The Christian story of the world goes together—it starts with a single, all-powerful God creating a perfect world, and ends with the same God redeeming and re-creating the world, this time unto eternal perfection. It’s a U-shaped narrative beginning happy and perfect and ending happy and perfect: everything in between is the drama that God intended to unfold in order to show his Glory.

If we parachute into Easter, without anchoring it into this bigger narrative, we lose all the context and thus the meaning. 

So let’s rewind the clock.

Right after Adam and Eve, evil spreads like wildfire—Cain kills his own brother!—reaching the fever-pitch that brought about the flood. After devastating the world in His divine judgment, God promises Noah never to let it get that bad again, and He disarms Himself, throwing His bow, His weapon of war, into the sky as a reminder, a memorial that He will solve this problem another way.

This covenant leads to more and more covenants—treaties that God makes with humans.

The next covenant is one He makes with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the fathers of the nation Israel.

God chooses them to make them a great nation, and He makes covenants with them, covenants of promises that build on each other and lead to the same end-point of redemption.

So yes, the nation of Israel is chosen by God, and blessed, and God said it was for a specific purpose: to fight evil.

The name Israel means “God fights”, and it is not random that God gave Jacob the name Israel after he fought with Him all night long.

Abraham’s covenant is different. Instead of ritually covenanting together, God puts Abraham asleep and God covenants with Him—alone—making a unilateral promise to give him land, descendants, and blessing. It’s unconditional. You can’t mess it up. And Abraham is asleep in the corner.

That passes to Isaac and Jacob, and God reiterates his promises down the line until He makes another covenant. This time with Moses.

Moses’s covenant is familiar to us, structured around the Ten Commandments. But it is conditional: all of Israel’s success and blessing in the Promised Land is dependent on their ability to keep the 600+ laws found in Exodus and Deuteronomy. Very different from Abraham’s.

Under Moses and Joshua’s leadership, Israel makes it to the Promised Land, and they claim it as their own, the promise of God realized. Four-hundred years later, Israel is the most powerful nation on the planet, under the rule of David and his son, Solomon. 

But they can’t live by those laws and the covenant fractures.

But God reaches down into their darkness and makes a new covenant with David, another unconditional promise (like Abraham’s) to make David’s kingdom last forever. 

So here is David, failing, holding the trump card—the gift of God.

He doesn’t know how, but somehow God is going to redeem the world, keep all those laws, and do it through David’s family.

But that promise fades as 1,000 years passes and Israel, and the world, march down into the bottom of the U.

Deep in the bottom of that U is the story of Easter. 

What God promised to Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David is fulfilled in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The Gospels tell His story as a mirror image of the story of Israel. 

God disarmed Himself after the flood, but He turned the judgement on Himself at the cross.

Jesus enters their darkest hour, not to help them, but to save them.

The Christian story centers around this fact: that sin has entered the world and destroyed all of us, dragging us all to the grave. Like Israel, we are unfit to keep commandments, much less six-hundred of them. 

This is the unique mystery of Christianity. The responsibility lies completely on God to find and execute the solution.

The Bible tells us this big story and tells us exactly how we can come to know God and be united with Jesus in His sacrifice.

Since Jesus has done it all, this is good news, not good advice.

Since Jesus kept the law perfectly, He bought the right to every promise God ever made to Israel, and He’s offering them to us.

Since Jesus rose from the dead, we look forward to the day we live with Him, freed from the curses and evils of this world.

That is why Easter is the celebration that leads to greatest worship. It’s the climax to the story of the only God in the history of religions who Himself needed courage.

In the darkest hour of the creation’s history, Jesus was on the cross, and it’s no coincidence that the sun was blotted out and the earth trembled.

The Creator became the Savior, and today is the day we remember, respect, and worship.

Read this on the VDT.