Pastor Dan's Blog

The tragic events at Virginia Tech have riveted the eyes of the nation for the past week. We have been appalled at the cold-blooded killer’s plot to take so many innocent lives. Some may be feeling depressed, helpless, fearful, angry or just numb from this tragedy. One thing that we all can do is to pray for the families of the victims. Pray that God would comfort them, draw them closer to Himself and give them hope for the future.

Beyond prayer, what lessons can we learn from the Virginia Tech massacre? What would Jesus say if someone told Him about it? Actually, we have an account where Jesus was told of a similar massacre and Jesus gave an answer. NLT Luke 13:1 About this time Jesus was informed that Pilate had murdered some people from Galilee as they were sacrificing at the Temple in Jerusalem. 2 “Do you think those Galileans were worse sinners than other people from Galilee?” he asked. “Is that why they suffered? 3 Not at all! And you will also perish unless you turn from your evil ways and turn to God. In this case, some innocent Jews were offering sacrifices to God in the Temple at Jerusalem when the governor had them murdered. Murder in a public place of innocent victims, not so different from what happened at Virginia Tech. The first thing that Jesus says is that the victims were not any worse sinners than those who were not killed. The violence of evil does not discriminate between levels of sin.

What Jesus says next contains the lessons that we should be reminded of in the face of any tragedy, whether created by man or by nature. Jesus says, “And you will also perish unless you turn from your evil ways and turn to God.” When we contemplate the Virginia Tech massacre, we should first of all come face to face with our own mortality. None of us knows how much time we have left on this planet. Our lives may end with an auto accident, a heart attack, old age or a murderer’s bullet. When life is over, we will either perish in a place called hell or live forever with God in heaven. So these events should compel us to examine our own lives to make sure that we have turned from our evil ways and put our faith in Jesus Christ to forgive our sins. The temptation is to look at a psychopath like the murderer Cho and think we are not so bad after all. Jesus calls us to look inside the darkness of our own hearts and seek God’s forgiveness and presence in our lives.

The corollary lesson concerns our neighbors, who we are to love as ourselves. Our neighbors, the people within the circle of our lives will also perish, unless they turn from their evil ways and turn to God. If we love our neighbors, we must do whatever we can to open their eyes to the reality of God’s love, before it is too late, before they perish.

In America, we tend to live with the delusion that death is distant and we don’t have to worry about it. Jesus tells us we’d better prepare for it today. At Virginia Tech, 32 innocent victims perished. Every day in the United States, 6800 people die. Death comes to the young through the elderly. Are you ready? Is your family ready? Is your neighbor ready? Eternal destinies lie in the balance. Jesus calls us to learn from the Virginia Teach massacre. Be prepared for death before it’s too late. Get right with God.

For more information, read my article Beginning A Relationship With God.

Has Jesus’ tomb been found? If you’ve been following the news, in the last week of February filmmaker James Cameron and director Simcha Jacobovici have announced that they have found the bones of Jesus. Their documentary will air on the Discovery Channel on March 4. Jacobovici has also authored a book entitled “The Jesus Family Tomb: The Discovery, the Investigation, and the Evidence That Could Change History.” What are we to make of this?

If the bones of Jesus have been found, it would mean that the resurrection of Jesus was not true. The Bible teaches that Jesus was resurrected from the dead and ascended into heaven, which leaves no room for a body. The cross and the resurrection are the central tenets of the Christian faith. Paul writes in NIV 1 Corinthians 15:17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. So, this book and documentary are a frontal attack on the basis of Christianity. Jacobovici makes this bizarre statement, “some believers are going to say, well, this challenges the resurrection. I don’t know why, if Jesus rose from one tomb, he couldn’t have risen from the other tomb.” Not much logic here. Multiple resurrections? If Jesus was resurrected, there would be no bones or tomb at all.

Let’s look at the facts. The tomb is not new, it was discovered in 1980 by contruction workers digging in Jerusalem. Inside the tomb were ten limestone ossuaries. A prominent Israeli archaelogist, Professor Amos Kloner, who examined them at the time did not see any special signficance in them. Now, all of a sudden, 27 years later, much ado is being made over these ossuaries. What is the evidence?

The main evidence consists of the names written on the ossuaries. Some of the names are Judah, son of Jesus, Jesus, son of Joseph, Mariamene (Mary Magdalene) and Maria. These were all very common names at the time. The name Jesus appears in 98 other known tombs and on 21 other known ossuaries. So called statistical analysis is purported to indicate that the random probability of this particular association of names would be low. This is not evidence, it is simply junk science. Joe Zias, who was the curator for anthropology and archeology at the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem says, “Projects like these make a mockery of the archeological profession.”

To introduce a high-tech CSI element, the authors did DNA testing. What did they test? Well, that’s not clear at all, as the bones contained in the ossuaries were buried immediately after they were found. So they scraped something out of the boxes and they found that the DNA from the Jesus box and from the Mariamene box were not related. What does that prove? Well, if you have read the fictional novel, The DaVinci Code, you would know. It supposedly supports the preposterous claim that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and had a child. DNA testing in this case is completely meaningless as we don’t even have the bones anymore. In any tomb, one would expect a high probability that that the DNA of a husband and wife would not be related. More junk science.

As opposed to this junk science, what do we have to disprove it. We have multiple ancient texts written by eye witnesses that date to within a few years of the actual events. In these ancient texts, translated for us in the New Testament, we have evidence that Jesus Christ did indeed rise from the dead. No body was ever produced. If Jesus’ body was available, the enemies of Christianity would have produced it and that would have been the end of Christianity. However, no one could find Jesus’ body, because it didn’t exist.

For any thinking person, the evidence against the lost tomb of Jesus is overwhelming. The evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is solid. Use the controversy to talk about Jesus to your friends.