Sunday 8 April 2012

Counter Intuition……



Aware that on this day especially, the net is awash with excellent articles on Easter Sunday. So I will be brief.

All I can say is I’m glad. I’m glad that Jesus died for all the evil things I have done, and that he cared enough to do it. I'm not talking about overeating or breaking wind in a lift, either. In the clip below Im referring to stuff from 1.28 onwards.... 



And that in doing it, I was given scope to be forgiven and healed and rescued from being me, daily, and eternally.

If Good Friday was not good at the time, but the seeming death of goodness, and Easter Saturday was this bleak non day where people sat staring into space, without hope…..Easter Sunday was the great reversal.

Death couldn’t hold Jesus. And so he came back from the dead. But he didn’t show off and go on to vindicate himself before the whole world, but only to a select few. The first batch were some Jewish women the Gospels can’t even fully agree on naming. The latter were the nearly disbanded disciples.

satan (and the missing capital is intentional; the name is a job title, and it just means “obstructer/ opposer/accuser”) had intended to destroy Jesus and one one hand, he did. Jesus, as known in the first round, was gone. And dispatched terribly, his back whipped to the bone, beaten up, and finally nailed up naked. But satan had been out thought and outloved. The great reversal- what appeared to be the end of everything was just the beginning.

Does this clip help illustrate?



Paul says in Collosions 2 v15 “And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross”

I don’t think anybody playing by the rules of logic can say that Jesus has not made the biggest impact on the world since its creation:

"Here is a man who was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He grew up in another village. He worked in a carpenter shop until He was thirty. Then for three years He was an itinerant preacher…He never owned a home. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never had a family. He never went to college. He never put His foot inside a big city. He never traveled two hundred miles from the place He was born. He never did one of the things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but Himself. . . …While still a young man, the tide of popular opinion turned against Him. His friends ran away. One of them denied Him. He was turned over to His enemies. He went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed upon a cross between two thieves. While He was dying His executioners gambled for the only piece of property He had on earth—His coat. When He was dead, He was laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend……Nineteen long centuries have come and gone, and today He is a centerpiece of the human race and leader of the column of progress…….I am far within the mark when I say that all the armies that ever marched, all the navies that were ever built; all the parliaments that ever sat and all the kings that ever reigned, put together, have not affected the life of man upon this earth as powerfully as has that one solitary life."

And if all that is true, what can it mean?

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to” (C.S. Lewis)

I’m a Christian, and since I took this road I’ve been resuced from myself a million times, I have been loved into an ongoing wholeness, I have been blessed with a wonderful family, and I have been given wisdom. Its all been free, as well.

This bloke sums it up pretty well……


No comments:

Post a Comment