It's before dawn on Sunday as I write this.

The world is quiet. Most of it is asleep; at least, most of it in this time zone.

And on the Sunday of Passover week in Jerusalem, in about the year 31 AD, it was just as quiet.

Saturday, the Sabbath, had been a day of sorrow for the disciples and remaining followers of Jesus of Nazareth, Whom they had believed to be the long-prophesied Christ, the Messiah of the Hebrew people, He would lead them to freedom from (they thought) Rome.

But on Thursday night - Passover itself - He had been betrayed by perhaps the one they thought least likely to betray Him: Judas Iscariot, who shared with the high priests salivating for the chance to arrest Him away from the crowds, had given them exactly that opportunity in the garden of Gethsemane, just outside the walls of the city. His betrayal had been foretold; the price he'd received (thirty pieces of silver) had been foretold; even the use of that money to buy a potter's field had been foretold in Scripture.

That night, the Pharisees had held what is often termed a "kangaroo court", trying to railroad Jesus into a guilty verdict. They took the one they got and went straight to Pontius Pilate, the hand of Roman law in Judea, at dawn on Friday to get him to crucify Jesus and get the troublemaker and insurrectionist out of their way. Pilate, normally a brutal and bloodthirsty man, was overwhelmed by His inner strength, and with the dream of his wife ringing in his ear, pleading for him to have nothing to do with the murder of this godly man, did what he could to obey her wishes.

But Jesus was in control the entire time - the entire week - throughout His entire Ministry.

Despite his reticence, Jesus gave him no defense to base his protection of the Son of Man on: His silence in the face of physical agony amazed Pilate to the point where after seeing His stoicism following His fierce scourging, he said to the crowd, "Behold, a man". Yet Christ gave him no other recourse but to turn Him over to be crucified. By nine in the morning He was on the cross; by three in the afternoon He had given up His Spirit.

Joseph of Arimathea  gave his newly-cut tomb for his (secret) rabbi to be buried in, and was awarded the Body upon request. He, Mary Magdalene and the mother of Jesus (among others) prepared His body for burial, wrapping it in a shroud after anointment and placing it in the tomb.They went to great trouble to do so before sundown on Friday, so as not to defile themselves on the Sabbath, which started at sundown that evening. Meanwhile the high priests had a huge stone rolled into place in front of the tomb entrance and guards posted, knowing better than the disciples Jesus' own prediction of rising from the dead (this version comes from Matthew 20:17-19, but it was recorded eight to ten times in the Gospels).

"Behold, we go up to Jerusalem; and the Son of man shall be betrayed unto the chief priests and unto the scribes, and they shall condemn him to death, And shall deliver him to the Gentiles to mock, and to scourge, and to crucify him: and the third day he shall rise again."

So now we're back to where we started - sunrise on Sunday morning. 

The sun is just beginning to illuminate the world. Mary Magdalene, a follower named Joanna and Mother Mary rise with the sun and make the long trek to the tomb. As they reach it, they are startled to see two supernatural men in white, two angels, whose very appearance frightens the guards into flight. Their arrival was punctuated by an earthquake, and the stone was rolled away from the sepulcher. As the women entered, they saw what should have been expecting: an empty tomb.

The Gospel writers tell of various meetings the Risen Christ had - with Mary Magdalene outside the tomb before she had even had time to digest the event; with two men on the road to Emmaus, twice to Peter and the assembled disciples in Jerusalem (famously excluding doubting Thomas the first time), and so forth. (See Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, John 20-21, Acts 1:1-11 for the details.) 

My favorite hidden detail is the folded linen left behind by Jesus. Until this detail of Jewish life was explained to me, I missed the significance. When the master is dining, the servants await an indication from him that he is done and not going to return to finish his meal. The master signals this without speaking to the servants (which might be beneath him, I guess) by how he leaves his napkin - if he just has it tossed on the seat or table, he's done with the meal and they may clean up. But if he carefully folds the napkin, he intends to return to the meal.  

Jesus folded His linen. He intends to return!

But the important thing for you and I to remember on this Easter morning, the most holy of all moments on the Christian calendar, is not the specific details of His Resurrection but the very TRUTH of His Resurrection. Christ DID come back from the dead, exactly as He said He would. There were witnesses - hundreds of them, over the course of forty days, before His Ascension to Heaven just before the Pentacost.

WHY is that so important? 

