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On Easter, we celebrate God’s great reversal, yet many of us still carry wildernesses where things feel anything but right. Mary Magdalene was in such a wilderness in John 20 as she wept outside of the tomb. In the wilderness, we often cannot see when Jesus is right in front of us.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The sermon contrasts Moses as a “pale imitation” of the prophet to come with Jesus as the one who fully transcends those limitations. What specific limitations of Moses does the sermon highlight, and how does Jesus go beyond merely relaying God’s truth to actually mediating between God and humanity?
Mary Magdalene stands in the garden surrounded by angels and Jesus himself, yet cannot see him through her grief. What does this moment reveal about the nature of grief, faith, and recognition—and how might it apply to our own experiences of seeking God in difficult seasons?
The sermon uses the image of a surge protector sacrificing itself during an electrical surge to illustrate the difference between Jesus’s sacrifice and other forms of heroic self-sacrifice. What does it mean that Jesus “rose victorious” rather than remaining dead, and why does that distinction matter for how we understand salvation?
Peter calls listeners in Acts 3 to repent and turn back so that sins may be blotted out and times of refreshing may come. What does practical repentance look like in response to the empty tomb—and how is it different from simply admiring Jesus as a heroic figure?
The pastor emphasizes that the earthly promised land always fades—health, home, even life itself—while Jesus leads us to the only lasting one. How does that contrast shape the way you approach blessings, losses, and future hopes in your daily life?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Well, happy Easter, everyone. It’s such a joy to be together in worship on Easter Sunday. Our very first in-person Easter Sunday. I am just so excited. I’ve been stressing out all week trying to get this ready and thinking, ah, boy, it has to be perfect for God. It has to be perfect. It’s our first in-person Easter. But you know, it is perfect because He is risen.
And to all of you online, He is risen. It’s good to be with you as well. What a joy it is. And the joy of Easter is a joy of God’s reversal of everything that is wrong. If you’ve been with us over the course of Lent, you may have noticed that the video was different tonight that opened up. This is the last message in the wilderness series, but the video changed. And it changed in a couple of ways. Did anyone notice what changed? See, that’s a test. See if you pay attention.
Yeah, Jim. The cross came across. The cross showed up in the video. And Leo, there was happier music. Yeah, there was happier music. It wasn’t so dreary the whole time, right? And then there was one more thing. Anyone get the one more thing?
Okay, well, here it is. If you’re online, you can leave it in the comments. I just won’t tell you. No, I’m kidding. The one more thing is that it reversed. If you’ve noticed over Lent, we started with these lush green fields like we often feel like in the best moments of our lives. Everything’s lush and green and going well. And then it gets drier and drier and drier. You notice tonight, it reversed. And so too, God reverses our wildernesses.
And that’s why we’ve been in this series thinking about the promises of God, God’s faithfulness when things don’t necessarily seem like they’re going all that well. ‘Cause here we are on Easter Sunday. Now, maybe you’re coming in and you’ve had a wonderful Easter. Everything’s been great. You found every Easter egg you hid so you’re not afraid of any rotting in the house or anything like that. It’s just a great Easter. I don’t think we ever found every real egg that we hid. There were always one to be found later on, right? But you found everyone, everything is going great. It’s a wonderful Easter.
But I bet for most of us, we come in and we have that Easter joy and yet there’s something that isn’t right. There’s still those wildernesses that we’re in. Still those challenges, those things where we’re saying, “God, would you make this right?” And he hasn’t answered yet. What do we do with those?
I was thinking about that and my purpose isn’t to bring us all down on Easter. You’re thinking, “Oh boy, I came to the wrong place for Easter, this is gonna be a dreary sermon.” Well, Easter starts off kind of dreary. Think about it for the disciples. Think about it for the women that were around Jesus, like Mary Magdalene, who we’re going to read about in just a moment.
They knew that Jesus had talked about all these cryptic things about resurrection. They knew that he’d said this stuff about going to the cross, but they couldn’t quite make sense of it. And that’s where we pick up. We’re gonna turn to John chapter 20 verse 11. Here we find Mary Magdalene and it says,
“But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb and as she wept, she stooped to look into the tomb. And as she saw two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet. They said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ And she said to them, ‘They have taken away my Lord but I do not know where they have laid him.’ Having said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus. And Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?’ Supposing him to be a gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him and I will take him away.’”
