Holy Week DevotionalSample

Our passage today in John’s gospel encourages us to remember that the beginning of our story with God was in the Garden. Christ’s journey toward Golgotha started in Eden.  

On the day God began to create, the darkness of the deep had no light of its own. It “was” a nowhere “place” of nothing in the time before time began- nothing to see, nothing to feel, nothing at all. Until God the Father, through the Word, spoke the command as the Spirit hovered over the deep, “Let there be light.” At the command of God, darkness gives way to the dawn. 

Redemption follows this same pattern. Humanity had become a people dwelling in darkness, hopelessly united to Adam through whom “death spread to all because all sinned” (Rom. 5:12 ESV). It was as Jesus said, “people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil” (John 3:19 ESV). Our salvation is much more than a simple financial transaction of Jesus paying our debts. Our salvation required nothing less than new creation itself.  

In order to free humanity from bondage to the power of death, God took on human nature so that “he might taste death for everyone” (Heb. 2:9 ESV). Facing death on the Cross, he brought us and all our sin with him. His death was our death, and his life is now our life. Death could not hold the One who “upholds the universe by the word of his power (Heb. 1:3 ESV). Now death can no longer hold those who have been united to the eternal, risen King either. By the resurrection of Jesus Christ, God reveals that the first creation was a pale “shadow” of what God intended to do when “the sun of righteousness… [rose] with healing in its wings” (Mal. 4:2 ESV). 

Creation began in a garden and it begins again in the garden by Christ’s tomb, this time with Christ mistaken as the gardener. Now those who bore the “image of the man of dust,” would be remade into “the image of [the] Son” (Rom. 3:29 ESV). As the Spirit of God once hovered over the darkness of the world, God again “said, ‘Let light shine out darkness’” to reveal his eternal purpose: “to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God [to us] in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6 ESV).

As darkness turned to twilight on that Easter morning, Mary witnessed the dawn of the new creation. Mary carried the very longing, grief, and hope of God’s people searching for the Lord like a new Eve seeking the last Adam. If ever we are going to meet Jesus, we must meet him in the dark as Mary did that day. Christ is not a savior of those who believe they need no saving, nor the healer of those that are well. He did not come to comfort the proud, nor build up our personal empires. He has not come to bless our begrudging worship or half-hearted holiness. He says, “Behold, I am making all things new” (Rev. 21:5).

As you go from this Holy Week, I encourage you to reckon with every aspect of Jesus. He proclaims judgment for those who have no more than the appearance of righteousness but salvation for those that humbly seek him. He promises to wash away every stain and even fill us with the Spirit. He is the Lamb who was slain by the enemy, but now he eternally reigns. And at “the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:9-10). 

This is God’s story and ours.