At around this time each year people think about the events that happened over two thousand years ago on a hill just outside Jerusalem. Easter is well regarded in Christian circles as the peak time of the year with the focus on the events of the crucifixion of the Creator of the Universe, the Lord Jesus Christ on a rough cross. In light of recent startling global events, it’s challenging to ask if and how the crucifixion speaks to us?

Jesus Christ’s appearance on earth born into a Jewish family demonstrated that God is not distant to the events of human experience. In His life on the planet around the beginning of the First Century AD, He lived in Galilee, grew up in relative obscurity learning the skills of carpentry in a family in Nazareth before launching out at the age of thirty on His great quest of redeeming a lost humanity. He connected with us, the Emmanuel (God with us – Isa 7:14), foretold by the prophet Isaiah approximately 700 years before. As a man, Jesus experienced things that we experience. He ate, slept, wept and walked the road of human life. He suffered hardship, observed people’s pain and brought comfort, healing, truth and deliverance to many.

He proclaimed in Luke 4:18-19: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’ Not only does Jesus, the God-man connect with us (the human race), but His clear goal was to bring salvation, deliverance, freedom, healing and blessing to a lost and broken world. So the events culminating in the betrayal, trials, flogging and crucifixion of Jesus, God’s sacrificial lamb, points to this amazing but perplexing salvation from the hand of God.

Jesus suffered tremendously.
He knew pain, and so He is familiar with ours. He suffered unjustly as well. He feels the heartbreak of children without parents, the anguish of grief, the pain of loneliness and the numbness of tragedy. Can we really argue that God doesn’t care about our plight? Is He really distant, leaving us to our own fate? In Romans 8, the apostle Paul penned some powerful words. In verse 32 he wrote: “He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all – how will he not also, along with Him, graciously give us all things?
In verse 34 and 35 he continues, ‘Christ Jesus, who died – more than that, who was raised to life – is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?’

The resounding answer from scripture is that none of these things (death, life, time, spiritual forces or anything from creation) are able to separate us from the love of God in Christ. He loves us, oh how He loves us.

Connect with Him this Easter and drink deeply of His love and grace.
Dave Wilson