Here’s Mary. She has angels on one side of her. She has Jesus on the other side of her. And she feels like she’s completely in the wilderness ‘cause she doesn’t know where Jesus is, where he’s supposed to be. He’s supposed to be there. He’s dead, he’s buried. She’s going to tend to the graveside to anoint his body. Where is Jesus?
Have you ever asked that question in your life? Where is Jesus? We’re gonna think about that tonight. And as we do, let’s come before our God in prayer. Let’s pray.
Father, we come before you as those who celebrate the goodness of your love today, that you are the one who sent your son into the world to triumph over death for us. Today we celebrate the victory over death. And yet, Lord, at times it feels obscured. At times we feel like we’re asking the question, where is Jesus? At times we don’t know where to turn. Lord, tonight, as we come into your word, would you help us to see the promises that you have promised over the millennia that you are faithful to respond to? And would you help us to know that you remain faithful today? And to trust in the promises that you’ve given us. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
So I was reading about a man who died recently. His name’s Bob Bourne. That’s kind of a catchy name. How many of you know who Bob Bourne is? Ah, good, I was counting on that. I didn’t think anyone would know who Bob Bourne is. I didn’t know who Bob Bourne was. But I do know what Bob Bourne is famous for. And I bet you will too. Let’s put it up on screen. Anyone know what that is? Yeah, peeps, it’s peeps.
How many of you love peeps? A few of you. How many of you despise peeps? A number of you, okay. Sort of in between. Yeah, peeps evoke strong reactions. But all of us know about peeps. And Bob Bourne passed just a couple of months ago and I was reading about the story of what became peeps. He was the son of a founder of a candy company and the candy company bought another candy company that made jelly beans. Good enough. But they also had come up with this process where they molded marshmallow into— that didn’t come out right. Marshmallow, there we are. It sounds like I’ve been eating some. Marshmallow into shapes. And it took like, I think it was 27 hours, handcrafted marshmallow.
Think about that. It’s not very practical for any kind of production. You would never hear of a candy today that took 27 hours of handcrafting to produce because, well, for one, we couldn’t afford it. And for two, unless you happen to live right by wherever it was made, they couldn’t make enough if they could produce it at a price people could afford.
But Bourne, Bob Bourne, looked at this process and he came up with the idea on how to create a machine that would inject the marshmallow and create the shape we now recognize, the peep. And now they make millions and millions of peeps every single year and the better part of a century later, they’re still using the very same process that he created as a young man at his father’s candy company.
Create an empire! If you were a candy maker, I bet you’d say he entered the promised land of candy making because whether you like peeps or not, you know there’s millions of them at the store every single year. I mean, it’s a successful candy. Maybe it’s not quite being one of the Hershey family members or something, but I mean, it’s a major candy out there. Yeah, he still died. He took his family, his company to the promised land of candy and yet he still died. Seems to be an unavoidable thing, doesn’t it?
Moses, as he was leading the people out of the wilderness, that’s where we’ve been for the last six weeks, leading the people out of the wilderness, out of Egypt to the promised land. What happens to Moses? Moses dies. He doesn’t actually even enter the promised land. We talked about that last week and about how he lost sight for a time on what God was calling him to do, just a brief time. He doesn’t enter the promised land.
Even if he did, he still would have died. ‘Cause Joshua, who does enter the promised land, what happens to him? He dies. Every generation thereafter, he dies. King David, we heard earlier as Jim was reading, King David, the exemplar of God’s kingdom of Israel. What happens to him? He dies.
Over and over and over again, what happens? People die. I remember years ago, I was talking to a friend of mine. We were teaching together. I was talking about a time that his, he was teaching his class when a tornado warning came through town. And they had to go down into the cellar of the building. It was over at Lindenwood, so just across the street. And he had to take all the students down into the basement. And it was really getting dark. And there was a student there who had never been through a severe storm before. And the student said, “We’re all going to die.” And this may not have been my friend’s most comforting words he ever uttered. He said, “It’s a proven fact.”
