Every Easter Sunday, we find people sitting in churches that have no real understanding of just what went on at Easter, or why it happened. They come to church because they have a yearning to hear the story of Christ, but they leave with just as many questions as they had before they came in.
It is with this in mind that I chose to give an overview of the Easter scenario so we could all have a basic understanding of what happened; when it happened; and why it happened. I hope I am able to answer some of the questions you might have.
The Jewish leaders hated Jesus because He preached something they did not understand, and they were too comfortable with where they were to try and find out what it all meant. They hated Him, and they conspired to have Him killed. If they were able to get Jesus out of the way permanently, everything would go back to the way it was before and all would be fine.
We sure do like our comfort zones. Those religious leaders liked the esteem they got from those around them. They liked being the ones who told people how to worship. They were much like the Hollywood crowd today; they were all wrapped up in self-righteous adulation. They were so stuck on themselves they could not understand that their way might not be the best way. And so their wish came true – Jesus was arrested on false charges and sentenced to death. But three days after He was put into the tomb, their worse nightmare came true.
And it caught Jesus’ disciples by complete surprise. We are talking about the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. None of the disciples sat around waiting happily for Him to come out of the tomb. No, they hid from the general population because they feared they would be crucified, too. They sat in stunned silence, hearts wrenching because the One whom they loved and believed in was put to death on the cross, like a common criminal.
Was this the end? I am sure that one part of them thought it might be; yet another part kept waiting to see what was going to happen next. I believe they were stunned beyond feeling at this point.
After the Last Supper, they sang psalms and then went to the Mount of Olives. This is where Jesus told them that they would run away from Him that same night. Then Jesus asked the disciples to sit and wait for Him while He went and prayed. The Scripture tells us that Jesus was deeply sorrowed and stressed at this time.
We cannot even imagine what Jesus was going through. On one hand, He knew He was the living Christ, part of the Heavenly Godhead. On the other hand, He knew His capabilities as a mortal. And as He looked at the next morning, His body began to shudder at the thought of hanging on that cross. While this was going on, Judas was over at the chief priest’s home, getting paid to turn Jesus over to them. He then led a contingent of guards to the Garden so they could arrest Jesus.
I have always thought it funny how it took a whole contingent of armed soldiers to go get Jesus. That shows me two things. First, it shows me that the priests and leaders were afraid of Jesus, and it also shows me that they were determined to get Him without any slip-ups this time. Then Judas went to Jesus like a long trusted friend and kissed Him on the cheek. This was the sign that showed the captures which one to arrest.
They took Jesus to the high priest and the Sanhedrin. They looked for testimony that would convict Jesus so they could hurry and kill Him. Finding none, two men who were paid came forward and told lies. These lies are what convicted our Savior. If anyone has ever told lies about you, trying to get others to turn against you, you know how betrayed you felt. Now we start having a glimpse of how Jesus must have felt that night.
Now there was a crowd outside in the courtyard and Peter was in that crowd. Hate must have been so thick you could cut it that night. This is where Peter was asked if he knew Jesus, and three times he denied Jesus.
Early that morning, they tied Jesus up and handed Him over to Pilate, the governor. Now it was about this time that Judas became remorseful at the terrible thing he had done and went to return the money he was paid to betray Jesus. But the priests said it was blood money and could not be accepted into the temple. Judas didn’t want the money so he threw it at them. After he did this, he went out and killed himself because of what he had done. So the priests took the money and bought Potter’s Field as a place to bury foreigners. Those who have been to that area tell me that to this day, that field is barren and empty.
Upon questioning Jesus, Pilate could find no reason to kill Jesus. And being the true politician that he was, he didn’t want to assume any responsibility that might later damage his career, so he left it up to others to make his decision. He gave the crowd a choice of having Jesus released or another prisoner, Barabbas. And once again, in political fashion, he asked the crowd what he should do with Jesus, and they shouted to crucify Him.
They handed Jesus over to the military, who mocked and beat Him severely. Then he was taken to Golgotha, Skull Hill, where He would be put on a cross, naked and bleeding, broken and dying, to hang between two criminals. In mockery, they put a sign on the cross above Jesus’ head that read: “THIS IS JESUS – KING OF THE JEWS.” Little did they realize that He really was!
The Creator was being punished for the sins of His creation. From noon until three in the afternoon, darkness came over the earth. He cried out, not so much in physical pain but the pain of knowing His Father, who He had never been apart from, had turned His back on Jesus. Why did God do that? God is a holy God who cannot look upon sin, and since Jesus had taken all of our sins upon Himself, God had to look away – even but for a moment.
