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The Ukrainian war and the atrocities it has shown us prays on our mind. We ask difficult questions of ourselves, the world and God to which there are no easy answers.

As a church we have contact with a church in Kyiv. They worship to the sounds of air raids and bombs. They serve their neighbours and are living lives in the storm of war. They sleep in their bomb shelters and blog daily about their faith and their lives.  This is some of what Maia, one of the leaders, has written about God’s care in the midst of war following the birth of her granddaughter. 

‘Nights even after 26 days of war still signify danger and bring fears – most bombings happen at night. This is a special time of the day for us to keep reminding ourselves of God’s goodness, His protection, and provision.

Days before the war I saw it in my nightmares how we would be evacuating from Kyiv, under bombings, possibly on foot through snowy fields with our pregnant Sasha, trying to get to a village 60 km from Kyiv. Of course, it turned out that with Russian invaders coming close to Kyiv and occupying suburbs and villages those places turned into battlefields. We are grateful that when the war started God gave us the wisdom to stay in the city.

During the first days of the war, we heard a lot of reports of women giving birth to babies in bomb shelters and women not having milk to nurse because of stress. Those stories fuelled my next portion of nightmares. We had never thought of buying any baby formula ahead of time! Our granddaughter was going to nurse. Just as I was getting worked up about finding where we could get formula. I got a call from a volunteer with who we had worked in Eastern Ukraine when we took humanitarian aid there in 2014-18. She said she was focused on helping our military but she had some baby diapers and formula that needed to be distributed and she asked if our church could help with distribution. God didn’t only assure me that He will take care of our grandbaby but He also tasked us with helping others!

My big fear was that Sasha would have to go to the hospital at night, during curfew and air raid. Then the baby action came. And it was night, a curfew and air raid. While Sasha waited for contractions to become more frequent we started hearing loud explosions. Before it got worse Nikita called the ambulance, it arrived very quickly and we watched how it took Sasha and Nikita on an absolutely empty road to the hospital towards the sounds of explosions.

Later that morning hospital insisted that Nikita leaves till a more active phase of labor. Meanwhile situation around Kyiv was getting worse and it was announced that a curfew would start that evening for 48 hours. If Nikita didn’t get in the hospital before curfew Sasha would be alone through the birth and after. The explosions were much more audible near the hospital. I can’t imagine how scary it was for Sasha to be alone. Around lunch time I asked Nikita how Sasha was doing, he said she was crying, I could see Nikita was on verge of tears too. I went to the bedroom and cried.

Some days a while ago we had started sharing our lunches and dinners with our concierge – she is still serving as our “security guard” 24/7. So I took lunch to her that day and on the way back I was coming in the elevator with a neighbour who asked how we were doing. I started telling about Sasha and Nikita and broke into tears. He didn’t go to his floor, came out of the elevator on ours. He started making phone calls and didn’t give up for 2 or 3 hours until he found the head doctor who allowed Nikita to get into the hospital and be with Sasha before, during, and after Briana’s birth.

You know, how in my nightmares I was imagining that Sasha would give birth in a snowy field under bombings, or in a bomb shelter, or even at home. But God took care of everything! She was in a good hospital, had an excellent doctor, and Sasha, Nikita, and Bria were given the best room. They also had very good food – now because relatives are not allowed to bring food, restaurants are donating a variety of wonderful meals to hospitals. The nights Sasha and Nikita spent at the hospital were more comfortable than at home – they got to sleep in the bed, rather than on the floor in our bomb shelter.

Yesterday they also found a very good private paediatric clinic close by. The doctors in this clinic didn’t leave Kyiv! They are currently not charging anything – people can pay what they are able to or have services for free.

God has been so good and so faithful every step of our way through this valley of shadow!’

In the midst of war they are very aware of God. God is at work here too, in the immense relief effort, in collections, in fundraising efforts, in the offering of homes for refugees and in prayer as we join with the church across the world in praying for peace.

Join with us as we pray for the situation. You may like to use this prayer or follow Maia on this link (1) Maia Mikhaluk | Facebook

God of peace and justice,
we pray for the people of Ukraine today.
We pray for peace and the laying down of weapons.
We pray for all those who fear for tomorrow,
that your Spirit of comfort would draw near to them.
We pray for those with power over war or peace,
for wisdom, discernment and compassion to guide their decisions.
Above all, we pray for all your precious children, at risk and in fear,
that you would hold and protect them.
We pray in the name of Jesus, the Prince of Peace.

Amen

At the heart of Easter is a commemoration and celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. To make any real sense of this we need to put the resurrection into context.

Three days before, Jesus had been crucified. This was the preferred method of execution by the Roman Empire and so was nothing unusual – many thousands of other people had been and would be executed in the same manner. So what made this any different?