Never ask a religion or philosophy professor about such things. Not maybe the words for that moment, but it’s a word to keep in mind because it is a proven fact. We all die. Even the blessings that we most yearn for, and even those blessings that God gives us in this life will fade. It’s our life itself, our health, it will fade. If it’s a nice home to live in, even just something modest, something that’s appropriate, but just enough to protect our families, it’ll eventually fade. If it’s that car that you’ve been praying for so you can get to work and back, just a reliable transportation, guess what, it’s going to fade.
Everything that we seek on earth is going to fade. Even the promised land itself would fade. It wouldn’t last. It certainly wouldn’t last for any individual. Moses passed, and he keeps going like that.
And in that moment, as Mary is standing there, and those angels are right there in front of her, she’s so covered by the grief that she’s experiencing because her teacher, her rabbi that she’d been following, Jesus, who had turned her life around. She’s following him, she’s all in. He’s dead, he’s been wrongly convicted, he’s gone. He’s right there in front of her, she can’t even see him. She’s so blinded by grief. But it’s grief that seems appropriate because she looks at the past, she looks at everything she knows about the future, and she says, this fits, it’s what happens, it just happened too soon. We thought Jesus was going to do more first. We get to enjoy him longer. We get to learn from him longer, and now he’s gone.
We’re told later on, just a few verses later in the Gospel of John, that even as they start, as the disciples start to wrestle with this idea that maybe Jesus has come back to life, they’re still struggling to get it into their heads because they weren’t connecting it with the promises of scripture that had been given over the centuries before. I don’t blame them because this is incredible. How could it be? And even if you know that Jesus is something special, even if they were starting to get the sense that Jesus really was both the Messiah and even the Son of God, although clearly during his earthly ministry, the disciples are still struggling to get that idea. Even if they start to get that, how do you put it all together? How do you make sense of it?
Yet we’re told about several encounters during that Easter morning between Jesus’ interaction, the angel’s interaction, that his followers are told time and again, trying to see what scripture has promised. And how appropriate it is that as we’ve been in the Exodus thinking about how Moses was leading the people out of the wilderness, God ultimately leading the people out of the wilderness, that he’d told them back then when he had passed along what the Lord was saying that Jesus was coming.
Have you caught that? What an amazing thing. Let’s turn over to Deuteronomy chapter 18, verse 15.
Moses says that the Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you from your brothers. It is to him you shall listen.
Okay, you say, well, that wasn’t very spectacular. He didn’t say there was going to be Easter Sunday. He didn’t say everything was gonna be great. But it’s a starting point. ‘Cause here’s what God knows. This is why God, I believe, gives that promise to Moses and why Moses passes it along. This is at the end of Moses’ ministry. Moses knows that he is going to die soon.
And Deuteronomy is Moses going over, here’s everything that I’ve taught you. Here’s what you need to remember that the Lord has said so you can keep going and you can keep being faithful to him. He says, you need to know that there’s going to be another one like me. I’m going to pass, but someone else is going to come who’s going to reveal God’s truth to you.
Now, something that we see in this, as we look at this verse, is that God’s the one who’s going to do this. God will raise up for you a prophet like me. There are a lot of people that like to be prophets. There are a lot of people who appoint themselves prophets. I think there’s a lot of people that somehow have gotten the mistaken idea that being a prophet is a glamorous, wonderful job.
Read the Old Testament for a while and you realize it’s not. You should, Jonah isn’t weird for running when God calls him to do something. Jonah understands what being a prophet is like and he knows it’s scary and it’s bad and it’s going to be painful. That’s why it’s important that it’s not a self-appointed prophet.
Self-appointed prophets, even if they speak the truth, won’t be able to stand up to what happens. Need God’s strength. But even if they speak the truth, only a true prophet raised up by God could possibly go further than that and actually reveal new truth to people.
And as we look at the qualifications in Deuteronomy for this prophet that’s going to be raised up, what we realize, and Deuteronomy says explicitly, is that it wasn’t fulfilled during the time up to when Deuteronomy was finally finished. Seems like it was mostly written by Moses, that’s certainly what we have confessed over the years, and it seems like the best understanding of Deuteronomy, but the end of it has what we might call today an obituary.
