Tag: Resurrection

The New Age Has Come

Does it involve Eastern thinking? Kind of. Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

We’re talking about the difference the resurrection makes and one aspect we’re looking at today is that the new age has come. Now when we hear about the new age, we often think of those in the east. In a sense, we are correct. However, to talk about the true new age movement, we need to stop long before we get to areas like India. We need to stop at the Middle East. The modern new age movement has us going back to the old lie of “You shall be as gods.” The real new age movement began in the area of Jerusalem. Our modern movement is simply behind on the times and living with an old view that has been replaced.

Many Jews believed in a coming age of the Messiah that would have the reign of the Messiah. There are many references in the Bible that some think refer to the end of the world but in reality, they refer to the end of the age. For instance, in the Olivet Discourse, Jesus is not giving signs of the end of the world. Instead, he is giving signs that the age is coming to an end. What would be the next age? It would be the age that has the ruling of the Messiah. The Jews had something else wrong. Jesus would not be ruling in Jerusalem creating just another earthly monarchy. Instead, he would be ruling from Heaven by the side of the Father over all the Earth and His kingdom would be spreading. (This is something we will be touching on later on.)

This means that everything has changed. When Paul converts on the road to Damascus, he does not just have a worldview where the idea of “Jesus is not the Messiah” has changed to “Jesus is the Messiah.” He has to change his view on creation, Israel, the Law, righteousness, justification, forgiveness, the Messiah, suffering, etc. The reason for this is that the action of God in history was central to Jewish thought and they based their identities on it. They spoke of God who brought them out of Egypt. They spoke of God who rescued them from exile. The next new movement then would be to speak of God who acted in Christ.

Picture it as if you had a set of beliefs that could be seen as a spider web. Suppose one of your beliefs is “The grocery store is 20 miles from my house.” Then, you do some measurements in your car with your odometer and realize that the store is actually 18 miles away. Okay. That’s a small belief that you can change and it doesn’t affect you too much. You realize your math was off and that’s that. Now suppose instead that you come to the conclusion “The grocery store never even existed.” This is a belief that would more likely have you check into the mental hospital wondering what was wrong with you.

It’s the same today with people who often apostasize from Christianity and don’t change their worldview much. If you leave the faith, the degree to which your worldview changes is the degree to which Christianity affected your worldview prior. If it played a small part, it will not change your worldview as much. If it played a major part, you will have to totally change everything that you see in your worldview. This is something that explains how serious the situation was for Paul. Everything changed.

If the resurrection of Jesus does not change everything, then something is wrong.

Now to be fair, this could be more difficult for us in America since we have grown up in a society where Christian theism has always been in the background at least and we live in an age where the resurrection has normally been seen as the reality. We can find it hard to appreciate how different the world was before Christianity came along. This is why we need to often drop our modern Americentric understanding of the world and try to see how it was before Christ came. It’s also why we should be doing reading in other areas relevant to biblical studies.

For now, let us rejoice. The new age has come, the age of Christ. Hopefully the modern new age movement will learn to keep up with the times.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

The Resurrection and Joy

Do we have reason to rejoice? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

We’ve been looking at the resurrection lately and what a difference it makes for the Christian. For tonight, I think of what N.T. Wright has said about comparing Judaism of the day before Christ to the time of Christianity. The Jews lived in a time of hope. It was the question of if God was going to come and bring about the promises that He said He would do. Would God conquer their enemies? Would God rescue His people? When would God fulfill His end of the covenant?

Nothing wrong with that of course. In the time before Christianity, one could have joy of being a member of the community of God, but it still was looking forward to something important. One was still in bondage. As we know from John 8, Christ did come to set us free and that was what we had really been waiting for. Christ did not come for a patch of land. He did not come for one group of people. He came first of all for God. He came to do the will of the Father. He came second for the world. He was not interested in a land but the planet. He was not interested in a group of people but every tribe and nation.

That hasn’t changed.

Now the Jews and their land was the means to that. For the Jews, everything revolved around the Temple. Consider it if you will a gateway between Heaven and Earth. This is the best analogy I can think of, but some of us who grew up in the gaming sphere know about a scene where someone enters a place like a temple and ends up finding a gateway that leads to the place where the really good being or the really evil being lives. It is the idea that there are two worlds and this one place is the connection point between both worlds.

I want to be sure that you know I am not saying God lives in another dimension as it were and that that place is physical. I do not think that as God is not physical. I am saying that there was a place that He did make His presence known especially for the Jews and that was in the temple. As long as the temple was there, YHWH was there. God did not reveal Himself to everyone but made a plan to reveal Himself to everyone starting with a particular people in a particlar place.