At about three o’clock, Jesus gave up His Spirit and died. Immediately, the veil in the temple was ripped from top to bottom. That is significant, as if it were ripped from bottom to top, that would have shown that men ripped it. From top to bottom showed that it was ripped by God Almighty.
That veil was used to keep God and the people separated. When it was ripped at the moment Jesus died, that was the first time God could be directly accessed by everyone, as long as they had accepted His Son as their Savior.
All this means is that we are full of sin and cannot associate with God. The only way we can get rid of our sin is to give them to Jesus. But to do this, we must first accept what Jesus did, and that was to die for us. The moment we accept Him, He takes our sin and then we can have a personal relationship with God the Father.
A rich man named Joseph, who was from Arimathea, came and took Jesus body. He put it in a tomb he owned. And after Jesus was put in the tomb, the leaders had a large round rock rolled in front of the tomb’s door, and then they had it sealed, so nobody could get in. Then, they posted a small contingent of Roman guards to guard the tomb.
That Saturday must have been the loneliest day in eternity. But when Sunday morning rolled around, things changed dramatically. What a difference a day makes.
Let me make an interjection here. For those who say the Bible is not tied together with the same message from beginning to end, go back 800 years before Christ to the book of Isaiah. Isaiah prophesied what would happen to Jesus.
ISAIAH 53:2-9 reads,
‘There was nothing beautiful or majestic about His appearance, nothing to attract anyone to Him. He was despised and rejected – a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. People ended up turning their backs on Him and looked the other way when He passed. He was despised and they did not care.
‘Yet, it was their weaknesses He carried – it was their sickness and sorrows that weighed Him down. And everyone thought His troubles were punishment from God for His own sins! But He was wounded and crushed for our sins, and because of His stripes, we are healed. He was beaten that we might have peace.
‘All of us have strayed away like sheep. We have left God’s path for our own. Yet the Lord laid on Him the guilt and sins that belonged to us. He was oppressed and treated harshly, yet He never uttered a word. He was led as a lamb to the slaughter. As a sheep who remains silent before the shearers, He never said a word.
‘From prison they led Him to His death. But who realized He was dying for them – that He was suffering their punishment? He had done no wrong. He had never deceived anyone. But He was buried like a criminal, but was put in a rich man’s grave.’
This is but one instance where we see the Holy Spirit at work. Without divine intervention, there is nobody who could accurately foretell the future in such detail, especially 800 years before it happened.
We all know the old, old story. Jesus left His throne in Heaven to live among us. He was absolutely sinless, yet He took all sin upon Himself, so we would not have to bear it. And we hated Him for doing so - because we didn’t understand.
Don’t we find ourselves doing the same thing today? Aren’t people coming out of the woodwork to deny Christ; to kick Him out of our country; to eliminate all reference to Him? There were people who did that 2,000 years ago and then found out how wrong they were. Do you just suppose that might happen again today?
So we left off with Jesus being put in a tomb, behind a sealed rock. On that first Easter Sunday, so many years ago, the women got up early and began their journey to anoint Jesus’ body with spices. I would imagine that as they made their way to the tomb, their conversation was silent with only occasional hushed words being spoken. You have to remember that they were still in spiritual and emotional shock.
But what a difference a day makes! As they rounded that last bend in the path, they felt the earth shake. It was an earthquake. And when they looked up, the stone had been rolled away from the tomb and the guards had been so frightened they had fainted.
MARK 16:1-13
‘When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, bought spices so they could go and anoint Him. Very early in the morning, on the first day of the week, they went to the tomb at sunrise. They were saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone from the entrance to the tomb for us?”
Looking up, they saw the large stone had already been rolled away. When they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a long white robe sitting on the right side; they were amazed and alarmed.’
‘Don’t be alarmed,” he told them. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is no longer here. See the place where they put Him – it is now empty. But go, tell His disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you to Galilee; you will see Him there just as He told you.”
Nobody saw Jesus leave the tomb, but over 500 saw Him after He had left it. This was the third day since the cross. Many people aren’t very clear on the timeline during this period, so let me try and clarify it a bit.
The Jewish Sabbath was over. It began at sunset and ended the next day at sunrise. The Roman day began at sunrise and ended in darkness like ours does. Scripture says it was “late on the Sabbath, as it began to dawn on the first day of the week.” This would indicate that it was Sunday morning (late on the Sabbath – first day of the week.) We must remember that the Jewish calendar of days was different from the Roman calendar of days. But by studying both, we would find it is safe to say that Jesus was hanged on Friday afternoon, and He arose Sunday morning.
