Passover/Easter Messages
( A place to "Linger, Explore, and Discover" )
The Last Week of Jesus, by Helen Setterfield
The Last Week Of The Life of Christ and The Feasts of the Jews, by Bill Risk
What does Easter have to do with the Resurrection of our Messiah?, by Alvin Crofts II
The Suffering Savior, Psalm 22, by Ray Stedman
New Bodies for Old! (On the resurrection body), by Lambert Dolphin
Time and Eternity, by Lambert Dolphin
Six Hours in Eternity on the Cross, by Lambert Dolphin
When Time Became an Eternity, by Arthur C. Custance
Life Beyond Death, by Ray C. Stedman
A Note of Certainty, by Ray C. Stedman
Who is Minding the Store?, by Ray C. Stedman
Follow the Leader, by Ray C. Stedman
The Fact of Facts, by Ray C. Stedman
A Living Hope, by Ray C. Stedman
The Answer to Death, by Ray C. Stedman
What Difference Does it Make, by Ray C. Stedman
G.K. Chesterton notes that Jesus' burial ended the possibility that what this world has to offer will satisfy us. He concluded that all of human history itself was buried with Jesus Christ.
"It was well that the tomb should be sealed with all the secrecy of ancient eastern sepulcher and guarded by the authority of the Caesars. For in that cavern the whole of that great and glorious humanity which we call antiquity was gathered up and covered over; and in that place it was buried. It was the end of a very great thing called human history; the history that was merely human. The mythologies and the philosophies were buried there, the gods and heroes and the sages. In the great Roman phrase, they had lived. But as they could only live, so they could only die; and they were dead..."
"And if there be any sound that can produce silence, we may surely be silent about the end and the extremity; when a cry was driven out of that darkness in words dreadfully distinct and dreadfully unintelligible, which man shall never understand in all the eternity they have purchased for him; and for one annihilating instant an abyss that is not for our thoughts had opened even in the unity of the absolute; and God had been forsaken of God..."
"On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realized that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth, and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn."
Notes Added (2018):
In 2018 the Christian traditional calendar for Easter (Sunday April 1 this year) commemorates the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, his death, and burial, and resurrection.
Passover celebrates the deliverance of Israel under Moses. The week long events in this Jewish festival, following a guideline called the Haggadah, begins this year at sundown on March 30 and concludes on Shabbat April 7 this year. The traditional meal know as the Seder takes place at the beginning of the week.
The Jewish Lunar Calendar is out of phase with our Western Roman calendar. In the latter calendar, Easter is designated as the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox. Wikipedia is a good source for further reading on all the above.
Some Bible scholars believe the crucifixion of Jesus took place on April 3, AD 33 or Nisan 14 during Passover Week.
March 15, 1998, revised March 3, 2018