It had been a very dark day for followers of the Lord. By the time Jesus died, only a few disciples remained at the cross. Everyone else had fled. The very last to leave were a few of the women who had followed Him. They were devastated and discouraged. How could God’s purpose continue from this low ebb? What would keep this new way to God – the Kingdom of God – its flame barely burning at this point – from being fully snuffed out?

For the past 5 weeks we’ve been considering the passion of Christ. We’ll continue that theme this morning, and since this is resurrection Sunday, we’ll take a special look at the grave that couldn’t hold Jesus. Matthew alludes to at least three characteristics of Jesus’ grave in this passage that are important for us to note. The first is that it was:

Matthew says in verses 57-59,

We know very little of this man, Joseph of Arimathea. That he is significant to this part of the gospel story is confirmed in the fact that all four gospel writers mention him, though he is not mentioned before or after this event. Matthew says here that he had become a disciple of Jesus. Mark tells us that he was "a prominent member of the Council, who himself was waiting for the kingdom of God."(1) That would be the Sanhedrin Council. Luke says of Joseph, regarding the decision of the council to have Jesus killed, that "he had not consented to their plan of action."(2) Not everyone on the council had agreed to put Jesus to death. It was the railroad job of Caiaphas, in his rush-to-judgment push, that had succeeded in condemning the Lord, apparently over the objections of ones like Joseph, here. Luke calls Joseph "a good and righteous man."(3) However, to that John adds that he was "a secret disciple, for fear of the Jews.(4)

When we consider the violent way in which the Jewish leaders dealt with Jesus, it isn’t hard to understand Joseph’s fear. Yet whatever those fears may have been up to this point, here we see him boldly stepping out to risk further exposure of his sentiments to the council. According to Mark’s account of these events, Joseph "gathered up courage and went in before Pilate, and asked for the body of Jesus."(5)

It had been a very dark day for followers of the Lord. By the time Jesus died, only a few disciples remained at the cross. Everyone else had fled. The very last to leave were a few of the women who had followed Him. They were devastated and discouraged. How could God’s purpose continue from this low ebb? What would keep this new way to God – the Kingdom of God – its flame barely burning at this point – from being fully snuffed out?

God always has an answer because He will always have a few who faithful who will come forward in the clutch and do what needs to be done. Into this dark time stepped Joseph of Arimathea. This righteous man would bridge the gap and keep the seed of faith alive with his act of compassion and courage.

Someone has pointed out that long ago, when Israel was brought low by the famine in Egypt and God’s people were in danger of extinction from the face of the earth, God used a Joseph to carry the day and save His people. When God needed a faithful man to stand in the gap during the fragile time of Jesus’ birth, God used another Joseph as protector and provider and even as deliverer as that Joseph took the child and fled to Egypt when murder was nearly certain. And now, in the darkest day of Christianity, God calls forth yet another Joseph to fill the gap.

God is never without true believers. He is never without those who will continue His cause. Faith will not die out on the earth. If all the leaders fall away, He’ll just call on someone that none of us has heard of before. While the embers of faith may burn low sometimes, Jesus’ promise is, "The gates of Hades shall not overpower it."(6)

But we’re talking about the grave of Jesus, and I said to you that it was a predicted grave. What I meant by that is that centuries before this, God had looked down the corridor of man’s then future history (if I can express it that way) and seen this secret disciple, Joseph, and his bold deed of providing Jesus with a decent burial place of the kind held only by the rich. Typically, criminals, among whom Jesus was crucified, were taken down from crosses and buried in common, unmarked graves, or even dragged out and left on the garbage heaps of the city dump to be eaten by carrion consuming birds. This would not happen to God’s Son. The Lord had inspired one of His prophets, Isaiah, to write about it long before this time, just as He did regarding many other specific details of Jesus’ life.

Isaiah 53, written over 700 years before Christ, contains a number of remarkable predictions of the Messiah. Verse 9 of that chapter goes like this:

Now there’s a paradox. Jesus died among those who were wicked and was on his way to a wicked man’s grave. Yet by some unlikely occurrence, if we can refer to God’s providence as "unlikely," He was actually buried among the rich.

This is one of the many - over 300 - prophecies that foretold in minute detail particular events that would transpire in the life of Christ – events that were so out of the ordinary that they could not have been staged. The person willing to become familiar with this area of Christian evidence will be rewarded with good reasons to have faith that Jesus was who He claimed to be. Skeptics and unbelievers used to try to explain these phenomenally accurate prophecies away as fabrications, actually written after the life of Jesus. Yet when manuscripts of the writings of the Old Testament prophets, including a nearly complete copy of Isaiah, were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, the facts were established. These prophecies were written well before Jesus’ life. The skeptics’ arguments were silenced.

Look again at this prophecy in Isaiah: "His grave was assigned with wicked men, yet He was with a rich man in His death…." Could such an unlikely paradox have been a mere lucky guess by Isaiah? If you believe that, let me talk to you about a bridge I want to sell….