For we Christians, this hope has been fulfilled and it was fulfilled in Christ. Now our lives are to be dominated by joy. I plan to get into this more in future blogs but let’s consider some points. First off, we have the ultimate reversal. When Christ resurrects, what happens is that death itself starts to work backwards. Christ is the first one to experience this but we are told that not only we, but all of creation will experience that resurrection. (There is nothing conclusive about animals in the new world, but the thought of something like this would be one of my main inclinations to think that God will redeem the animal life of His creation as well.)

Second, we have been set free. The Jews wondered when they would be set free from Rome, but their goals were too small. God was not coming to set them free from Rome but to set them free from sin. The problem is we Christians often make the same mistake. It is not that our wishes for our lives are too great for God to fulfill. They are often way too small. In Luke 12:32, we are told that God has given us the Kingdom for instance. It is quite amazing how much we ask for forgetting we have the Kingdom. We think that God does not give us anything when in reality, He has given us everything, namely Himself. What more can He give?

Finally, this means that we are forgiven. This is something else I will expound on later and I thank a good Christian friend for pointing this out to me in a similar sermon he did on the resurrection. It had the interesting thought experiment in it of imagining what it would be like to live in a world without forgiveness. None of us would want to live in that world, but to an extent, we all act like we do, though we don’t do so as seriously. We think of some sin that is so heinous to us that we cannot imagine that God would ever forgive it, all the while going through our lives committing X number of sins regularly that are smaller sins but still thinking “It’s no big deal.” If there is no forgiveness, there is no sin that is “No big deal.” If there is forgiveness, every sin is also in its own way a big deal when you consider the price that it took to grant that forgiveness. In the first world, we say mercy is not great enough. In the second, we try to say our sin is not great enough.

Consider this then as an entryway into a subset on the resurrection at this point and how the resurrection leads to Christian joy. I hope you’ll continue coming along. Also, for those interested, I am looking into upgrading the blog site talking to some people who know a lot more about this than I. I already know about the issue with the date of the blog entries. Feel free to let me know about anything else you’d like addressed.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

The Resurrection And Sex

Can there be any connection between these two? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

Generally today, if you talk about religion, you won’t get people’s attention too much. However, once sex enters the picture, people are suddenly interested. At a job I once worked at, I came into the break room one day reading the book “Smart Sex: Lifelong Love In A Hook-Up World” by Jennifer Roback Morse. The books I’d read hadn’t got too much attention but suddenly that day the talk in there was “Nick’s reading a book about sex!”

So what does the resurrection then have to do with the national obsession?

The first place is that as we learned recently, our bodies matter. That means that what you do with the body matters. Paul tells us about this in 1 Cor. 6. Some people were of the mindset that the body will pass away so it does not matter. What you do sexually is not much different from what you eat. Paul is aghast at the very notion! He tells the Corinthians that their bodies are part of the body of Christ. How can one join Christ with a prostitute?

In other words, in the resurrection, one’s whole being is to be caught up in the identity of Christ. It is not just that you give Christ your soul, spirit, what have you, and then your body doesn’t really matter. Your body matters because Christ rose in His body and your body is to rise one day and to be transformed to be fully like His body. Your body should be being prepared for that day just as your soul, spirit, etc. are being prepared. (I use different terminology since I’m sure people have different beliefs on the nature of man in that area. I do not wish to argue for any one at this point)

If your body is to be the body of Christ, you are not to join them with a prostitute. It is important to notice that right after this, Paul does go on to address questions on marriage and despite what some people say, he is not a prude. He does not condemn the coming together of the man and woman. In fact, he says that the husband and wife should only withhold themselves from one another by mutual consent and then to devote themselves to prayer and come back quickly lest they be led astray. In other words, Paul knows how strong the desire is between husband and wife and he does not condemn that desire.

Even more radically, he says that a man’s body belongs to his wife. Of course, that goes the other way as well, but such a thought would have been unheard of in Paul’s time. It was the man alone who were in charge. Now I do hold to the position that a man does lead his household, but the man does not live for himself alone. The man is to live for his wife and that includes living bodily. His sexual energies are to be spent on her.

Just shortly before writing this, I was even debating this with someone who was telling me I should not worry about fantasizing and looking elsewhere. Faithfulness should be a choice and not an obligation. If you are married, faithfulness is an obligation you have chosen. It is not an added bonus. It is essential to your marriage. What good is it for you to say “I have remained sexually faithful to my spouse” in your body, but have not done so in your mind and fantasy life?

