What does the Bible say about Easter?

- Pete Farrington

What Is Easter All About?

I’d like to begin with a verse that encapsulates in one sentence what Easter is all about. The Apostle Paul wrote this,

“For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures...”

-- 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 (ESV)

This is of first importance, whether you are indifferent to Jesus, whether you hate him, whether you have known Him for 5 days or even if you have been a Christian for fifty years. This is of first importance and it always will be.

There Is A Cost To Sin

A number of years ago I was sitting on the banks of the Arno river in Florence, Italy where I was living at the time drinking an espresso in the Tuscan sun. I was wearing a tank top which revealed self-inflicted scars on my bare upper arm. A good friend was sitting next to me and saw those scars for the first time that day. After hearing me tell the story of my struggle with self harm in my late teens, he said to me “You know, it’s funny because those scars actually point to something true, that blood had to be spilled.” The penny dropped for me in that moment. I had been a Christian for a long time but in some ways I felt like I was born again again in that moment. Every problem finds its answer in the Cross and empty tomb of Jesus Christ.

More on that a bit later but my friend was right. A debt was owed, a payment had to be made. The Bible says as much.

It says in the book of Hebrews that,

“...without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.”

-- Hebrews 9:22 (ESV)

We All Feel Like We're Not Enough

For most of my life I have had a profound sense deep inside that I am not enough. I’ve sought after and lived on the approval of others. And no matter how much I've tried to please, and no matter how much I have pleased others I was still left feeling like I had to make up for something. My self loathing was not merely a problem with self esteem and not just something that could be fixed with self-affirmation. I think we all struggle with that nagging feeling of not being enough. It may not have manifested itself in self-harm for you, it may look like masking that feeling with ambition, relationships, sex, raw experiences or career. We all try and fill up what we know is lacking in us. You can work your fingers to the bone, but it will never be enough. You can try to just love yourself more. That won’t work either. You will never be enough. The world will tell you that you just need to have more bubble baths, you need more "me time", that you just need to find your authentic, true self, and that you can love yourself into wholeness. But this is flawed reasoning.

I think something Allie Beth Stuckey said is really powerful.

“If our problem is that we’re insecure or unfulfilled, we’re not going to be able to find the antidote to these things in the same place our insecurities and fear are coming from.”

-- Allie Beth Stuckey

You cannot love yourself into wholeness. We need outside help.

Children Of Wrath

Now when describing mankind’s state without Jesus, we sometimes use language like “You are broken and just need fixing”. But the Bible goes much much further than that. You are not just broken, I am not just broken. We are dead without Jesus. Numerous times in the Bible it speaks of us being dead in our sins. In fact, in Ephesians it even says that without Jesus we are “Children of wrath”. What does that mean?

“…they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator...”

-- Romans 1:25 (ESV)

Our sin is an offence to a holy, righteous and perfect God.

And so, that feeling I spoke about of not being enough is only one part of the problem. The biggest issue that we face is that our sin, our disobedience and rebellion against God, puts us under the wrath of God. We are children of wrath. The Bible talks of sin being a wall of hostility between us and god. And God, being a just judge is right to punish sin. He would be wrong not to.

“…the Lord will by no means clear the guilty.”

-- Nahum 1:3 (ESV)

“…the wages of sin is death...”

-- Romans 6:23 (ESV)

What Hope Is There?

So if I am guilty and the wages of sin is death and there is no forgiveness without the shedding of blood, what hope can I possibly have?

Let’s look at something that Jesus said about why he came into the world in the book of Luke.

Jesus is actually speaking about himself in this passage and tells us about his purpose of coming into the world.

“….The Son of Man (Jesus) must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.”

-- Luke 9:22

That’s an interesting word, “must”. You see, God the Father had a definite rescue plan. We were his enemies but God had a plan to save those very same people who had rejected him.

And this is something we could never do. We could never save ourselves. No matter how many chances we got, we could never work our way up to God's level. Someone had to die in our place. Jesus in his willing submission to the Father followed through on that plan all the way through to the cross.

“For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, (remember that wall of hostility?) the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time.”

-- 1 Timothy 2:5-6 (ESV)

“The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Christ Jesus than we ever dared hope.”

