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.