Easter Isn’t Over

Easter Sunday was a few days ago now, but that doesn’t mean it’s over. The effects of what we celebrated last Sunday continue to grow, slowly, like the buds of spring continue to open all around us and the fresh green continues to deepen into maturity and the apple blossoms transform themselves, somehow, into delicious fruit. Jesus said, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). Then he died—for us. Now, 2,000 years later, his resurrection is still bearing fruit—transforming the cold, dead hearts of sinful, proud, selfish people who trust in his forgiveness and salvation into living, loving, new creations—a transformation that is every bit as glorious and surprising as the growth of a tiny, dull little sunflower seed into a towering, thriving wonder of nature. This is how God works. He does nothing by half-measures. He doesn’t ease off once he’s done enough to get by. He goes on, and on, and on—working wonders far beyond anything we could ask or imagine, and glories no mind has conceived (1 Corinthians 2:9). That’s why, in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul uses seeds as an illustration of the resurrection of God’s people:

“But someone will ask, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?’ How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body….So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.”

Jesus did not merely win his people a bonus extension on our current kind of living. That would have been good—certainly better than dying—but he went much further. He won us an entirely new reality—imperishable, glorious, and full to bursting with his own resurrection power and life. The life Jesus won for his children is so far beyond our present reality that you might as well be comparing sunflower seeds to full-grown sunflowers. There is no comparison. And yet there is a connection—the seed is the beginning of the glories to come. And here, today, God has already planted the seed of his resurrection life in the hearts of those who put their faith and trust in Jesus Christ. Here, today, that seed is already taking root and growing, slowly—budding and opening, blooming and bearing fruit in the lives of those who die to sin with Jesus and rise to new life by the power of his resurrection.

Easter isn’t over. It’s only just begun.

If you’d like to think more about the ways that God’s creation points us to our Creator, my new book “The Language of Rivers and Stars” is releasing in a few days on the first of May. It is now available for preorder.