What is Easter all about?
In The Beginning….
Let’s start at the beginning for those who are unfamiliar with Christian and Jewish beliefs. Christians and Jews believe in one God who created all things, the stars, galaxies, planets, the earth and you and me. Christians believe that God is manifested in three distinct forms called the trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. He is one God, but in three different forms.
God lives in the spiritual realm called heaven, which is separate from the physical realm and unseen by humans, except for a few extraordinary circumstances recorded in the bible. This is with the exception that the Son of God, named Jesus Christ, came to earth in physical form. I will go into this in greater detail later in the article, and is really the main reason for the article.
Before God created the Earth and human beings, He had a heavenly family of spiritual beings. God decided He wanted to expand his family, so He created the Earth and human beings and put them in a special place called the Garden of Eden, a place where God and mankind could interact with one another. Human beings are physical beings, but also have a spirit which lives on after the death of the body. God gave mankind dominion over the earth and all the animals He had created and charged mankind with taking care of the Earth.
One of the spiritual beings in God’s heavenly family, God’s chief musician named Lucifer, was filled with pride and decided to rebel against God. He wanted to place himself above God. Because of his pride, God expelled him out of Heaven to the Earth where he began to interact with humans and convinced them to rebel against God as well. (As a side note, this is why things like Pride parades are so offensive to people of faith).
This rebellion of mankind is known in the Christian faith as the “fall of man”. God expelled mankind from the Garden of Eden and into the wild where life became much more difficult for them. From that time forward, mankind would struggle with sin and separation from God.
This separation from God is not something that God wanted or intended, but it was necessary because there were provisions in the Garden of Eden to keep mankind alive indefinitely, and God did not want them living in rebellion (sin) forever.