There was a public debate between Professor Richard Dawkins, the famous atheist biologist and Professor John Lennox, the Christian mathematician.
Dawkins started by summarising his greatest problem with Christianity (with a tone of total disdain): ‘[Lennox] believes that the creator of the universe, the God who devised the laws of physics, the laws of mathematics … billions of light years of space, billions of years of time … couldn’t think of a better way to rid the world of sin than to come to this little speck of cosmic dust to have himself tortured and executed … That’s the God that John Lennox believes in.’
Lennox started his answer by thanking Professor Dawkins for accurately summarising at least part of what he believes. That is incredible!
What Dawkins thinks is the most ridiculous flaw in Christianity is what Lennox holds as its greatest jewel. It will always be so. The cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the absolute heart of Christianity. What is hideously ugly to one is beautiful to another.
Christianity claims that the first Easter weekend is the centre of human history. The events of those three days from the first Good Friday up until Easter Day can transform the eternity of every human. That is a claim!
So this is the page of our Bibles to turn to with our children. It is these events that we want them to watch unfold before them.
We want our children to discover why the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection is the most amazing story ever told. We want them to join in the shouting as Jesus rides on a donkey into Jerusalem as the returning King.
We want them to listen as an innocent man is sentenced to the ultimate punishment. We want their hearts to break as the King of the universe dies. We want them to share the relief of knowing that Christ’s pain brings us into His family.
We want our children to stand at the mouth of the open tomb at dawn as the King rises again.
‘He’s alive?’
A friend told me that she remembers the moment when she first told her sons that Jesus had risen from the dead. They were two and three years old. They both looked as if they were about to walk out of the front door and look for Jesus. She could see their thoughts in their eyes, ‘He’s alive? So where is He now?’
That’s why we must not stop there. We want them to imagine standing on the hill outside Jerusalem as the disciples watch their best friend rise to rule in heaven. We know where He is. And we know where we’re going.
And if you are convinced that the Easter story is the perfect place to make a start, please don’t continue to have the nagging doubt that you won’t know what to do when you open the Bible with your children.
When some of our friends were trialling the first draft of our book of Easter family Bible times, The Wonder of Easter, we asked them for feedback. One told us: ‘We don’t want to lose this precious routine that for so long we have yearned for. We didn’t know how to go about doing it. We didn’t have an impetus to do it. We didn’t think we could do it. Now I think we can keep going, but the children will certainly be missing all of your visual treats like fire, Happyland figures, drawings, Play-Doh and Lego. Thanks so much for giving us the opportunity to do this.’
Parenting is often the story of loving our children enough to muddle through when we don’t really know what we’re doing. We keep going, trying to work it out as we go along, because we love them. You love your children and young people. You love Jesus Christ. So open the Bible with them and show them their Saviour dying. For them. Then rising again. And even if the journalists, the academics, the influencers and the teachers are dismissing the gruesome, dark, bloody, obscure events of Easter, we can take our lead from Paul and, resolve to know nothing except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. Because our faith does not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power (1 Cor. 2:1-6).
