Good day dear friends.
Happy Easter to you all! The proper Easter day is over, but the Easter season has just begun! For fifty days we will be celebrating Jesus' resurrection and presence with the disciples. Our sermon yesterday was entitled, "Jesus is Alive!" and it dealt with common conclusions about death and the unexpected joy of resurrection.
Here is our study guide for today:
Monday: Death is first mentioned as a deterrent from disobeying God. Quite honestly in Genesis 2:17, God says if you mess up, you die. And a little later on, God mentions the need to remove the people from the Garden so that they don’t eat from the Tree of Life (Gen. 3:22-24). The fear is that people would live forever here on the earth. Why is death such a scary thing?
Here is that verse: "17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die."
The fear of the unknown has always scared us. In this seventeenth verse of chapter 2 of Genesis which comes after God has given the positive command, "You shall freely of any tree in the garden except...God has said, Don't eat from this tree or something bad will happen to you. Did God mention death as something as bad in those afternoon walks with the creatures? Did Adam and Eve understand death? Did they understand anything at all? Had God told them death might be introduced and this is the way that death made its appearance after disobeying Him? Whatever God may have told them, it didn't work. They still disobeyed God and declared their independence from Him. It leads us to Genesis 3:22-24:Then the LORD God said, "See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever"-- 23 therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. 24 He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life."
Death became part of life. The growing old of our bodies and the eventual shutting down of our bodies became a part of life. What may have been God's plan for Adam and Eve to live forever in this garden with God was now no longer possible. And if you think about it, with the growing old and slowing down of our bodies, death becomes a friend; a liberation from this earthly body for our spirits so they may return to God.
Is death scary to you? I mentioned the fact that death is permanent and it separates us from our loved ones. And we've had no one to come back from the dead to explain it all to us. We have Jesus and His victory and the words from John 11 and 14 to speak of that place that is being prepared for us. We honestly can not call death the great unknown, for we have from He who conquered it, the promise of "that where I am you may be also."
PRAYER: Loving God of life, speak to my mortal heart again those promises of He who conquered death. Let me live my life confident that I am a Resurrection person, in You I have life; in abundance now and in heaven eternally. I pray in Jesus' name. Amen.
Have a great and blessed day.
e.v.
