Take a Fresh Look at the Resurrection

I hope you're not in a rut about Easter, tired of the old traditions and complacent about the story. If you're like me, chocolate bunnies and Easter egg hunts and eating lamb and ham just kind of miss the mark.

Well, I decided to take a fresh look at the Easter story after I heard someone speak on the radio about the solid proofs from the Bible that Jesus did indeed rise from the dead. I don't intend to write about them, though they are fascinating and there are thousands of resources you could turn to if you wanted to study that. I think it's far more important that you take the time yourself to study the biblical accounts of Jesus's death, burial, resurrection, and the interesting things he did in the forty days after that.

So here's what I noticed.

Jesus wasn't the first to rise from the dead. He was the first to rise that week, but when he died many holy people rose from the dead. They waited for him, then walked the streets of the city and appeared to many people.

The Pharisees remembered that Jesus had promised that he would rise from the dead and tried to prevent it, but the disciples didn't believe Jesus.

Jesus had some new and interesting skills, and not just with fishing, cooking, and folding laundry. No, I'm not joking.

Jesus appeared to women first, giving them the greatest legal validity they had ever received. The eyewitness testimony of these women is crucial to the concrete proof of the resurrection.

Not to sound crude, but ghosts and those who might be described as the walking dead or zombies are in the Easter story. Often I think that some of the great myths of all time are perversions of biblical truths because men can't even think of original stories.
Jesus seems very busy and driven in the resurrection accounts. He appears to be focused on demonstrating that he has risen from the dead just as he promised, as well as urging his disciples to wait for supernatural power to do amazing things.

To be sure, the next forty days are a mysterious time. The disciples only saw him a few times. Then, from the Mount of Olives, Jesus promises that he will return in the same way he leaves-as he leaves the ground and takes off up into the sky and beyond! This is the real Superman!

After you read the stories in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, please read 1 Corinthians 15 and contemplate how vitally important the resurrection is to everything about following Jesus.

Angry

What would I say from the deepest part of my soul about the killing of the unborn? It troubles me incomprehensibly that anyone would not want their child, be they the father or mother. Beyond that, I am at a loss for words that anyone could be willing to believe that a baby in the womb is anything other than a living human being. Just because the government says so?

Trying to be dispassionate and rational instead of furious for a moment, I am trying to understand how our nation has allowed abortion for forty years. I comprehend that we cannot stop the occasional serial killer who escapes justice, or the unexpected school shooter, our the Dr. Kevorkians, rare though they may be. Terror attacks cannot always be foreseen, nor can the next mad genius' plot to do something evil.

Abortion started out as something rare, secretive, and desperate. However, as soon as Roe v Wade, the abortion rate quickly skyrocketed to a third of all pregnancies. Within three years. For all the reading and study I have done, I still can't understand. I don't want to. I want it to not be true.

I don't know which is worse. The fact that one in three children is killed by their mother before being born, or the fact that only a tiny minority of people are doing A SINGLE SOLITARY THING about it.

There is no Civil Rights Movement for the unborn. It is a very few people, most of whom feel lonely in their crusade because most of their friends and family do not care at all about this national problem.

There are three registered sex offenders in my neighborhood. I make sure my family knows to avoid these individuals. There is also a known drug dealer whom the police have dealt with on numerous occasions. There are probably numerous illegal aliens in my neighborhood also. There are only three abortion facilities in my state.

One of them is in my neighborhood.

This is not a metaphor; this is a fact. The holocaust is happening three blocks from my children's bedrooms. This utterly disgusts me. You and I are responsible for this. What have you done? I know that I have done pathetically little.

What if nobody cared that Rosa Parks didn't give up that seat in the bus? What if no brave children faced the police dogs and fire hoses of Birmingham? What if Martin Luther King gave his I Have a Dream speech to an empty national park?

I can tell you what; business as usual. Segregated lunch counters right here in Oklahoma. Lynchings. Blacks still unable to rent a hotel room, attend the school of their choice, coach a football team, run for president. Cross burnings and church burnings. Our Declaration of Independence would still be marked "Insufficient Funds."

Men and women, boys and girls died so my children would have the honor of attending school with children of every race. They fought the last of the wars for independence from tyranny on American soil. Thomas Jefferson was right when he said that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of patriots and tyrants. From the War of Independence to the Civil War to the civil rights movement this has happened time and again.

One by one by one, our little children are being quietly ushered into extermination chambers. They go in; they don't come out. Sixty busloads a day. Every day.

Look around you the next time you are in public.

One out of every four women has made this choice.

Thirty million of them helped elect our president.

One hundred people were missing from my graduating class.

Two hundred fifty laughing children are missing from my children's elementary school.

Eighty people are missing from my church.

My soccer team is six children short.

Sandy Hook happens one hundred forty times a day- in other words, every ten minutes. 9/11 happens every single day.

Let us think about this. We are furious that Islamic terrorists attacked innocent people....

I love our God-given liberties, and our Declaration of Independence and Constitution that protect these rights. I am opposed to the government infringing on my rights to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to keep and bear arms. I am opposed to the government destroying our economy. Yes, it is true that the second amendment protects all the other rights. Who will protect the unalienable right to life? Fifty five million American citizens have been deprived of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, property, speech, religion, the right to bear arms, and all the rest.

What do you think God Almighty thinks of our nation? A balanced budget won't please him if we still use government money to kill babies. Prayer in schools won't please a holy God who knows that we have killed a third of the students. You see, we do not even deserve freedom of religion if we in the churches don't even ASK women not to abort their children.

As you can see, I am very angry about the holocaust of abortion. (Yes, do the math, that is a very appropriate term. ) I could have gone on this rant for a very long time, but God stopped me. I looked back over the previous paragraph and was shocked by what I wrote. I said we don't deserve our freedoms. Yet they are God-given and unalienable. How is this possible?

Grace.