Does this take hard work? Absolutely, especially for us men who tend to look for many partners by nature. When we are out together, the Mrs. knows that I will regularly look away at times just so I can make sure that my mind stays pure. I have to be very careful with what I watch on TV and if a program is getting to be too showy at one scene, I can look away or else just cover my eyes at that point. Faithfulness is a choice, it is an obligation, it is a battle, and it is totally worth it.

The resurrection also shows us that sex is not to be avoided as a punishment like the Gnostics would have thought. There is no harm in bringing new life into the world. This does not mean that every married couple will do so or even want to do so, but it certainly means that the Gnostics were wrong in their position. Even those Christian couples who choose to not have children would not say that other couples are ipso facto wrong for wanting to do so.

It also means that since this is part of the creation, and since God is in the business of re-creating through the resurrection, a point we will get to lately, we should celebrate the good gift that He has given. Christians are not to be prudes about sex. There is a time and place to talk about it of course, but we Christians have often acted like we cannot say anything about it. The reality is the non-Christian world has a message about sex just as much as we do and if we do not share our message, then a questioning world will only get one message and it is a message they will be quite eager to hear and obey.

If anything, we should be leading the world in this just as we should in environmentalism. I am not saying we go to results alone, but if the message is true from Christ, the results should be good. If we are the ones that uphold sex as the good gift of the creator, then we should be the ones who treasure and value it the most and treat it as the sacred activity that it really is. We often can watch TV and movies thinking the world is really getting in some exciting sex. Would that they heard about what goes on in our marriages and thought “Dang. The Christians really know how to get the most out of sex.”

If the body is good, then what is done with the body in marriage is also good when done rightly. (No. I am not talking about technique here, although I am not objecting to that) Keep in mind however that this requires more than just the physical aspect of sex. It has been said that sex begins in the kitchen. What this means is that a marriage that enjoys God’s gift of sex should be shown in all aspects of that marriage. It should be the case that the husband is seeking to love and honor the wife in all ways and the wife is seeking to honor and respect the husband in all ways. (Men appreciate more the language of respect than love. Vice-versa for women)

We dare not have the idea that we are just to have sex and not worry about everything else. Being a faithful spouse as has been said is more than just something that happens in one room of the house. It’s more than just something that happens in the house. Being a good spouse is something that takes place wherever one is and no matter how far away the other person might be at the time. If I, for instance, am one day speaking at a conference while my wife is home for some reason, and though I cannot call her or receive a call from her at the time, I am still to be a good spouse just as she is to be to me.

For those of us today who are concerned about defending true marriage and seeing what the world has done to it, let me say as I’ve said several times before, that if we complain about the way the world is treating marriage, I firmly believe it is because the church led the way. We dropped our guard and made our own justifications and what a shock that the world around us followed suit. (For those who wonder about how the new atheists abandoned rationality as another example, it is also because the church abandoned its intellectual grounds first)

Perhaps the world will treat marriage more seriously when the church does the same thing?

For now, celebrate sex as if the body matters, because it does, and your body and the body of your spouse are good things. Both of you will enjoy resurrected life together some day. You might as well enjoy your life together right now!

In Christ,
Nick Peters

What’s A Body To Do?

If matter matters, what about my body? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

Last time, we talked about the existence of matter itself and how the resurrection makes a difference. Recently, I had Jehovah’s Witnesses at my door as you can read about in a recent post. One statement that they made was that Jesus laid down his body. Why would he pick it up again?

Well why wouldn’t he?

What we are told is that our resurrection will be like that of Jesus’s and if we will rise again bodily, then that means that Jesus rose again bodily. Now I was told “Why couldn’t it not be instead like that of Lazarus?” Why? Because the Scriptures do not say we rise like Lazarus, but that we rise like Jesus. We rise in a body that is immortal and will not die again. Lazarus rose only to die again.

Now some of us might think that 1 Cor. 15 rules against that since it contrasts between the physical body and the spiritual body. It really doesn’t. Even a skeptical NT scholar like Dale Martin says that to think of the translation as physical is really a bad one. The better idea is to think of the force that dominates. Is it going to be the desires of the flesh that dominates or is it going to be the power of the Spirit that dominates?

What about flesh and blood? Quite likely, this is an idiom that refers to perishable sinful nature. This means our bodies as we have them now are unfit for Heaven, but it does not follow from that that all bodies are unfit for Heaven.

