Plain View Farm, Rural Bryant, SD

Our Christian faith (unlike Wisdom, which has seven pillars) has really only one pillar holding it up. Yes, there are the doctrines of Christ, salvation, sanctification, baptism, and so on, but without the one pillar we are speaking of, the whole edifice of the Church would instantly collapse, since it is the bedrock foundation supporting the entire structure. Without this pillar, without this foundation, there would be nothing for us to look to in Christ beside a good teacher of ethics and a fine moral example--truly not a Savior and Lord of all, a Redeemer of the World, the King of Kings, the Lord of Eternity, and all the rest the Scriptures claim Jesus to be as the only begotten Son of God.

What is this most important thing? You must have guessed it by now--the Resurrection. Easter is really Resurrection Day, a celebration of Christ raised from the dead. It is a day more important than even his nativity day, or Christmas, the birth day of Jesus. He could have been born and been called Jesus and performed the miracles and taught the Sermon on the Mount, but if Jesus had not been raised from the dead after he went to the Cross for us, it would all have been in vain.

Do you agree? Doesn't that sound a bit extreme? It should sound extreme, because it is extreme. You cannot find a more extreme even than this, the raising of Christ from the dead. It matters more than all the events in history, which really are a repetition of the same old things, as Solomon testified, when he said there is nothing new under the sun. But the Resurrection of Jesus is not a "second time around" kind of earthly event. It had never happened before, and it will never happen again. It is THE GREATEST EVENT IN HISTORY AND THE GREATEST EVENT IN THE UNIVERSE. It revolutionized, utterly changed human history itself. It revolutionized, utterly changed earth and all its people. Earth could never, never be the same again. It started off on an entirely new course in the Universe--one that will end at the destined place that Almighty God the Father has ordained for it to end at--which is to say, a new beginning will take place at that time for Earth, for there will be a new heaven and a new earth, the Bible promises us in the book of Revelation.

Think of any other event, and it has happened before--even the atomic bomb--was that new? Scientists would say so, but what happened to Sodom and Gomorrach, Admah and Zoar? These cities of the plain south of the Dead Sea were thriving, rich, arrogant, and unspeakably immoral and wicked. God finally let His judgment fall on them, after much patience, long-suffering, and warnings. When they refused to repent and change their ways, they were destroyed. Genesis tells us when, how, why, and what, and where, not to mention who were involved. It was a very important event. But people have gone to the general area and found interesting signs of a catastrophe having occurred there. The heat of the fire was so intense that there is no evidence of these cities left above ground, yet the earth and rock itself was fused like glass. It appears an atomic bomb went off there, which would fuse glass and blacken the earth. God is the Creator of nuclear fusion, and fission too--for the sun is a controlled nuclear bomb explosion. Now you know: the stomic bomb is not new at all (it is simply new to human beings who thought they invented it in the Manhatten Project in the 1940s under the direction of Dr. Oppenheimer of the U.S.). We are depending on a nuclear explosion every second of the day for the light and heat and radiation that keeps all life on our planet, including ourselves, alive and well. Without this gigantic atomic bomb, buried deep in the inner layers of the Sun, exploding exactly in the way it does, acting as the engine producing the energy we need for plants to conduct photosynthesis (just one of the reasons we need the sun), the earth would be a frozen rock hurling through the wastes of dark space.

The sun may someday explode, the scientists warn. It may grow old and unable to keep burning at the present rate, and then it will expand tremendously in a short time, burning up all the nearby planets, then shrink catastrophically small, and the solar system as we know it will freeze up and turn utterly desolate. But God--He has the last say--and He has told s in his scriptures that the earth will never cease to exist, and so we need not fear such an event happening to this planet--even if the sun should cease, the earth will not perish! Not knowing the scriptures, the Word of God, some evolutionary scientists have got another idea entirely different about how the sun and earth will fare in the billions of years ahead. They are flat wrong--I am happy to say, for the Word of God is true, and let every man be a liar--as it says so pithily in the Bible.

Easter--Resurrection Day--Atomic Bombs--Fission/Fusion--Photosynthesis-- A New Heaven and a New Earth--now do you have a better idea what the Easter Egg and the Bunny are not telling you? It isn't just a day of frolic for the kids on the lawn as they race to gather up the most Easter Eggs in their baskets. It is the Day of days, when we see that there would be no hope of salvation, no hope of eternal life, even no hope of life continuing here on this earth for human beings and all the living things that share this planet with us, except for Christ being raised from the dead back in 33 A.D., give or take a year.

THANK GOD FOR THE RESURRECTION! We owe everything to Christ being raised from the dead--absolutely everything!