Happy Easter Indeed!

While Christmas is the Christian holiday that gets all the fuss and fanfare, I daresay Easter should get at least, if not more, attention! Christmas did bring Jesus to earth, without which He could not have fulfilled His destiny. However, Easter was His destiny, His reason for coming to earth. Christmas brought us a great leader, a religious example, a truly pure-hearted man. However, had He lived and died like any other man, the fate of mankind would be unchanged. Our sins would destine us to an after-life of the harshest suffering, which we unarguably deserve.

Easter is what changed our lives for the better. Our Lord, our Savior, our Redeemer lived His full 30+ years leading up to this day. Sure, He healed individuals, both physically and spiritually during His time on earth. He walked with mankind and lived out what our lives should look like every day. But without His final unavoidable, un-delayable, un-delegatable act, Christmas would not mean as much.

Even Good Friday is not what changed our lives for the better. This perfect man hung dying on a cross, gasping for breath, then using those breaths to bless those around Him and beg for forgiveness on their behalf. Because He was a man and felt human emotion and pain like each of us does, He knew in the days leading up to His death that the pain would be excruciating, the mockery relentless, the taunts cruel. He begged His Dad to find any other way, but His love for humanity led Him straight into Judas' embrace, into Pilate's courts, and up the hill bearing a cross heavy enough to hold all of mankind's sins. I can only imagine that as the nails dug in and the cross dropped into place, the reality of the pain and suffering set in. Though He knew He would not stay dead, the pain of His impeding suffocation was real and terrible. As the criminal next to Him questioned how He could save anyone if He couldn't save Himself, I am sure His human heart was tempted to do just that. To end His pain and let those who were delighting in His death to suffer their own deaths a thousand times over in hell. But as I've heard a hundred times over the years, those nails were ultimately powerless to hold God to the cross. It was His love alone that kept him bloodied and beaten and dying on that cross. And for that reason, we do celebrate Good Friday.

But had it ended there, had our Savior died on that cross and been buried, our sins would still be undefeated and would still condemn us to a life without Him. Easter Sunday brought with it death defeated, a resurrection of a human life sacrificed for His creations, and freedom from our destiny. We can live a life full of mistakes Jesus could never make: pride, unmercifulness, hatred, impatience, intolerance; and still know that as He hung there dying on a cross, He knew exactly what He was dying for, knew that millions of people would reject His sacrifice as unnecessary or even fiction. But all it takes, all Jesus needs to hear to make His death worthwhile, is that we believe. We believe all the taunts thrown in His face on that day, that He is the King, the Savior, the Son of God, and that He was there to save others. As the criminal on his other side learned, it took just one brief conversation for him to confess he believed everything Jesus said and did was true, and he was forever saved from a permanent death and would bask forever in the same love that led Jesus to the cross that day.  By defeating death, Christ defeated the hold sin has on us.  Though we are cursed to live our human days fighting against our condemned nature, God offered us redemption by sacrificing His own Son in our place and then raising Him from the dead.  That one life, that one death, and that one resurrection forever changed the world, and I pity the ones that do not know or believe that the one true God loves and cares about them personally.

And that, dear readers, is why Easter is indeed happy. May you bask in a love like no other, knowing that your Lord died and rose again to give you life everlasting and all you have to do is believe it.  He could not have made it any harder on Himself or easier on mankind if He had tried.  Hallelujah!