³For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, ⁴and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared …

The facts are the facts, and our faith is completely worthless if it does not rest on them. A teacher once told his history class the Bible does not line up with historical facts. If that is true, then all is lost for Christians, because the early believers portrayed in their testimonies a belief in the historicity of the death and resurrection of Christ. It has been said that you cannot remove all references to the resurrection of Christ without creating major holes in the New Testament. We cannot dismiss the resurrection as first-century mysticism and then go on attempting to live the Christian life based on the spiritual truths contained in Scripture. That would not be biblical Christianity.

Could it be that the apostle Paul was prescient in his anticipation of our present generation’s arrogance in claiming to know more than the eyewitnesses who saw, touched, and ate with the resurrected Jesus Christ? Make no mistake about it, Paul intimates: our faith rises and falls on the historical reality of Christ’s resurrection.

Here, as Paul begins his defense of this testimony, he lays it out succinctly in its most elemental essence—just the facts. First, Christ died, which hardly needs proof. No one seriously doubts His crucifixion, despite weak efforts to assert He had only swooned on the cross, or that at the last minute someone else died in His place and fooled everyone. Paul roots this fact in scriptural purpose, that is, His death was “for our sins” and “according to the Scriptures.” In other words, it was a fulfillment of OT prophecy. His burial was the proof that He had died.

The second fact, which Paul expands on in this chapter, is that Christ “was raised on the third day” and again, “according to the Scriptures.” The proof of His resurrection was that He appeared to His followers, who then testified of what they saw. John put it this way: “What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of Life … what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you…” (1 John 1:1, 3a).

This is of “first importance.” You might say this is step one in the journey of faith. Belief in the foundational facts of the Christian faith must be unshakeable, or nothing else matters.

Father, I believe in the death and resurrection of Your Son as a historical truth. I am staking my eternity on it.