It talks about the end of Moses’ life. And we read this. Deuteronomy 34, “And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses whom the Lord knew face to face. None like him for all the signs and wonders that the Lord sent him to do in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land and for all the mighty power and all the great deeds of terror that Moses did in the sight of all Israel.”
There would be prophets. Some of them would do great things. But even the best prophets, even prophets like Elijah never came up to the level of Moses talking to God face to face. What does that even mean to come into God’s glory like that?
None of them did the dramatic mass of miracles at the level that Moses did. All of them felt in comparison like a pale imitation.
I think if you’ve hung around me for any time, you know that I have a great love of Reese’s peanut butter eggs. Now of course, like everything that has a season, you can only get peanut butter eggs for a few weeks during the spring, right? That’s when they come into season. You go to the peanut butter tree and you pick them. That’s the only time you can get them, apparently. It’s a miracle that Reese’s has kept the whole market on peanut butter trees and so that’s all we can do.
And yeah, there’s Reese’s peanut butter Christmas trees, there’s Reese’s pumpkins now, they’re all good. Then there’s just the classic Reese’s peanut butter cup. But I believe if you’re a Reese’s aficionado, I hope I can get an amen on this. I believe if you’re aficionado of Reese’s peanut butter cups, you can agree that there is no peanut butter cup better than the Reese’s peanut butter egg. Can I get an amen on that? Amen, yeah, I mean, it’s clearly true, right? Yeah, I mean, they’re just better. The perfect ratio of peanut butter and chocolate, everything is great. It’s like bringing a revolution to the land every time you bite into it, it is so good. And then it’s gone again and then you eat those pale imitations.
And that’s sort of what Israel found themselves doing. They had the Reese’s peanut butter cup of prophets in Moses. He could part the sea at the Lord’s command. He could bring plagues on powerful leaders and everyone would look and say, wow. And then the people would send them off with all the treasure of the land and they’d go and what would they do? They’d go and be led to the promised land and he’d give them the very word of God for the first time they had the word of God that they could turn to over and over again.
This is what Moses did. And they could see that God was speaking directly to Moses because he glowed with the glory of God after he came out of the Lord’s presence. He had to put a veil over his face because he was so bright.
And then it didn’t happen again. And how do you reconcile that? They’re out of the wilderness. They’re in the promised land. And yet they didn’t see the same level of experience of God’s glory from day to day.
How do you make sense of that? There wasn’t a prophet like him we’re told until we turn to the New Testament. What do we find as we read about Jesus? We find in Jesus, the one who exceeds Moses.
I don’t know what exceeds a peanut butter egg. But in comparison, Moses is just a peanut butter cup. And they were about to experience that. All who would open their eyes and see what Jesus was there to do.
We see that over the course of his entire life. We often look at Christmastime at Matthew 2, verse 15. It says as they flee to Egypt, Herod is killing the infants trying to eliminate Jesus. And what do they do? They flee to Egypt. And God brings them back and we’re told in Matthew 2, 15 that out of Egypt, I called my son.
Now, when that was first uttered by the prophet, he was referring back to the Exodus from Egypt, the people being brought out of Egypt by Moses. But what we’re told is that ultimately the fulfillment of that wasn’t in the people leaving Egypt. It was in the person leaving Egypt.
And in that we’re told how to understand the life of Jesus. Who is Jesus? Jesus is the one person in all of Israel who could actually make things right.
And his whole life was enacting everything that Israel was meant to be as a people. Israel was meant to shine God’s light to the world, but guess what, they were sinners like us, so they didn’t. Israel was meant to bring redemption to the world by communicating God’s word, but guess what, they’re sinners, they didn’t, but Jesus does.
He reenacted the Exodus and the life of Israel. And then as in that passage that Jim read earlier, what are we told that David himself, David the great king could reflect that there would be one that he even would call Lord. Yes, he was as high as anyone human ever could be. And yet David could look and see there would be one who was his descendant who also was greater than him.
