Spring is here! The lonely brooding days of winter incite us to long for a better time. Winter groans of coldness, misery, barrenness, and death—a time of blizzards, wind chills, and slush. But spring is a time of April showers, cool breezes and flowers—singing of warmth, joy, fullness, and new life. It is the season of the resurrection of the one who is lifegiver, and it is fitting he defeated death when life was rising up all around him. Perhaps God timed it especially for that season in the cycle of nature that best gives hope; maybe when believers join Jesus in his triumph over death, it will be another spring day.
The story of Jesus’ cross is rooted in Israel’s Passover, that life celebration of deliverance from the winter of her discontent in Egyptian bondage (Exodus 12-13). Jesus, as Israel’s Messiah, is the Passover lamb sacrificed to deliver all nations from the winter of their discontent in the bondage of their own sin (1 Corinthians 5:7).
Spring is a pleasant reminder of hope realized, winter a bleak reminder of death’s reality. The hope of an eternal spring belongs to those celebrating Jesus the Messiah as their own Passover: “In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade-kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time” (1 Peter 1:3-5). Spring is here!