Daily Word
A word of encouragement for your day.
CRUCIFIED, DEAD, BURIED - RAISED!
"For I handed down to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures."
Who was it that humanity tried to destroy by hanging on the cross to die?
The Lord and Sustainer of creation, the one through whom all things came into being and through whom all things exist, the one who holds together every atom of creation, upholds all things by the power of his word.
If He is removed, all things perish.
If He is not, nothing exists.
He is Life – without Him there is no life.
To imagine an existence cut off from the Source of Life is the greatest of all follies. There is no such thing as an independent life. Every breath we take as humans is the Creator's gift of love to us even if we do not realize it.
When humanity turned its back on God and went its own way, it entered the path to its own destruction and everything it does and produces bears the stamp of death and destruction: "peoples labour merely for fire, and nations become weary for nothing" (Hab.2:13).
Without being aware of it, humanity digs its own grave and will eventually destroy both itself and the wonderful earth the Lord created.
It was this humanity of death and destruction that Jesus took upon Himself to the cross to die and then be buried with Him.
He died as "the last Adam" – the end of sin-poisoned humanity and carried it with Him into His grave – in order to become in His resurrection the head of a completely new humanity and the beginning of new heavens and a new earth.
Those who cried out "Crucify, crucify!" and persuaded Pilate to carry out their demand had no idea that with their mindless hatred of him they were realizing God's eternal plan for the salvation of humanity and creation and that God was thus fulfilling all that he had predicted through all His prophets in the Old Testament.
God turned man's evil to his good – to possibilities that never existed before – the Crucified One rose!