Conquered: An Empty Tomb (Mark 16:1-8) | Easter Sunday

Transcript

JR 51
4/5/2026
Easter Sunday Message
Conquered: An Empty Tomb
Mark16:1-8
Jesse Randolph

Well, once again, a very Happy Resurrection Sunday to you all. Today, we’re celebrating the fact, we’ve heard this through the scripture reading, we’ve heard this through song, wonderful song, beautiful song, glorious song. We’ve heard that there’s a Lamb who was slain. There was a Lamb who was laid in a tomb. But there was a Lamb who rose. And, in a world where chaos is happening, right, where war drums are banging, and gas prices are rising, and policies are dividing, and civility is declining, and hope is lacking. We need that message. We need that message of hope. And the reality that Jesus’ tomb, even today, remains empty provides that hope. It provides this world the hope it so desperately wants. And this hope that it so desperately sought after in various different iterations.

If you have a bible with you, I’d invite you open with me to the Gospel of Mark, and specifically, to Mark 16. If you don’t have a bible, that’s ok, you can look over your neighbor’s shoulder, they won’t bite, I promise. Or, you have a special dispensation today, to open up your phone and look at Google and pull up Mark 16, as we consider one account in the four Gospel accounts, of the resurrection of Christ.

I’m going to read from Mark 16:1-8. God’s word reads,
“And when the Sabbath passed, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, bought spices, so that they might come and anoint Him. And very early on the first day of the week, they came to the tomb when the sun had risen. And they were saying to one another, ‘Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?’ And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled away, although it was very large. And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, wearing a white robe; and they were amazed. And he said to them, ‘Do not be amazed; you are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who has been crucified. He has risen; He is not here; behold, the place where they laid Him. But go, tell His disciples and Peter, He is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see Him, just as He told you.’ And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment were gripping them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
Now, on a typical Sunday morning here at Indian Hills, what we would be doing is we would be picking apart every little detail of that text, working our way through every nook and cranny of this text, leaving no stone unturned in this text.

But this morning, with it being Resurrection Sunday, and having half the time to devote to a normal sermon here, what I’m going to do is take that text, we even heard it through that beautiful rendition of that song “Witnesses”, by our own Max Whitson. And we’re going to launch right into a few key resurrection-related truths. Resurrection-related truths that we all need to and ought to reflect upon on this Resurrection Sunday.
First, we’re going to consider this morning: The Requirement of the Resurrection
Second, we’re going to look at: The Record of the Resurrection.
And then third, we’ll get into, The Results of the Resurrection.

So, let’s start with The Requirement of the Resurrection.
Earlier this weekend, on Good Friday, we gathered to commemorate the fact that Jesus of Nazareth, who was the Messiah sent to Israel, who was and is the eternal Son of God. He came to this earth, with a specific mission. He came to this earth with a mission to die. He came as the sacrificial Lamb of God, through who’s death He takes away, John 1:29 says, “the sin of the world.” And die He did. As we remembered Friday night. He was put to death on a Roman device of torture known as a “cross.” And He went to that cross as an act of substitution. The Holy One standing in for the unholy ones, meaning you and I.
He did so as an act of love. Romans 5:8 says, “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
And He did so in fulfillment of prophecy. You might remember how we looked at it on Friday night,
Isaiah 53, written some 700 years before the birth of Christ, predicted that this coming One, this Messiah would be “pierced through for our transgressions.” And He would be “crushed for our iniquities.”

Well, it wasn’t only predicted of Jesus that He would die. It was predicted of Him – in the Old Testament – that He would rise.
Psalm 16:10 says, “You will not give Your Holy One over to see corruption.”
Then there’s Isaiah 53:10, one of our texts from Friday night, which begins with these words,
“But Yahweh was pleased to crush Him.” That’s where we were on Friday.
But then it goes on to say this, “He will see His seed, He will prolong His days, and the good pleasure of Yahweh will succeed in His hand.”