1. LET’S TALK ABOUT THE STONE
In MATTHEW, it tells us that the Lord caused a mighty earthquake and an angel came and rolled the stone away. All of this happened suddenly, or at the same time, and was not stretched out over minutes or hours.
I don’t think that the angel moved the stone to let Jesus out, but so the women would be able to see in. Mark says the angel was a young man. Luke tells us even more information. He says there were two angels. Let me clarify something else. Hollywood likes to portray angels as comical men or sweet fluffy women. Which are they?
In the Bible, angels are never mentioned as being comical or sweet and fluffy. They are also never mentioned as being women. Angels are always men and angels are very powerful. They are even mentioned in Scripture as warriors and guardians.
As the women stood there, looking at these angels, they could not have helped being frightened. They were in the middle of some really heavy supernatural occurrences and they had no means by which to explain them or understand them.
2. THE WOMEN WERE TOLD TO GO AND TELL.
There is one thing that stands out in the New Testament. It is the fact that over and over again, we see where God wants us to “go and tell.”
Once again, God gives instructions; this time through His angels. He tells the women to go and tell the others what they had seen. They can’t tell the guards because they are all unconscious. So they run back to the house to tell the other disciples.
How do you think these ladies felt? I think they were still in shock, but they now found themselves even more so. Could it really be possible that Jesus has come back alive? They had seen Jesus raise the only son of a widow, and they had seen Him raise His friend Lazarus. But now that involved them, could they believe it? We have those same feelings today when we know Jesus can heal, but doubt if He will actually heal us! We know He can perform miracles in a person’s life, but just aren’t sure He will do them in our lives.
If you had been there that morning when the ladies came running in, out of breath and very excited, would you have believed their story? It would be human nature not to believe it. It was a wild tale, to be sure, but was it true?
Here they go to anoint His dead body, and the next thing you know, they are once again caught up in divine events that are going to shake the world they live in. They feel the quake. They see the rock moved. They see angels. They see the guards unconscious. And then they see Jesus. And now they are told to be evangelists and go and tell. Would the others believe them?
I have always felt it was significant, in the light of how women are thought to be “less than” in many churches, that the first people God chose to see Jesus after He arose were women!
These women loved Jesus with a spiritual love most people yet today do not have. By washing His feet or pouring perfume over His head, they were ascribing deity to Jesus Christ. They demonstrated complete submission unto the Lord, and Jesus accepted it. The Apostle Paul tells us that someday every knee shall bow at the name of Jesus, for there is no other name that is higher than His.
So we know by reading the Bible that these women responded by telling others that Jesus was alive and that they had seen Him with their own eyes. But how was this message received at first?
3. LET’S TALK ABOUT THE DISCIPLES.
In LUKE, it says the women’s story seemed like nonsense to the disciples at first. Peter got up and ran to the tomb so he could see for himself. When he got there, he looked in and saw the empty tomb and the burial clothes neatly folded and put aside. Jesus must have been a very neat and orderly man to take the time to fold his dirty laundry and lay it neatly on the stone bed. And so, Peter was amazed and went back to confirm the story to the others.
I am of the opinion that the disciples were good men who really did love Jesus, but they were men who really didn’t understand very much of what they had been taught. So here they sat on that first Easter, in a quandary and not knowing what to do about it. Hoping one thing and possibly believing something else.
That describes many people today. They know they are to love Jesus, and they do to the best of their ability, but since there is no real understanding of Him, and therefore no real relationship with Him, they sit as the disciples so many years ago; confused, in need of touching, and not knowing where they stand.
Since the crucifixion on the cross, the disciples had been scattered and feared for their own lives. They stayed out of the public eye, behind closed doors. But on this day, they made their way to Galilee to see Jesus. Scripture tells us that they worshiped Jesus when they saw Him, even though some had doubts. Tell me something. How can you worship someone when you have doubts about Him? When did they first start having doubts?
How many Christians are doubters today? And in what areas do they doubt? Sometimes, doubt can be positive rather than negative. Doubt can inspire you to study deeper, learn more, and pursue understanding. I pray that those who doubt will use their doubt to grow a stronger relationship with Him.
Now, I have talked about everybody from the Jewish leaders of that day to the disciples who saw Jesus after He arose from the tomb, but I have not talked much about the Roman soldiers who were guarding the tomb.
