"Easter and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ" Rescue Radio with Marjorie Cole

0:00 Music. Rescue Radio, because there's a war for your soul. Father God, we thank you that the war has been won by your spirit, by your courage, Father God, by your promise, keeping your promise even to redeem us. Lord, I thank you, Father, for Jesus.

0:41 Thank you, Jesus, for laying down your life for us and considering it, Lord God, a worthy endeavor to redeem us who have been lost, kidnapped, hijacked, held hostage by the God of this world. And I thank you, Jesus, for giving us power over all the power of the enemy. I thank you for giving us purpose and meaning and a reason to live. I thank you, Jesus, for giving us the authority that you said, I give you power over all the power of the enemy. Nothing shall by any means hurt you. Thank you for those who are courageous enough to use that authority. We bind the powers of darkness that have taken control, the God of this world that have tried to blind the hearts and the minds of the people who live here. We thank you for exposing him. We thank you, Jesus, for the promise that no weapon formed against us will prosper.

1:24 And so we thank you for this day that you go with us, before us, keep us in your peace, your protection, and that the powers of darkness will not be able to destroy the work that you called our hands to do, our lives to perform for your glory. And we thank you, Jesus, that you give each one who listens today eyes to see and ears to hear, and a heart to receive the revelation of your love and truth. Father, we ask these things in Jesus' name. Amen. We're going to be talking today about Easter and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. So let's begin by reading a passage out of Matthew 28, verses 1-8. Now, after the Sabbath, as the first day of the week began to dawn, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to see the tomb. And behold, there was a great earthquake, and an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone from the door and sat on it.

2:13 His countenance was like lightning, and his clothing was white as snow. And the guards shook for fear of him and became like dead men. But the angel answered and said to the women, Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here, for he is risen, as he said, Come, see the place where the Lord lay. And go quickly and tell his disciples that he is risen from the dead, and indeed he is going before you into Galilee. There you will see him. Behold, I have told you. So they departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy and ran to bring his disciples' word. This is the biblical account of what we will call the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which the world calls in various names, usually Easter.

3:01 And so, today we're going to be looking at some of the. Contrasting ideas, images, symbols, ways that we have disturbed and distorted the true power of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And so, here we go. Well, 2 Timothy 4, verses 1 through 4, I charge you therefore before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who will judge the living and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom. Preach the word, be ready in season and out of season, convince, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and teaching. And the question is why?

3:42 Verse 3, for the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers, and they will turn their ears away from the truth and be turned aside to fables. Yeah, the Bible. Made up stories. Stories, fables, fantasies, fairy tales, fables, yes. So this is another example. Evidence of the fascination that we have with the forbidden. You know, everything that's wonderful, beautiful, true has been wrapped in a shroud of fables, fantasies, lies, and distortions. Even the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

4:23 Why? To hide and distort the profound mystery of the love of God, the power of the death of Jesus Christ, the fact that He is the Lamb of God slain from the foundation of the world. And it's hidden, Jerry, it's hidden on the shelves of the merchandisers, you know, with the Easter eggs and the bunny rabbits and the jelly beans and everything else that's out there. It's offered as a way to symbolize or celebrate Easter, the resurrection. What's happened, the world and the church have incorporated a whole bunch of pagan practices and connected them and cluttered the beauty and power of the resurrection of Jesus with all these fables and traditions. Satan always writes the narrative.

5:11 He always provides another option to the true story of what's ever going on. And these origins of the mystery, the fantasy, they're all hidden. Nobody knows where these things always come from, But now they're celebrated on a grand scale on every shelf and every store and every place where there's traffic, human traffic. We go and we are presented with these deadly, stupid, forbidden lies to be options to our celebration of the life and death of Jesus Christ and his resurrection. Well, the origin of some of these traditions, it's kind of a mixture, right?

5:51 And that's what we're doing. It's a mixture of truth and error that we so often do. And basically... If you look at many different heathen practices in Asia, in Europe, and so forth, this is where we get a lot of these traditions that we associate with Easter. You know, we got the bunnies, eggs, plastic grass, chicks, and ham. Forbidden by the Lord for the Jewish people. And then, of course, the candy and the sweets. Well, basically, the term Easter or Ostara comes from a Germanic goddess or Celtic goddess.

6:36 It's kind of all in that same area. Mixed up and mushed together. Yeah, E-O-S-T-R-E, Easter. And it also comes from Babylonian goddess of Astaroth. So it's all different. Pagan cultures. Pagan culture traditions. And supposedly, you wonder where the Easter Bunny came from. Well, according to the fable or the tradition or the legend. This goddess, Astaire, found a bird whose wings were frozen. And this goddess saved the bird and, by turning it into a rabbit, yet the rabbit retained the ability to lay eggs, and that's where we get the Easter bunny.

