i) Starting from an empty tomb - B. Childs

ii) Moses: God's unspeakable gift - (1/2) - C.E. Wigg

Starting from an empty tomb

In the wake of Easter, I am left wondering what just happened. In a way, Easter is the most natural day of the year for a Christian. We live in the reality that we serve a resurrected Lord; Easter is the day of the year when we are most likely to remember this. But oddly enough, Easter sometimes feels more like an anomaly in the Christian life. Oh yes, we remember, this is the core of our faith. This is the basis on which everything else rests. How did I lose sight of it? I ask myself.

In our day-to-day, twenty-first-century lives, we don't talk about resurrection. The subject only comes up at Easter or when a believer dies. For most people in the world (including, I'm sorry to say, some professing Christians), the death and resurrection of Jesus seems like an extraneous event of history. Jesus rose from the dead, and Hannibal crossed the Alps. Both were significant events at the time, but have little to do with us.

In the book The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, Lesslie Newbigin observes, "It is obvious that the story of the empty tomb cannot be fitted into our contemporary worldview, or indeed into any worldview except one of which it is the starting point." You can't have Buddha and an empty tomb; you can't have Western Imperialism and an empty tomb; you can't have an innocuous Jesus and an empty tomb. Many have tried to fit these things together as a puzzle, but the power of the empty tomb repels anything that competes with it.

Easter is a reminder to me that, in the course of each year, my worldview has a tendency to get rearranged. I get lost in details and ideas that seem relevant to my life. But there is nothing more relevant to any human soul than the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and there is no more suitable foundation on which to build a life. Christ's resurrection offers the promise that we, too, will be raised from the dead. But also, as the apostle Paul assures us repeatedly in his writings, the same power that raised Christ from the dead is also working in us to accomplish all that God desires (see, for example, Romans 8 and Ephesians 1). The resurrection of Christ changed everything, and there is no going back. Once the sun has begun to rise, it will not reverse its course.

Today would be a good day to take stock of your worldview. (I'm not merely referring to your theological and philosophical convictions; our worldviews encompass the smallest bits of our lives as well as the biggest.) What does the empty tomb have to do with you? Is it an accessory to your life or is it essential? What does God desire to do in your life with that same power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead? Allow the mystery of Easter to turn your life right side up and remind you of the foundation upon which your hope is built.

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[Copyright(c) 2005 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. A Slice of Infinity is a ministry of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.]

Moses: God's unspeakable gift (Part 1)

Charles E. Wigg

We should notice that when the Children of Israel left Beer, (The Springing Well), their next encampment was Mattanah, and this word in the Hebrew language means “Gift”. It does not often occur to me or to us, how much we really owe to the Person of the Holy Spirit. We should remember that the very same God, who so loved us, that He gave His Son for us, has also given His Holy Spirit to us. When Paul bursts out in thankful adoration and gives thanks to God for His Unspeakable (free) gift, he was thinking not only of Christ, but also of the Holy Spirit. (2Corinthians 9:15).

The work of Christ was both wonderful and complete. As it is stated in the Book of Ecclesiastes, nothing can be added to it, and nothing can be taken from it; but it would have meant nothing to you or to me, apart from the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit. It was the Holy Spirit who first troubled our consciences, who first convicted us of our sin, who first led us in His goodness to repentance. He it was who first made us aware that we were lost sinners, who made us realise that we needed a Saviour. He it was that then used the Word of God, to bring light into our souls, and to show us the abundance of the provision that God had made in the death, the burial, the resurrection, and the ascension of Christ, for our complete salvation. When once we had responded to His prompting, and exercised faith in Christ, receiving Christ as sour own personal Saviour, and confessing Christ as our Lord. It was He who gave us the assurance that we were then eternally saved, and He did this by witnessing with our spirits that we are now the children of God. It was He that performed in us the miracle of the new birth, and then came to live in our redeemed personality. At that decisive moment, God gave us His unspeakable free gift. Not only did He give His only begotten Son for us, but also He has given His Holy Spirit to us. Well might we thank God for His unspeakable free GIFT. Let us now proceed to trace the wonderful work of the Holy Spirit in our individual lives. [To be concluded]

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[Reproduced by permission of the Author]

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