As we prepare to celebrate Easter, we are forced to contemplate that the events of this Holy Week were all part of God’s perfect plan, even though things seemed to be going so wrong for Jesus and His disciples. Col 1:19 reveals what God was doing through the betrayal of human beings, the plotting of church and secular leaders, the cowardice of Jesus’s disciples and the baying of the crowds:
God’s plan involved reconciling all things to Himself through Christ – all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven – using the cross as His method: ‘by making peace through His blood, shed on the cross.’ As our Bible studies on 1 Cor 1 have been showing, this method seemed utterly bizarre and incongruous to all people at the time and continues to astound and stumble many today. Nonetheless, the Cross is God’s method of reconciling us to Himself and we have to accept that no other means of salvation is possible.
When life does not go according to our plans, when we feel that we have reached a dead end and can go no further, the Cross reminds us that God works in the most unusual and unexpected ways. We may be downcast, but we are never actually cast down, for He is able to lift us up out of the blind alleys and can make a way where there is no way. Because of the Cross, we have hope.