But there is another sense in which this grave was predicted and we find it right here in our text in Matthew. Beginning in verse 62, he says, "Now on the next day, which is the one after the preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered together with Pilate, and said, ‘Sir, we remember that when He was still alive that deceiver said, 'After three days I am to rise again.'’"

If you read on you will see that these authorities, both Jew and Roman, were concerned that Jesus body might be stolen and that someone might claim He had been raised from the dead.

My point though, is that Jesus had openly predicted His own death, burial, and resurrection before it happened while He was still alive. He had predicted it so clearly that even His enemies understood it.

I found at least ten times in the gospels(7) where Jesus predicted His death and resurrection. I can’t quote all of them here because of time, but let me read a passage that is representative. This is Mark 8:31-32:

"And He [Jesus] began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. And He was stating the matter plainly."

You know, there seems to be no end to the ways that Satan tries to twist the clear truth of God’s word so he can deceive people. There are those today who claim that Jesus came to earth to establish His kingdom, but that He failed when He was crucified due to the opposition against Him and set up the church instead, as a stopgap measure.

Nothing could be more untrue. Jesus did not fail. His death, burial, and resurrection were exactly what God intended. He set up his kingdom and that kingdom was the church.

This grave was predicted by prophets before Him and it was predicted by Jesus Himself. Events were not out of control when Jesus was crucified!

This was a predicted grave. It was also:

Look again at our text in Matthew 27:62-66:

These men, who were Jesus’ bitterest human enemies at this time, knew of His predictions of His death and resurrection, so they determined to do all they could to prevent a fake resurrection claim. Yet in doing so, they inadvertently built a wall of protection around the claim of the resurrection so that those like us who would live thousands of years later would have good reason to believe that He did rise from the grave alive. Let me explain.

Had Jesus been entombed and then His grave left alone and unguarded, who could believe that He was raised without wondering whether or not His body was actually stolen? But God worked it in such a way as if to say, "Let His worst enemies, those who have the most to lose in a fake claim of resurrection, guard the grave. Let all of the worst fears and concerns of both the Jews and Romans motivate them to secure it as effectively as possible." What better way for God to preserve the truth of the resurrection – so that when claims were made that the body was stolen, the strength and security of the grave would testify against it.

There are a couple of things to note here about the level of security of this grave. First, there has been some disagreement as to what "guard" Pilate meant when he said, "You have a guard; go, make it as secure as you know how." Some suggest that Pilate was referring to the Jewish temple police. Then they proceed to denigrate the Jewish guard to make them sound like a bunch of buffoons who could easily have allowed Jesus’ body to be stolen by grave robbers. Yet a careful look at the competence of the Jewish Temple Guard shows that they were far from incompetent. The total number of men in the temple police was 270 or 27 courses of 10 each. Discipline among them was quite strict. If the captain approached a guard member who was asleep at his post at night, that guard was beaten and burned in his own clothes. A member of the guard was forbidden to sit down or lean against something while on duty at his post. While I’m not convinced that Pilate referred to this group of guards, they would certainly have been competent for the job – especially when you consider the motives in this particular case.

There is more reason to believe, however, that the guard Pilate posted was a Roman guard unit. Why? Because if it were the temple guard, why would they have needed to go to Pilate to request it? They could have posted it themselves without any Roman involvement. A.T. Robertson, a noted Greek Scholar, says that the phrase "You have a guard," is in the present imperative. It’s a command in the original language, not a passive statement. He says that it could only refer to a Roman guard because it means literally, "Have a guard." He also adds that the Latin form of the word translated "guard" here (koustodia) is the word most often used to refer to the Roman guard, not the Jewish guard.(8)

A Roman guard unit was a 4 to 16 man security force. Each man was trained to protect six feet of ground to the death. A 16 man square of four on each side was supposed to be able to defend 36 yards of ground from an entire battalion. To post around the clock a 16 man guard unit placed 4 men immediately in front of what they were to protect. The other 12 slept in a semi-circle in front of them. For thieves to get through they would have to step over all 12 of these sleeping guards and then take on the four who were awake.(9) The case would be similar, though reduced a bit, if this were a less fortified, 4 man guard. To forfeit on one’s post, that is, to allow the thing guarded to escape or be stolen was a capital offense. It isn’t likely that the timid disciples who had fled the scene when Jesus was arrested and crucified, and the only ones who could be construed as having an interest in stealing the body, would take on such a Roman guard unit.

Some have suggested that perhaps the word "guard" here meant only one Roman soldier. Yet this cannot be true as Matthew reports in 28:11 that after Jesus’ resurrection, "some of the guard came into the city and reported to the chief priests all that had happened." Obviously the grave was guarded by a multi-troop force.