Both of those passages, Psalm 16 and Isaiah 53, were prophetic. They’re written hundreds of years before the Messiah would come. Hundreds of years before Jesus walked the earth. And they predicted that when the Messiah did come He would not only die, He would not only be “crushed,” but He would rise. Whatever grave, whatever tomb He’d be placed in, would not be able to keep Him, to contain Him.

And it wasn’t only the Old Testament prophets and Old Testament psalmists who predicted that the coming Messiah would both die and rise.
Jesus Himself, at various points in His life, made the very same prediction.
In the Gospel of John, as He’s interacting with various religious leaders of His day, Jesus said this in John 2:19, “Destroy this sanctuary,” or “Destroy this temple.”
And then He said this, “and in three days I will raise it up.”
Now down the page in John 2:21, we’re given the interpretation. It says specifically that Jesus was “speaking about the sanctuary [or the temple] of His body.”
Or in Matthew 17:22, “while they were gathering together in Galilee, Jesus said to them, ‘The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men; and they will kill Him, and He will be raised on the third day.’”
In other words, Jesus was crystal clear during His life, in saying that He would not only die, He would not only rise, but that He would rise specifically on the third day.

And so, the resurrection was required not only to certify the claims of the prophets of old, but to certify Jesus’ own claims that He would die and rise on the third day. If He hadn’t been risen, well then, all those prophecies and all those predictions would have flagged Jesus as a false prophet under the Law of Moses.

Here’s another reason that the resurrection of Jesus was required. The resurrection authenticated Jesus’ claims to be exactly who He said He was. You know, as you study the Gospel accounts, and you study those approximately three-years of Jesus’ ministry, you see He did a lot. He was busy man in His humanity. He taught all over the place. He performed miracles of all different types. And along the way He made various piercing, eye-opening statements about Himself, staggering statements. Listen to these words, and these are just a sprinkling of these from the lips of our Lord:
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through Me.”
“Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.”
“I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die”– ever.

Well, when Jesus rose from the grave as He predicted He would do, that event not only amazed the witnesses who saw it happen, or saw Him after it happened, that fact, His resurrection validated His statements about who He was and who He claimed to be.
It is because He was raised that we, even now, know today that He actually was and is God.
It’s because of His resurrection that we know that He was and is the Savior.
It’s because of His resurrection we know that He does and did have the ability, by His death, to pay for the forgiveness of our sin.
There was a Hall of Fame pitcher in the early 1900’s named Dizzy Dean. And he once quipped that,
“It ain’t braggin’ if you do it.” Well, Jesus did it. He did exactly what He said He would do when He came out of that tomb alive on Sunday morning. In doing so, He proved that He truly is “the resurrection and the life.”
He did, Romans 1:4, “designated [Himself] as the Son of God in power . . . by the resurrection from the dead.”
He proved that He truly is the God-Man, and that He truly does offer salvation and forgiveness of sin for all who would believe upon Him.

So, that was The Requirement of the Resurrection. Next, we want to get into The Record of the Resurrection.
Simon Greenleaf was a famed American lawyer and jurist in the early 1800’s who also was a law professor at Harvard Law School. And his writings, even today, on the rules of evidence are still used in law schools and courtrooms alike. And one of Greenleaf’s writings was a book in which he blended both his expertise in the area of evidentiary rules and his faith – his Christian faith. And in this book he placed the resurrection of Jesus under the American rules of evidence to see if they held water, in a typical court of law situation. And in that book, after examining all the evidence, Greenleaf wrote this: “A person who rejects Christ may choose to say that I do not accept it.” “It” meaning the resurrection. But then he goes on to say, but, “he may not choose to say there is not enough evidence.”