7:28 And, of course, all this was during the spring equinox, you know, when things are coming to life again, and there was just kind of the worship of— Fertility. Fertility. A rabbit was a symbol of fertility, and the eggs were symbols of new life and so forth. But all this got rolled into the church, the Catholic church. It got rolled into, and all the way through now. No, it's all everywhere. Catholicism. It's everywhere. It's not just one church. Yeah, it's just. But we are mesmerized with this kind of fable fascination. And it's, again, just what Satan always does. He creates a false narrative so that he can create counterfeits to the real to distract and distort and weaken or minimize the power of the truth.

8:18 And again, people are more delighted in buying into that counterfeit than to stand up for and embrace and experience the real. So it's really a corrupting of the truth with a myth. you know, he is just substituting something unholy for something holy, and his narrative always tries to counter-explain everything that's holy and authentic, so that we can be buried in this attempt to destroy the revelation, the truth, obscuring the truth, so that no one really seeks it, and it loses its power. The resurrection, as we just read about it in Matthew, loses its power of incredible.

9:02 Awesome, astonishing interaction with God and man in Jesus Christ coming back to life with this goofiness, this silliness, these distractions. Almost every church you see, right now you drive around and you see all these banners in front of churches that say, hey, come to our Easter egg hunt. And it's like, okay. I mean, not okay, really. What are we doing here? We want to have fun for the kids. And, you know, we can Jesusize it by saying, you know, the rabbit is a symbol of life and fertility and that the eggs and stuff are symbols of new life.

9:48 And it's springtime and the grass is coming up and the flowers are soon to bloom and so forth. But, you know, people think nothing of it. It's a fun time, but it's such a mixture. Could I just read something here from 2 Kings 17? This is when the Assyrians had taken over the Israel, and then they came back and recolonized Israel. And they brought in pagan people to live and mix with the remnant of those that were still in the country with the Israelites. And, of course, these pagans brought on all their pagan traditions.

10:33 Legends, gods, pagan practices. So it says, here's what it says about the people in 2 Kings 17, 33 and 34. They feared the Lord, yet served their own gods. According to the rituals of the nations among whom they were carried away. To this day they continue practicing the former rituals. They do not fear the Lord, nor do they follow their statutes or ordinances, or the law and commandment which the Lord had commanded the children of Jacob, whom he named Israel. So basically, this is what the theologians call syncretism, where you unite or attempt to unite, or there's a mixture of truth and error, of true faith in God and paganism.

11:23 So Satan had to do something to veil and conceal this most powerful of all human events. I mean, he had to come up with something, and the more ridiculous it seemed to be, the more powerful it was. So he didn't fail to spin a yarn, another fable, around the death and the resurrection of the only begotten Son of God, who was also designated to be the Lamb of God, slain from the foundation of the world to take away the penalty of death that had come upon us because of sin. So Satan, you know, he was really on his game here, but how often does he not do this? He uses the trivial and the carnal distractions to reduce the meaning and significance of a truth into a mockery.

12:09 You know, Satan covered up the incomprehensible love of God, his ransom payment. You know, God was paying a ransom through the blood of his son to buy back all of us, his sons and daughters who had been kidnapped and held hostage in the devil's concentration camp. So God was doing an amazing thing here, and the devil was trying to obscure it, and now even still to this day, you know. As children, he tells us stories, he gives us candy, he gives us, you know, foolish things to follow, and we miss the whole awesome and incredible point of what really happened on that day with the death and the resurrection, Jesus Christ.

12:50 So you have the Easter bunny for Easter and Santa Claus at Christmas, and You have these things that are just really contrary. So contradictory. Really so wickedly. So how can we live? I mean, how blinded have we become that we will incorporate these traditions and kind of use them sort of to preach the gospel? But why do it? Why do it if you're a believer in Jesus and you believe in the resurrection? Why obscure it with a bunch of foolishness, legends, fables that are rooted in demonic, pagan traditions?

13:33 Well, I think the reason that happens is because we are also mixed in our affections. We want the ways of the world, and we also know the things of God. But we know that Satan, his major target, is the believer, because he already has the other people kind of deceived and duped and mesmerized and stupefied. And the practices of witchcraft, enchantment, and sorcery have already blinded their eyes, their minds. But for us, it's like he's trying to bury the Son of God in a tomb filled with jelly beans and Easter rabbits. I mean, come on, let's wake up. And you have an incredible story here with Jesus Christ raising from the dead.

