You don’t need me to tell you how important this week is in the Christian faith. Millions of people around the world will be celebrating the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. This Jesus wasn’t just a good man or a prophet of God. This wasn’t a moving story about failed justice and the loss of an innocent life. Yes, those elements are there, but the story is actually much bigger than that. This weekend, we celebrate the culmination of redemptive history as the very one who spoke everything into existence was murdered by his creation so that his perfect sacrifice would atone for their sins.
Let that sink in for a second.
Throughout the Old Testament, we see God’s plan of redemption foreshadowed in a host of different places:
- Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22, showing what God would actually follow through with thousands of years later
- Bringing His people out of Egyptian slavery in Exodus
- The sacrificial system in Leviticus that was a shadow of the cross
- The bronze snake in Numbers 23
- The awkward marriage of Hosea to a prostitute to show how God remains faithful to Israel, though they are unfaithful.
These are just a few.
The Four Thousandish years of OT history tells a single story: that God will redeem his people. What we get to see in our day and age is that Jesus is the complete fulfillment of that plan.
In fulfillment of the stories above, Jesus is the Son whom the Father did sacrifice for the forgiveness of sin, delivering us out of darkness into his Kingdom (and household). All who look on Jesus’ sacrifice and believes will be saved, though we were previously hostile to Him.
That is what Holy Week represents. It’s God’s complete love that compelled him to step down into his creation, to take on the form of his creation as Jesus of Nazareth. He fulfilled his own righteous commands that we never could so that he could be the perfect sacrifice for our sin that we never deserved.
He was willing to be praised on Monday by the very people he knew would call for his crucifixion on Friday. Let that one sink in for a minute.
Ephesians 2 tells us that we were dead in our sin and trespass. Not sinking in the ocean, reaching out for help, but dead… as in Lazarus – stinking in the tomb type of dead. Coincidentally, the story of Lazarus was just before the Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, which was another, timely foreshadow of what Jesus was about to do himself.
My thought for you (and me) today, as we enter into the weekend for Holy Week, is that (if you are a believer in Jesus), you and I get to celebrate this weekend because of the overwhelming power of what Jesus accomplished. It was nothing that we did, are doing, or will do for Him in the future. We celebrate the fact that:
- God knew from the foundations of the world that we would be separated from Him by sin (1 Peter 1:20 / Revelation 13:8)
- God showed us through thousands of years of interaction with human history that He had a game plan.
- God executed the final phase of that game plan as he walked this earth.
- God sacrificed the only thing that would bring permanent reconciliation between him and us – Jesus.
- It worked.
“But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved”
Ephesians 2:4-5
All glory and honor to our king!
Share this Post
