• Easter, Holiday's Perspective, Jesus v. Religion, Resurrection/Easter, Rob Robinson, Salvation, Sin

    Posted on April 8th, 2012

    Written by Rob Robinson

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    “He Is Risen, He Is Not Here”

    “He Is Risen, He Is Not Here”

    In 1846 dr. Simon Greenleaf wrote a 3 volume work called A treatise on the laws of evidence.

    This work is considered to be one of the single most important authorities on the legal procedure for handling and examining evidence in a court of law.

    Dr. Greenleaf examined the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ to see if the internal evidence of the scriptures about Jesus death and resurrection were true or false.

    The results are contained in a book that Dr. Greenleaf wrote called An examination of the testimony of the four evangelist by the rules of evidence administered in the courts of justice.

    Dr. Greenleaf came to the striking conclusion that according to the same rules that are used in a court of law to examine evidence, there is more evidence for the historical resurrection of Jesus Christ than any other event in all of human history.

  • Easter, Encouragement, Forgiveness, Fulfilled Prophecy, Good Friday, Jesus v. Religion, Resurrection/Easter, Rob Robinson, Salvation

    Posted on April 5th, 2012

    Written by Rob Robinson

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    Good Friday: What Jesus Felt the Day He Died

    Good Friday: What Jesus Felt the Day He Died

    There were at least 21 different laws that were violated in conducting these 6 trials throughout the night against Jesus. The following are seven of the most important:

    No legal transactions, including a trial, could be conducted at night.
    It was illegal for judges to participate in the arrest of the accused. (John 18:3 John 18:28)
    They struck Jesus during the trials: It was illegal to strike the accused during a trial. The use of violence during the trial was apparently unopposed by the judges. (John 18:22,23)
    In a Jewish court, the accused assumed to be innocent, until proved guilty by two or more witnesses. The Jews failed to find two witnesses who could agree on what Jesus had done. (Mark 14:59 Matt 18:63)
    When it was discovered that the witnesses had disagreed on their testimony, the prisoner should have been released, and all charges dropped. (Mark 14:56-59)
    A guilty verdict was rendered against Jesus without any evidence. (John 18:30)
    The voting process to condemn Jesus was illegal. It should have been by roll call, with the youngest voting first. Here they all voted together at the same time. (Matthew 26:66)
    Although the Jewish leadership clearly violated their own laws, Jesus never once opened His mouth to defend Himself. Amazingly, Isaiah predicted that this would happen more than 600 years before Jesus was born.

    Isaiah 53:7 He was oppressed and He was afflicted, Yet He opened not His mouth; He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, And as a sheep before its shearers is silent, So He opened not His mouth.

  • Easter, Frank Morison, Resurrection/Easter, Who Moved The Stone

    Posted on April 5th, 2012

    Written by B.P.U Contributor

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    3. What Happened Before Midnight on Thursday

    3. What Happened Before Midnight on Thursday

    I suggested on an earlier page that considerations of time played a peculiar and decisive part in determining the events that immediately preceded the death of Christ. If we wish to get at the real truth about this matter we must study it with our eyes, as it were, constantly upon the clock. Particularly is this the case when we approach two very important elements in the case: The dealings that the Jewish leaders had with judas and later with Pontius Pilate.

    Both these men played a strange and, at first sight, an inexplicable role in the happenings of those twelve hours that closed the earthly life of Christ. Let us begin by considering the case of Judas.

  • Easter, Frank Morison, Resurrection/Easter, Salvation, Who Moved The Stone

    Posted on January 8th, 2012

    Written by B.P.U Contributor

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    6. Thirty Six Hours Later

    6. Thirty Six Hours Later

    By all the ordinary standards of human reasoning, the mystery attaching to the person of Christ ought to have terminated with His death and burial. That He really did die in the full physical meaning of that term we have already judged to be one of the certainties of history, and we have seen how a consistent and straightforward account is given of the steps taken to give the body a respectful burial. I cannot personally see anything in the accounts of the crucifixion and burial that is not deeply and profoundly true to expectation. The whole account reads like an actual, unvarnished, and even naïve transcript from real life. Yet when we turn over the page to the events of the succeeding days we run into a situation that, were it not for the complete singularity of certain aspects of the problem, would be utterly unbelievable by any student acquainted alike with history and the conclusions of modern thought.

    It is because I believe there are things lying hidden beneath the surface of the narrative that must profoundly modify the construction we place upon it, that I will ask the reader to consider first the trend of events from about six o’clock on Friday afternoon to the setting out of the little party of women at dawn on Sunday morning.

  • Easter, Frank Morison, Resurrection/Easter, Who Moved The Stone

    Posted on January 5th, 2012

    Written by B.P.U Contributor

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    5. The Situation on Friday Afternoon

    5. The Situation on Friday Afternoon

    If we are to gain a teal insight into the events immediately following the death of Christ we shall have to begin by studying carefully the situation as it probably existed about four o’clock on Friday afternoon.