So what does this mean for us overall? Let’s suppose that we go on from here and assume that this is a physical body that is rising up. What does this say about our bodies right now?

When Jesus rose again, the idea was that the body was something that you would want to escape. It was a prison. Hence, some Gnostic cults were against sexual activity. After all, why imprison another soul in a body? In a culture that was like this, the resurrection would have been seen as nonsensical. Why on Earth would someone want to live again in their body? The body was meant to be temporal. To be set free from the body was the ultimate healing. At the end of Plato’s “Phaedo”, Socrates orders an offering to be given to Asclepius. Why? Asclepius was a Greek god of healing and Socrates was experiencing death, release from the body, the ultimate healing.

The Christians did not see it that way because Jesus rose in the body. That meant ipso facto that the body was a good thing. God was not going to allow death to have a victory over the human body and He had set about a way to make sure that death would not spell the end. Indeed, someone who is without a body is compared in Scripture to someone who is naked. (2 Cor. 5) We are not angels. We are meant to be bodied. (Yes. When you have a Christian loved one die, God does not get another angel. You will never be an angel, and that is just fine.)

This then means that like the environment, what you do with your body matters. For instance, before my marriage, as an Aspie, I had a very limited diet. Now in a sense, it still is of course, but it has expanded as I’m wanting to be one who leads my family for a long time. In the past before the marriage, it was pizza every night. Some of you might wonder about my being overweight with that. The reality is I eat less overall and tend to be active. I weigh about 120.

We do not treat our body lightly for the same reason we do not neglect the environment. I do realize I still have a way to go, but we are all on the path of sanctification. Not all of us are health guru types. Our body is not just excess baggage for us. It is an important aspect of who we are. It is not an accident that we live in a body. We are meant to experience the world as bodied creatures.

Christians are unique in that we are believers of resurrection to a bodied life. We believe that this body is good and that God will raise it up again, which is one reason we bury our dead. Of course, God is capable of re-creating bodies, so that someone who dies in an animal attack and gets their body ground up, or in an explosion or something of that sort, can be resurrected. That is no problem. It does not mean the matter will have to be identical either. Not all our questions are answered explicitly in Scripture, but we know that it is not beyond the power of God.

Since our bodies matter, does that have any impact on ethics? There are such in the Pauline epistles, but we will discuss that next time.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Matter Matters

So does it matter what we think about matter? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

We’ve been doing a study on the difference that the resurrection of Christ makes. Note that in this study I am assuming that the resurrection is true. There are other times that I have answered the question of the resurrection, but for now, rather than give an apologetic, it is simply to point out that there is much more that the resurrection means for us than what we take from it. It certainly means we are forgiven and have eternal life, but we are missing far more than we realize with our approach to the resurrection.

In the Greek world, there was already growing a movement against matter that later comes out more in the Gnostic heresy. From a Platonic perspective, this world was the world of change and the good and perfect world was the unchanging world of the forms. For the Gnostics, matter was a creation of an evil god and it was the role of Jesus to free us from the material world and take us to our real dwellings.

Thankfully, we are past this in the church today. We never have any ideas in the church that the world is going to go away and that we’ll all live forever in an immaterial Heaven. Oh? You mean we still have that kind of belief. Of course, most Christians would realize that we are in Heaven bodily after the resurrection, but many times that line is blurred. I think of the time I heard a pastor speaking at a sermon about a friend who had died and how the next day, he knew his friend was walking on those streets of gold.

Now we can quibble about how we will interpret the description in Heaven in Revelation and if it’s literal or not. (I say not) However, the point to make is that his friend was not walking on those streets of gold if they were real. Why? It is because the body of his friend was still in the ground and until the resurrection took place, his body would remain in the ground. I advise pastors doing a funeral to simply say that the Christian who has died is in the presence of Jesus. Don’t talk about the body being up there. It is not and will not be until the final resurrection.

What we need to realize is that in the resurrection, we get the realization coming in that the creation of the world was not an accident. It was not a plan B. It was not that God’s angelic world didn’t hold up since the devil rebelled so he figured he’d just try with another world altogether. No. This world was part of the plan all along. In fact, it would seem odd for God to create a world of even less perfect creatures than the angels and say “Maybe they’ll do better.”

My wife happens to be a great lover of nature and she is right when she tells me that it is a shame that the New Age movement outdoes us it seems in environmentalism. Christians can too often write off proper care for the environment. Now I am not in any way saying to go out and be a tree hugger or join PETA or something of that sort. I happen to think man is to be in charge of the environment and master and use it, but he is also to have a respect for it as the creation of God.

