As I made my way through the grocery store this past week picking up some essentials, I couldn’t help but notice the distinct lack of religious symbolism in such spaces.  This week is the confluence of the Jewish Passover, the Muslim Ramadan, the Sikh Vaisakhi, and our celebration of Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday.  Yet, the secularism of our society has sanitized any belief in God from its landscape, and replaced it with pink and purple eggs with sugar coated bunnies.

 

I think of that first Resurrection Sunday when an entire company of Roman soldiers guarding the tomb of Jesus was confronted with the life-changing event of an angel’s appearance, the great stone of the tomb that held Jesus rolled away, and the One whose body they were guarding walking out of that tomb.  Who could outdo such an experience!  Yet, in a short while, they were taking bribes of money to spread a news that wasn’t true.  Such is the deception of secularization – the whitewashing of the truth of the Gospel with lies about individualism, inclusivism, sexuality and neutrality.  We replace the resurrected Christ with eggs and rabbits, and we lift up our fists at God saying, “Let us break His bands asunder, and cast His cords from us” (Psalm 2:3).  It is a rebellion that has left us bereft of life’s anchors and clinging to the flotsam of our moral wreckage.  I sat with a man and his wife as he told me his terrible story of a mind immersed in anxiety because he had obeyed the dictates of his flesh. He lived a godless life while his wife, in desperation of find meaning, discovered loving believers in Christ who introduced her to the Cross.  Their separation grew as he reveled in sin and as she ran towards God until the police came to the door with a warrant for his arrest.  As he sobbed uncontrollably in my office, she took his hand, smiled at me and said, “Pastor Tim, I am happy.  He’s come to Christ.  I have my husband back.”  This week, as we celebrate the death and resurrection of our Lord, we do well to remember the tide of secularism around us that says, “God isn’t important.”  And we remember the words of wisdom, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death” (Proverbs 14:12).  Believer in Christ, stay the course.  Keep your eye on the Saviour.  Not just for this week, but for the days to come.  A deathly cold is settling in.