    Hitherto we have approached this subject almost exclusively from the official and priestly point of view. That point of view was extremely important in the earlier stages of the case. The prosecution was the priests’, and it was vital to our purpose to know what lay behind it. But with the achievement of their main object, these official representatives of Jewry recede temporarily into the background and a new group of people takes their place. It is with this group the personal friends and adherents of Jesus-that we shall be chiefly concerned in the next two or three chapters. Let us begin by considering who these people were, and what the documents tell us with regard to them.

    If we exclude Mary and Martha of Bethany, and their brother Lazarus, who, for certain reasons that we shall discuss later, are not heard of in connection with the final tragedy, we are left with a group of sixteen persons, all of whom are known to have belonged to the inner circle of Christ’s personal supporters:

  • Easter, Frank Morison, Resurrection/Easter, Salvation, Who Moved The Stone

    Posted on January 3rd, 2012

    Written by B.P.U Contributor

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    4. A Psychological Parallelogram of Forces

    4. A Psychological Parallelogram of Forces

    If anyone thinks that in approaching the trial of Jesus of Nazareth by Pontius Pilate he is approaching the simple and the obvious he is making a big miscalculation.

    This thing is extremely subtle: Outwardly, it has all the placidity of still waters, but beneath the apparent stillness there are deep and hidden currents that make it incomparably the greatest and most profoundly interesting psychological study in history. We do not get rid of the mystery of Christ when we bring Him to the Roman bar; we increase it tenfold.

    The first hint that there is something curious about this story that is not directly disclosed by the narratives comes, strangely enough, not from the behavior of the Jews, or even of the Prisoner Himself, but from the behavior of Pilate. I remember reading through the four accounts side by side, not once but many times, trying to discover what it was that subconsciously stamped the story of this trial as peculiar. And every time I read them the conviction grew that the hidden and disturbing element lay in what, for want of a better phrase, I must call the unsatisfactory alignment of Pilate’s behavior, as uniformly reported in the Gospels, with his known character and antecedents.

  • Easter, Frank Morison, Is The Bible the Word of God?, Resurrection/Easter

    Posted on December 30th, 2011

    Written by B.P.U Contributor

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    2. The Real Case Against The Prisoner

    2. The Real Case Against The Prisoner

    I remember this aspect of the question coming home to me one morning with new and unexpected force. I tried to picture to myself what would happen if some two thousand years hence a great controversy should arise about one who was the center of a criminal trial, say, in 1922. By that time most of the essential documents would have passed into oblivion. An old faded cutting of The Times or Telegraph, or perhaps some tattered fragment of a legal book describing the case, might have survived to reach the collection of an antiquary. From these and other fragments the necessary conclusions would have to be drawn. Is it not certain that people living in that far-off day, and desiring to get at the real truth about the man concerned, would go first to the crucial question of the charge on which he was arraigned? They would say: “What was all the trouble about? What did his accusers say and bring against him?” If, as in the present instance, several charges appear to have been preferred, they would ask what was the real case against the prisoner.

  • Bible Studies, Easter, Frank Morison, Is The Bible the Word of God?, Resurrection/Easter

    Posted on December 29th, 2011

    Written by B.P.U Contributor

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    1. The Book That Refused To Be Written

    1. The Book That Refused To Be Written

    I suppose that most writers will confess to having hidden away somewhere in the secret recesses of their most private drawer the first rough draft of a book that, for one reason or another, will never see the light of day.

    Usually it is Time — that hoary offender — who has placed his veto on the promised task. The rough outline is drawn up in a moment of enthusiasm and exalted vision; it is worked on for a time and then it is put aside to await that leisured “tomorrow” that so often never comes. Other and more pressing duties assert themselves; engagements and responsibilities multiply; and the treasured draft sinks farther and deeper into its ultimate hiding place. So the years go by, until one day the writer awakens to the knowledge that, whatever other achievements may be his, this particular book will never be written.

  • Atheists, Doctrine, Easter, Forgiveness, Fulfilled Prophecy, Heaven, Holiday's Perspective, Is Jesus God?, Jesus v. Religion, Resurrection/Easter, Rob Robinson, Salvation, Sin

    Posted on April 23rd, 2011

    Written by Rob Robinson

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    Three Days in the Grave, Forever Lord of All

    Three Days in the Grave, Forever Lord of All

    1 Peter 3:18-20 For Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit, by whom also He went and preached to the spirits in prison, who formerly were disobedient, when once the Divine longsuffering waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight souls, were saved through water.

    The first thing that Jesus did after he was Crucified, was descend into Hell and preach to those who died during the flood of Noah.

    Peter reminds us that only eight people believed the Lord at the time Noah was building the ark for 100 years. When the time came to enter the Ark and be sheltered from God’s judgment, only the members of Noah’s family actually believed God and went into the Ark.

    It has been estimated by mathematicians, that at the time the flood of Noah occurred, there could have conservatively been over six billion people on the earth. Computing the explosion of population that occurred from the creation of Adam, to the time of Noah, people were living up to nine hundred plus years.