And in that we would see a prophet and more than a prophet, a prophet and a king. And the final word from God, Hebrews chapter one. The author of Hebrews writes, “Long ago and at many times, in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets. But in these last days, he has spoken to us by his son, whom he appointed the heir of all things. Through whom he also created the world.”
Sometimes we ask, why hasn’t God sent a prophet today? Why don’t we have anyone like Elijah today? Wouldn’t it be nice? Wouldn’t it be nice if someone showed up tomorrow? Easter Monday, big news headlines, all the news channels, what are they doing, all the wall coverage. There’s a prophet in New York City, they tried to arrest him, he called fire down from heaven and they couldn’t take him away and now we’re just gonna turn in wall to wall coverage. We’re just gonna tell you what this guy said because clearly, clearly this one is real.
We got our cameras a little too close and they melted. Wow. Can you imagine when that’d be great? Why doesn’t God do that? Doesn’t he see? The line from Jesus Christ Superstar, if only you’d come in a time of mass communication. Seems like it would have been a good idea. Why doesn’t God do that?
It’s because there’s nothing more to be said. Nothing more can top what Jesus has said in not just his words but in his deeds, in the very taking of himself to the cross and his triumph over death that nothing could stop him, that that tomb, that the rock couldn’t be rolled in front of it, nothing could stop him. What can you say after that? Nothing.
I’ve become a fan over the last few years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I was kind of late to the party but I’ve been slowly filling it. And it takes a while. If you’re gonna fill in if you haven’t been watching it because there’s what, 35 movies now? 36 plus all the television shows. It takes a while, especially you don’t have a lot of time for binge watching so it’s sort of, I’ll watch a third of a movie tonight, okay? I’m not gonna get finished for a while. But I do know at the end of their movies, of course you have to watch all the way through the credits because you don’t wanna miss the little teaser scenes that unlock the puzzle of the next movie.
What does it say at the very end oftentimes? Well, for example, if you watch the first Captain America movie, it says Captain America will return in the Avengers. Why? So that we know he’s going to come back. There’s gonna be another.
Moses, as he’s going to pass though, it’s like the third Captain America movie. Remember seeing it and I had gotten pretty attached to Captain America by this point. Again, I know I’m late to this but finally I’m thinking, well, this guy’s pretty neat, Captain America, go Captain America, who get to the end and it doesn’t say Captain America will return. It says Spiderman will return. You know, he showed up, he did a cameo in the movie. It’s like, oh, where’s Cap? Different character.
And I kind of think that as people hear Moses saying, there’s gonna be another prophet they’re thinking, but we want you, Moses, we know that we can trust you, Moses. You are Moses, you let us out of the land and yeah, we grumble at you and we get mad at you. But overall, we think you’re a pretty decent guy. We know we can trust you. Moses doesn’t say he will return. Moses says there’ll be another.
It’s not just a reenactment though. Yes, Jesus is going to do what Moses did. Yes, Jesus is going to do what David did, but it’s not just a reenactment. It’s not just, oh, another one shows up to fill in the next movie.
‘Cause here’s the thing that Moses couldn’t do. He couldn’t truly be a mediator for them. What did I mean by that? Well, the people got it partially in their encounter with the Lord during the time of Moses. Deuteronomy chapter 18, 16.
Moses goes on, he says, just as you desired, he’s referring to that prophet, just as you desired of the Lord your God at Mount Horeb. On the day of the assembly when you said, let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God or see this great fire any more or less I die.
The Lord said to me, they are right in what they have spoken. I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among your brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth and he shall speak to them all that I command him. And whoever will not listen to my words that he shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him.
What’s Moses saying there? What’s Moses want them to know? Well, he’s reminding them of the time when he first starts to encounter the Lord with them and the Lord is speaking to all of them and the people rightly say, well, wait a second here. We like that God can do all these miracles. He’s also kind of scary. He’s awfully holy. Now, if we keep hearing from the Lord, we’re gonna die.
What does God do in that moment? He says, okay, you are right to recognize my holiness. You are right to recognize that there’s a gulf between you and me. You need help. And so he provides Moses who can convey what the Lord has said but they don’t have to encounter holiness they realize is completely separated from them that would destroy them.