4. LET’S TALK ABOUT THE GUARDS
Scripture says that when the Roman guards saw the angels, they shook, or trembled, at the sight of them, and they became as dead men, or to use today’s vernacular, they fainted dead away. Do you remember when Peter cut off the ear of one of the soldiers who came to arrest Jesus, and Jesus healed it? I often wonder what effect that had on him throughout his life. Did he ever accept Christ? And I have wondered what effect the resurrection had on those soldiers who fainted.
The Bible says the soldiers trembled. These were hardened soldiers, trained in the way of military men. They could withstand just about anything, and had probably seen it all – with the exception of Jesus Christ arising, that is. So why did they faint? To answer that, let me ask you another question. Do you understand just how powerful the Spirit of God is and what impact it can have on you? The soldiers fainted because they came face to face with the awesome power of a mighty God, and without Jesus in your heart, you cannot handle it.
Now, we are still faced today with a lie that was born around those guards. They reported what had happened to their superiors and to the religious leaders. They were faced with either accepting what had happened and revealing that Jesus was the Christ, or trying to cover it up and find another way to explain it away. They knew if they simply acknowledged it, they would lose their power to Jesus.
I have told you before that people do not change. That is something else they did that we still do today. We don’t want to get into trouble, so we always make things up to cover ourselves. The only problem with that is, it is just make believe and since it has nothing to do with the truth, it is a sin because it is a lie.
The religious leaders paid the soldiers to say that while they were asleep the disciples came and stole His body. And that lie is still being circulated today by people saying He was not really the Christ or that He didn’t really arise from the tomb. Let me poke some really big holes in that story.
How many of you have been in the military? When you are on guard duty, what do they do to you if you fall asleep? It depends on the situation. You can get anything from a courts-martial to being shot by firing squad. Soldiers do not, and never have fallen asleep on duty! They slept in shifts so that there would always be two or three that stayed awake.
That is hole number one. Hole number two is this: Let’s say they had all been asleep. If a group of men came within ten to twenty feet of you and rolled a stone that weight up to a thousand pounds several feet, don’t you think that would wake every one of those soldiers up?
Hole number three is that if they really did think the disciples had stole the body, there would have been arrests warrants issued, and every one of those disciples would have been caught and killed. But nobody ever issued any warrants and nobody ever went out looking for them. As a matter of fact, they hushed the whole thing up as quickly as they could manage to.
The truth is simple. There is no other explanation that makes any sense at all, except that Jesus really did arise from the tomb. And in so doing, He became victorious over sin and death, enabling everyone the chance to have eternal life supreme, spent in Heaven with Him.
But to do so, we must worship Him with all of our hearts, minds, and souls. In other words, we have to be totally sold out to Him; we must live our lives in pursuit of getting closer to Him. And when we do that, we will be “in Christ.”
We talked a little last week about our obedience to Him. I explained that there is one area in which Christians seem to believe it is okay to be disobedient. And that area is evangelism. What does Jesus say about that?
5. GO AND TELL
In MATTHEW 28:19-20 we find Jesus’ last command to us.
‘Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded of you. And remember, I am with you always to the end of the age.’
Why would God go to so much trouble? There is one verse in the Bible that says it much clearer than I could ever make it.
JOHN 3:16
‘For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son so that whoever would believe in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.’
That is why He did it. Simply because He loved us. And in return, we are to be obedient and do what He has already told us we must do. But there is a problem.
Too many Christians find it too hard to talk about Jesus to people who might not want to listen. And they think that is fine. It is not fine. It is a sin because it goes against the command Jesus gave. He didn’t give a suggestion; He gave an order. And if we really are followers of Jesus, we will have a desire to do what He said.
So now you know how all these things fit together to form the events of Easter. But do you realize how important it is that we pay attention to it? I am not talking about paying attention to Easter during Easter. I am talking about living what you know about Easter – all year long.
Where are you today in your walk with Jesus? Do you realize that He is the only way you will ever get to Heaven? If you are serious about going, you need to have a very personal relationship with Him. Do you have that today, or are you planning on having it “sometime in the future?” If you are waiting, I promise you that day will never get here.
If there is anything in your heart at all that is telling you that you need Jesus, you don’t have to understand it; all you have to do is obey it. As we sing, I want you to step out from where you are and walk up here to me.
I am going to give you an opportunity right now to make sure you are safe in Christ. I will pray with you and stand with you, as you begin standing for the Lord.
INVITATION