For a start, this was a political stitch up. The Jewish authorities were alarmed by the popularity of Jesus and his claim to be the long expected Messiah, the ‘Saviour of Israel’ because he didn’t fit the mould of what they were expecting, a warrior king who would defeat the Romans. They made trumped up charges, incited the population of Jerusalem to a demonstration of social unrest and then persuaded the Roman Governor that this would turn into a riot if he didn’t execute the ‘troublemaker’ Jesus. The Governor, named Pontus Pilate gave in to their demands. So one may conclude that this was just another sorry story of the ‘little guy’ being stomped on by the great and the powerful?

That most certainly wasn’t the case. However it may have seemed, Jesus was in control of the situation.

When a mob had gone out at ded of night to arrest him Jesus gave no resistance. In fact he pointed out that he could call on an army of angels to defend him if he so wished.

When a mob had gone out at dead of night to arrest him Jesus gave no resistance. In fact he pointed out that he could call on an army of angels to defend him if he so wished.

In actual fact it was the destiny of Jesus to be crucified!

Confused? You’re in good company – so were his disciples, who ran off in confusion and fear.

To understand this we have to delve way back into the Old Testament, to the time of Moses. Via Moses, God had given a set of laws by which his ‘chosen people’ (the Jews) were instructed to live. Embedded in these laws was the requirement to make sacrifices for forgiveness. The people could only approach God through sacrifice. This entailed the slaughter of an animal, usually a lamb. This might seem a bit distasteful to us today but the slaughter of animals for food and clothing was part of the normal way of life.  (It is today but the difference is that it happens out of sight). This ritual was also a sacrifice in the sense of loss. The person making the sacrifice was sacrificing a valuable asset.  The problem was that these sacrifices by their very nature were imperfect and so had to be repeated over and over again.  

Enter Jesus. Over millennia, humanity had strayed so far away from the path that God had mapped out for them that they had created such a gulf that He was simply out of reach. To close this gap there needed to be a one-off perfect sacrifice. That sacrifice was Jesus. Jesus lived a perfect life –i.e. he never strayed from what God the Father had called him to do; that is he never sinned. His sacrifice on the cross was a one-off, sufficient to atone for all past, present and future sins of the entire human race.

At the moment of his death the gulf that humanity had created between themselves and God was bridged.   That was the game changer of game changers!!

Quite rightly Christian celebrate Easter, the day when the crucified Jesus rose from the dead. This was not a resuscitation – no one ever in the long and bloody history a crucifixions had ever survived. The dead Jesus was resurrected, he was recognisable as the Jesus that his disciples had known but he was also changed. He was no longer constrained by human limitations, he could appear in multiple places at once, doors couldn’t keep him out, he could appear and disappear at will.  

Isn’t his all a myth though? A story with perhaps a grain of truth but enhanced and exaggerated with the passage of time?

Most certainly not – Look at the evidence; around 500+ people were witnesses to the risen Jesus (see 1 Cor 15:6). The same disciples who ran away at the time of his arrest and cowered in in a locked room were, a few weeks later, out on the streets  fearlessly attesting to the risen Christ to crowds of thousands ( Acts 2), within a few decades Christianity had spread throughout the known world.

Easter? What’s all the fuss about?  – The moment when the world changed for ever, where the gulf between God and humanity was bridged.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16)

Note: the reference in ( ) can all be found in the Bible

Well first of all, let’s look at a couple of often asked questions

Question: Why does the date of Easter move about?

Answer:  Easter Sunday commemorates the day when Jesus rose from the dead after his crucifixion. We know when this was because he was crucified the day before the Jewish  celebration of Passover and he rose on the 3^rd day (Sunday).  Now the Jews used a lunar calendar (i.e. based on the cycles of the moon) to calculate Passover and the Christian Church followed suit in calculating on which day to celebrate Easter. However, that wasn’t as easy as it sounds since at the time there were different ways of calculating Lunar cycles. In 325 AD the Roman emperor Constantine called a council of Church leaders to sort out a load of  issues including ‘when is Easter?’ It was decided that all Christians should celebrate Easter on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox. You’d have thought that would have settled it wouldn’t you? But not so! Different traditions still chose different calculations to determine when Easter fell and this wasn’t helped by a change in calendar from the Julian to the Gregorian (the one we use today). Even today, although the Gregorian calendar is used universally, the Orthodox Christian church still uses the Julian calendar to calculate Easter so they celebrate at a slightly different time to the Western Churches.  

So for us, Easter is always on the first Sunday after the first full moon that follows the spring equinox. However, this full moon is an ecclesiastical full moon (ecclesiastical means ‘of the Church’), and isn’t calculated in quite the same way modern astronomers would. Simply eh?

Question: Where does the name ‘Easter’ come from?

