Modus Ponens

Easter Sunday, at Blue Sky Church in Bellevue, I learned that without believing in not only Jesus's resurrection and ascension into the heavens, but also the feasibility of the resurrection of any dead person, one's very belief in Christianity is worthless. I was fortunate to receive today's message from Lead Pastor Steve Morgan, which was made possible by Blue Sky's four hundred members, whose $6.1 million in tithings last month will enable them to expand in enough volume to reach over twice as many of Christ's followers as before with their life saving message of the accuracy of the literal content of the Bible.

In Pastor Morgan's Easter sermon titled "Wonderful Truths That Christians Believe," he addresses that "shocking" irrefutable fact that has everyone asking "what are Christians talking about?" "Jesus actually rose from the dead," he informs us. The Bible is actually quite clear that Jesus and various others have undergone a transition from dying for days at a time to not being dead anymore. Sadly, many people find this truth, which is self evident in that it's written in the Bible, hard to believe. Morgan justifies that there must be existing circumstances of resurrection from the dead because the Bible says there are, and if there aren't, as he puts it, "Christianity unravels entirely."

Although it's a hard concept to believe, let alone wrap your head around, one's belief in God is explanation enough of how a corpse can revert back into a living being, Morgan denotes, asking "Is Christianity true or not?" (obviously). "There is no in between. You have to be logical about this." Millennia ago, the so-called believers in Corinth weren't grasping this level of reasoning and purported that Jesus was actually the only former corpse to be restored of his physical life. Paul caught wind of their flawed teachings and was disturbed deeply by the notion that they could be spreading a false gospel that is untrue and would therefore offer no salvation from sin, or, at the very least, one that is exponentially less entertaining.

Paul hastily wrote them to rebuke their erroneous testimony so that they could be equipped with the one he presented to all of the other new converts. He explains to them that if living beings can not in fact be risen from the dead, then Jesus could not have been risen from the dead; and if Jesus hadn't been risen from the dead, then the sacrifice of his life for our sins didn't pay for our sins, so in death they would all still be judged and justifiably punished for all of their transgressions against God, and the good word they preach to others and believe themselves is nothing more than a bunch of meaningless rituals and unexplainable habits. Since Jesus, aside being the only tangible arm of a trilateral God, was a living physical being who had died and been risen from the dead, then the dead in general, which too are the remains of formerly living beings, can and do rise from the dead (1 Cor 15:12-22).

"Historians are absolutely clear that this letter is actually true," Morgan says. "The Apostle Paul was scared about it," and he is scared about it too, because, he says, "if [Jesus] wasn't raised from the dead, none of it is true," explaining that it is impossible to subscribe to Christianity by picking and choosing the parts you find most believable– otherwise, it is a completely different doctrine, and since there is no actual scripture in favor of any such doctrine, the idea of a form of Christianity that only advocates that the relatively believable portions of the Bible are true is preposterous; therefore, either everything the Bible says is true, or it is all a lie and attending church is a complete waste of time that contains no useful substance. As a matter of fact, if the Bible is not wholly true, the persuit of a Godly lifestyle should be set aside for other persuits of happiness and moral satisfaction, since our souls wouldn't be saved from eternal damnation anyhow. Morgan puts it best when he says "if it's all just a lie, people ought to really feel sorry for you Christians."