Sermon Illustrations
Doctor Explores the Medical Miracle of the Resurrection
Thomas A. Miller, a surgeon and researcher, explores the miracle of Christ's resurrection from a medical angle. Dr. Miller notes that the body contains trillions and maybe even 100 trillion cells. Each one of these cells carries out thousands of different chemical reactions. Thus a bodily resurrection would require "some phenomenal power to energize life' into all these individual cells, but it would have to do so in such a way that specialized nerve cells could resume their unique function, heart cells perform theirs, blood cells and bone cells do theirs, and so on."
Dr. Miller continues:
Consider the heart as just one example. It beats on average 70 times a minute, 4,200 times an hour, 100,800 times a day … and 36,288,000 times a year …. And for that to happen, thousands of processes within each cell must act in a coordinated way to ensure that the blood entering the right side of the heart is effectively propelled into the lungs, where the red blood cells contained in it discharge carbon dioxide and pick up oxygen, following which it returns to the left side of the heart where it is propelled to the tissues of the rest of the body, do that they might receive precious oxygen they need to sustain their many functions. This all happens at least every second in such a smooth fashion that we are not even aware of it. And at the moment we die, all these processes came to a screeching halt.
A bodily resurrection implies that thousands of processes in trillions of cells must be restarted with the unique intricacy and inter-coordination that existed before death. Dr. Miller notes that this would require not just incredible power but also unimaginable knowledge. He writes:
Even the latest science has not unraveled the complete mystery of each of the cells of our bodies, and how they interact and "talk" with one another …. But for the resurrection of Jesus to occur, all of that information had to be known in its completeness and totality, and known some two thousand years ago.