We don’t usually approach Easter with judgment on our minds. It’s an odd fact considering the other perhaps more appropriate name we give the high point of the Christian year. When we say “Holy Week,” are we reminding ourselves what holy means? The week is holy because God the Son acted conclusively to wipe out our offense against a holy God, the God who must judge sin.

One night, Jesus was visited by a man named Nicodemus, someone he called “a teacher of Israel.” Jesus wasn’t referring to a formal title but to an informed and biblically educated condition. This man should have perceived from Scripture the necessity of an entire faith transformation.

Jesus told him that every human must “be born from above” (John 3: 3).

But transformation isn’t in our hands, it isn’t from down here. To put it another way, we can’t carefully work ourselves into a non-sinful situation, we can’t think our way into it, or even lovingly achieve it through our own merits or determination. Something else has to happen, and that something else comes “from above,” as Jesus said. That something else is clear in the rest of what Jesus told Nicodemus: God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son so that we wouldn’t perish.

To unpack that, we have to look at the certainty of judgment. The backdrop, as it were, of this scene between Jesus and Nicodemus is certain destruction. That’s what the verb “to perish” means if referring to humans, as Jesus is doing here.

It’s important not to slide over this fact. Judgment is in the hands of a holy God, before whom Jesus was standing more than before Pilate when he said, “You could have no power at all against me unless it had been given to you from above” (John 19:11, my emphasis).

In the garden, God had declared to our parents, not yet sinful, “Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen 2: 17). If Adam and Eve ate, they would die though it wouldn’t happen immediately. The extended years of any human life wouldn’t change that fact. Every sinful human would perish, and perish means more than just to stop living.

Paul declared that except for the Son of Man, as Jesus called himself, there are no sinless humans (Rom 3: 23; 2 Cor 5: 21). Because every human sins, the word death is written on the backdrop of every life.

Maybe you’ve encountered a sinless human or maybe you yourself are sinless, never mind what Paul says. Whether I look at my own actions and responses or at the lives of others, experience leads me to side with Paul. I have not observed that humans, including myself, are sinless. If you have shared this observation (and include yourself), you will agree that there is only one consequence according to the Bible. We will perish.

The writer of Hebrews says: “As it is appointed to humanity to die once but after that the judgment, so Christ was offered once to bear the sins of many” (Heb. 9: 27-28a).

Read Isaiah 53, and you’ll find the prophet saying the same thing–in part, this: “He was despised and rejected by men, / A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. / And we hid, as it were, our faces from him; / He was despised and we did not esteem him.”

“Surely, he has borne our griefs / And carried our sorrows; / Yet we esteemed him stricken, / Smitten by God and afflicted. / But he was wounded for our transgressions, / He was bruised for our iniquities; / The chastisement of our peace was upon him, / And by his stripes we are healed” (Isa 53: 3-5).

The judgment of sinners was the issue at Calvary, and it’s easy to get so caught up in the beauty and hope of spring days, spring flowers, and the return of beautiful weather that we forget what Holy Week means. Holy Week is about making things right with a holy God, something no human is able to do.

The night Jesus talked to Nicodemus he had more to say about humans who would not perish than about destruction. The rescue he implied would be accomplished “from above,” by the Father and the Son—“his only begotten Son,” Jesus said. Our part, as Jesus told Nicodemus that night, was and is simply to believe.

This morning I learned that the Hebrew word we translate “silver” or “money” is from a verb meaning “he/she longs for.” Longing and giving in caused Adam and Eve to be cut off from the God who made them, cared for them, and had daily fellowship with them. As a result, they perished.

But Jesus’ told Nicodemus, “whosoever believes in the only begotten Son will not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3: 16).

He could say that. He was and is that only begotten Son, and he was going to deal conclusively with the judgment hanging over every sinner.

Glorious Easter thought!

Fill your heart with it this weekend.

from the Edgefield Advertiser, oldest newspaper in South Carolina

April 8, 2020

With thanks for the great images: coins, steve-johnson-WVUrbhWtRNM-unsplash.jpg; dark apples, dasha-kanina-H0iY1UUpY0I-unsplash.jpg; branch loaded with apples marek-studzinski-JpuD4qCINbM-unsplash.jpg; hand with apple, jasmine-raybon-Eb4KnTw3jp4-unsplash.jpg; many red apples, krishnam-moosaddee-jf6EbeBE8UQ-unsplash.jpg