Also worth mentioning is the fact that after the grave was found empty, the Jews bribed the soldiers to report that the body had been stolen and promised them that they would use their influence over Pilate to keep him from punishing them. This is reported in Matthew 28:11-15. It is further proof that this was a Roman guard unit and not the temple police since they are shown to be accountable to Pilate. That the soldiers would consent to go along with such a ruse after they were unable to stop Jesus’ resurrection would seem to be their only option, save facing the wrath of Pilate.

My point here is that this grave was secure. And since it was protected at such a high level of security, it is virtually impossible that someone stole Jesus’ body or that, as some try to assert, He didn’t actually die but He just "swooned," and then rolled away the stone and himself escaped past the guard on foot.

The predicted grave, which, because of those predictions, became a secured grave, ultimately, at His resurrection became:

Luke says in his account of this:

As Christians, we know why the grave was empty. He had risen!

Our text in Matthew 28:1-6 says:

"He has risen." The grave was empty. We know that because it is reported as empty by all four gospel writers. We also know it because of the circumstances surrounding it.

Don’t you think, given the strength of opposition against Christ and His followers at this time, that if Jesus’ body had still been in the grave, His enemies would have brought it out and put it on public display to stop the belief among the disciples that he had raised from the dead? The advance of Christianity could have been stopped in its tracks by simply showing the corpse of Jesus.

Remember last July when our troops in Iraq killed Saddam’s two sons, Uday and Qusay? Remember how the Arabs and Iraqis at first tried to say that the US had staged the whole event and that the two were not really dead? What was it that finally proved that the sons of Saddam were really dead? Though it seemed like a barbaric thing to do by western standards, our troops put the bodies on display. Yes, there were still some who said that the video and photos were faked, but who today still believes that these two criminals are alive? Virtually no one.

The same could have been done with the body of Jesus – and there was plenty of motivation to do it among His enemies. But it wasn’t done because there was no dead body to display.

A popular means of discounting the Bible’s accounts of the resurrection by skeptics is to claim that the disciples, the Romans, and later, the Jews, actually went to the wrong tomb. That’s why there was no body. But don’t you think, with motivation strong enough to push religious men to commit murder, that had that body been anywhere in the vicinity to be found, they would have found it and produced it?

In fact, the account of the Jewish leaders bribing the soldiers to say that the disciples had stolen the body is perhaps the greatest proof that the grave was empty. You only need a cover story if you have no evidence.

To the skeptic who says to the Christian, "Prove the resurrection," I say, "The grave was empty. All the facts we have verify it. If Jesus didn’t raise from the dead, then explain, against the testimony of the evidence, where His body went. I say He was raised."

Little Philip, born with Down’s syndrome, attended a third-grade Sunday School class with several eight-year-old boys and girls. Typical of that age, the children did not readily accept Philip because of his differences. But because of the persistent work of their teacher, they began to like Philip and accept him as part of the group, though not fully.

The Sunday after Easter the teacher brought some L’eggs pantyhose containers (some of you ladies will probably remember those) the kind that look like large eggs. After each child was given one, they were all told to go out into the yard, find some symbol for new life, and put it in the egg-like container. Back in the classroom, they would share their new-life symbols, opening the containers one by one in surprise fashion. After running around the church property in the wild confusion eight-year-olds are capable of, the students returned to the classroom and placed their containers on the table.

Surrounded by the children, the teacher began to open them one by one. After each one, whether a flower, butterfly, or leaf, the class would "ooh" and "ahh." Then one was opened that had nothing inside. Immediately the children began to make comments about it. "That’s stupid. It’s empty. That’s not fair. Somebody didn’t do the assignment."

About that time Philip spoke up, "That’s mine."

"Philip, you don’t ever do things right!" one of the students responded. "There’s nothing there!"

I did so do it," Philip insisted. "I did do it. It’s empty. The tomb was empty!"

Silence followed. From then on Philip became a full-fledged member of the class. He died not long afterward from an infection most normal children would have shrugged off. At the funeral this class of eight-year-olds marched up together to the front of the building and each placed an empty pantyhose egg in a small basket beside his coffin.(11)

We’ve learned today that Jesus’ grave was:

Footnotes: Use your back button to return to your place

1. Mark 15:43
2. Luke 23:51
3. Luke 23:50
4. John 19:38
5. Mark 15:43
6. Matthew 16:18
7. Matthew 16:21; 17:23; 20:19; 26:61; Mark 8:31; 10:34; Luke 9:22; 18:33; 24:6-7; John 2:19
8. The Resurrection Factor, Josh McDowell, Here’s Life Publishers, San Bernardino, CA 92402, p. 56
9. Ibid., p. 56
10. Luke 24:2
11. Story told in Leadership Magazine

Dave Redick is Minister of the Hwy 20 Church of Christ in Sweet Home, Oregon and Editor of The Preacher's Study. He may be reached at pstudysupport@comcast.net.

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All Scripture quotations and references are from the New American Standard Version unless otherwise stated.

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