is a power cut in your house, and you have no electricity and no gas. And the Gas and Electric Board—the authorities—say, “Hey, you can borrow a gas camping stove.” So that's helpful. I can cook. More helpful would be to get the power back on. But it'll do in the meantime.
Or you take a boat out onto the North Sea from the harbour at Filey—a little later in the year (that might be wise; we'll get back to that in Acts 27 and we might develop that story further)—but there you go. It gets a bit choppy, and the boat starts taking in water. And you're discovering this is from a leak—there's water coming in through the bottom of the hull. Someone says, “Here's a bucket—you can help with the bailing.” Well, that's useful. Better would be if you could fix the leak.
Where's this going?
There are lots and lots of good things that Christians get involved in that are really good. Okay—looking after the Earth, protecting us from change to the climate—these are really good things to do. Let's look after our planet. God's made us stewards of it.
Or healthcare. So, lots of you here work in healthcare in various ways, and lots of us will have had friends who are sick, and we genuinely prayed for God's healing and for God to restore them to health. We did that during our prayers this morning—thank you, Mena (who is also a doctor).
Okay, these are good things. But they are far short of what it is all really about. What's what Christianity is really about is that we are spiritually dead. One day we will die physically. And when Jesus returns, he will judge those who are guilty—which is the entire human race, unless they are forgiven—and we will die eternally as we are consigned for all eternity to a place of judgement and punishment.
That is our real and deepest need.
But Jesus died and rose so that we can have new life spiritually. And one day, he will raise us physically.
You see, this planet will die anyway. Okay—you can fix global warming, you can stop using plastic, you can do all that stuff. But eventually, the sun will become a red giant and go cold, and the Earth will die. Okay—you can delay it, but you can't stop it unless God gives this planet and its sun new life.
Healthcare in this country—actually, for all we complain about the problems in the health service—it is amazing. Go back in time 100 years ago—we had nothing we've got now. It is extraordinary what people can do in the name of modern medicine. But the best that even the best doctor can do is give somebody extra time.
What we have, brothers and sisters, is the answer to death itself.
Other people can fix all manner of other problems in your life. But nobody else can fix this. Jesus of Nazareth is the only hope in the face of death. The only answer to death itself is the Jesus who rose from the dead.
That is the hope we have. And that is what we offer.
Christianity is a resurrection religion.
Conclusion
The risen Jesus appears to Paul in a vision or a dream—verse 11. You remember, Paul wanted to go to Jerusalem, and after going to Jerusalem he wanted to go to Rome. Well, the Jerusalem stage of that process has got pretty stressful and pretty fraught, and he feels pretty out of control and out of his depth.
So Jesus reassures him. He says, “I'm still in control. You will get to Rome, Paul.” And even more precious to Paul: “You will get to testify to me in Rome.” That's the thing he would love more than anything.
And so Paul is told he can take courage.
Take courage: as you testified about me in Jerusalem, so also testify in Rome. Paul, take courage. Keep trusting me. Keep testifying.
See, we have a faith that stands up to scrutiny. We have a faith that offers life out of death. And therefore Jesus says to us: take courage.
We take courage, and we hold on to the Jesus who gives life to the dead. We take courage, and we hold that Jesus out to a dead, dying, and decaying world.