He Is Risen
"If Christ is not risen, your faith is futile." — 1 Corinthians 15:17
He Is Risen | Four Reasons You Can Believe the Resurrection Is Real
Most people are willing to say Jesus was a great teacher. Fewer are willing to say he rose from the dead. But in He Is Risen, Pastor Kap Chatfield makes the case that the resurrection is not a leap of blind faith — it is one of the most historically grounded claims in the ancient world. And if it is true, it changes everything.
Evidence One: The Empty Tomb
The tomb outside Jerusalem was sealed, guarded, and witnessed. By Sunday morning, the body was gone. What makes this historically significant is not just that Christians claimed it — it is that the claim was made publicly in Jerusalem within weeks of the event, in front of people who could have walked to the tomb themselves. No Roman official, no Jewish authority, no hostile witness ever produced the body or denied the tomb was empty. They only argued about why it was empty. That is not a legend. That is a historical problem that demands an explanation.
And while the women were on their way to the tomb wondering how the stone would ever be moved, God had already dispatched the answer. The same God who rolled that stone away is not stumped by what you are facing today.
Evidence Two: The Enemy Witnesses
The strongest testimony for the resurrection may actually come from those who had every reason to disprove it. The Jewish authorities did not deny the tomb was empty — they paid soldiers to lie about it. The Roman soldiers who admitted to falling asleep on duty were risking a death sentence. The Jewish Talmud does not deny that Jesus did extraordinary things — it just attributes them to sorcery. And Flavius Josephus, a Jewish historian writing under Roman authority who never became a Christian, recorded that Jesus appeared alive on the third day and that the movement named after him was still going strong decades later. If the resurrection was a conspiracy, the enemies had every resource to expose it. They couldn't.
Evidence Three: The Shroud
The Shroud of Turin is a burial cloth that has baffled scientists for over a century. The image on the cloth is not paint, not dye, not ink — it exists only on the topmost fibers of the linen at a depth thinner than a single human cell wall, caused by dehydration and oxidation at a molecular level. In 1898, a photographer discovered that the image was already a photographic negative — 600 years before the camera existed. In 2011, Italian scientists concluded that the energy required to produce that effect — millions of watts delivered in billionths of a second — exceeds anything technology today can replicate. NASA ran the image through equipment built to map planets and it produced a coherent three-dimensional relief of a human body. The best scientific explanation available is an explosion of light so intense it burned a photograph into the fabric from the inside out. That is resurrection power.
Evidence Four: The Changed Life
Kap closes with the most personal evidence of all — his own story. From smoking weed daily, chasing empty highs, and despising Christians, to standing before a room full of people declaring that Jesus is alive. The disciples scattered after the crucifixion. Peter went back to fishing. And then he heard a familiar voice from the shore. Jesus did not just restore Peter's hope — he restored the relationship. That is what the risen Christ does. He is not a historical footnote. He is risen — present tense — and the same power that raised him from the dead is available right now.
He is risen. He is risen indeed.