So, what “evidence” was Greenleaf referring to, when he wrote that sentence? When he arrived at that conclusion? What evidence is there that Jesus did, in fact, rise from the grave after being crucified? After dying? After being placed in a sealed-up tomb?
Well, let’s start here. Let’s start with the fact that on that blessed Sunday morning that we’re celebrating today, the tomb was in fact empty.
Mark 16, I read from it just a moment ago, Mark 16:4 says,
“And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled away, although it was very large. And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, wearing a white robe; and they were amazed. And he said to them, ‘Do not be amazed; you are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who has been crucified. He has risen; He is not here.”
So the tomb was empty. And that fact is recorded not only in Mark’s Gospel, but in the other three Gospel’s as well, Matthew and Luke and John.

Not only was the tomb empty, though. The One who left the tomb, the physically resurrected Jesus, appeared to several different people in several different places. And each time He did so He demonstrated that He had, in fact, been raised bodily. The clearest example of this, I think, is given in Luke 24, which records this scene following Jesus’ resurrection, and it says this, starting in verse 36,
“He Himself stood in their midst and said to them, ‘Peace to you.’ But being startled and frightened, they were thinking that they were seeing a spirit. And He said to them, ‘Why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? See My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself; touch Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.’ And when He had said this, He showed them His hands and His feet.”
He showed them His hands and feet. He also, that same account says, ate with them. He shared a meal with them, which tells us what? That He was raised bodily. This group of disciples in this interaction wasn’t seeing a phantom or a spirit. They were witnessing the physically resurrected Lord!

So there’s the evidence of the empty tomb. There’s the evidence of Jesus’ physical appearances to others after He left the tomb. Next, there are these eyewitness testimonies. There were several different people who encountered the risen Lord with their own two eyes, and they were recorded in various different places in the four Gospel accounts. Now, these aren’t people who were relying on witnesses or on second-hand information.

These were people who saw it themselves with their own two eyes. First-hand eyewitness information. For instance, Acts 1:3 speaks of these different followers and groups of apostles and disciples who witnessed Jesus personally raised.
Acts 1:3 says, “He also presented Himself alive after His suffering, by many convincing proofs, appearing to them over forty days and speaking about the things concerning the kingdom of God.”
We know that He appeared to Mary Magdalane and to “the other Mary.” We know that He appeared to the two disciples who were on their way to Emmaus, in Luke 24. We know that He appeared to ten of the apostles in John 20. We know He appeared by a lake to some other disciples in John 21. We know that He appeared to eleven of His disciples on the mount in Galilee in Matthew 28. We know that He appeared to those who were present for His ascension in Acts 1.
And then we have the Apostle Paul, who in 1 Corinthians 15:4 says, that after Jesus “was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures . . . He appeared to Cephas [that would be Peter], then to the twelve. After that He appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep. After that, He appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all, as to one untimely born, He appeared to me also.”
Going back to Greenleaf, the Harvard Law Professor. This is what you would call an open and shut case. In a court of law this would be an open and shut case. The fact is Jesus presented Himself as risen, out in the open, for all to see. And that many did, in fact, see Him in that risen state.

Now note, it wasn’t just that these eyewitnesses saw the risen Christ. There’s this other piece of information, which is that they were absolutely transformed by what they saw. Their lives were absolutely changed by what they saw. Think of James. James was Jesus’ half-brother. And earlier in Jesus’ ministry James was this hardened skeptic. James was this one that thought that his brother was certifiably crazy. You know, in Mark 3:21, James is quoted as saying of Jesus, that he has “lost His senses.” “Bro has gone off the rails.” That’s what James is saying, paraphrase.
But when we get to the book of Acts, written after the resurrection, we learn that James is now being depicted as this prominent, vocal leader in the early church. This man who was boldly telling others about the salvation that’s found through his brother, the Savior. What changed? What changed James? What changed was the intervening resurrection.

