Education and the Empty Tomb
What does Easter have to do with education?
We are educating in light of the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Jesus alone is Savior. “Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). This means that education is not a savior, but it certainly can be an idol. Only Jesus redeems and restores, and only Jesus deserves the worship due such a gracious and glorious Savior. Jesus alone is Lord. “And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifested in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen by angels, preached among the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up in glory” (1 Timothy 3:16). Since Jesus is Lord, He rules us, our families, our nation, and all the peoples of the world. Jesus is Lord of Providence Classical Christian School. We are making His invisible kingdom visible day by day, together by His Spirit so that the earth is full of His knowledge and glory as the waters cover the sea.
In his book Tempted and Tried: Temptation and the Triumph of Christ, Russell Moore writes,
Part of the curse Jesus would bear for us on Golgotha was the taunting and testing by God’s enemies. As he drowned in his own blood, the spectators yelled words quite similar to those of Satan in the desert: “Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross that we may see and believe” (Mark 15:32). But he didn’t jump down. He didn’t ascend to the skies. He just writhed there. And, after it all, the bloated corpse of Jesus hit the ground as he was pulled off the stake, spattering warm blood and water on the faces of the crowd.
That night the religious leaders probably read Deuteronomy 21 to their families, warning them about the curse of God on those who are “hanged on a tree.” Fathers probably told their sons, “Watch out that you don’t ever wind up like him.” Those Roman soldiers probably went home and washed the blood of Jesus from under their fingernails and played with their children in front of the fire before dozing off. This was just one more insurrectionist they had pulled off a cross, one in a line of them dotting the roadside. And this one (what was his name? Joshua?) was just decaying meat now, no threat to the empire at all.
That corpse of Jesus just lay there in the silences of that cave. By all appearances it had been tested and tried, and found wanting. If you’d been there to pull open his bruised eyelids, matted together with mottled blood, you would have looked into blank holes. If you’d lifted his arm, you would have felt no resistance. You would have heard only the thud as it hit the table when you let it go. You might have walked away from that morbid scene muttering to yourself, “The wages of sin is death.”
But sometime before dawn on a Sunday morning, a spike-torn hand twitched. A blood-crusted eyelid opened. The breath of God came blowing into that cave, and a new creation flashed into reality.
G. K. Chesterton had this to say about Easter in his book The Everlasting Man:
On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realized that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but of the dawn.
We are educating our children in the new creation wrought by Jesus Christ in His resurrection. I pray that as you walk with the Gardener in the dawn of this coming year you experience the rich blessings of knowing Him and making Him known.
He is risen. He is risen indeed!