The Meaning of Easter

Timothy Birdnow



Imagine, if you will, that you are God. You are all powerful, you have unlimited imagination, you can do anything. Now you are complete, and don't really NEED anything, but you decide you want to have some fellowship of sorts. You take it into your head to create some beings that are independent of you, that exist seperate from you, but that are intended to be your friends and cared for by you.

How do you proceed? Well, first off, if they are to have independent existence you have to create certain characteristics, and a medium in which they operate. The characteristics you want are similar to your own, albeit you aren't going to give them all of your power since they won't be able to handle it, being finite. You want them to be intelligent, kind, loving, and self-willed. You want them to be able to make free choices.

Free choices presuppose alternatives. But what alternatives can exist outside of you? You are the determinant of what is and what is not. How do you give freedom to being that can only exist in harmony with yourself?

When I was a child I had a toy robot that was amazing in it's day; it walked five paces, then threw open it's chest and laser guns came out. It spun round in circles, firing the lasers, then closed it's chest and walked another five paces and did it again. And again. And again. Within a week I tossed it in the toybox and never played with it again.

If you are to create different beings you will want them all to be different. I grew bored with that robot because it never acted any differently. It had no free will; it was preprogrammed and did what it was designed to do regardless of changing conditions. Had I had my will I would have given it independence, let it make it's own choices. I would have wanted it to be unique, individual. I would have wanted that for all of my toys.

If I, with my limited intellect and simply notions, wanted that, how much more will you, the God of our imagination here, want that for your creation?

So you make all of your creations unique, which means some have more of this and some more of that. You love them all, but there will be some who will have more of everything and some less. Do you like the one you gave less to any less than the one you gave more to?

No, but you have created a fundamentally unfair situation.

How do you square these things?

The Bible says that Angels were created before Man. What exactly are angels? They are rather like bits of free-floating information; they are software without hardware, as it were. They are alien from our way of thinking; non-corporeal entities. They exist in a number of differing species - Angels, Archangels, Powers and Principalities, Thrones and Dominions, Seraphim and Cherabim. At the top was one angel who was given the most in terms of gifts. Somewhere there lay a lowly angel with the fewest.

You claim to be all just; what would YOU do?

Hold a tournament, of course!

You have no intention of changing the creatures fundamentally, but you offer them a chance to decide their own place in existence by letting them choose how much they want to have. But you can't intervene much, because that would influence events and if you influence events you are again being unfair. So you veil yourself, recuse yourself and let your creation hash things out. You impose certain rules to act as guardrails, and you sit back and watch.

But what happens? The top dog is likely to not be top dog any more - and he's smart enough to know it. So what does he do?

He decides he isn't playing your stupid game. And he convinces as many of his fellows as he can to simply ignore it - and you.

The Bible says there was war in Heaven, and that war was an intellectual battle of wills between those who wanted to follow God's plans and those who decided they would be their own gods, thank you very much. The fall conceived by Lucifer was rather like performing a lobotomy on onesself, but it was worth it to Lucifer as he simply couldn't accept his coming loss of power. To add insult to injury, Michael, a lowly Archanger (second rank from the bottom) was his chief opponent in the war, and was given the power to expel the now aptly named Satan (adversary) from Heaven.

We can't know what this means; it was a battle between non-corporeal entities, much like a computer virus being removed by an anti-virus program, but that doesn't really give us the true picture. What did happen was that a sizable portion of the original beings created turned against God, and fell. We say they went to Hell, but it seems likely that Hell is a state within their spirits itself; the suffering of guilty consciences by beings who exist entirely in the mind rather than having their thoughts dilluted by physical bodies. They rejected love, which is God, and so suffer the lack of love - even for themselves. They no longer have friendship, they no longer have mercy, or tenderness, they no longer have anything but the torment of rage. Hatred is all that is left to them.

Is God unmerciful here? Was it terrible He let them go to Hell? He didn't force them anywhere; they chose to be there rather than to be with Him. He has simply given them what they want, which is to be cut off from Him. Hell may be a sort of place, but it is more a state of mind. Demons carry Hell with them. And since they are so much more intelligent than Man they did this with full understanding and knowledge, and they will never repent because the only way they can is to go to God to ask for the strength to repent, and they cannot do that because they have chosen to be shut of Him. Hell is the only act of kindness they will accept.

So now, you the theoretical God, decide to create a different creature, one limited by physicality. In many ways these new beings will be weaker, less attractive, less intelligent, but they will experience things very differently from the first creatures you made. But, just as with the angels, you have to give them the right to decide who and what they want to be, where their place will be in your creation. What do you do?