When we do our environmental duty, perhaps we could go out singing the hymn of “This Is My Father’s World.” It is created for us to use, but not to abuse. We are the caretakers of the creation acting on the behalf of God. It is certainly the case that while we do not worship the creation, we should be the ones doing such a job taking care of it that we put the New Age movement to shame. It is not a sin for the Christian to love the world God created. In fact, I would say it is a sin for him to not do so.

When God resurrects Jesus from the dead, we find that He is really saying that the other side is wrong. This is a good world. It is a good world because Christ rose in a material body. Does the fact that He rose in a body say anything about our bodies? We’ll save that for next time.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Jesus Was Right

Jesus made some strange claims. What to make of them? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

We’re looking at the topic of the resurrection now and what difference it makes. We’ve made the point in our introduction that there is something different about the resurrection of Jesus. If all we had was the resurrection of Lazarus, well that would be nice, but we would not have a new religion. We have one because Jesus rose again. For many Christians, the resurrection is a demonstration of the deity of Christ, but is that all? Even if it is, how does that work?

Throughout the gospels, one finds Jesus making great claims about Himself. There will not be an exhaustive list here, but He claims to have the power to forgive sin, He claims to be Lord of the Sabbath, He claims that your response to Him will be what determines your final destiny, He interprets the Law of Moses by His own authority, and claims to have a unique relationship to YHWH unlike anyone else. Jesus was not explicit with His claims in a modern sense, but His claims were easily understood by His audience.

It was these claims along with actions like the cleansing of the temple that led to the crucifixion of Jesus. Let’s pause to see what the crucifixion in itself would say about Jesus. To the Roman world, it would say that Jesus was someone who was opposed to Caesar and died for it. For the Jewish world, it would mean that Jesus was one who was opposed to YHWH and died as a blasphemer to Him. Thus, Jesus was wrong whichever way He turned. He could not please the Romans and He could not please the Jews.

Did God agree with that decision?

The resurrection is God’s way of saying “No!” It is giving the stamp of approval to the life of Jesus. In resurrecting His Son from the dead, God showed that Jesus was truly who He claimed to be and He has the authority to make those kinds of judgments. Now we will get later on in another post as to the kind of body Jesus rose in and what a difference that makes, but for now, let it just be stressed that the act of resurrecting Jesus was a reversal of the claims of His opponents. In biblical language, God vindicated Jesus.

What this means for us today is that the claims of Jesus are to be taken with an emphatic seriousness. In no other person has God spoken in such a way and to such great claims. He was not, to use the trilemma, someone who was insane or someone who was the devil out of Hell. He really was and is the rightful king of this world.

What has this to do with deity? It means that Jesus’s claim to have that authority in Himself is backed. Now I do believe it is a mistake to go to the gospels thinking that these were only written to show that God walked among us. They do show that, but they also show more than that and we dare not miss out on the whole because we are fixated with a part. We know that God has acted in Jesus by the resurrection as in resurrecting Jesus, God also upholds His own honor. God sees someone speaking with this kind of authority and says “Yes. That one is right. He speaks for me.” This is not something adoptionist by the way for those who are concerned. This is just recognition. Jesus speaks for God perfectly because He only perfectly embodies the nature of God.

We can often spend so much time looking at the deity of Jesus that we can miss the message of Jesus and realize that that message is right. The first lesson we need to learn then is that Jesus was, nay, IS right.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Why The Resurrection Matters

Jesus rose from the dead. So what? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

We Christians do know, supposedly, that the resurrection is the most awesome event ever. It is the event that changed the world. If I ever say Jesus’s resurrection turned the world upside-down, my Mrs. is always quick to remind me of what I really mean to say as I’ve told her before. It did not turn it upside-down. It turned it right-side up. Christians will happily go to church on Easter and you will hear “He is risen! He is risen indeed!”

But then comes the time when you ask why it matters so much. So Jesus came and died and rose again. What does that have to do with anything? We believe that Lazarus was resurrected as well, but yet you do not hear anything about celebrating Lazarus day in the church. We frankly don’t know what day it took place on. Throughout the Bible we can find occasional resurrections taking place, but only Christ’s is celebrated. Why? Is it just because we like Him more?

The most common answer we can get is that because Jesus rose from the dead, we can be forgiven of our sins. Yes. This is true, but again, is that it? Now don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that that is a small part of the matter. Forgiveness of sins is a huge deal and it is something we should all be thankful for and frankly, if that was all that it established, then that would be reason enough to celebrate.

