Did Jesus Rise on the Eighth Day?

Gary: Now, Contending for the Faith. “To Whom It May Concern: I caught your radio broadcast a few days ago. I thought it sounded good until I heard one of you gentlemen say that Jesus was resurrected on the eighth day. I was shocked! Then I even heard you say it a second time. If you’re going to make statements like that over the air, don’t you think you should explain what you mean? Otherwise, you could lose a lot of listeners, including me.”
 

Tom: Dave, this is “To Whom It May Concern,” but I think it’s to you. I’m backing off from this, particularly with this irate inquirer here.

Dave: Well, whoever it is, Tom, raises a good point. And how many times has it happened? Sometimes my wife tells me what I said, and I say, “Did I say that?” And sometimes you’re trying to talk fast and your brain gets ahead of your words or your mouth gets ahead of your brain, one or the other. And I probably said it, because this is a well-known way of expressing the fact that Jesus rose on the first day of a new week, which is the eighth day. Saturday is the seventh day, then Sunday must be the eighth day, but I can understand it could cause confusion, so probably when I said it, in my mind I know what I mean, and I think everybody else does, or you don’t have time to explain it. But it is a good point.

Tom: Yeah.

Dave: We’ll have to explain it. In other words, I do believe Jesus rose on the third day—the third day after He was in the grave three days and three nights. And the third day, He rose from the dead. It wasn't eight days!

But from another standpoint, even a biblical standpoint, this is the…He was the firstborn of the New Creation. The eighth day is referred to in the Bible as a new beginning. This is the New Creation, and so I’ve been used to expressing it that way also. And my apologies to anyone out there that I made imagine that I thought Jesus was in the grave eight days.

Tom: Yeah, this brings up another point. There are things that we say, and, Dave, you and I have been…not radio, per se, but we’ve been working together for a long time, and we assume each other understands what we’re talking about, but we forget there’s a whole new group out there that’s just joined us. So, we apologize for that, and there are…the medium, as well. It’s a little bit hard to always repeat, always qualify, always give all the documentation to what you’re saying, and I’d have to say, “Well, just hang in there with us! Eventually, we’ll get to it; or if you write to us and voice your concern, we’ll try and respond either on the radio program, or, you know, if we can get to it, we’ll do it personally.

Dave: But we really appreciate this.

Tom: Yes! Absolutely!

Dave: Because if we say something that’s confusing, doesn’t sound right, or, God forbid, is not biblical…

Tom: Right.

Dave: Please, please, tell us! We would not consider that to be an attack but a kindness. If we’ve misspoken, or if we really have some wrong idea from the scriptures and you can show it to us, we would be grateful for that. We don’t want to continue on in error. But we certainly don’t want to make faux pas—well, I don’t think it was a faux pas, it was a true statement. He was resurrected the eighth day, but you do have to explain it, and I failed to explain it.

Tom: Well, I do faux pas all the time, but Gary, in editing this, he gets some of them, but some of them do get out.

The other point of this, Dave, is our heart here is that people would search the Scriptures—that they would be discerning, grow in their discernment, not just buy what we say (we referred to this earlier)—but not buy what we say just because we say it, because the heart here is if we are accurately—if we’re not accurate, get on us big time! But if we are accurately pointing to, underscoring, what the Word of God says, then, as we’ve said before, the argument out there is not with us. It’s with the Word of God. And we want to do this as accurately as we can so that we can be corrected by the Word of God as well as anybody else who has a problem with it.

Dave: You know, Tom, one of the things that I appreciate most about this letter from whomever—whoever sent it—the person at one point in the letter sounds like they’re going to write us off completely as heretics! “Oh, they say Jesus was eight days in the grave,” and it said they almost did that. But at least they wrote to us for an explanation. And I think it’s a good point for us to consider. I don’t want to be too quick jumping on somebody and say, “Oh, the guy’s a heretic! I just heard him say this or that.” I want to at least check it out and make sure that I really fully understand what the person said. And that’s what I appreciate about this writer, and so I would just urge anybody else out there, don’t write us off too fast. But if we say something that you think isn’t correct, please write us! Give us some help so that we can make an explanation at least, or be corrected. And I do appreciate that very much.

Tom: Right.

Dave: We do like to hear from our listeners as well.

Tom: Yeah. Dave, one more comment along that line—and this is the problem with the medium—we have seven minutes, maybe in one segment, to talk about an issue, and some things we could talk about, if people would hang in there with us, we could talk about all day, and certainly bring the wealth of documentation, wealth of research that we’ve done, but we can’t always do that. That’s why it isn’t just—the radio program is one medium; we have another one—it’s called the newsletter. We’re on the internet at thebereancall.org, on which we have archives of information, research that we’ve done, and people can access that. Or, you know, if they get impulsive, just write to us, and we can at least direct you to where we have more documentation, where we have more information for you.

Dave: Very good!