To get a glimpse of just how lame George W. Bush is as an “evangelical Christian,” look at this excerpt from an “exit” interview conducted last December by ABC’s Nightline correspondent Cynthia McFadden:

MCFADDEN: Is it literally true, the Bible?

BUSH: You know. Probably not ... No, I'm not a literalist, but I think you can learn a lot from it, but I do think that the New Testament, for example is ... has got ... You know, the important lesson is "God sent a son."

MCFADDEN: So, you can read the Bible...

BUSH: That God in the flesh, that mankind can understand there is a God who is full of grace and that there’s nothing you can do to earn his love. His love is a gift and that in order to draw closer to God and in order to express your appreciation for that love is why you change your behavior.

*****

Telling people God came in the flesh so they’d be prompted to change their behavior with the payoff of drawing closer to Him isn’t going to keep anybody out of hell. That’s simply the performance-based acceptance program religion pushes.

The most basic gospel message is that, in order to gain eternal life through Jesus Christ, a person must rest their faith in what God says He accomplished by bringing His Son down in human flesh and having Him die on the Cross as the only payment for sin. This means believing not only in His death at Calvary—and the finality of the victory against sin won there—but in His resurrection.

Of course, the resurrection is often a place where self-professed Christian “leaders” get tripped up. As I’ve pointed out before, Jimmy Carter, in his 1996 book Living Faith, tells the reader that while he was raised from a baby in church, and was only three when he began memorizing Bible verses in Sunday School, “By the time I was 12 or 13 years old, my anxiety about (doubting Christ’s resurrection) became so intense that at the end of every prayer, until after I was an adult, before ‘Amen’ I added the words ‘And, God, please help me believe in the resurrection.’ ”

*****

As Jordan often repeats, “You’ll never meet an honest person who spent 15 hours looking at the actual evidence of the resurrection of Jesus Christ not come to the conclusion: ‘He came out of the grave.’

Jordan will then say, “Now, you might not like what the resurrection means, but you can’t look at the evidence with an unprejudiced heart and mind and not recognize the historical reality that Jesus Christ rose from the dead.”

*****

From multiple passages in the Gospels, we know that after Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples she had just seen Jesus Christ resurrected from the dead, an emergency closed-door meeting was arranged for that evening.

During the gathering, the resurrected Christ miraculously appeared before them, saying, “Peace be unto you,” and showing them His pierced hands and side.

The immediate response was the men “were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit,” according to Luke 24. Jesus asked, “Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts arise in your hearts? Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.”

Christ’s next question was, “Have ye here any meat?”, upon which they gave him “a piece of a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb,” and He proceeded to eat in front of them.

“What you learn in John 20 is they were in a room they’d locked down and they thought it was secure and, all of a sudden, Christ appears in their midst—literally just came through the walls,” says Jordan. “That’s a passage that details the veracity and authenticity of the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ.

“They see Him; they see He has a body that has flesh and bones. It’s a real literal body that’s obviously also a supernatural body because it just came into a locked-down room.

“But when it literally materialized in front of them they could touch Him and even see Him sit there in the fellowship of consuming a meal with them. It was a real manifestation of someone they knew so they wouldn’t think He was a spirit, a ghost, or some kind of ethereal hallucination.

“The fascinating thing is what the passage tells us about the resurrection of the body because we’re going to ‘have a body made like unto his body.’ The capacity that His body has to function, you and I are going to have!”

****

In I Corinthians 15, the Apostle Paul takes on the skeptics of the resurrection with the admonishment: “Awake to righteousness, and sin not; for some have not the knowledge of God: I speak this to your shame.
[35] But some man will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come?
[36] Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die:
[37] And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain:
[38] But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body.”

Jordan explains, “Those questions came because people were denying the resurrection. They were asking, ‘How is it the dead are raised and is it a real, physical, literal body, or is it just they live on in our memories, or is there reincarnation?’

“You remember in Acts 17 when Paul spoke of the resurrection in Athens, the great intellectual center of the ancient world? It’s still a center from which you and I are influenced today. It’s really the intellectual center of western civilization.

“In Acts 17:30, when Paul began to speak of the resurrection, they said about him, ‘Just a babbler. Let him babble on,’ and Paul simply turned away from them.”

The passage reads, “And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent:
[31] Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.
[32] And when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked: and others said, We will hear thee again of this matter.
[33] So Paul departed from among them.”

*****

In trying to reason with the unbelieving Corinthians, Paul writes, “Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?
[13] But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen:
[14] And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.
[15] Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not.
[16] For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised:
[17] And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.
[18] Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished.
[19] If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.”

Jordan explains, “If you look at verse 14, Paul defines what that means when he says ‘if you believed in vain.’ What is vain faith? It’s to believe something that isn’t true. If Christ isn’t raised from the dead, then your faith in His burial resurrection is dead. Why? Because you’re believing a lie! So what he’s doing is demonstrating how the resurrection isn’t a lie; it’s truth.”

*****

Jordan continues, “Did you ever hear about Pascal’s Wager? Pascal was a French philosopher who became a Christian and his wager was, ‘If it turns out when I die that there’s no God, that the gospel isn’t true, I would have still lived the better life.’

“But you see that isn’t what those verses (in I Corinthians 15) say. Now, it is true that if there’s no heaven, no hell, no God, and Christ wasn’t raised from the dead—if you live in obedience to the truth of the Word of God you will live a better life; a higher life.

“If you live in pursuit of, ‘Be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another,’ you’re going to make a better life; have a better world about you. But you’re also going to be vexed like Lot was who lived in Sodom with the filthy conversation of the wicked.

“What Paul says is, ‘Hey, if this stuff isn’t real, the book of Ecclesiastes . . . what Solomon said—let’s just ‘eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.’ So Pascal’s Wager isn’t really well-founded. At least it isn’t what Paul thought—the resurrection’s that important.

“In verse 36, notice how Paul answers: ‘Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die.’ He’s saying, ‘Are you nuts?! You don’t believe in the resurrection?! I mean, don’t you realize that every Spring you witness resurrection (in nature)?! You see it so often you don’t even think anything about it and you’re questioning . . . Nah, you’re nuts!’ ”