Like I explained in my last blog, living life on planet earth is indeed like watching a horror movie, all alone, in the middle of a dark night.
The next day you’ll be tired and still a bit rattled. Depending on how rattled you are, there will likely be a few more sleepless nights for a while.
But the days and weeks will roll by and all that trauma will fade from consciousness … it is soon all forgotten … until …
One lazy weekend afternoon, you’re all alone at home with nothing to do. Maybe the weather is bad, the rest of the family is off doing whatever, and you’re home alone, slouching on the couch with the cat, flipping through channels and apps, and … there it is … THAT movie!
The one that scared the willies out of you and left you sleepless for almost a week! Yeah … THAT movie! Well, what the heck, let’s watch it again and see if it’s still as scary as it was the first time … and, of course, it’s not.
Because you know how it’s all going to turn out. There are no shocking surprises, because you know what’s next. You know which characters will die and who will live. You know who/what the enemy is and how he/she/it is overcome in the end. And the atmosphere in your living room in the middle of the afternoon, watching from the couch with a cat in your lap, is altogether different from a dark bedroom all alone in the middle of a dark night with your imagination on fire.
Because the sun came up, and now you can see clearly what is happening and what and where the scary stuff is, and what you need to do about it.
And I think that is a beautiful picture of Easter …
Our sinful nature condemns us to death, because, as we are, we cannot stand before a holy, sinless God. Christ bore our punishment for us. Like the blood on the doorposts in the exodus story caused the death angel to pass over those homes, His blood cleanses us from our sin so that now we can be in the presence of a holy God.
Physical death is one thing, but spiritual death is forever being separated from God and any good thing. We will all experience physical death, but because He rose, Christ overcame physical death. Because His shed blood cleanses us, we don’t have to experience spiritual death.
Each person has to make their own decision about whether to accept His sacrifice for themselves personally and begin walking with Him. But in and of ourselves, we are incapable of that here in our earthy life. So when we accept His sacrifice and begin following Him, He deposits His Holy Spirit in us to light our path and empower us to live for Him.
Now we have light to see where we’re going and how to live until our earthly life is over and we can be re-joined with our Creator forever.
Reality exists permanently in the spiritual realm.
The physical realm is temporary and simply a manifestation of the spiritual. That means that the properties of physical light mirror spiritual light. So we’re going to talk about the properties of light this month.
We can see now ... because the Son is up!
Happy Easter!