Author Archives: canugirl

by Noel Walker

Have you ever wondered why the date for Easter keeps changing each year?  The reason has to do with the Jewish calendar.   Jewish New Year (celebrated as Passover) is observed at sundown on the evening of the first full moon after the first day of Spring (vernal equinox).  Jesus was celebrating Passover with his disciples Thursday night when he was betrayed.  Jesus was crucified on Friday (Good Friday) and rose from the dead the following Sunday.  Because it’s based on a lunar calendar, the date changes every year.  Because of the way the full moons happen, next year Easter falls on March 31^st.

The name “Easter” comes from a pagan festival, observed long before Christ, which derives its name from Ishtar, a Babylonian idol goddess whose Anglo-Saxon name was Eastre. In Babylon, round cakes imprinted with the cross (a sign of life to the Babylonians) were made.

The word “Easter” does not properly occur in the Bible, (although the King James Version has it in Acts 12:4 instead of “Passover.”)  So why do we observe Easter?  We know from Scripture that God’s desire is that Christ’s death upon the cross and his subsequent resurrection be remembered every week.  This is what the early church did (Acts 20:7). The resurrection upon the first day of the week is undoubtedly the reason for early Christians assembling on that day rather than the Sabbath. The early church found in the Passover, and specifically in the death and resurrection of Jesus, a substitute for the life-connections of the pagan holiday Easter.

An annual celebration of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus is a glorious opportunity for us to share the reason for the hope that we have.  Perhaps you saw the front page article in Newsweek this week titled, “Christianity in Crisis: Why we should ignore politics, priests, and get-rich evangelists and just follow him.”  Easter is an opportunity for us to discuss who Jesus is and why his resurrection matters to us.

When you talk to people about Jesus make sure to mention that we celebrate the resurrection not just at Easter but every week when we share a communion meal together.  When we pass the bread and the fruit of the vine each Sunday we preach a sermon to each other.  Paul says we, “proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.” (1 Cor 11:26)  The early church commemorated Jesus’ death and resurrection every week when they assembled. We are a community of believers where Easter happens 52 weeks each year.

Noel Walker

If you’re a fan of Science Fiction or even if you’re not, there is a worldview that you have likely seen on TV or in movies that makes big claims about how life works.  One of the first places this idea showed up in pop culture was in a short story written in 1952 by Ray Bradbury (author of the dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451).  The story was called, “The Sound of Thunder,” and it is about an illegal time machine, operated by a guy named Travis.  For a price he will take you back in time to see sights or experience things that would be otherwise impossible.  The one rule Travis has is that you can’t touch, engage or interact with the past world in any way, lest you cause a chain of events that unintentionally leads to radical changes in the future. In the story, Travis explains to his new customer, Eccles that accidentally killing one mouse would kill all the future offspring of that mouse which might cause a fox to starve, which would cause thousands of foxes to never be born which might cause a man to freeze to death which could kill thousands of people.  Thousands would die just because of the accidental death of one mouse.

Despite the warning, Eccles steps off the machine while visiting prehistoric Earth and squashes a butterfly.  Upon their return to the present they find the world radically altered, and not for the better.  The worldview here is called Determinism and it proposes that all outcomes are caused by a single set of pre-existing conditions.  If you slightly alter the preconditions you radically alter the outcome.  Science Fiction or not, most people believe this.  Most people believe that their future is totally under their own control and they will determine it through the choices they make.

Our text this week throws that understanding for a loop and leaves us with a problem.  Romans 8:28-30 says that, “all things work together for those who love God,” and that God has predestined things to work out as they do.  God is sovereign over all outcomes.  He knows how everything is going to turn out.  Here’s the problem: if God already knows, they we don’t have any choices!  We are blessed or cursed with an end point to our lives that we have no control over.  How can that be fair?  Or just??

In Proverbs we read, “To humans belong the plans of the heart, but from the LORD comes the proper answer of the tongue. … In their hearts humans plan their course, but the LORD establishes their steps.” (Prov 16:1, 9)  What this is saying is that when you are asking, “Does God know how things are going to end or do we have free will?”  You are asking the wrong question!  This is not a “either/or” situation but rather a “both /and” situation.  You are free to choose whatever you wish and you are responsible for your choices AND God also knows how everything is going to turn out.

But this leaves us with more questions. If God knows how everything is going to happen, why does He let bad things happen?  This is a serious question (one that will take more room than this page can offer; we’ll talk about that in the sermon today) but the bigger problem ought to be if God wasn’t in control.  Do you really want to live in a world where the success of your life is totally determined by your choices?  If you really believed that, how could you get out of bed in the morning?  Every day the possibility would exist that you are going to mess up the rest of your life with a tiny mistake today; or worse!  Somebody else might mess up your life with one of their choices and you won’t know it until it’s too late!

The good news in Romans is that we make our plans but God guides what happens.  We can trust him because He uses all outcomes to conform us to the image of His son Jesus (Rom 8:29).  For those who love God, the bad things that happen are being used for good, the truly good things can never be taken away, and the best is yet to come.  We’ll talk more about this today.

by Noel Walker

Glory is a biblical word that describes a condition of life that reflects the presence of a pure and holy God.  Something that is glorious finds it’s source in God.  It points to God. In Isaiah 6:3, the prophet describes an overwhelming vision of God, sitting on his throne in the temple. God sat on His heavenly throne as King and His royal robe filled the temple.  The angels in the temple shouted, “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.”  The temple could barely contain the robe of God the King, but His glory could not be contained.  It spilled out of the temple and consumed the whole earth. It was a spectacle that is exceeds understanding and is beyond imagining.

One of the Hebrew words for glory ( kabod ) is the same as the word for “weight,” or “heaviness,” and this double meaning is particularly vivid.  Something that is glorious has some weight to it; it can be felt.  In the same way a heavy object carries momentum, something that is glorious has gravity that we can feel.  It has an impact on us when we interact with it.

Writing in Greek, Paul uses a play on words in 2 Corinthians 4:17 that the Jewish readers would get while the Gentile readers might not:

 16 Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. 17 For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.

In Romans 8 Paul returns to this idea when he says, “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.” (Rom 8:17)  How do we become glorious?

To bring glory to something is to point out it’s value or delight in it’s goodness and both of these things seem unlikely to ever be true of us.  Is God going to brag on us, when His kingdom has fully come?  That doesn’t seem likely, or even healthy. How could God ever be proud of us?  The Gospel is that Jesus Christ became sin for us so that through faith we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor 5:21).  C.S. Lewis writes,

It is written that we shall “stand before” Him, shall appear, shall be inspected. The promise of glory is the promise – almost  incredible and only possible by the work of Christ – that  some of us … shall actually survive the examination, shall find approval, shall please God… To be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son – it seems impossible … but so it is.

Our future glory is the delight that the Father will have in us when all is made new.  It is the same delight He feels in His own Son, who was perfectly obedient, a fully compliant.  As we learn to behave a little more like Jesus each day we are being perfected by the Holy Spirit from one degree of glory to another. (2 Cor 3:18)

Through our union with Christ in baptism, His glory becomes ours, our true identity and our future hope.