{"id":5289,"date":"2026-03-13T08:34:53","date_gmt":"2026-03-13T12:34:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5289"},"modified":"2026-03-13T08:34:53","modified_gmt":"2026-03-13T12:34:53","slug":"he-rose-again-from-the-dead-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/13\/he-rose-again-from-the-dead-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"He Rose Again from the Dead (Part I)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here<\/a>
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Throughout the season of Lent, we’re taking a close look at the Apostles’ Creed – one of the earliest and most concise summaries of what followers of Jesus believe.<\/em>
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According to the Domino Effect, one thing leads to another.
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It can be great fun to stand up hundreds\u00a0of tiles in creative\u00a0patterns.\u00a0Then your only task is to\u00a0knock down the first tile, step back, and enjoy\u00a0the action.
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Some people take this more seriously than others. Participants in the Netherlands’ annual Domino Day compete to invent the most complex and spectacular effects.\u00a0On November 13, 2009, 89 players teamed up to create a domino field that utilized 4,491,863 tiles, a global benchmark\u00a0that is still unsurpassed.\u00a0It took more than an hour for all the dominoes to fall.\u00a0\u00a0
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Even with four million tiles, the only thing that really\u00a0has to happen is the first thing<\/em>.\u00a0Everything else follows.
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And what if that first thing is an event like no other, such as the alleged resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth? Even Hugh Hefner understood what was at stake.
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The founder of Playboy<\/em> and celebrity embodiment\u00a0of the all-about-me lifestyle wasn’t a particularly big fan of religion.\u00a0He acknowledged in an interview before his death that there was probably something like “the beginning of it all,” and that God might be defined as the Great Unknown.
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Did he believe in the resurrection?\u00a0“If one had any real evidence that, indeed, Jesus did return from the\u00a0dead, then that is the beginning of a dropping of a series of dominoes that takes us to all kinds of wonderful things.\u00a0It assures an afterlife, and all kinds of things that we would all hope are true.”
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Hefner appears to have remained a skeptic\u00a0to the end. But he grasped that if that first spiritual domino had really fallen, and if it somehow was put into play in one’s life, you would never know where things might lead.
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The Apostles\u2019 Creed does not mince words. After reporting what everyone knows to be true \u2013 that Jesus of Nazareth was executed by crucifixion and then entombed late one Friday afternoon outside Jerusalem \u2013 it dares to go where literally no one had gone before.
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\u201cOn the third day he rose again from the dead.\u201d
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The apostle Paul was all-in.\u00a0Take away the resurrection\u00a0and the whole scaffolding of Christianity comes down.\u00a0
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Cultural critic Gertrude Stein famously commented about\u00a0her hometown of\u00a0Oakland, California, “There’s no there there<\/em>.”\u00a0If the resurrection turns out to be nothing but sentimental bunk, the religion game, at least for Christians, is over.\u00a0There’s nothing\u00a0there<\/em> worth paying attention to.\u00a0
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Here’s how Paul put it, as rendered in the Bible paraphrase called The Message<\/em>:\u00a0“If there\u2019s no resurrection, there\u2019s no living Christ. And face it \u2014 if there\u2019s no resurrection for Christ, everything we\u2019ve told you is smoke and mirrors, and everything you\u2019ve staked your life on is smoke and mirrors. Not only that, but we would be guilty of telling a string of barefaced lies about God, all these affidavits we passed on to you verifying that God raised up Christ \u2014 sheer fabrications, if there\u2019s no resurrection” (I Corinthians 15:13-15).
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But if the Easter story is really true, it’s the ultimate first domino. Tip it over, and it\u00a0will knock down another domino, and that one will knock down a third.\u00a0And by the time it gets to our lives, it has the power to change everything.\u00a0
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Since the validity of orthodox Christianity hangs by a single thread \u2013 was Jesus\u2019 tomb empty or not on the first Easter? \u2013 the pushback by skeptics has been intense.
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A considerable amount of pressure has even come from \u201cinside.\u201d Since the middle of the 20th<\/sup> century, something like half of America\u2019s pastors have expressed either doubt or outright dismissal of Christianity\u2019s central miracle. In a scientifically skeptical age, it seems far-fetched to believe that a deceased person is ever going to breathe again.
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According to Lifeway Research\u2019s 2020 State of Theology survey, two-thirds of Americans believe the Creed\u2019s assertion that Jesus rose from the dead.
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In her book Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World\u2019s Largest Religion<\/em>, author and apologist Rebecca McLaughlin says that number \u201cmakes me feel two things: hopeful and heartbroken. First, I feel hopeful, because it suggests that twice as many Americans as attend church weekly might be open to doing so if they were invited. This is a huge opportunity.
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\u201cBut I also feel heartbroken,\u201d she continues, \u201cbecause the idea that someone would say they believe Jesus actually rose from the dead but that this belief would have so little impact on their life that they weren\u2019t even part of a church is truly tragic.
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\u201cThis exposes the danger of \u2018cultural Christianity\u2019\u2014the vague assent to Christian beliefs without any evidence of actual faith in Christ.\u201d
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What happens if we genuinely become persuaded that the Easter story is true?
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Living as if Jesus is alive and well and ruling the cosmos will\u00a0change the way we pump gas, and make coffee, and read to our kids, and sacrifice for others, and respond to social media, and wait in that long line, and pray for people we don’t know, and deal with that cantankerous relative, and wake up in the morning, and serve beyond our comfort zones.\u00a0
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All it takes is tipping over that first domino:\u00a0Lord, show me how to live as if Jesus is really alive.<\/em>\u00a0
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And before we know it, four million other things are happening that we didn’t even see coming.

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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here\u00a0Throughout the season of Lent, we’re taking a close look at the Apostles’ Creed – one of the earliest and most concise summaries of what followers of Jesus believe.\u00a0According to the Domino Effect, one thing leads to another.\u00a0It can be great fun to stand up hundreds\u00a0of tiles in creative\u00a0patterns.\u00a0Then your only task… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5290,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1080,207],"class_list":["post-5289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-apostles-creed","tag-resurrection"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5289"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5291,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5289\/revisions\/5291"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}