Yes, it's Easter. That time of the year when we celebrate our salvation. If your Jewish, then Passover is important. It is a celebration of Elohim freeing the Israelites from Egypt. It was and is a type of an event to take place some time in the future. For us, it is to celebrate and event that took place 2000 years ago.
For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth on Him will not perish but have everlasting live. Or as my daughter puts it, you will never die. Her statement is only partly true. You will live forever. It's just a matter of where you will spent eternity.
I learnt lots so far this Easter. For one thing, learnt about the earth age according to the Jewish calendar. It's 5679 years old. I might come back to that. It hold another theory I have about another matter.
I learnt about Maundy Thursday. I had never heard of Maundy Thursday until my wife and I joined St Luke's Anglican Church here in down town Frankston. And I might come back to that also.
Maundy Thursday also got me thinking about another matter. A far more, for Christians at least, of something else that occurred at Easter. It happened after the last Supper and prior to Jesus arrest. I always wondered what might have been going through Jesus mind all those years ago.
Ray Stedman wrote a commentary about Hebrews and also about what he believes happened in the Garden of Gethsemane. I like what he wrote and if it is so then it is staggering.
Here is part of what Mr Stedman wrote:
"How can he sympathize, how does he understand our pressures, if he has never sinned? The answer to that leads us into the dark shadows of Gethsemane. There is no other incident in the gospels that fits the description of this passage where, with prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, he cried unto him who was able to save him from death. As the Lord and his disciples left the Upper Room they passed through the dark valley of the Kidron, up unto the side of the Mount of Olives to the olive tree grove where it was his custom to go. Separating three of the more sensitive of the disciples, Peter, James and John, he withdrew with them into the deeper shadows of the garden. There followed a protracted period of excruciating torment of spirit that found expression in loud, involuntary cries, streaming tears, and ending in a terrible bloody sweat."
"To deepen the mystery of this, there is the awful intensity of this struggle. This passage in Hebrews clearly implies that the Lord Jesus is here facing the full misery which sin produces in the heart of the sinner while he is yet alive, what we call "the sense of sin." I think we can even analyze this further. The three-fold period of wrestling in the garden suggests that he was here being exposed to the full intensity of what makes sin in our lives so defeating, so unshakable, that which makes up a sense of sin: shame, guilt, and despair."
That is what Jesus endured for you and me. Did this, could this have happened in the garden? Yes. Did it? Maybe.
Which ever way one looks at it, the fact that this was all heaped on Him who had not ever done one thing wrong in His entire life, is mind blowing in its intensity. This, for me, makes the cross a let down. Because I know shame. I know guilt. I know despair. And I caused all three at one time or another in my life. Just think. Why should another pay for what I did?
Jesus was aligning Himself with me. He was taking me to the cross. He was becoming what I am.
What was the outcome? Jesus would be separated from His completeness for the first time ever. The Godhead would become incomplete.
Lets get back to what made the cross necessary in the first place. Because the cross and all it stands for is just a bloody mess without and understanding of why it was and is necessary.
God requires our obedience. Without it we, the created, are separated from our creator. We have to, justice and the law demand it. Disobedience requires that a penalty be paid. Some one has to die for the penalty to be paid. That person must be sinless. One can pay the penalty for ones own sin, that's eternal separation. There is no way back from that.
Enter Jesus who becomes the substitute. In the OT the lamb was the substitute. But it was only a covering. It didn't remove the guilt, shame and despair of sin. Only a sacrifice provided by God Himself could do that. Enter Jesus. He becomes that sacrifice. But he must have all our sin placed upon himself. And He did. At the cross. Before the cross I believe.
I haven't completed what I wanted to write. Maybe tomorrow.
About Maundy Thursday. Look here. My wife went last night. She is in the choir at St Luke's. For her it was moving. And when one reads up on it one can see why.
And we wont go into the whole 3 days thing just now will we?
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