2nihon

“They took the body down from the cross and one of the few rich men among the first Christians obtained permission to bury it in a rock tomb in his garden; the Romans setting a military guard lest there should be some riot and attempt to recover the body. There was once more a natural symbolism in these natural proceedings; it was well that the tomb should be sealed with all the secrecy of ancient eastern sepulchre and guarded by the authority of the Caesars. For in that second cavern the whole of that great and glorious humanity which we call antiquity was gathered up and covered over; and in that place it was buried. It was the end of a very great thing called human history; the history that was merely human. The mythologies and the philosophies were buried there, the gods and the heroes and the sages. In the great Roman phrase, they had lived. But as they could only live, so they could only die; and they were dead. On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realized that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.”

Looking forward to a wonderful Easter weekend…my thoughts are with Christ and all he accomplished on the Cross, winning myself and all of humanity to himself by one sacrifice, opening The Way to the Father through the rending of his body, the One through which we died, buried, and were raised into this new life! So much victory on this weekend, so much glory accomplished in three short but eternally important days. The splitting of mankind’s history into two separate spiritual realms, Old and New, Christ’s joining of mankind to himself…oh what glorious days these are. There is no sorrow in these days, only grateful tears. Immanuel! God with us! God around us! God INSIDE us! Happy Easter, everyone!

I was born with a fearful nature—a real slave of the Fearing Clan! But I have since made the glorious discovery that no one has such a perfect opportunity to practice and develop faith as do those who must learn constantly to turn fear into faith. One must either succumb to the fearing nature altogether and become a “Craven Coward” for the rest of one’s life; or by yielding that fearful nature wholly to the Lord and using each temptation to fear an opportunity for practicing faith, be made at last into a radiant “Fearless Witness” to his love and power. There is no middle course. In the same way a moody temper, a sharp, spiteful tongue, or a dismally anxious and foreboding habit of mind, as will as the other temperamental characteristics…can all be gloriously transformed into their exact opposites. Love takes our defects and deformities, and out of them, as out of “crooked Jacob,” fashions princes and princesses of God.