Christ the Lord of All | Holy Week DevotionalSample

God tells time differently than we do. Under the old covenant, the new day began when the sun set. We see this principle established in Genesis 1 by the constant repetition of “it was evening and it was morning, the first [second, third, etc.] day.” Rather than creating the world in one instant, God chose to make successive changes, enriching the world one day at a time, introducing new creatures, or rearranging the world in key ways. Each day is a transition from darkness to light. It is a picture of progressive glory. God is moving the world from darkness to glory. In the same way, God seeks to transform us “from one degree of glory to the next” (2 Cor. 3:18).

Giving dominion over to humanity, God intended that we would continue developing the world, following God’s example. Just as God worked for six days and then rested, we are to work for six days, exploring the world and using the things that God had made to cultivate the earth and form human society. Even in sin, we yet bear the image of God and are capable of remarkable feats of creativity and skill, but when sin entered the picture, human society and the world became diseased. In sin, human society produces tyrants. In sin, human community becomes fractured and hostile to one another and God. The very place in which God created all life had become tainted by the power of decay. The world that was to be turned into a garden became “subject to futility [and in] bondage to corruption” (Rom. 8:20-21).

In our passage today, we see the first moments of Christ’s restored life. Like Adam, Christ had to undergo an experience like death before he could receive his bride—the Church. In innocence, God put Adam in a sleep like death, causing him to arise to meet the bride that was made a helper fit for him. To destroy sin that had tainted humanity, Christ experienced true death—but it was a death like sleep because the power of death cannot hold the Lord of life. The Gardener who planted Eden had, like a seed, been planted in the heart of the earth, now to rise. Christ emerged while it was still dark—the dawn of a new day and a new creation. The “shoot from the stump of Jesse” rose from the garden tomb like a grapevine to bring life to all who abide in him (Isa. 11:1, John 15:4-5). Now, because of Christ’s death, we have become helpers made fit for God.

God is life—the foundation of life, the source of life, the author of life. Only God “has life in himself” and Christ has been given the authority to render God’s judgment against those who embrace death (John 5:26-27). In sin, God’s presence is fatal to those of corrupt natures such as ours. To sin is to embrace the opposite—non-being, anti-life, death. In order to redeem us, we need a new nature and a life not our own.

This is the true power of the gospel. We have not been restored to a place of neutrality. Rather, just as Eve shared the same nature as Adam—bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh—in Christ God became bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh so that we would “become partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4). It is not that we have had our slates cleaned or our sentences commuted. On the cross, God made Jesus who “knew no sin” to “be sin” on our behalf, so that “we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). Because Christ died and rose for us and in our place, now we are “a new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17). Because Christ ascended to the right hand of power on high and is coming again to judge the living and the dead, we can know for certain that “when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).

I don’t know what your life has been. I don’t know what dark guilt you carry. I don’t know what suffering you have caused or experienced. What I do know is that God has done everything necessary to make you into the man or woman or boy or girl he created you to be. With God, what begins in darkness always turns to light. I know that God’s love for you is beyond your ability to fathom or even explain, proven by the fact that while you were yet a sinner, Christ died for you. I do know that while you may suffer in fear, believing that you could never be accepted, God stitched you together in your mother’s womb with loving care because you are a glorious reflection of his very nature. God hasn’t wasted that effort. Your life is not a mistake. Your life is the very place where God intends to bring about a resurrection.

John tells us that he has written his gospel so that “you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31). Jesus is the Lord of life, giving life to all who call upon his name. Jesus is the Gardner who can make our thorn-choked lives burst forth with new vitality and abundant good fruit. Through Christ, you can have an indestructible life, receiving the very righteousness and nature of God the Son, who gave himself for you.

Rejoice! Rejoice, this Easter day! A new day has dawned and the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead is now at work in you.

Day 8 Video