Jesus overcame death when He rose from the dead. How do we describe that?

The most amazing, I think, is He overcomes unwillingness and stubbornness, and pride, to make us believers.

Peter felt like he’d totally failed Jesus. He probably asked himself a question over and over again: now that Jesus is alive from the dead, why would He put up with a total failure like me?

So Peter wants to do Jesus a favour and quit.

n John 20 we are shown what happened after the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. With virtually every other person the biography ends there with the person’s death. You will be shown sometimes what’s happened after that person’s death, but that person who died is done.

But death is not the end of Jesus.

The Scriptures testify that Jesus is the Son of God. Especially they testify in His crucifixion. In this one account in John there are seven prophecies fulfilled. Some of these are two-part prophecies, fulfilled at different times, sometimes far apart.

For many people life is becoming darker and harder to bear. They can only imagine what is going to happen, and all that dystopian science fiction doesn’t help things. They can imagine the worst. But they’re not even close to how bad it’s going to be.

I want to share a number of things I learned in my regular meditation.

The fear of dying makes a person a slave to the control of another who promises life.

The fallacy to this is that we are going to die anyway. No one can keep us alive, but we can choose which way we die.

We might find this wearying, like Pilate, who finally asks, what is truth? Then he walks away, without waiting for an answer. But today we will see that to live rightly we need absolute truth in our lives.

When you see Jesus being arrested and tried and crucified you marvel at His presence of mind. That is the only word for it.

It means self-control so maintained in an emergency or embarrassing situation, that one can say or do the right thing. That’s the best word for it. Jesus has presence of mind here in these next chapters of John.

When you see Peter during this same time you see him making mistake after mistake. He wants to follow Jesus with all his heart, but that’s not enough and he is intimidated and crumbles in fear.

Jesus’ request is for His disciples to be with Him where He is and to see His glory.

This will affect the whole world for the next twenty centuries because people will be able to grasp what is the whole point of existence: to be united into the family of the Father in love.

Wouldn’t it be nice if, as soon as you receive Jesus as your Lord and Saviour, you went straight to heaven? No more hassles. Be with God.

But it sure doesn’t work that way, does it? We still have to live in this world. And we find that we have changed, and we can’t live like we used to. But then we aren’t so good at being holy, either.

How do we live rightly in a toxic environment?