Or Thomas. Thomas was there following Jesus in His steps during His earthly ministry. He’s one of the apostles. He’s even heard Jesus testify repeatedly to the fact that He will not only die, but rise. But Thomas still doubted. In fact, even after the tomb was found to be empty. And even after reports of the resurrection were making its way through the community, Thomas still doubted. In fact, here are Thomas’s doubting words in John 20:25, he says,
“Unless I see in His hands the imprint of the nails, and put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe.”
So somehow, in his grief over Christ’s death, Thomas had forgotten that Jesus had previously spoken about the fact that He would rise. And not wanting to be more sad and disappointed than he already was Thomas doubted.
That is, until we see what’s described next, in John 20:26, it says,
“After eight days His disciples were again inside, and Thomas with them. Jesus came, the doors having been shut, and stood in their midst and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ Then He said to Thomas, ‘Reach here with your finger, and see My hands; and reach here your hand and put it into My side; and do not be unbelieving, but believing.’”
And then, Thomas says in John 20:28, it says,
“Thomas answered and said to Him, ‘My Lord and my God!’”
What changed? The resurrection.

Then, of course, there’s Paul. Paul was not only not a follower of Christ when Jesus died and when Jesus rose, but rather, at that earlier phase of his life, Paul was not Paul, but Paul was Saul the Pharisee who was persecuting earlier followers of Christ. But then, years later, Saul, as he was then known, is charging toward Damascus. He’s on this hunt to take over and persecute Christians. But the Lord intervenes. And that changes everything. Because now, no longer a determined hater of Christians Saul becomes Paul, this devoted follower of Christ who has written all these epistles in our New Testaments now. And what was at the heart of Paul’s conversion? Well, he encountered the risen Jesus. Here are Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 15:8, which is all about the resurrection. He says, “and last of all, as to one untimely born, He appeared to me also.”
And then importantly, Paul there, didn’t have an encounter with a dead Christ, or a phantom Christ, or an emanation of Christ. He had an encounter with the physically resurrected Jesus.

And then, note, not only did men like James and Thomas and Paul testify to having encountered the resurrected Jesus, they were willing to die for saying that that had happened. As we study the records of church history, we see that James was later beaten and stoned to death, that Thomas was speared to death. And Paul, we believe, was beheaded. And why? For a lie? No way. For the truth. For the truth that Jesus had risen bodily from the grave.

So, we’ve looked at The Requirement of the Resurrection. We’ve considered just now The Record of the Resurrection.
Now, we want to consider The Results of the Resurrection. We want to consider the importance of the resurrection. The centrality of the resurrection. To believers, certainly, but to everyone on this planet who has ever lived. I’ve got five of these for you.
Here’s the first one:
The resurrection of Jesus Christ establishes an absolute standard for truth. An absolute standard for truth. You know, many today, in this postmodern world in which we live, they will outright deny that there is such a thing as “absolute truth.” That’s why we get all sorts of nonsensical statements like, “your truth is your truth” and “my truth is my truth.” And Islam is true, like Buddhism is true, like Judaism is true, like Christianity is true. It’s all truth. That is the definition of nonsense.

When he was interacting with the intellectual elites of his day, Paul, formerly Saul, now Paul is at Mars Hill, where all the Athenian philosophers gathered in Acts 17 (verse 30), and he says this,
“God is now commanding men that everyone everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He determined, having furnished proof to all by raising Him from the dead.”
Did you catch that? God, when He comes to judge the world, in the end He’s not going to judge the world by majority opinion. He’s not going to judge the world by what is most popular in that day. He’s not going to judge the world by what gets the most “likes” and “followers” on Instagram. No. He is going to judge the world, it says: “in righteousness”, a moral standard of righteousness. And He’s going to judge the world, it says: “through a Man”, that “Man” being Jesus, whom He “raised from the dead.” So, notwithstanding what the “tolerance police” are telling you today, about how you need to be more tolerant than you actually are, there is truth in this world. And that truth is found in the Risen Christ. The One who called Himself the truth. He’s the way, the truth and the life. And He was certified to be the truth, when God raised Him from the dead.
So, the resurrection establishes that there is a standard for truth in this world.

