Here are 4 ways the resurrected Christ Jesus actually changed the world for the better.  Now, we don’t celebrate Easter the pagan religion or myth, the word is taken from Eastra, the goddess of spring, in whose honor sacrifices were offered. But we do celebrate Resurrection Day!  Now, what good is it? What good has the Risen Christ brought to history?  The answer is absolutely amazing!

When someone tells me in the grocery store or Starbucks…”Happy Easter” I respond by saying, “Thank you, Happy Resurrection Day to you too!”  I usually get a polite smile and silence. But sometimes they ask, “what do you mean?”  At that point, I do share how He changed my entire life—if they are interested in the eternal.

Resurrection Sunday is the most important day in the Christian year.  For this post, I lay out four ways Jesus changed the world.

It is important because If Jesus did not rise from the grave, the entire edifice of the

Christian religion falls like a glass shattering over the tile floor.

But if he did, then the entire history of the human race changes. See here for historical evidence of this amazing event.

And it did change history!  Jesus himself said 

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also;

and greater than these shall he do…” John 14:12.

In his book, WHAT HAS CHRISTIANITY EVER DONE FOR US? How It Shaped the Modern World, Jonathan Hill of Oxford University

Jonathan Hill argues not that Christianity is the true religion or that Christianity has done more good than bad, which I think it is or did, but he rather he looks to the contribution of Christianity to the “other.”

1. Christians started most educational institutions in history. Universities such as Harvard Yale, Princeton, and in Britain Oxford, Cambridge were all founded by Christians to help bring the love of Jesus through education.

   All but 2 colleges were started by the Christian church in the USA. By the close of 1860, there were 246 colleges in America. Seventeen of these were state institutions; almost every other one was founded by Christian denominations or by individuals in the name of Jesus.

   2. Christians helped the poor more than others. No other institution or people than the people of Jesus have given more of their time and lives to the service of the “other people” in hospitals, culture, the arts, education, society than any other. Even now the Christians are addressing world poverty, hunger, and AIDS more than any other group. The people who followed Jesus, the Church, have taken the lead in providing medical and health care, emergency relief and education to the poor and needy to the 99% than any other group in the history of the world.

3. Jesus’s people, Christians, are responsible for the creation of more humanitarian relief than any others. In particular, the duty of society to assist the poor and sick (the Roman Empire had no welfare system and no hospitals for the common man ); The American Red Cross —one of the world’s largest humanitarian networks with 13 million volunteers in 187 countries helping to respond to disasters, build safer communities, reaching an average of more than 100 million people across the globe. Then there is World Relief which serves over 4 million vulnerable people a year and has over 100,000 volunteers actively engaged in reaching their communities with life-saving messages focusing on microfinance, AIDS prevention and care, maternal and child health, child development, agricultural training, disaster response, and immigrant services. And I did not even mention Compassion International, Samaritan’s Purse, World Vision, Salvation Army and multiple other Jesus based organizations to provide food practical help in famine-stricken areas for including refugees worldwide to untold millions of people too.

4.  Christians are primarily responsible for the growth of science. Contrary to popular notions, there is no dichotomy between science and Christianity. This Warfare thesis between Science and Religion, especially the Christian religion, is a myth of gigantic proportions. No one deserves more blame for this stubborn myth that these two men: Andrew Dickson White(1832-1918), the founding president of Cornell University, and John William Draper(1811-1882), professor of chemistry at the University of New York. Did you know that modern’s science’s driving force has been Christianity for hundreds of years, virtually its only significant contributor?   Great men like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Pascal, Descartes, Newton, Kelvin, Mendel, Boyle — all are devout Christians.

What else empowered the early Christians to change their world than the physical and historical resurrection of their Lord?

Jesus has risen from the dead and

the world has never been the same.

So Happy Resurrection day to all!

Consider these books as well that argue with a similar thesis.