Lent Leads Us To Easter
And Easter is everything! Following His baptism, Jesus spent forty days and nights in the desert, neither eating nor drinking. He was isolated from all those who could encourage him, sleeping rough in the wilderness. After that the Bible says, “He was hungry.” British understatement at its best.
It was then the old serpent came. Jesus was tempted beyond human endurance, but He was more than able to defeat the devil in a way the first Adam could not. It seems the first Adam did not value the beauty of the garden, so the wilderness was given to the second Adam as a better classroom. It is there we witness the first of many defeats the devil would suffer at the hands of the Son of Man—resisting the temptation to feed on the wrong things, to test God’s care for Him or the temptation to take a cross-less shortcut to power. He defeated the devil in the wilderness as He would time and time again in His ministry. The wilderness taught Him all He would need to know for His ministry life, and it will teach us how to grow and resist the devil too, if we enter it.
Lent reminds us of the fast in the wilderness, a time of hungering, reflection and prayer far from distraction. If we learn to feed on God, hear His word to us and grow to trust Him, we will understand better the power we have to defeat Satan as God’s children.
Lent leads us to Easter with its triumphal entry into Jerusalem—a new covenant and the agony of the cross. But a few days later a body would rise, a body the world had never seen before. This was not a ghost. It was not even a human as we are. It was a glorified, divine human who could eat, be touched and speak. He did all the things He could while living among us and so much more. This was not like Lazarus though. Here was something completely new. The first of a new creation, the promise of a new earth and, with it, a new kind of people.
Sin entered the world in a garden, but the curse of sin, death itself, died that day in a garden as Jesus rose. He is “the beginning and the firstborn from the dead” Colossians 1:18, the new creation, the new man. Think on that. Easter is more than bunnies and Easter eggs. It is the herald’s cry of God’s re-creation, when the angels who announced His birth, now stand by His tomb to proclaim his re-birth and re-life. It is the start of the restoration of all He intended for His beloved creation—His making of all things new, even life itself.
In the film "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," a father shows his son all his riches. Then he says, “One day, my son, all this will be yours. But I’ll have to die first!” This was true of Jesus. For Jesus to be truly human, He had to die, just as He had to be born. There is no raising to life without a laying down to death. It is true for us also. Paul says, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” Galatians 2:20. We must die in some way.
We all like Christmas, but perhaps the biggest party should be for Easter, when we celebrate Christ’s second birth, through death, to glory and life everlasting. It is all about Christ’s journey from the womb to the tomb, never to return to a tomb again. But He will return to the earth and that is good news worth celebrating and sharing.
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Chris Jones is the Global Outreach Director at New Hope Church. He longs for the unreached people of the world to experience the life-changing love of God and for people at New Hope Church to find fullness of joy by obeying the Great Commission.