If you are a Born- Again Christian - as I am !- You believe absolutely that Jesus Christ is alive today and forever more. You believe that He is Fully God and Fully Man.
You live by the belief that He was born of a virgin and lived a perfect and sinless life! You stand by a belief that He healed and preached of people's need to get into a right and proper relationship with God The Father. The only way for that to happen was to accept Jesus and accept His as Your Lord and Savior. Jesus worked amazing miracles and He often spoke of the people's need to be freed and absolved of their sins. He taught that He was the only way that this was possible, He also taught that He came to die on the Cross and that His own shed blood would provide the forgiveness that all of us HAD to be accorded. It was only be accepting Him and by trusting in His sacrifice that we can be granted forgiveness and have access to God's healing and restoring grace.
A study of the Gospels show that people got excited about Jesus because of the wonders and the miracles! They saw Him as the one who would free them from the oppression of the Romans Even those closest to Him, His 12 Hand Picked Apostles and those and sit and listened to Him teach often either did not know or knew and decided to dismiss His preachings and teachings concerning The Cross of Calvary. They were excited by what they saw and had vision of being with Jesus and seeing Him amaze them for long years to come. A 3 year ministry and seeing Jesus die the humiliating death of a criminal on The Cross seemed like a horrible nightmare that they did NOT wish to think about and dismissed regularly.
As often as Jesus spoke about His death, He spoke as much about how The Cross would not be the end of Him and His ministry. He spoke of His Resurrection, His total and absolute conquest of The Grave and emcouraged those who sincerely listened to yearn for what God would start to do after His resurrection.
Jesus was arrested on The First Holy Thursday Night after initiating the practice of Communion.He was beaten, tortured, tormented and brutalized EVEN before He was affixed by nails to The Cross! He spent 3 hours on The Cross and died at 3 PM on that First Good Friday. He was also run through with a spear before He was taken down from the Cross.
He was laid in a borrowed tomb. The Very Next Day, Saturday, Some of the Religious Leaders who had harangued The Roman Governor, Pilate, for His Execution. Now insisted that there was a chance that His followers would steal the body and claim that He'd risen from the dead! A large rock was rolled in front of the enterance to His tom and it was sealed with armed Roman soldiers guarding it.
On This Saturday, The Apostles and Disciples walked around dispirited, defeated, abandoned and depressed, They'd fled away from Jesus as He was arrested. Everything He now had spoken if seemed to be meaningless and utterly and impractically worthless. Some were in hiding, Thinking that they would soon be arrested for being connected to Him.
The reason for this gloom and defeatism was thinking- On THIS Saturday, That all the promise and hope that Jesus represented died and was buried and forever gone- just as they now totally believed that He was!
The Believers know the rest of the Story- He Conquered Death and defeated the grave at The First light of Sunday morning. Yet, These same apostles and disciples knew that He had died and been dead for OVER 30 hours. If you read the accounts of The First Easter with these long hours of Saturday in mind, This serves to energize and ignite the energy, passion and stunning power of their response to The Risen Jesus!
Praise God for His triumph! He is Risen! He is Risen Indeed! Let us rejoice in this. However, Please keep in mind that between The First Good Friday and The First Easter, wedged inbetween these two days, There WAS a DARK! SATURDAY!
- Johnny-
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