Answer: It’s not absolutely certain, but it is thought that name ‘Easter’ is taken from Eostre, the name of a pre-Christian goddess in England, who was celebrated at the beginning of spring. The only reliable reference to this is comes from the writings of the Venerable Bede from the late 7^th early 8^th centuries.  Bede wrote: “the month in which English Christians were celebrating the resurrection of Jesus had been called Eosturmonath in Old English, referring to a goddess named Eostre. And even though Christians had begun affirming the Christian meaning of the celebration, they continued to use the name of the goddess to designate the season.” This seems to have stuck

Question: So where do rabbits and eggs come in?

Answer: A tradition of decorating eggs seems to have been around since the Middle Ages (eggs denoting new life) but it wasn’t until the 17th Century when  childhood  began to be recognised as being more than just preparation for adulthood  that times like Christmas and Easter became times of family celebration. Decorating eggs was still common up to the middle of the 20th century but thereafter they were almost entirely replaced by chocolate eggs.

The Easter Bunny seems to have started life in Germany as the ‘Easter Hare’ and taken to the USA by German immigrants where it was supplanted by the more ’cuddly’ rabbit.

But all of this is of little importance except perhaps as quiz questions.  What is infinitely more important and indeed more amazing is that almost 2,000 years ago Jesus was tortured and crucified and was buried in a tomb. Now crucifixion was a common means of execution – hundreds of thousands, some historians think more than a million – people were crucified by the Romans. There is not a single record of anyone surviving!  There can be no doubt that Jesus died on the cross. And yet three days later the tomb that had been sealed and guarded was empty. A few weeks later, the same people who had deserted Jesus at the first hint of trouble and hidden themselves in locked rooms terrified that the same people who had killed Jesus would come for them, were out in the streets proclaiming that he had risen from the dead, that he was indeed the Son of God. They were so persuasive that thousands of people joined then in just one day, despite strong political and religious resistance.  Within 30 years or so, belief in Jesus the risen Christ had spread throughout most of the known world. Could this really have happened if it was all based on a con trick? Seriously? The evidence is overwhelming – Jesus was undoubtedly crucified   (there’s plenty of independent evidence of this). He rose from the dead three days later and commissioned and empowered his followers to take the ‘Good News’ (Gospel) throughout the world. And that is exactly what they did. And what is that Good News? It is encapsulated in one of the most famous verses in the whole Bible.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16)

As a result of Adam and Eve disobeying God, he kicked them out of the garden and instead of simply collecting the food they needed they had to work for it. Seems a bit vindictive? Well the reason given in Genesis is that they could no longer be trusted. They were likely to continue to disobey God and eat the fruit from the ‘tree of life’ This would apparently give them immortality. Whereas much later in the bible it is clear that this is ultimately God’s intention for humanity, they were nowhere near ready for it. Was (is) this a real or a metaphorical tree? There is no way of knowing, but the message is clear – disobeying God has consequences. We can once again use the child analogy; a child might be allowed to play unsupervised in the back garden provided he/she doesn’t try to climb the big tree. If he ignores this and is caught half way up he may no longer be allowed in the garden as he may be tempted to climb even higher next time, not understanding that he could fall and be badly injured.

So Adam and Eve end up working the land outside the protection of the garden. Things get worse! Their first children given the names Cain and Abel have a falling out – Cain is jealous of Abel because his offering to God was accepted and his (Cain’s) wasn’t. We aren’t told why this was the case but from the phraseology employed it seems likely that Abel offered the best he had but Cain offered second rate stuff. (This resonates with a passage we find in the last Book of the Old Testament – Malachi – where the people are castigated for bringing second rate offerings to God). The message couldn’t be clearer – only the best we have is good enough to offer back to God. But this is not the end of it. In a fit of jealousy Cain Murders his brother!

Needless to say, things didn’t go well for Cain. Of course God knew what he had done but despite this Cain tried lying to God – a really bad move – and so God banished him. There follows a plea from Cain that this punishment is too hard and God might as will kill him or someone else will. To prevent this God puts a ‘mark’ on Cain warning others not to harm him. It’s not clear what this mark was nor indeed who these potential killers were.

That brings us to another unanswerable question. Cain got married – who to? Well there are only two options: There were either other human beings on the earth with whom the decedents of Adam (those created in the image of God) mated, or the sons and daughter of Adam and Eve (we’re told that there were ‘many’) intermarried. That might be anathema to us today but in fact in most ancient societies marriage between close family members was not unusual and indeed not forbidden until the time of Moses, way in the future. In reality, either way, it doesn’t change the message – the uniqueness of humanity first created in Adam by God was and is inherited by all future generations.

