But now I want you to look at something else. I want you to turn from thinking about those enemies of Christ, who are exemplified by the soldiers and the priests on that first Easter Sunday, and instead I want you to focus on Christ’s friends, those who learned of the resurrection and who met with Jesus Christ following His resurrection.

Here’s a case, which like so many others, shows us a man who proposes a theory to explain away the reality of the resurrection. And instead of being rebuffed or forgotten, as Schofield and his book should have been, he is rewarded. It’s a case of rewards instead of punishments.

The soldiers had not left their post, and the tomb was empty. They must have been terrified, wondering what was going to happen to them. After the religious leaders met together, they did not seek to have the soldiers punished. Instead, the guards were told to lie about what had happened.

Each year at Easter time, when I turn to these stories of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, I find myself wondering what I’m going to find new to preach on. When you’ve been doing this as many years as I have now, you begin to have the feeling that you have preached just about everything you can, given the rather limited corpus of material. And yet, each year as I turn to these stories, I find that there’s something there I never saw before.

I wonder if you have been confronted by the power of that resurrection. The chief priests and Pharisees tried to secure their ecclesiastical world against Jesus. Saul tried to secure his religious traditions and life. Satan had been trying to secure his evil kingdom. Perhaps you too have been trying to secure your own way of doing things or your own values or your own mastery of your time.

There was another character who got into the act. In fact, he had been leading the battle against the Lord Jesus Christ for centuries. His name is Satan. We see him first in the Garden of Eden, where he tempts Eve to eat the forbidden fruit and thus participates in the ruin of the race. We see him in Egypt and in other nations as they persecuted God’s people, through whom the Messiah was to come. At last we see him waging war against the incarnate Jesus.

So in opposing Jesus the first thing Saul was trying to secure was his Judaism. But there was also a second item that he was desperately trying to secure, namely, himself. Later his situation during this period was described as trying to “kick against the goads” (Acts 26:14), like an animal fighting one who is prodding it to go in a right direction. This meant that, although Saul was fighting against the Christians with intense zeal, he was at the same time fighting an even more intense struggle within the secret chambers of his heart.