They are too stupid to openly rebel against you, but they can be pursuaded by someone smarter. They have to have this option, or they have no free will and end up as automatons. What to do?

You let the rebels converse with them.

The rebels have only one way of hurting you; they can drag others into their rebellion. They will use their intellects and abilities to trick and seduce, if possible. You permit this, to give the new beings freedom.

Man falls.

Now, because you let them be tricked, you are willing to give them a second chance. The only problem is that evil is a rejection of you and your love, which means they don't really WANT a second chance, except to avoid the suffering that they brought on themselves.

When you created the parameters of reality you built a fundamental justice into the fabric of reality. There are spiritual laws than, once broken, have to be reset. To reset this you need a redeemer, someone who hasn't fallen to come and pay the spiritual debt. Think of it as a bank; if you are overdrawn you can't get anything out of it. Imagine if you want to square your account, but have nothing to put in to pay the fees and penalties; your property will likely be repossessed.

Now imagine a kindly gentleman who feels bad for you, and he pays off your mortgage or car loan.

In this instance God Himself has to come and do the paying, and He has to give you an example of how to avoid getting back into debt. So He comes as a man, born, grows up, then begins teaching, knowing all the while that He has to pay your penalty, which in the laws of the Universe is death. Being perfect He will not receive the final death, which is eternal seperation from God (Himself) so His will be a real death, and a worse one than most people think, because "He decended into Hell" meaning that for a time He was completely cut off from His divine self, and He experienced the pain of all Creation that had been inflicted on Man as a result of the Fall. All of it. It was the worst agony any corporeal being could endure, and it was freely chosen by Jesus. That was for you - and for me.

But the death alone was not enough; Death, the results of Man turning to himself as his own god, had to be overcome. No man had ever come back from the dead (save a few like Lazarus whom Jesus brought back, only to die again) and it was the one thing necessary to bring triumph over Death and Hell - and over the fallen angels who sought the ruin of all Mankind. The resurrection destroyed them, for their power lay in the seperation of Man from God, which was now over. God had made peace with Man, for Man.

Now we live in an age of grace, and Man has a choice again. This ended what was refered to as a great scandal, that God continued to deal with Man after the fall, because it made Him appear hypocritical, intervening in the test we were supposed to have failed. But our failure was a result of trickery and deceit, not volition alone. We are the ones who realized our foolishness.

Much is made of the problem of pain; and many have turned against God because of the seeming unfairness of human suffering. yes, suffering is and can be terrible, but were I the God that I had asked you to imagine yourself I would not have done anything different. Yes, pain can be terrible, but it is temporary to those who choose it to be, and it results in a far better hereafter, both for yourself and for others. The suffering of the damned is only there because they choose to suffer rather than to ask for forgiveness. Once freed of their physical bodies they have true understanding of their decisions, and want to be free of God and with others of their own kind, just as criminals draw together even while they may be actively trying to hurt or cheat each-other. It's who they have chosen to be, and they refuse to seek redemption and be with those who they hold in contempt. The punishment ultimately is from themselves, not God. They know the debt they owe, and choose to continue to add to it.

Another argument made against Easter is that it only saves those who believe, and that is true. What is lft unsaid is that everyone can believe, and at the end everyone will get a final chance. This Catholics call Baptism by Desire; a God-seeking Jew, or Muslim, or Buddhist is not cast into eternal fire - unless he wants to be. BUT it is more difficult to cultivate the habits needed to make the right decisions, and Catholics believe in temporal punishments to make up for "that which is lacking in the Cross" as Paul put it, so the pius non-Christian has a harder go after death to scrape off the barnacles left from Sin. That purgation occurs in a place that is neither Earth nor Heaven, and is called by Catholics Purgatory.

There has been, in the past, another place called Limbo where virtuous pagans (and it used to be believed unbaptized children) went. This was paradise but without God; that is why Dante placed Limbo in Hell. There may be such a place, where those who, on the final vision, reject salvation but seek virtue (I can see some modern atheists ending here) may go; they will have exactly what they want, but God is absent. God is all there is, and without Him we are but prisoners in a guilded cage. A palace can still be a prison, after all.

And so, on this Easter day, we Christians celebrate the gift of salvation, the promise that all has been made right and we can eventually go home. Frankly, were I God, I wouldn't have done it any other way!

He is indeed risen!