14:15 That in itself is powerful, not just he died on the cross, but that he rose from the dead. If he had died on the cross, that would have been nothing. Anybody can be killed and mercilessly murdered on a cross, but he rose from the dead. And so Satan is putting these things in front of us to kind of like minimize the truth. But I tell you something, Jerry, creation itself did not miss what was going on. On the cross and in the tomb, the sky turned black as night. The thunder rebuked the shameless folly of those who mocked him. The earth broke underneath their feet as if to cry out in pain to having to have to receive the holy blood spilled out on the ground.

15:00 A few were able to receive and reverence this moment and cried out. They realized that the most profound, and I don't even know if they realized it at that moment, maybe at the morning of the resurrection, the most profound of all things that had ever been done in human history. And these elements, the creation, was a witness to his promise kept. And that promise began in the garden when the seed of the serpent would be burning against and trying to bruise the heel of God's seed, the seed of the woman. And that's what he did on Calvary. Jesus' heel was being bruised.

15:40 But three days later, after the death blow had been struck, the head of the serpent was crushed when Jesus Christ, the Son of God, broke the head of the devil and rose from the dead. So the head crusher was coming to complete God's promise to Eve, promise to humanity that he would come to bring redemption. And that redemption came through the full payment for the sin, And the death that had come upon the earth, upon all of us, because of the sin against the truth, the disobedience, and eating the fruit from the forbidden tree. And what a great symbol of redemption is that the first evangelist, the first person who witnessed the wisdom of Christ was Mary Magdalene, out of whom Jesus had cast seven demons.

16:32 And she's the one. She's a woman, mind you. And in a lot of places in that culture, women did not have much credibility in terms of, you know, proclaiming or witnessing. But Jesus, he's a woman's liberator. He's a man's liberator. Elevated women to the right status after the devil had crushed them. And she went and told those who had been with him as they mourned and wept. And when they heard that, he was alive. And had been seen by her, they did not believe at first. But then, you know, it was all verified to the disciples that were on the way to Omaeus and the other, the 12 or the 11, because Judas had already committed suicide.

17:17 So, Satan could not, he bribed the soldiers to tell a lie that his followers had stolen the body. But the evidence of the resurrection could not be hidden because the veil of the temple, six inches thick, was ripped from the top to the bottom, which opened up the way for all of us to enter into the Holy of Holies. The earth had opened up the graves of the righteous who were being seen by many people. They were witnessed by many people. So, graves are opening up. The Lord himself appeared, like you just said, to his followers. He ate food with them. He was there with them 40 days. And then in front of them, at that 40-day point, he ascended into heaven, and they saw it.

18:00 So, you know, how can we not know this unless we do not really embrace the truth? And we settle for celebrating this celebration with coloring Easter eggs and, you know, gorging ourself with candy. It's just, it's too, it's so contrasting. It's so offensive. It's so cheap and it's cheap and offensive. And how can we, I mean, yeah, you say, well, everybody in our family, well, we do this. this is our family tradition, this is memories, this is da-da-da-da. Isn't it time to start telling your people, your precious little ones, the truth about what really happened so that they have something to hold on to, some real truth that they can anchor themselves to when we come into the desperate days where bunny rabbits can't save you and Easter eggs will be of no avail, and you'll need to know the power of the resurrection of Jesus Christ that you might be saved.

18:57 I mean, what are we giving our kids to understand if we just bury them in all kinds of, you know— Fantasies. Fantasies. And you know what? These fantasies don't even all agree with each other. They don't even hold water. I mean, you've got a bunny. You've got a rabbit. You've got a bird. You've got an egg. You've got colored eggs. It's all mushed together to make no sense. The only purpose of all this madness is to cover up the true power of the resurrection of Jesus Christ so that people are all hung up on eating Easter ham, and, you know, if they even do Easter anymore, I don't even know. But, you know, we do have people, yes, some in the church who do reenact the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We have those things, and they're still there.

19:42 Some people are holding to that, you know, the truth and making that available. You make a choice. How much corruption and clutter and compromise do you want in your life? Do you want in your family? Because the more you allow corruption and clutter and the devil's narratives to operate in your life, the more you're going to have the devil's judgments, the demonic judgments of sickness and poverty and fear and confusion and mental torment and accidents, assaults and injuries and every other thing Satan can use against us to crush us, to separate us from the love of God. That's how you're going to have to make a stand. And I think the more pure and holy and deliberate is our witness for the truth, the more powerful will be the truth in us.

