Easter's True Vision
Civilizations have always recognized that there
must be some greater power in the universe than
that of human beings. We have understood deep
within ourselves that there has to be a greater
intelligence behind it all.
Where is it that we learn about this greater power?
Of course it is in the Bible. The Bible is our
resource. Why? Because the Bible is the divinely
inspired record of God's redemptive act in Jesus
Christ for which the Old Testament prepared the way and the New
Testament proclaims.
In other words, God is revealed in Jesus Christ. Acts 17:24 says, in
essence, the God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of
heaven and earth. This God gives to all men life and breath and
everything.
The Bible is the record of God revealing himself. It begins in
Genesis with pre-history in the first few chapters and progresses through
world history with a religious interpretation and ends with post-history
in Revelation.
But the key to it all is in the fact that we believe (as John tells us in
the beginning of his Gospel), God understood that remaining invisible
would not help us to understand his righteous expectation and therefore
he became flesh and blood so we could see him as the living God in
history.
So we can see that Jesus Christ is focused into time. It's a time
when God showed himself in flesh and blood, and a time when God has
focused his "warning" that we must understand his divine intentions,
without which we will fail.
Our worship acknowledges who we really are and the relationship
that is ours.
As Christians we believe that worship ought to reflect our
relationship to this living God. It is recognizing God as our creator and
us as the created. We are connected to this holy and righteous one.
But the Christian believes that everything is connected to the God
who revealed himself in history.
History is an observation of time. I have been to the Holy Land twice
and one of the things that really struck me was "time." In America,
anything 500 years old is ancient. In the Holy Land I was walking the
road where Jesus walked some 2000 years ago. I looked at rocks and
boulders that I was told were over 5000 years old. I couldn't imagine
time in those terms. I couldn't conceive of that kind of time.
The Bible talks about time as a sequence of events, beginning with the
creation of the world by God, followed by specific events along the way
and culminating in the prophecy of the book of Revelation (which has not
yet taken place). And furthermore the Bible says that a thousand years is
as a day in the sight of the Lord. Time is important to us; but not to God.
And so we are a part of history in relationship to the living God. History fits into God, not God into history.
When we are young, we think we will live forever. When we grow
old, we know that death is not far away. But because history fits into God
rather than God fitting into history, death is not a mistake. It is a part of
God's plan.
We have difficulty with death for a lot of reasons. It often seems unfair, knowing how bad people live on and good people die. It seems unfair when young people die long before their time. But we know that
death is part of God's plan, that there is this "gate" through which we pass
from the world's "time frame" into God's "time frame". And it is God's
plan.
So what is Easter's true vision?
True vision of life is the ability to see what is invisible. The God of
history is revealed in Jesus. Our worship acknowledges who we really are
and the relationship that is ours. God is an awesome God. He has promised that death is not a mistake. The Easter message is that there is new
life now, and life after death.
This is true vision.
-Pastor Starkey
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