But all Moses could do is relay what God had to say. He couldn’t mediate the situation for them. He couldn’t make their sins okay. We actually see Moses try. After the Israelites are unfaithful and they start worshiping the golden calf out in the wilderness because they say, this is just taking too long. We need a God that we can see.
Moses says to God, take my life. Yes, they sin, but take my life. And God says, no, that doesn’t work that way Moses. But does work that way with Jesus.
Author of Hebrews goes on in verse three of Hebrews chapter one. He says, Jesus is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature and he upholds the universe by the word of his power after making purification for his sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high having become as much superior to the angels as the name he inherited is more excellent than theirs.
Notice what Jesus has done, we’re told. He hasn’t just conveyed the truth of God so that people didn’t have to encounter the scariness of God’s holiness and his greatness and it’s not just that. He’s made right our sins and then he takes his throne.
Moses couldn’t bear the judgment that wasn’t for him. He couldn’t take on the sins of Israel. He certainly couldn’t take on the sins of the whole world. He could tell them how they sinned.
We can turn back to the law and look over and over again examples of how each and every one of us sin day in and day out. I can turn to the New Testament and see, just turn to the Sermon on the Mount. We’ve been looking through that on and off over the last year. Go over there and see what Jesus says and what do we find? I sin day in and day out.
Moses couldn’t make right for that.
What happens when someone tries to die for someone else? We sometimes read these stories, heroes that go and do something to rescue somebody and then they themselves die a firefighter going into a burning house, for example.
They give their life and we say, wow, that’s wonderful. These people are heroes that do that and we applaud them for it but then they’re dead. And oftentimes they don’t even succeed in what they’re doing. We still want to heal them for trying.
But Jesus goes and bears the judgment on the cross that we deserve. He takes the sin that I have, my everyday crankiness, my forgetfulness, my thoughtlessness, everything I do that displeases God, everything I do that doesn’t show the light of God to the people around me, all those things. He takes all that for everyone who trusts in him. He goes to the cross and he dies.
When Mary’s standing there in that garden saying, where have you taken my Lord? She’s thinking that he is just like one of those firefighters we hear about on the news. He charged into the burning house for us. He was trying to help us and he did amazingly but he’s dead and I just want to honor him.
But Jesus doesn’t die. He does die but he doesn’t stay dead.
Anyone know what this is? Well it’s a box but what’s inside the box? Surge protector, what do you do with surge protector? Yes and I’m not going to talk about that at which point I’m going to make poor Jim cringe as the resident electrician ‘cause I’m going to get it all wrong.
But basically there’s something interesting I think about surge protectors. And that’s, you know, you first think, oh this nice thing, it just, it puts a wall between me and electrical storms and other surges, it keeps me safe. But what is it really doing? It’s sacrificing itself for those things.
If you actually get a surge, what’s going to happen to the surge protector? It’s going to die. And the better ones will tell you that the not so great ones just keep on acting like the hero. They’re still there but it’s not protecting anything anymore.
And that’s, it’s going to die and sometimes it can’t even succeed at protecting the equipment. And I would imagine most of you at some point have had something plugged in. We had stuff plugged in here a few months ago. On a surge protector, electrical storm comes in, big claps of thunder and lightning. It was very, very frightening and then the equipment was dead. Had to replace it, it’s gone.
So there’s something else, and this is why I have the box. I wanted us to see this. Notice here it says how much it protects. It does 3,940 joules of surge protection. And it comes with $300,000 of connected equipment warranty.
Wow, I should plug in a lot of stuff before the next storm, huh? What’s the point? Why do you need that warranty? It’s because this thing’s going to fail and then you need someone to go and clean up the mess. And so they say, well, we’ll come in and we’ll clean up the mess when it fails and we’ll buy you some new equipment.
All your memories on that computer are gone but at least you’ll have a new computer. Should’ve backed up.
And so often that’s what rescue looks like. It’s sorta kinda almost there. Moses, if he had died for the people, he’d be like a surge protector. He’d be shocked by the weight of holiness upon him as the people were so unholy and he would die but he couldn’t make them righteous ‘cause he himself wasn’t righteous.
