This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

I want to welcome you back to day five of our look through Matthew chapter 27.
We've been looking these last couple of days at what happened the moment that
Jesus died and right after He died. Yesterday we saw the moment He died, the
curtain was torn in the temple, the earth shook, the dead were raised, the
soldiers gave witness.

Today we're going to look at three more events and they happened in the hours
after Jesus' death. And all of these, all of these events, in these events you
see the proof of the resurrection, the power of the resurrection being looked
forward to even before it happens. What do we see?

We see some women who are watching. We see a man by the name of Joseph who is
doing some burying. And we see some religious leaders who are reacting with,
continuing to react with fear.

They're fearing. First you have the women who watched. Listen to verses 55 and
56.

And many women who had come from Galilee with Jesus to care for Him were
watching from a distance. Among them were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of
James and Joseph, and the mother of James and John, the sons of Zebedee. And
then down in verse 61 when Jesus is being buried the scripture says, "Both Mary
Magdalene and the other Mary were sitting across from the tomb and watching.

" Now question, why do we keep hearing that they're watching? We keep hearing
that they're watching because these women are going to be the first witnesses of
the resurrection. They saw where He died and they saw where He was buried.

And what we're hearing here are some very powerful counters to some of the
objections to the resurrection of Christ. If you begin to read those who say
that Jesus didn't really raise from the dead, there will be reasons that they
say this could not have happened. People know from the study of history that
something did happen that day.

History changed that day. But maybe it was a lie, they say. Maybe it was a
hallucination, they say.

Maybe it was a confusion, they say. So all these objections come up. God knew
they were going to come up and so He counters them in advance.

One of the objections that comes up is that the women went to the wrong tomb.
And so even in advance we have God putting in His Word knowing this would be an
objection thousands of years later, the women knew where the tomb was. They
watched Him being buried.

No mistake was made. They watched Him die, they watched Him being buried. It's a
silly objection.

Everybody knew where the tomb was. The leaders knew where the tomb was. They
sealed the tomb.

Everyone knew where it was. There's also an answer to another objection in these
women being set up as the witnesses, being affirmed as the witnesses, because
they will be the first witnesses of the resurrection. Another objection is that
the disciples just made the story up.

If they had made the story up, they would have never said that the women were
the first witnesses of the resurrection. In that day, in the first century,
women were not seen as credible witnesses. Women were not allowed to testify in
a court of law.

And so these men in that culture would have never said, "Well, let's make women,
if we're making up a story, let's make the women the first witnesses of the
resurrection. " No, they would have been the first witnesses. They would have
left women out altogether.

It would have been impossible for them to think, "Well, 2,000 years from now,
women will be very credible witnesses. They might be even better witnesses than
men. Culture will have changed.

" You can't see outside of your culture. No one can. No.

These witnesses, these first women, even beforehand, God is showing them exactly
where Jesus died. They're faithful to be there to see where Jesus was buried.
Maybe that's part of the reason why God makes sure that they're the first to
witness the resurrection because they've been faithful to see what had been
happening all the way through.

They are there. And so they are the witnesses. Alongside of these women, we see
a man by the name of Joseph.

And Joseph buries Jesus. In verses 57 down through verse 60, "As evening
approached, Joseph, a rich man from Arimathea, who had become a follower of
Jesus, went to Pilate and asked for Jesus' body. And Pilate issued an order and
released it to him.

Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a long sheet of clean linen cloth. He
placed it in his own new tomb, which had been carved out of the rock. And he
rolled a great stone across the entrance, and he left.

" You see in this moment the great courage of Joseph. Mark and Luke tell us that
Joseph was a member of the council, of the Sanhedrin, the body that had
condemned Jesus. But he's become a follower of Jesus.

And John tells us that Nicodemus, who was also one of the religious leaders, the
very Nicodemus who came and spoke to Jesus at the beginning of John, and who
hears that you have to have new life, a rebirth, unless you're born again. He
also helps in this burial. Joseph and Nicodemus, I would have loved to hear
their conversations about Jesus as they buried him.

Nicodemus may have become a secret disciple by this time. Did they have the same
disappointment in Jesus as the other disciples? Did they somehow look forward to
the resurrection, to the hope?

We don't get any answers to these questions until we get to heaven. But for now,
there's the fascination of these two men who respected and cared for Jesus
enough to be sure that he was buried. Joseph, one of the most powerful
businessmen in Jerusalem, Nicodemus, one of the most powerful religious leaders
in Jerusalem, even in his burial, Jesus is attracting people to himself.

