True or False

As Easter weekend passed this year and I returned home from visiting my family, my mind has been focused on the nature of truth. I’ve been contemplating the essence of Easter and what we, as Christians, should be celebrating. Every year, we celebrate Easter weekend with the Easter Bunny and chocolate-filled eggs, but the true celebration, the heart of this holiday, is a celebration and affirmation of truth. Easter isn’t just a time for us to get together with our families for dinner and watch our children eat copious amounts of candy. It’s an important moment for us to focus on and reaffirm the essence of our existence as believers. It is a moment when we must remind ourselves that because something is true, other things are false.

When we celebrate Easter, we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus because it is true.

Easter weekend begins with Good Friday, which is the day that Christians mourn the dark moment when Jesus was crucified and died in our place, bearing the punishment we deserve. It then culminates in Easter Sunday, where we celebrate the joy of Jesus’s resurrection from the grave. It is Jesus’s life that we’re celebrating, not His death. The weekend celebrates who we are, why we are, and where we’re going. Jesus cannot simply be a wise teacher and a good man who was martyred. If that is all He was, our faith is built on nothing, and our hopes are false. Jesus cannot be some dead historical figure whose memory we celebrate.

We're celebrating because He lives.

Easter is the fundamental test of our resolve and understanding of what is true and false. If we celebrate a good man who died and left a nice legacy behind, then we celebrate a falsehood that isn’t worth the paper the story is written on. A Jesus story based on fiction is useless. A Jesus myth is nonsense. The story of Jesus, born of a virgin, crucified in our place, and raised from the dead three days later, is either true or it is false. We either have hope of life and resurrection from the dead, or we have the empty nothing of death. There cannot be a half-measure or some compromise. Jesus is either exactly what the Bible says He is, or He was a crazy person, and our faith is nonsense.

Jesus either rose from the grave, or the entirety of Christianity is false.

Sometimes, more than one thing can be true at the same time. For example, my vehicle can be black, and a truck simultaneously, but things that are false are incompatible with the truth. My vehicle can be black and a truck, but it cannot also be a helicopter. I can be an adult man with red hair, but I cannot be an adult man with red hair and be a bottle of lotion. I cannot live and be dead. I either exist or I do not exist. This is the fundamental reality of truth. It is binary, black and white. Jesus is either the Son of God, died on the cross, and rose again, or He was a crazy man who misled billions of people over the last two thousand years. There is no in-between.

Celebrate what is true, reject what is false.

Jesus is the only way to see God. Jesus is the only way to life. Our sins are forgiven by the grace of God because of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We accept it as a gift through our faith. This is the truth. Other religions are false because Christianity is true. If other religions are true, then Christianity is false. If Jesus died for our sins and rose from the grave, then the Bible is true. If the Bible is true, then other religious texts are false. Either Jesus is the only way to the Father, or there is no way to the Father. The world may reject it because it’s not “inclusive” enough, but it is the truth.

We either believe and have life, or we do not believe and will die. The truth is as simple as that.

From now on, I pray that we all celebrate Easter because it is true. I pray that we use Easter weekend to reaffirm the reality of truth and remember that something true cannot also be false. Easter is a celebration of life. Easter is a celebration of hope.

Easter is our celebration of the truth.

Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”- John 20:29

Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.- John 14:6