Yet what if we’re throwing a party for the good news when we do not have all of the good news? What if there is even more that we can tell people in our evangelism? What if in fact we can find that the resurrection makes a difference in how we approach our lives entirely? What if it means something not just for us as individual Christians but rather means something on a grander and universal scale?

Keep in mind in all of this writing that I plan to do on the resurrection, I am not going to be giving a defense of the resurrection. That is important to do. I have done it before as well. There are numerous books out there that you can get to get a defense of the resurrection. The problem is most of us get to the point of establishing the resurrection if we are apologists and then it’s “Christianity is true,” and we move on from there. Yes. Christianity is true then, but then what is it that Christianity is saying that is true?

So in all of this, I am going to be for the sake of argument assuming the resurrection to be true. I want to write to the Christian in the pew who believes the resurrection and then say “Now here is what this means to you.” It is my sincere hope that as we look at various topics, we will transcend what we have earlier said about Christianity. We are not going to forsake that, but we are going to past it. The resurrection of Jesus means Christianity is true and that we are forgiven, but it also means more than that, and if we can grasp this, and this includes myself, how much better could our lives be?

Barring nothing else coming up, I hope that the next blog post will really start to dig into some of the ways the resurrection changes reality. I hope you’ll come along for the journey.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Creation and Easter Saturday

What is it like in the in-between time? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

If there’s something that can often frighten us, it’s the future. In fact, everything we fear is in some way future-based. We fear what will happen if X is true. If we have a disease, we fear for our future. If we are going to a job interview, we fear whether we will get the job or not. The future is the big unknown.

The in-between time between what we have anxiety about and where we are can be a difficult time. I, like many young men, was quite nervous the day before my wedding and I am sure I only got one hour of sleep that night. There’s also a picture of my bride before the wedding downing a 5-hour energy drink. I believe she had a similar problem. It was a really big step and we were both nervous. The unknown was looming ahead.

Before we moved to Knoxville, I was quite nervous. I didn’t know what was going to happen and in my mind, I was undergoing all the disaster scenarios. As we’ve got here, I’ve found out that most of those have not happened. Of course, I still have some anxiety, mainly over how are we going to pay all those bills that keep coming in?

We can often think of the unknown from the perspective of the apostles. There their leader had been crucified and who was going to be next in line? They would. They were hiding out away from the danger. There was no desire any more to be identified with Jesus.

That’s a fascinating topic and something to look on and indeed, I have looked on it before. However, let us suppose that we were to personify the creation and look at it the way it is presented in Romans 8:18-27. What would it mean to the creation when it looks at the death of Jesus supposing that somehow it could know what was coming?

Romans 8 tells us that creation does look forward to being set free from bondage. Israel already knew they were in bondage. They had been in slavery in Egypt and here after their captivity, they were still in bondage in that the rule had not been restored to Israel and the pagans were the ones in charge.

Israel’s problem was that for a number of them, they were looking at only themselves. Did God plan to set free Israel? Of course. He was not thinking of doing it however in conquering Rome. There was a greater power that held Israel bondage and that was the power of sin.

This power held the world in bondage. Indeed, it held creation in bondage. The accuser had done his work and Jesus throughout His ministry showed that He was going on a battle against the devil and was going to defeat Him and bring about the Kingdom of God.

Creation watches on Easter Saturday then and sees the Son of God in the tomb but realizes that surely the journey is not coming to an end. Surely at this point in the story there will not be a let-down. The very Son of God has come down. Is that the way it’s going to end?

We today are in a similar position, though afterwards. We have seen the resurrection and as we live, the story is going on, but there is a part of us that says “This story is reaching its conclusion isn’t it?” We do await the return of our Lord and the resurrection when evil will be totally removed from the world. Creation itself waits and while there is rejoicing that Christ rose, we rejoice not just because of what happened in the past, but because of what we know is to come in the future.

When we celebrate Easter tomorrow, let us remember that we are not just celebrating that Christ rose and we shall be with Him. We are celebrating that the Kingdom has come and that Christ is Lord and He has demonstrated that by rising from the dead. We are looking forward to the final fruition of the Kingdom on Earth and living our lives aware that the King is going to return someday. We are seeking to be found to be good servants for when He returns.

Easter is a time to celebrate indeed, but let us not forget we celebrate not just for a past reason, but a future one too.

In Christ,
Nick Peters