And even here as he's being buried, you see another answer to the objection,
"They made this up. " If they'd made this up, the disciples would not have made
a member of the Sanhedrin a hero of the story. They were the ones that condemned
Jesus.

To them, they were the enemies in this story. But in the depth of how God works,
amidst those seeming enemies, there were some early followers of Jesus. Even
amidst the Jewish leaders that condemned Jesus, the court of law that did that,
there are some of the earliest followers of Jesus.

We want to paint things as all black and white. They're the bad guys. They're
the good guys.

God is working in the hearts of all throughout all of this. Now, there's another
objection that's answered here, and that is that somehow when the women went,
they confused Jesus' body with someone else's. Sometimes in a tomb, there would
be more than one body that was buried.

They would be maybe on a shelf, and there would be maybe a family that was all
buried in there. And they thought that Jesus was buried on the right, but he was
really on the left. So when they saw an empty shelf on the right, they just
confused him.

They didn't notice his buried body that was on the left. But very clearly here,
we're told this was a new tomb that Joseph himself owned. No other body was
buried in this tomb.

The objection is answered before it's even given. And then number seven of these
experiences that happened following the death of Jesus is the reaction of the
religious leaders. The leaders feared, and because of their fear, the tomb was
sealed.

In verse 62 to verse 66, "The next day on the Sabbath, the leading priests and
Pharisees went to see Pilate, and they told him, 'Sir, we remember what that
deceiver once said while he was still alive. After three days, I will rise from
the dead. '" So we request that you seal the tomb until the third day.

This will prevent the disciples from coming and stealing his body, and then
telling everyone he was raised from the dead. If that happens, we'll be worse
off than we were at the first. Pilate replied, "Take guards and secure it the
best you can.

" So they sealed the tomb, and they posted guards to protect it. One of the most
popular objections to the resurrection of Christ, people saying that it didn't
really happen, is that his body was stolen. It was taken by the disciples or
someone else out of the tomb.

But the tomb was sealed and guarded. You see, in seeking to keep the body from
being stolen, these leaders provided powerful proof that his body could not have
been stolen. There was a Roman guard.

There was a seal on the tomb. The idea that disciples somehow made all this up,
it's pretty silly when you take a deeper look at it. They were devastated and
depressed.

They were running away. They were not figuring out some plot to start a new
religion. And by the way, after Christianity started, after they began
proclaiming the resurrection, they became persecuted, and most of them were
martyred.

People hold on to lies that benefit them. They don't hold on to lies that don't
benefit them. And if it had been a lie, before they were martyred, they would
have said, "Oh, we just wanted some popularity.

We just wanted to keep on with the people liking us. " No, no, no. It didn't
really happen.

They went to their death proclaiming that Jesus was raised from the dead. When
you see all these objections countered even before the resurrection occurs, you
know that God is desiring to speak to every one of our hearts. The joy in all of
this is going to burst on us in the beginning of the next chapter.

But even leading up to the resurrection, God is orchestrating the events to
build your faith, to build my faith. There's a personal question in all of this.
Am I going to be like the religious leaders, fearing what the resurrection is
going to the life of Christ will take from me?

Or am I going to be like the women, waiting for what the resurrection will bring
to me? Before you follow Christ, you can fear what Jesus is going to take from
you, and you cannot come to Him because of that, not knowing the gifts that He
wants to give to you, the love and the life that He wants to give to you. And
even after you've begun following Christ, you can begin to get caught up in some
envy, some jealousy, some sin, some selfishness.

And out of that, Satan can plant a seed of fear, and you begin to fear that God
wants to take things from you. No, the resurrection is a resurrection to life.
He wants to give life to you.

It's not the life that this world holds on to. That's passing away. John tells
us, don't hold on to that one because it's passing away.

No, it's the life that only He can give you. It's resurrection life. And so
Jesus says, we pray, we thank you that you've so clearly laid out in your word
the answers to some of the objections that people have that maybe we have about
the resurrection so that you can make it clear that you did resurrect a new
life.

It's not some fable or some nice ending to the story that was made up as a
legend. It is the truth. It's the truth that changed history.

And it's the truth that changes my heart. It changes my heart when I come to
know you, Jesus. And it changes my heart every day as I trust in not the life
that this world wants to give to me or even the kind of life that I'm seeking
after for myself, but I trust in the kind of life that you want to give me
through the resurrection.

Thank you for the resurrection life. In Jesus' name, Amen. Be sure to join us
next week.

You've made it this far and we're going to finish our study of Matthew next week
with the best ending ever. Even if you know the end of the story, it is an end
of the story worth hearing every day of our lives. So I'll see you next week for
the end of the book of Matthew, the resurrection of Jesus.