20:31 What would be, Margie, what would be some of the examples of clutter in our lives? We've got the clutter surrounding Christmas. We've got the clutter surrounding what we call Easter, which is, you know, we shouldn't even use that term, really. It's the resurrection. It's the celebration of the resurrection. And what are some of the other things that really clutter our lives? Well, anxiety, fear, man fear, what people will say, what people will say, trying to please people, trying to make people happy, trying to stay safe, trying to control other people so that our world is safe. It's all about fear. Our whole world is cluttered with what ifs and oh no's and what's going to happen if.

21:15 And I've got to and it's up to me. These are the thoughts that clutter our soul, mind, will, and emotions. But in your spirit, you can know the truth and walk in the peace of God. So it's a matter of whose report are you going to believe? Are you going to believe what God says and not falter? He doesn't change his mind. He doesn't go back and forth. He's the same yesterday, today, and forever. Are you going to stand with him even though it doesn't always look like or feel like it's going to work out? Or are you going to go with what it feels like, looks like, and every wind of doctrine that comes by pushes you in another direction? You will be unstable in all your ways. So the clutter can be anything from, you know, stuff and accumulating too much stuff in your physical life, you know, junk and clutter and all that sort of thing.

22:03 Or it can be, you can be clean and your life can be simple. But to do that, you're going to have to make some decisions what you're going to cast out, what you're going to reject, what you're not going to do anymore, what you're going to not allow to... Entertain you in your mind, in your thoughts. You know, just speaking of entertainment, you go down the halls of any movie theater and they'll show you the next movies that are coming out. And they're all just built on fantasy, witchcraft, fables, foolishness, goofiness, you know, all kinds of things that are not in any way edifying or pointing to hope or truth in people's lives and their hearts. Well, you go to a public elementary school book fair and you'll find probably 90, 95% of them deal with fantasy, fables.

22:51 Spells. Spells. Sorcery. Witchcraft, sorcery, all kinds of things. It's like, oh, this is what our kids are getting. And even a lot of the, you know, the cartoons and the video games, people are just so cluttered. Taken up, cluttered. Cluttered. You know, I was thinking the other day that, you know, there's the devices, our phones, are like remote controls in the hand of our enemy. And he pushes this button and we go over here. He pushes that button and we go over there. It's like we're being controlled and mesmerized by those electronics through the prince of the power of the air who is actually guiding us. We're almost like we're like little robots and he's just pushing us here.

23:33 And so people jump for their phone. They got to have their phone. They don't know what's going to happen if they don't have their phone. And it's like there's just a kind of a overtaking of human wills by the fantasies, the sorcery, and the fables of the enemy. So we're just, you know, we're just kind of like being dumbed down and set as sheep for the slaughter, don't even realize it. Yeah, and it's like, you know, wherever you go, people are just locked into the phones. I mean, it can be used as a tremendous... So you can get information, tap into the internet, you keep in touch with people.

24:14 It can be good. It can be a tremendous tool to use for good and for the glory of God. That's the problem. But we're just so mesmerized. We're just, they talk about man and machine woven together, incorporated man and devices. Paul said we're not ignorant of his devices. He wasn't talking about cell phones right then. But the devices, the strategies, the strategies of the enemy, you know, talks about the strategy. In Ephesians 6, it talks about the strategies of the enemy. Yeah. And there's so many. Yeah. But we have to be alert to them and avoid them and keep our minds and hearts focused on the Lord. Well, the only way we know those strategies actually is to read the Word of God.

25:01 In Isaiah 47, for example, in verse 8, Therefore, hear this now, you who are given to pleasures. Pleasure is one of the enticing lures of the enchantments that the enemy, the fallen angels set up to pull us into that place of delusion, sorcery, and deception. He says, you who dwell safely, who say in your heart, I am and there's no one else beside me. I will not sit like a widow. I will not lose my children. But he says, these things are going to come upon you in a moment, in one day. The loss of your children, widowhood, they will come upon you to their fullness because of the multitude of your, what's the next word, sorceries, the magic, the witchcraft, the spells that we have been enchanted, he says, for the great abundance of your enchantments.

25:45 So the sorceries practiced against us, the witchcraft, the spells, enchantments have closed and shut our eyes, our mouth, our understanding. We do not get what's going on because we've been hypnotized, so to speak. He says now, God says now, stand now with your enchantments and the. This is Isaiah 47, verse 12. Then he says, Let now the astrologers and the stargazers and the monthly prognosticators stand up and save you from these things that shall come upon you. Behold, they will be as stubble. The fire will burn them up.