The best we can do is just a nudge. But if you’re trying to nudge someone and they’re trying to get across the Grand Canyon, you’re just gonna nudge them into the canyon itself and it’s not going to go well. Moses thought he could help but he couldn’t make it right.
But Jesus did. ‘Cause Jesus didn’t die when the holiness of God descended upon him. As God himself yet receiving the wrath of God, what happened, Jesus rose victorious.
Question is what are we going to do then? When my equipment gets blown out, what am I gonna do? I’m gonna go and buy a new surge protector. Maybe several of them. I’m gonna buy better ones. Keep buying better and better ones. Hopefully it will rescue the equipment.
But when we hear about our situation, when we recognize in God’s word, and I don’t think we even need to look in God’s word to recognize this, I look in my own life and I know I fall short in a million ways. I think most of us do.
Why do we have so many self-help books in the store? Because we realize that we’re falling short. We need someone to fix this. Jesus offers that fix. He offers not just to provide us with forgiveness of sins but his righteousness that we can be made like him, that we can be adopted in God’s family and dwell in his presence forever.
Question is what am I going to do? Acts 3.15, Peter’s talking, he says to the people listening, he says, “You killed the author of life whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses. And his name by faith in his name has made this man strong, whom you see and know. And the faith that is through Jesus has given the man this perfect health and the presence of all of you.”
They’re asking how did the disciples do a miracle? He says it’s not through us, it’s through that man that you killed. And now brothers, I know that you acted in ignorance as you did also your rulers, but what God foretold by the mouth of the prophets that his Christ would suffer he thus fulfilled. Repent therefore and turn back that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, that he may send the Christ appointed to you Jesus.
Peter goes on to cite that very passage we’ve been looking at in Deuteronomy and says that’s what’s happened here. You didn’t realize at the time, but the one who’s greater than Moses was here.
Question is, what are we going to do? When we’re confronted with Jesus, and we’re confronted with Jesus when we celebrate Easter, we’re confronted with one who emptied the grave, that he came up, the only one to truly overpower death. What are we going to do? What am I going to do? What are you going to do?
I can tell you what Mary does. John 20 verse 16, what does she do? She suddenly got Jesus reveals himself to her. He allows her to see him and what does she say? Rabboni, teacher. She realizes this is, wow.
And over time we see the disciples, that’s where they turn from, from desperation, from just utter grief to celebration because they realize Jesus is alive, that he has risen, he has risen indeed. He really is alive and unlike Moses who could give us the law but was gone, Jesus is alive.
Moses could lead the people to an earthly paradise, an earthly promised land, but an earthly paradise in a fallen world isn’t really paradise. It will fail. But by dying and rising, what we remember today, Jesus leads us to the only lasting promised land. That’s his, his land, himself.
What am I going to do? What are you going to do today? You haven’t yet trusted in Jesus. Pray that today would be the day that you do. ‘Cause each of us have that moment.
When we read these words, it’s like Mary standing there in the garden and the question is, am I going to believe? Am I going to turn to him and exclaim, teacher? And experience being in his presence again.
And we’re going to go on and think, well, maybe I kind of like Jesus now, he’s interesting. We need to turn to him and trust in him. ‘Cause he’s the only one that can lead us to the true promised land. The only thing that won’t fade.
And today he offers his hand to you and to me to experience his presence. Would you pray with me please?
Lord, we come before you and we realize that we fall short. We can’t enter the promised land. And when we get to the places even that we think you’re leading us on this earth, they fall short. Things break, things end, death comes. But when we turn to you and we recognize what you are doing, we are told that there is hope. That death isn’t the final word.
That there is a living hope and it is the one who is risen today. Father, would you turn all of our hearts towards your son, our savior, Jesus, that we might rest in him? Anyone in this service online or in person hasn’t yet experienced him in his presence. Lord, would you make today the day?
That we might all celebrate being in the true promised land, a land that will never fade and experience the true forgiveness of sins, his righteousness, that we might trust in his resurrection as the first of the resurrection of all. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
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