Here’s another one:
The resurrection is assurance that God accepted Christ’s death on the cross as payment for sin. It provides assurance that God accepted Christ’s death on the cross as payment for sin.
Romans 4:25 refers to Jesus not only being: “delivered over on account of our transgressions.”
Our sins, that’s what we looked at on Friday night.
But Romans 4:25 also says that He was “raised on account of our justification.”
So Jesus was resurrected to provide a guarantee, that in the sight of God His sacrifice has been accepted as payment for sin by God. His resurrection is proof that God has accepted the sacrifice of His Son.

That relates to the third one, which is:
The resurrection provides assurance that our sins have been forgiven. Resurrection provides assurance to the believer that their sins have been forgiven. As we covered on Good Friday, there’s no doubt that modern man, in his guilt, and to his shame, has tried to do away, as much as he can, with the reality of sin. He’s tried to sweep it under the rug by redefining it, mislabeling it, outright denying it, and denying its existence. But sin in man is as real and as true as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. Sin exists. It’s always existed. It attaches to us like barnacles on the bottom of a boat. We’re all sinners. I’m a sinner. You’re a sinner.
Romans 3:23 says, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
Every one of us was conceived in sin. And we do, in fact, sin – in deed and in thought. We are, categorically, and without exception – sinners. But sin is not just a status. No. Sin comes with a sentence and that sentence is death.
Romans 6:23 says, “The wages of sin is death.”
That includes physical death, meaning when our bodies give out and go into the ground, feeding worms and pushing up flowers, physical death.
Our sin brings about spiritual death. The reality of our spiritual estrangement, our separation from God in our natural, unregenerate condition.
Isaiah 59:2 says it best,
“Your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear.”
That’s spiritual death. And our sin brings about a terrifying reality of eternal death. Meaning, if we aren’t, before we die, restored to a right relationship with the God that we’ve sinned against by repenting and believing upon the name of His Son for salvation, what awaits us is eternal ruin as we’re tormented forever in hell. That’s eternal death. Our sin has created a problem, a sin problem that we couldn’t and can’t resolve on our own. Our sin could only be solved, and our sin problem could only be resolved by God Himself. And He provided that solution by sending His Son to die and sending His Son to rise for us.

Here’s another one:
The resurrection guarantees that believers, too, will one day be raised. You know, it’s often mistakenly believed that all Christians care about is the spiritual realm. You know, we just can’t wait to get on our rocket ship up to heaven. We can’t wait to get our wings, so to speak. We can’t wait to get that harp and to sit on that cloud, in this disembodied state, where we sing songs for trillions of years. But that’s not what the bible teaches. The bible does not teach that that’s what the believer is waiting for. Rather, what the believer is waiting for is our own one-day resurrection where we will one day be raised.
John 6:40, these are the words of Jesus, He says,
“Everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him will have eternal life, and I Myself will raise him up on the last day.”
And Christians recognize, with anticipation, that this “last day” will be a day on which we will be raised bodily, physically, in glorified bodies, which will be suitable for an eternity spent in the presence of the Living God.
Charles Spurgeon once said, “Six feet of dirt make all men equal.” Pretty pointed, accurate, right? But followers of Christ aren’t going to stay there. We’re not going to stay six feet under. No. Because Christ has been raised, we too will one day rise from the dead. Listen to these words from Paul again, in 1 Corinthians 15:21,
“For since by a man came death, by a man also came the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive.”

One more. And this one is really all-encompassing:
The resurrection is our only hope. The resurrection is our only hope. Listen to these words from
1 Corinthians 15:13. And as you hear these, note how blunt and clear and transparent these words are:
“But if there is no resurrection of the dead, not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain. Moreover, we are even found to be false witnesses of God, because we bore witness against God that He raised Christ, whom He did not raise, if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied.”
Wow. You have to at least appreciate the brutal honesty of the Christian religion. Right? I mean, that is as blunt as it gets. It’s saying that if the resurrection of Christ did not happen . . . then none of us has hope. If Christ is not risen, then the preaching that we do here is in vain. Your faith is in vain. My faith is in vain. The baptisms we’re about to witness are in vain. Right? If Christ is not risen we’re still dead in our sins. We’re not forgiven. We have no hope. We’re of all people, most to be pitied. What a waste of time this has all been. How pathetic we are. We really should be spending our Sunday mornings watching football in the fall. Right?

