"But Mary stood outside by the tomb weeping....Two angels...said to her, 'Woman, why are you weeping?' She said to them, 'Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid Him.'" (From John 20:11-13)
Mary was weeping because her expectations were wrong. She was expecting to find a dead person in the tomb. Instead, she found "The Empty Tomb." The parenthetical statement after John relates how Peter and He had gone into the tomb states that, "They still did not understand from the Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead." I fear that this will be the epitaph of much of humanity at the close of the present age, "They still did not understand from the Scripture...."
The title of John 20 in the NIV is "The Empty Tomb." This is the culmination of Scripture. Everything written in the Old Testament is a prophetic "announcement" that there is a day coming when the Very, "Coming One," would indeed appear on the earth. In Luke 24 we read that Jesus said to the incredulous disciples, "'O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken! Ought not the Christ to have suffered these things and to enter into His glory? And beginning at Moses and all the Prophets He explained to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.'" In John 5 we read that Jesus said to the religious folk, "....if you believed Moses, you would believe Me; for He wrote about Me." (Please keep that in mind the next time you read the Pentateuch.)
What has this day been like for you, so far, this past week, your anticipation of the weekend, and the future? I encourage you today to join me in the life of seeking to, in it all and through it all, "....understand from the Scripture...." What the Holy Spirit teaches us, we will continue to embrace and obey. What we do not or cannot grasp, we will not let it dissuade us from following, obeying, glorifying Jesus.
I leave you today with Paul's Words to Timothy, two people just like us. "Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life...."
Father, in Jesus' Name, I pray that my friend and I will be able to, "....understand from the Scripture...," all that we are able to in this age. Amen.
When Peter, an 18 year old Norwegian, "heard the call to evangelize China, on that day he not only emptied his wallet into the collection plate, but included a small note with the words, 'and my life.'"
Hebrews 12:2
Hebrews 12:2
