This past weekend in New Zealand we have been blighted with reduced trading hours - nothing happening on Friday, nothing happening on Sunday. It is all a bit of a pest for those who really wanted to go shopping on Friday and Sunday, and since we are a secular society, why inflict the observance of Christian holy days upon everyone in this manner? Well, I personally am not for inflicting Christian holy days upon any unbeliever, no more so than I wish to observe Ramadan, not being a Muslim. However, I do find it interesting that many unbelievers still expect to have those days off from work as paid holidays regardless, or if worked then paid double time with a day in lieu - a bit like wanting to have your cake and eat it? Well, I guess that is only human after all.

Lots of things are only human. I thought for quite a long time that most folks were basically good and decent types, and on the surface most of them still look that way. But there is good news and bad news about folks being only human.

The good news is that most of us actually are quite decent types, pretty much honest and reliable, caring, friendly and generally law-abiding. We mow our lawns, tidy our houses sometimes, sympathize with someone having a hard time, donate to charity, and try not to let the wind blow the supermarket trolley into other cars in the car park. We don’t tell big lies (well, try not to) and only little white ones occasionally, and don’t like to hurt people’s feelings if we can help it. Mostly we are not too bad - on the whole.

The bad news is that, as much as we might sometimes like to think of ourselves this way, we are not (strictly speaking) all that good either. Very few in their most honest moments would dare to swear they are perfect. Not many at all would consider themselves to be holy - maybe possibly “self righteous” occasionally, but not in all honesty actually righteous. Afterall, it is not humanly possible to be anything like that - not really, not when you accept that humans are fallible and sometimes do wrong things. So the bad news is that we fall short of being holy and righteous, or at least the epitome of whatever that is.

Ecclesiastes 7:20 There is not a righteous man on earth who does what is right and never sins.

More bad news… Although it is not very popular to think of God this way, it is He who is the epitome of what is holy and righteous. Most folks are more comfortable with the idea that God is Love, and some even go as far as thinking that His unconditional love for us means that He doesn’t really mind very much if we are not quite as good as we ought to be. It is common thinking that God will overlook those little sins, the ones that make us only human but not really all that bad, and everything will be just fine regardless. This is where the bad news comes in… God doesn’t overlook anything. There is a bit of a problem. Certain things just don’t go together.

1 John 1:5 This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. 6 If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth.

At some point in a person’s life, they get to make a choice. Even putting off making that choice is still making one regardless. You can not sit on the fence on this one. The choice is basically to walk in the light, or to walk in the darkness. There is no twilight in this analogy. It might be a bit more comfortable if there was, but ultimately you have to choose one thing or the other - no fence-sitting allowed.

This Easter weekend I couldn’t help thinking a lot about Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ movie. I guess those are appropriate thoughts given that Good Friday is all about remembering what happened to Jesus a couple or so decades short of 2000 years ago. That movie was terrible - it was both excellent and terrible at the very same time. I guess I had been taught the “sanitized version” from Sunday School onwards, probably because nobody really wanted to give little kids nightmares - and in a way that is quite understandable. But the sanitized version (which doesn’t have much blood showing, and you don’t feel the pain) goes nowhere near like the real thing, and the real thing is most certainly shocking and terrible. There are times that it is good to get shocked - when it brings you to your senses, helps you to appreciate the real message and so respond more appropriately to it.

There are lots of messages concerning Easter - the gen on what it is all about. To me it is pivotal to what Christianity is all about, what God is all about, and what our relationship to Him is all about. To exist and walk in the light of God, to have a restored relationship with Him (who does not overlook sin), and to become spiritually alive, we are entirely dependent upon His grace - His gift to us of new life in Him.

And here is the Good News from Golgotha…

John 3: 16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.

Lots of folk these days will scoff that the resurrection of Christ did not take place, that people just do not “rise from the dead” (or else they could not truly have been dead in the first place). It is interesting that many of the arguments against this event taking place are less credible - less logical and rational - than those supporting the account of events in Holy Scripture. Rather than get into the arguments here right now, for those who are interested there is some good reading to be found in Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ. One thing that always amazes me - that people who are only human can assert that God, the One who created the universe by His word, doesn’t have the supernatural abilities required to resurrect a dead Jesus. What makes far more sense to me is that indeed He does, and that it all works together exactly in the way that Christians have believed ever since the very first Easter weekend.

John 1:12 Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— 13 children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

2 Corinthians 5: 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!
2 Corinthians 5: 21 God made him who had no sin to be sin [a sin offering] for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.