I want to consider three verses that usually are not read together at Easter. But hopefully, you will eventually see why I chose these.
"And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn."
Luke 2:7
"And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross."
Phil 2:8
"And Joseph bought fine linen, and took him down, and wrapped him in the linen, and laid him in a sepulchre which was hewn out of a rock, and rolled a stone unto the door of the sepulchre."
Mark 15:46
These three verses are the three pivotal points in Christianity. Christ came; Christ died; and Christ was buried. —That's not the end of the story—more in a moment. But consider these three events. Christ did not choose the most glamorous or the most popular or the most expensive items to mark the stations of His life. He started His earthly life in a feeding trough. He ended His life on the most despised and loathsome symbols of execution. His body rested in a hole in a rock.
Yet, God chooses things that are not important in the world's eyes. He uses weak and frail things to accomplish His mighty purposes.
I said that those three points were not the end of the story. There is Easter. After the Cross, there is Resurrection. After the suffering, there is triumph. Paul writes that Christ, "having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross" (Col. 2:15).
Now the days of humility are gone. Instead, Christ is glorified:
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father. (Phil. 2:9 - 11)
And for those who trust in Him, believing in all that He did for us, there is victory too. For us, death, while still unknown and perhaps foreboding, no longer holds the sting and the dread of eternal punishment.
“Death has been swallowed up in victory.”
“Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?”
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.
But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
1 Cor. 15:54 - 57
