Holy Week Devotional 2022Sample

Out of all the authors of scripture, John was given some of the most exalted words to write. His gospel is dramatically different from the others. No doubt we’ve all found ourselves thumbing through Revelation, perplexed by the visions he reported there. John was given a heavenly vantage point and he describes the mission of Christ from that perspective. In John’s gospel, the divinity and majesty of Christ is front and center at all times, starting with the first words: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:1, 3).

Jesus is not merely the Son of David, nor merely the promised seed of Abraham. Jesus is God himself—the very source of creation, through whom everything in existence has been made. There is no life, except the life that is in him, and it is because of him that all of us “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Everyone at all places and in all times depends upon Jesus at every moment, despite the fact that most don’t realize it. By beginning his gospel with Christ’s role in creation, John sets a much grander vision of the redemption before us. A mortal king can do a great deal—for a single lifetime. One of God’s assurances to us all is that tyrants like Nero, Hitler, Putin, or Xi Jinping have numbered days before they return to dust. What might the Creator accomplish?

In fact, the mission of Jesus is nothing less than to bring about a fully renewed creation. Unless “one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God,” Jesus had said to Nicodemus, “[U]nless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:3, 5). Those who believe in Christ and receive him, John tells us, are given “the right to become children of God” because we have been born again, “not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12-13). Our redemption is not being dusted off and polished a bit; rather, our redemption is nothing less than new birth, by water and the Spirit.

As we saw yesterday, Christ gives his Spirit like living water, causing deserts to bloom and, by his Spirit, we ourselves become sources of life everywhere we go. The waters of baptism, among other things, signify that we have passed through water into the new creation itself. As the world was covered in waters in the beginning and as each of us comes forth from the amniotic waters of our mother’s womb, in Christ we are brought out of the darkness of “the world” into the new life of God’s eternal kingdom. In Christ, we pass out of the world that is doomed to end, into the real world that will last forever. Indeed, “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17).

While we have yet to see the new creation fully realized, which we will see in its most glorious manifestation after the resurrection of the dead, Jesus has already established that victory. Jesus likens his death to a seed being planted in the ground: “[U]nless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). So long as the grain of wheat remains standing, it is fruitless. But if it dies, that one life becomes the source of life for many more. So too with Christ. On the cross, Jesus gives up his life in order that his death would bring life to countless billions—“a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Rev. 7:9).

The wages of sin is death and because Christ died for us and in our place, our sin has died with him. Because Christ died, accomplishing his redeeming work, we can know with an unshakeable confidence that our life has been eternally covered by his blood. There is nothing more to add because nothing necessary has been left out. Because he has sprinkled us clean, our sin will never rise again to condemn us. On the cross, Jesus declares his victory, giving us the most encouraging promise we might ever receive: “It is finished!”