CS Lewis in his book “Surprised by Joy” recounts his firmly held belief that Christians were wrong. He says that the last thing he wanted was to embrace Christianity. Lewis had a friend who he describes as the hardest boiled of all atheists and together they stood firm until one day in 1926 when his friend, the hardboiled egg, started to crack under the weight of the evidence.
Lewis writes:
“He sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Bible was really surprisingly good. He said “it almost looks as though everything written there really happened once”.
“To understand the shattering impact of this statement you would need to know the man. He had never shown any interest in Christianity, he was the cynic of cynics, the toughest of the toughs – and yet if even he were not safe in his disbelief, where would I turn?”
After investigating the basis and evidence for Christianity, Lewis concluded that in other religions there was “no valid historical claim as there was in Christianity”. His knowledge of literature forced him to treat the biblical accounts of Jesus death and resurrection as trustworthy. He said “I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myth”.
So finally, contrary to his strong stand against Christianity, CS Lewis had to make a decision. He wrote:
“You must picture me alone in that room in college, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity term of 1929, I gave in and admitted that God was God, and I knelt and I prayed.”
I don’t know if it was the eyewitness testimony to the resurrection that convinced him of the truth of it.
I don’t know if it was that fact that Jesus appeared to his mother, his brothers, and his enemies that proved that the resurrection was historical fact.
I don’t know if it was the sheer number of people he appeared to in various places at various times.
I don’t know if it was the faith of the disciples and their going to death for Jesus.
I don’t know if it was the life changing impact the resurrection had on people in the first century and every century after that.
I don’t know if it was the testimony to the resurrection from outside the Bible.
Perhaps it was the weight of it all. So with Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:20 he was able to say, “Christ has indeed been raised from the dead!”
This Easter, I hope you are able to say that too.