I know we’re still a few days away from Easter and we have to get through the darkness of Friday before we see the light of Sunday, but I want to look at the grave display in full 8K OLED.
Jesus does something never before done in dramatic effect. Not too much earlier, he raised three different people from the dead (a young boy [Luke 7], a little girl [Luke 8], and a friend – Lazarus [John 11]), but now he raised himself from the grave. This is astonishing!! And would have been unbelievable for every single person – from the harshest critic to the most faithful follower.
Think about how just a few days earlier He was paraded and celebrated coming in town like a celebrity and now was being arrested, tried, beaten, hung on a cross till death, and buried like a criminal. Quite the turn of events. How quickly fans can turn into foes.
The crowd shows us a mirror of ourselves, however. We can be just as fickle to change with the flow, to be socially persuaded in the right context. Think of public outbreaks, riots, and uprisings, or just our outspoken opinions of things we know in part.
People lambast someone or target a specific group and hate spews toward individuals in generalities. It’s easy to jump on a crucifixion bandwagon when we don’t know someone personally. It’s even harder to stand up against a mob that is strong and loud enough to impose their will. We can check our own judgment meter and even tune in to our executional tendencies.
We see this in sports ALL the time. One person messes up, a team loses, a bad call is made, or a questionable stance is taken and the world erupts. Social media goes viral like a starving school of frenzied piranhas on a bucket of fish scraps. We can praise someone in one breath and hang them the next.
This happens in politics and all throughout the famous landscape and it is what happened with Jesus.
The cool thing is that God used this to bring about the redemption of man. He brought others back to life to show individual concern for humanity. He did 3 resurrections and 3 is a symbolic number of completion in wholeness. In its perfection of a digit, the number 3 holds significant value that goes beyond the surface. So, in 3 resurrections, Jesus creates a connotation that He is the ultimate healer and capable of restoring wholeness of life to the fullest extent!
Then he adds on to this by jumping in the pool of death and coming back to life. This is almost an exclamation of new life. In him we see the full redemption of all that is broken both in the individual (for ourselves) and for the rest of the world (everyone).
As he makes his way from the parade to the grave, he shows us the grace it takes to live life to the full and the way to embrace the call of the Father. Jesus doesn’t want to go through with being killed. It would have been WAY easier to stay on the top of Jerusalem’s most popular, but he knew the most wanted list would give life. The cross was the only way to make access to the tree of life (Gen 3:22-24, Rev 2:7) available to you and me.
So, come, eat the fruit of eternal life. Believe in the name of Jesus. Receive the gift of grace and embrace the cause of the cross and the power of the resurrection! Ask God to show you the meaning of the grave for you, today!
#paradetograve
#ResurrectionTransformation
#TreeOfLife
#RestoringWholenessOfLife
Brett
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