-- 1 Timothy 2:5-6

So let’s go back to the Peter drinking an espresso in the sun a few years ago. I suddenly realised that day a little bit of what Timothy Keller talks about in that quote, that I had tried my best for most of my life to believe that I was actually better than I was in reality. Sure, I needed a helping hand but I wasn’t too bad off without Jesus. I could work my way to God. And yet I was left wondering if there were things about myself, things I’ve done which the blood of Christ couldn’t and didn’t cover. And so as a result of subconsciously believing this I’d need to take matters into my own hands. But Christ paid the debt in full. He took all of God’s wrath against us upon himself. All of our sin and shame. Jesus’ final words on the cross just before he died were incredible.

“…it is finished...”

-- John 19:30 (ESV)

We see an echo of this in Colossians…

“And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by cancelling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.”

-- Colossians 2:13-15 (ESV)

It is finished.

There is no amount outstanding. The record of debt has been cleared from your account. If you repent and call on Jesus’ name, you walk free. And if that were all, it would still be unfathomably good news.

There Is More Good News

But we are not morally neutral before God’s eyes thanks to what Jesus has done for us. He does not merely tolerate us. We have been welcomed into his family. We now call him father. We were once his enemies, no different from the very soldiers who nailed him to the cross. It was our sin, your sin, my sin that put him there. But he now calls us his sons and daughters. Jesus’ blood has brought us peace and we now have access to God. Not the kind of access that a servant or an employee has but rather the access that a child has to a father.

“For our sake he (God) made him (Jesus) to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him (Jesus) we might become the righteousness of God. ”

-- 2 Corinthians 5:21 (ESV)

So Jesus' perfect record is transferred to our account.

“In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”

-- 1 John 4:9-10 (ESV)

You might be sitting there thinking, "I don't see how Jesus could possibly be present in my life. I don't see any evidence of God in my days. But the love of God was made manifest among us that he sent his only Son into the world. He has displayed His love for you on the cross.

There may be things that you have done which you play over in your mind at night, fears that keep you awake and haunt you when you’re alone in your thoughts, regrets that eat you up inside. But you can know complete and total forgiveness in Jesus.

“...as far as the east is from the west,

so far does he remove our transgressions from us.”

-- Psalm 103:12 (ESV)

And as we read earlier, He has disarmed the enemy and put him to open shame. In his resurrection he has declared victory over sin, death and the devil. You can be totally forgiven and you can be totally free.

“According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you...”

-- 1 Peter 1:3-4 (ESV)

Living Hope

That phrase, "a living hope" is something which I've really experienced in the last year.

Just over a year ago my wife and I had a baby boy. Our little boy’s health deteriorated very rapidly during the first few hours after birth, and within 24 hours he was whisked off to the NICU and diagnosed with meningitis and had to be resuscitated. For about 48 hours my wife and I were faced with the very real possibility that our boy might not make it. It was totally agony. A living nightmare. The panic and the terror of what could happen was unbearable.

But I remember, during the months leading up to his birth, I had been reflecting a lot on this passage:

“For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.”

-- Romans 5:6-11 (ESV)

In those 48 hours where we just didn't know if our little boy was going to make it, amidst the panic and the terror, although I couldn't articulate it at the time, I had a calm deep inside because I knew that I did not need God to save my son for Him to prove His goodness to me. I knew that God's love for me, and being convinced of it, was not contingent on whether or not he saved my son. I knew He could save him and I knew He might, but I knew that after feasting on those verses in Romans in the months leading up to my boy's birth, I knew I could look to the cross and be utterly convinced of His love and His goodness regardless of my circumstances. And praise God my son his healthy and is a delight. He pulled through and he is a total joy.

But, Jesus never promised an easy life. In fact he promised that there would be difficulty, there would be trials. But, whatever you are walking through today you can be totally convinced of God's love for you. He has displayed, manifested, demonstrated His love for you on the cross.

How Do We Stop Our Doubts?

There was an old school theologian called Jonathan Edwards who wrote a whole bunch of resolutions for himself. One of them I come back to from time to time:

“Resolved, to examine carefully, and constantly, what that one thing in me is which causes me in the least to doubt the love of God; and to direct all my forces against it.”

-- Jonathan Edwards

The question is, how do we do that? How do we direct all our forces against anything that causes us to doubt God's love. We do that by looking to the cross. There are a thousand ways in which God demonstrates his love toward us every single day. Most of them we are oblivious to don't even notice, but none more so than on the cross. Whether you have been a Christian for 5 minutes or fifty years, there is nothing more important on this day or on any other day than to look at the Cross and empty tomb of Christ. I plead with you today to turn from your sin, look to Jesus and put your trust in Him and in what he has accomplished out of his great love for you.

“But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—”

-- Ephesians 2:4-5 (ESV) ---