Don’t let the roller-coaster resurrection story become stale for you. Grab a Bible, plop down on a couch with your kids, read it over and over, talk about it, and feel the awe. For those who are hidden in Christ, sin is forgiven. Death is done. Fear not. He is risen.

Reading through the Bible with my son has me feeling like a kid again.

This isn’t something new; we’ve always read Scripture together. But at the ripe age of seven, our son is weaned off the storybook-style, paraphrased, pop-up, scratch-and-sniff “Bibles” marketed to kids in his bracket, and now we’re plodding through the original. We usually read about half a chapter each night, talk about it, and pray—from Genesis 1:1 onward, genealogies and all.

Needless to say, each nightly reading involves some unpacking, and engaging in this exercise cannot but give you fresh eyes towards Scripture. My son and I are being discipled together. I’d liken it to taking your child for his first time to that favorite theme park of yours, boarding that classic log flume ride you know so well, and studying every reaction on his face to see if he’s experiencing the same thrill as you—until the moment when you’re both screaming with your hands in the air on the final plunge down into the water, because somehow, even though it’s your hundredth time, that climactic drop manages to catch you both off-guard.

Yes, I just likened reading the Bible to riding Splash Mountain. Because with every paragraph and every plot twist, we’re white-knuckling the proverbial handlebars of Scripture as we negotiate every bend, dip, and loop—from the rhythmic refrain of the creation week to the gut-wrenching sensation you feel when Eve bites into the forbidden fruit. At times I feel like that overly chatty moviegoer we all know well—or knew so well, back when physical theaters were a thing—shouting just before the jump-scare: “No! Don’t go in there!” And yet, in watching these reruns of redemptive history for the hundredth time with my boy, I never cease to gain fresh insights. So, as my humble Easter offering to you, what follows is one of them.

By Way of Review

The plot of Genesis is not hard to follow. There’s one true God, and his existence is a non-negotiable of reality that logically precedes the opening verse (“In the beginning, God…”). At the onset, as the Spirit of this God hovers over the blank canvas of the cosmos, God begins to announce his kingly decrees into the void, and worlds explode into being. Six days later, God crowns creation by forming man and woman in his own image and appointing them as his vice-regents. Yet a grave warning (literally) is spoken to a planet teeming with life: “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (2:16-17).

At the risk of spoiling the plot, Adam and his wife take the bittersweet bait, sending the universe into a nosedive. The genealogy following Adam’s descendants makes a point of noting of the men of each generation: “…and he died”—eight times, in fact (cf. Gen. 5:5ff, emphasis added). Death began its reign with Adam (Rom. 5:14)—and not only death, but sickness, suffering, and sorrow. And yes, for those of you with the ’rona on the mind, this does mean that the current pandemic is a result of sin, but not necessarily the particular sins of China, Italy, or orange man. Adam, our team coach, incurred the violation, and the whole human race was penalized. Our world is cursed.

But these judgments are punctuated by mercy; God promises Adam and Eve a coming Rescuer (Gen. 3:17), fashions animal skins to conceal their shame (v. 21), and postpones their death sentence for nearly a millennium (5:5). Common graces work their way into a rotting world the way a pinch of preservative stops a lump from spoiling. The world is passing away (1 John 2:17), and the world is being saved (John 3:17).

It’s important to rehearse these well-worn facts because we don’t give them their proper weight—especially the fact that death is our most ancient foe. Like my two-year-old whenever we play hide-and-seek, we forget what game we’re playing, who’s hiding, who’s counting, and our objective. We mistake various bogeymen as the real enemy—a political force, a rival denomination, or the presence of conflict itself. But despite our susceptibility to distraction, let us take note: death is the final antagonist in the story (1 Cor. 15:26). We will each stare down this foe sooner or later, and we will lose. The mortality rate is 100 percent.

I am sorry to belabor my point. We must rehearse the background of the story if what’s next is to land on our souls with any force. So forgive me as I now move to what will appear to be a defense of the extraordinarily obvious.

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