Well, that’s not the end of the story. No. Because 1 Corinthians 15:20 says, “But now Christ has been raised from the dead.”
Christ has been raised. Jesus not only really died, He really rose. And because the tomb is empty, and because He is Risen, and is alive today, we who have believed upon His name have actual hope. True hope. A living hope.
As that same author I quoted a moment ago, Spurgeon said, “We write Jesus’ name upon our banner, for it is hell’s terror, heaven’s delight, and earth’s hope.”

Now, if you’re here this morning, as one who has not put your faith in Jesus Christ, as your personal Lord and Savior, whether you’re someone who regularly attends our services, or whether you’re a curious visitor, or you’re a hardened skeptic who’s been dragged along here this morning, or you’re one of those unapologetic annual “attend church on Easter” box-checker, what you need to know is this:
The death that Jesus died He died so that you might live. And you need to know that Jesus rose from the grave, going from death to life so that you might do the same. Now, what you need to really grapple with this morning before we leave here is not only do you believe those truths to be true, that Jesus died and that Jesus rose, but have those truths actually grip your heart. That they are not just true to you, but do they compel everything about you? Do you live in light of those truths in faith? Have you put everything in terms of what you will do today and where your eternity will be spent in those truths, that Jesus died, and that Jesus rose? There’s a famous British preacher named Martin Lloyd Jones who used to always speak of preachers who, there are those who can advocate, meaning, they can state the facts of what they’re preaching. And then there are those preachers who are witnesses.
So, the question before all of us this morning, as we consider these resurrection truths, is this: Are you not merely an advocate of the reality of the resurrection, or are you a witness of it? Maybe not a witness in the sense that you were not there in the 1st Century to see it happen, but we have this book that testifies to it, about the truth of the resurrection. Could you testify to someone either here today or out there in the world, that the resurrection has transformed your life and changed your life as you have put your faith in Jesus, God’s only Son?
Friend, don’t stiff-arm this Savior. Don’t reject His kind offer of mercy toward you. If you’ve yet to put your faith in Jesus, don’t reject His underserved offer of grace that He’s extending to you right now. Don’t reject the spiritual life-preserver that’s being thrown out to you, as you hear His gospel message – the message of salvation. Instead, hear the words I’m about to read to you and then humble yourself before God. Beg Him to forgive you of the sins that you know you’ve committed against Him. Beg Him to wash you as white as snow. And then, beg Him to save your soul.
Here are those words, Romans 10:9,
“If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”

God, we thank You this morning for a chance to consider and rejoice in the realities of the resurrection of Your Son, Jesus. God, for we who have put our faith in Jesus Christ, today is a day of rejoicing, hope, joy, triumph, as we reflect on our conquering Savior, the One who conquered the grave and conquered death. What a joy we have in our hearts and what hope we have. God, I know also this morning, there will be those who are not in the faith. They’ve not put their faith in Jesus Christ. They’re either open in their rebellion. They’re hardened in some way. They’re deceived. Whatever the case may be, God. If there are those here this morning, who do not know You through Your Son, as Savior and Lord, I pray that today would be the day that You would open their eyes. Grant them eyes to see and ears to hear. Transform them, make them new creations in Jesus Christ, as Your Spirit draws them, and convicts them, and ultimately, indwells them. God, we praise You for the Cross. We praise You for the empty tomb. May we be faithful ambassadors and heralds of the truth, that Jesus has risen, Jesus is alive. We praise Him, our mighty Savior. Amen