26:27 They will not be able to deliver themselves from the power of the flame. It shall not be like a coal to be warmed by, nor a fire to sit before. Thus they shall be to you with whom you have labored, your merchants from your youth. They have wandered each to their own quarters, and no one will save you. So the enchantments, the spells, the sorcery, the mesmerizing, the delusions, the fantasies, all the work of the demonic narratives to lure us into the place of false safety, false peace. And he said, it is the very multitude of your sorceries and enchantments that's going to be your undoing. And so we have to wake up, wake up. We have to wake up. And the Word of God is full of truth. It's full of right doctrine.

27:11 It's full of, if it's rightly divided, it's full of hope and truth and peace. And it always directs, everything in there directs us to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Everything that, even in the Old Testament, the sacrificing of the lambs, everything turns us back to the Lamb of God who came to take away the sins of the world. And everything that God wants to tell you is everything Satan does not want you to hear or know or understand. That's why we've got all this compromise, this conglomeration of foolishness and demonic narratives and all kinds of options to celebrate the day and give the day to someone else other than to the glory of God and to be thankful to Jesus Christ. And so, again, we have got to allow the Word of God, rightly divided, to bring us to the place of truth, because only then will we have the peace and the freedom and the truth to stand and having done all to stand in these evil days filled with lies and fantasies and sorceries and enchantments and fables.

28:11 We have got to go back to the truth of the Word of God. And every day... God has called us to be celebrating the resurrection because it's through that resurrection. It's our emancipation. The cross and the resurrection of Jesus is where we have our life. You know, the cross, he said it is complete. It is finished. The whole thing is, the theologians call this the cross resurrection event. The cross was important, vital. He bore our sins and he bore our transgressions or shame on the cross, but it wouldn't have meant anything if he was not raised from the dead. It's the proof that he is the son of God.

28:52 It's the proof that our redemption has been completed, and that is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And so, Father God, we ask you to forgive us for despising the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, for counterfeiting and substituting all of these foolish things that are a mockery to the holiness and the goodness and the passion of your heart for us. We ask you, Lord God, to forgive us. Each one who's listening today, I forgive you for the way we have all been deceived and followed the lies and the deceptions. I ask you, Lord God, to forgive us for the lies we believed about the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And I bring before the court of heaven now and ask for the petitions of Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, to present our case before the Lord God regarding all of the sorceries, the enchantments, the deception, the delusion, the charms that Satan has set before us to deceive and draw us away from you, Lord God.

29:47 I pray that the court will rule in favor of the restoration of truth and bring us to the place of. The revelation of Jesus Christ and the truth of his power, his love to set us free, that that will be our solid rock and we will no longer be pawns and puppets and robots of the devil. Father God, I pray that you'd release from heaven now through the ruling of this court the truth about what's going on and bring your people out of darkness, out of this stupor, into your marvelous light. Also, forgive us for practicing religion instead of following the truth of Jesus Christ. Lord, again, we ask for a divine awakening in those who are sleeping, a breaking forth of life and light and revelation, and that they will again be awake to know, to see, to understand, to participate in their own lives, Father God.

30:40 We ask these things in the name of Jesus Christ, who is our faithful witness, who has seen all of these things and is still in love with us and is willing to bear our case, bring our case before the court of God for mercy. Thank you, Jesus. Amen. Yes, Lord, and thank you for... We just ask you to forgive us. We thank you for being raised from the dead. Forgive us for all the things that we've allowed in our lives to clutter our minds, clutter our hearts, clutter our churches, clutter our nation, Lord God. And we just pray that the revelation of the risen Christ will be so powerful and strong in each one listening in a whole new, fresh way this time of the year, Father. Amen.

31:24 And every day, Father, we pray that in Jesus' name. Marjorie, I was just thinking about the devices of the enemy, and you have a series called God on Trial that really basically incorporates in a very entertaining form, and biblical and entertaining. There's creative license in there, but it just really expresses. The power of Jesus Christ. It exposes so much of the lies and the deceptions and the devices of the enemy. Tell us about that. Well, it's an audio drama that is the reenactment of the life and death of Jesus Christ. And if you really want to pick it up where it's powerful, I mean, it's powerful all the way through, but in episodes 25, 6, and 7, or 24, 5, and 6, we have the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in those episodes.

32:18 And, you know, you can buy them individually. They're very, very reasonable. I think there's a total of 28. But if you wanted to just entertain yourself with the power of the truth of the war, check out on the website, liferecovery.com, the only place you can actually get them and see what it'll bring to your mind to this revelation of Jesus and the power of his death and resurrection, his descent into hell and getting the keys back from the devil. It's very interesting. Again, liferecovery.com, and it's called God on Trial. Check out episodes 24, 5, and 6. Okay, God bless you. Have a wonderful day. I have an emergency. What is your location?

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