Friday, March 01, 2013
Bigger Than Life
It
all started with Him. It was His
idea. He made a wonderful planet and two
extraordinary people. Until the day they
were convinced that they knew better than God, Adam and Eve had a great life
and a great relationship with their Creator.
Sadly, it only took a few generations for God's wayward creation to make
a mess of things. Several thousand years
later God implemented another idea: He
came to earth as a man and gave His own life so that mankind could once again
have communion with Him. He could do
this because he was bigger than life.
Easter
is a celebration of Jesus Christ's resurrection from the dead. Prophets had predicted it. Jesus himself said it would happen. Neither Rome nor the Jewish religious machine
were able to keep it from happening. Mortal
men could not withstand the resurrection because Jesus was bigger than life.
In
his book Who Is This Man, John
Ortberg reminds his readers that higher education began with these concepts
firmly in play:
The beginnings of today’s faculty
system were scholars who formed self-governing guilds, licensed by the pope to
have sole authority to grant degrees. The first university was established in
Paris around the twelfth century, and Oxford and Cambridge began in the
thirteenth. (The motto of Oxford University is from Psalm 27:1: “The LORD is my
light.”) Then came universities in Rome, Naples, Vienna, and Heidelberg. These
were all begun by followers of Jesus so people could love God with all their
minds. They came to be called universities because they reflected the idea that
in the beginning, God created all things... George Marsden noted that "one
of the remarkable facts about American history is that within six years of
landing in the Massachusetts wilderness, Puritans established what would soon
become a reputable college.” This is from its student handbook: “Let every
student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main
end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal
life, (John 17:3), and therefore to lay Christ … as the only foundation of all
sound knowledge and learning. That was Harvard University.
Imagine
how many more wonderful things would have come about should our institutions of
higher learning have remained true to their foundational principles. Unfortunately mankind has a way of attempting
to reduce life to concepts and ideas that they can understand and control. Faith is too risky. The miraculous is too hard to explain. Besides, to acknowledge a God who is bigger
than life is to acknowledge a God who must be obeyed -- wayward children can't
think of anything more distasteful than things like bowing, worshipping, trusting
and praying.
Fortunately
there are many who still believe what the founders of Ivy League schools
believed. Come Easter these people will
be celebrating the most amazing event in history. They will express their love to God, who
demonstrated His love for us by robing Himself in flesh and dwelling among us,
and by dying on Calvary. They will retell the story of how love overcame
political corruption, religious injustice and human ignorance. They will rejoice in the irrefutable evidence
that God is so much bigger than life, that not even death could hold him down. Find
a Bible believing church this Easter; celebrate the one who is bigger than
life.
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