⇉ If Christ did not rise from the dead, then we have no assurance that WE will rise when we die. One of the most unbelievable stats I've ever heard is that 30% of "born-again Christians" do NOT believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. As one pastor commented, "Guess what? If you don't believe in that, don't bother calling yourself a Christian!" That resurrection is the fundamental stone upon which our faith rests. And you can hardly call yourself "born-again" if you don't even think HE was born again!
⇉ It proved that Jesus was Who He SAID He was! He was mocked on the cross about how He could save all these others but could not save Himself. Of course, He could have saved Himself. But He has already told us how He would save Himself - and if He hadn't followed through, we would rightfully have doubted His claims to be the Son of God. He would have simply been what the cynics and disbelievers call Him anyway: "a good teacher" - "another prophet of God" - "a man with delusions of grandeur" - or as the Pharisees believed, "a blasphemer".
⇉ Most importantly, it showed that God keeps His promises! By fulfilling THIS promise - and we're not just talking about His own predictions like Matthew 20:17-19 above, but all 300+ of the OT prophesies of the Coming of the Messiah...well, specifically, we're speaking of those particular predictions of being raised up and sitting at the right Hand of God - By fulfilling this promise, the Trinity verifies ALL of Scripture's promises made in His Name. And there are some amazing promises: Romans 8:28 comes to mind, as does Romans 8:38-39, Romans 10:9, and most importantly the one Pastor Greg Laurie elucidated on Good Friday's sermon...

"God told us His Son would come to earth. That happened.
"God told us His Son would be crucified. That happened.
"God told us His Son would be raised again from the dead. THAT has happened.
"God told us His Son would come back again to the earth. That will happen."

There has never been a promise in Scripture that has not been fulfilled except for those which have YET to be fulfilled.

And THIS promise - the promise that Jesus will return in power to take control of earth, rescue the true believers, run the rest of the population through the Great Tribulation to determine who else can be saved (if any), and then seven years later, come back to put Satan and his fellow "bad hombres" in Hell and separate the remaining recently saved believers from those who choose not to accept God or Christ.

Those who make the choice not to accept God or Christ will be granted their wish not to be with Them. And woe be unto them. If that's currently you as well, I beg of you - it's not too late to change your mind. 

If you've been putting it off... don't put it off any longer. As I've written often recently, He is almost certainly returning within the next two years. It could literally be any day, although my best wild guess is still next year, not this. But I don't know, and neither do you. You cannot afford the risk any longer.

If you've questioned the validity of Christ's resurrection...there's a very good reason why you shouldn't. Above, I mentioned that hundreds of witnesses SAW Him, but what if you don't believe the Bible? Then take this for what it's worth - and this is verified independently by historians of the era who are NOT Christians:
    Would you let yourself be killed in the horrific ways that the apostles (and many others) were killed when all you had to say was that Jesus did NOT come back from the dead, if it were a lie?
    Think about that for a second: Some were crucified as Jesus was. Some were crucified upside-down (I've never decided if that's better or worse). Some were boiled in oil. Some were beheaded, some speared through, and the Lord only knows how else they were killed. And they were ALL killed for their belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ, the resurrection being the proof of that. All any of those men had to do was say "Just kidding! Don't kill me!" If you thought it was anything less than absolutely true, you'd say it, wouldn't you? You can make the (unsupportable) argument that it was some kind of mass hallucination or mental illness, but you cannot deny that those dozens of men and women believed that Jesus was crucified on Good Friday and was raised from the dead on Easter Sunday.

If you believe in a different religion than Biblical Christianity (and I include Latter Day-Saints and any other "Christian" faiths which use extra texts written after the first century AD)...I beg of you: now is the time to take a good hard look at your own beliefs, before it's too late. There is more historical support for the Bible's description of the events surrounding "its deity" than there is for ANY other "god", any other "deity", in any other religion. There isn't room here to flush that out - that's a multi-book topic - but I urge you to look inside your own soul, and listen for the Holy Spirit in your life.




Since I started typing this, the sun has poked over the horizon. Sunrise has happened. My twin daughters, eleven years of age, have gotten up and are playing a game on my smartphone. And as I often am, I am overwhelmed by my duty to them and to their brothers: to raise them correctly, to protect them, to support them, to teach them right from wrong in God's heart, and to make sure that when the Lord returns, they go with me to Heaven.

And I pray that you go with us as well. Happy Easter, everybody.