It never fails that just when things are going great, I manage to get humbled. Tonight as I was preparing to write my three Easter posts, for this site, and for Patriot Flyer and BNN, my DSL signal went bumping off into the night, taking a holiday. Panicky, I swapped modems, swapped computers, strung wires all over the place, nothing. I got on my dialup – backup, and that worked fine. Calling Bellsouth, I found out that there was a problem, that it couldn’t be fixed tonight, and I will have to suffer the ignominious dragging slowness of dialup until Monday! Check the temper, Joe old boy, you can’t do anything about it, so thank the Lord for dialup, spend a weekend working in a medium that you’ve already forgotten about, and come Monday you’ll be much more thankful for your speedy little dsl signal! OK, Thank the Lord, pass the asdfgqwerty’s and let’s see what is in store for Easter 2005! God bless you every one!
Easter, though some things like the easter bunny crop up to muddy the waters, is a particularly Christian holy day; not a holiday in our secular sense, but truly a very holy day, the very pinnacle of the Christian faith. It is not replicated in any other religion, it was not borrowed from any other culture, it is unique, just as what we celebrate is unique. Let me digress for a moment. I posted on Patriot Flyer yesterday a sort of terse sentence, wherein I said that anyone who is offended by Christianity should just take a hike while we celebrate Easter. I say it again. I promise I won’t get offended by your religion or whatever, if you will just leave the Christians to their celebration without a lot of whining. You might even learn something, if you’re not a Christian and wish to read on, and we most cordially invite you to do so.
Central to the message of the Bible is the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. I do understand that our Jewish brothers do not accept Him as Lord, but we do share the Old Testament Scriptures, and counter to the stories of hatred on the part of many Christians in earlier centuries, we Evangelical Christians today closely embrace the Jews, and we are indeed the best friends Israel has in the world. Continuing with my message today, Jesus is central to Christianity, and central to all of that is the resurrection. My views are somewhat narrow here, by design. I believe, supported by scripture, that Jesus did arise from the dead, that he ascended to the Father, and that He is coming again. If we do not accept those truths, there is no Christianity. The Apostle Paul stated in First Corinthians 15, that it is a fact that Jesus arose from the dead. He went on to say(v.20) that Jesus is only the first of a great harvest of those to follow who will be raised from the dead! “So you see,” he continues, “just as death came into the world by one man, Adam, now the resurrection from the dead has begun through another man, Christ Jesus.” In a nutshell, by the disobedience of Adam and Eve, death came to us, God having given his son Jesus to die on the cross as propitiation for our sins, has provided for us life, resurrection from our state of death, to live in eternity with God. Redemption. That is the subject of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. Not a “religion that someone wants to ram down anyone’s throat,” but a genuine message of God’s love for us all, love that transcends even death. Christianity is an invitation for us to bask in the love and forgiveness of God.
Further down in the I Corinthians passage, Paul writes of how our bodies will be transformed into everlasting spiritual bodies when Jesus comes back for us, and calls to mind a passage from Hosea in the Old Testament, regarding the victory that death seems right now to have over us. He says, that when this time comes, we will see fulfillment of that scripture, that death is swallowed up in victory. “O Death, he says, “where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” (15:55)
I really do anticipate with joy the day when I can join the throng of millions of believers from across the centuries, bought from death with the blood of Jesus Christ, as we march into the holy city, the New Jerusalem, as described in Revelation 21 -22. That day is coming as surely as I write this tonight, and I look forward to meeting you there.
And it’s all because Jesus loved us, died for us, and rose again on the first Easter!
God bless you, and may you have a blessed, holy, and happy easter!
Joe Comer
(all scripture quotations from the New Living Translationof the Bible)