Easter 2023

Posted in: News By House Divided on April 10, 2023

The Bible explains the reason why Christians celebrate Easter. Few understood this reason any better than Homer Simpson. In an episode of The Simpson’s, Homer complained, “everything’s so damn expensive these days, look at this Bible I just got…$15 bucks! And talk about a preachy book, everybody’s a sinner, except for this guy.”

Comedian Bill Maher quipped, “To most Christians, the Bible is like a software license. Nobody actually reads it, they just scroll down to the bottom and click, ‘I agree.’” But Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., saw the Bible very differently. King didn’t view the Bible as a software license, but as a software code – a deep, mysterious code authored by God for man’s eternal soul.

In one sermon, King said, “…whenever we think about man we must think of this tragic fact – that man is a sinner…this glaring reality of the gone-wrongness of human nature is set forth on almost every page of the Bible… (but)… in the modern world, we hate to hear the word ‘sin’. We try to run from it and try to talk about it in other terms”. Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, M.D., agreed.

In People of the Lie, Peck wrote, the evil person suffers from “… an extreme form of self-protectiveness…. Their ‘goodness’ is all on the level of pretense. It is a lie…this is why they are the ‘people of the lie’”. They lie not to deceive others but to deceive themselves concerning their own goodness. They are self-justifying, “…unable to tolerate the pain of self-reproach…the pain of their own conscience, the painful realization of their own sinfulness…” After a lifetime of research and clinical observations, Peck concluded, “The essential component of evil is not the absence of a sense of sin or imperfection but the unwillingness to tolerate that sense…Evil originates not in the absence of guilt but in the effort to escape it.”

The Bible is a guilt-inducing book. Consider this passage, “whoever keeps the whole law yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it” or the scripture saying, “anyone who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins”. For those seeking to escape the sense of their guilt, such verses are very bad news.

In America, evil is often defined politically: everyone who voted for Donald Trump is evil! But that’s not how the Bible defines evil. Biblically, sin is any transgression of the moral law of God by thought, word or deed…by act or omission. Judged by this standard, “there is no one righteous”; everybody’s a sinner, except for one guy.

King believed, “Man cannot save himself, for man is not the measure of all things and humanity is not God. Bound by the chains of his own sin, man needs a Savior.” At this, Secular American’s scoff and say, “religion is the opium of the masses”. The conscience of Secular Man seeks comfort in his truth: because God does not exist, I will not be judged. But Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz responded, “…the true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death – the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged”.

If, as King taught, “man is a sinner before Almighty God”, where can the hopeless find hope? The prophet Isaiah foretold of a Great Exchange, when the “Righteous One” took the place of the unrighteous, and “…was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace (with God) was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.” Moved by love, Jesus suffered for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, to present us blameless before God.

At Easter, Christian’s remember that God doesn’t forgive sin, he can’t. God forgives sinners, the great debt of our sin must still be paid. The cross reminds us who paid our debt. And now, Christ’s resurrection reminds us that because of God’s unmerited compassion, “mercy triumphs over judgement”.

The Bible says, “Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven…against whom the LORD counts no iniquity…” This is the good news Christians celebrate every Easter!