What follows is a genealogy of Adam and Eve’s decedents. What seems remarkable is the ages to which some of these lived. Can we really believe that life expectancy could stretch to almost 1,000 years? While there are a lot of theories as to why we age, the biggest factor seems to be genetic – put simply certain genes switch off as we get older, so it is not beyond the realms of possibility that ancient civilisations did indeed live much longer lives than modern generations. Many generations later, the King of Egypt (Pharaoh) asked Jacob (the grandson of Abraham, who we meet in later posts) how old he was. he replied that he was 130 years old but that was nothing like as old as the age that his ancestors reached.

Next time we look at a couple of major events which are described later in the Book of Genesis, the flood (Noah’s Ark) and the Tower of Babel.

Last time we left Adam and Eve together in the Garden of Eden. Was this a real place or poetic licence? Well the Genesis story if pretty clear that God placed Adam and Eve in a ‘garden’. It certainly wasn’t some sort of formal garden as we might imagine but a space which was in some way protected in that they could live in it without fear and really without much to do apart from tend what was already growing and collect food from it. One could perhaps image it as some sort of ‘nursery’ where the newly created (whether this be in a physical or spiritual sense – see previous post) humans could develop and mature. The reference to them as being naked suggests a childlike naivety like that possessed by children. Certainly the impression that the story gives is one of an idyllic life without cares and responsibilities, just like that of young children in our society.

We are told that God gave then only one instruction – not to touch a particular tree in the garden. Enter the talking snake. Was there really a talking snake or imagery? Well there is no way of knowing. Again if you imagine a young child coming across a talking animal they would in all probability take it at face value – they wouldn’t know any different. However, it is not particularly important whether Eve had a conversation with a physical snake or not; the important thing is that she had an encounter with Satan (the devil). So where did he come from? There is no explanation in Genesis but what is clear is that Satan is not any sort of God alter ego, he is not an evil equivalent of God but a part of creation. A few verses later on God makes this absolutely clear. Much later on in the Bible there are references to Satan as a fallen angel: an angel who challenged God and was thrown out of heaven. The meaning of the word ‘satan’ is deceiver. He persuaded Eve to break the one rule that God had given her and Adam; not to eat from the particular tree. Again, are we really talking about an actual apple from an actual tree? It doesn’t really matter either way; the message is clear; God wasn’t just being perverse, Adam and Eve were not ready to handle an understanding of good and evil or mature enough to make the right choices. We can use the child analogy again – we might well tell our children that they can pick and eat the raspberries but under no circumstance should they eat the laburnum seeds (these are very poisonous). Adam and Eve lost their childlike naivety before they could handle it. That was Satan’s strategy – to disrupt God’s plan for humanity.

Next time we’ll look at the effects of this one act of disobedience

In the last post on the subject of ‘The Bible’ we looked at the early chapters of the first book of the bible to demonstrate that the various books of the Bible must be read in context and giving due regard to the original target readership. However we also need to recognise that the Bible in it’s entirety is ‘the Word of God’; it was written by a multitude of different authors over several millennia; some of it is to be taken literally and some not. But how do we tell which is which?

In this post we will look a bit more closely at the early chapters of Genesis. WE established last time that the creation story wasn’t necessarily to be taken literally and we explained why. The essence of the creation story is that the world, indeed the universe, was created at God’s command, not by some mindless spontaneity. The mechanism by which it came into being is the domain of the scientist and not for consideration here. If we accept that then, also accepting that the initial readers (and indeed readers up until the middle of the second millennium) had no concept of a universe that didn’t have the earth at its centre , then progression of creation from the separation of dark and light right up to the creation of all living things is not really very problematical, remembering that the timescale is not intended to be taken literally. However, when we come to the creation of ‘man’ it does require a bit of unwrapping.

‘God created man in his own likeness’ (Genesis Chapter 1 verse 26). What does that mean? It is self evidence that humans as distinctly different from all other animals. Not genetically – humans and chimpanzees share 96% of the same genetic material and humans and chickens share around 60% of the same DNA! Nevertheless humans are very different from every other living thing in that we have the abilities; of reasoning and making decisions way beyond instinct, of abstract though, of perceiving the existence of God, of having the potential to become God like. That doesn’t necessarily invalidate the possibility of evolution as the mechanism as to reaching our physical form, but Genesis does make it clear that God created us with a distinct and separate dimension from the rest of creation. We call that ‘the soul’. From the Genesis story it seems that God created a male only. He then looked around for something else that he’d created to find the man a companion. How come? All other creature (with the odd exception) have both male and female so why only male humans? This part of the story is not primarily looking at procreation but at companionship – God created humans to be social not solitary. Did God really create a woman from Adam’s rib? There is no way of telling but the essence of this passage is that God created woman with the same spark of divinity as man. They were created equal.

Next time we’ll explore the ‘talking snake’