The Tomb Tourist
The Tomb Tourist
It shouldn't be hard to navigate a tomb, especially if it belongs to you. Travelling thorugh a tomb - what a fresh thought.
In fact if it really is your tomb there will be little navigating to do. Someone else will put you there and you will be completely pre-occupied elsewhere, completely oblivious to its darkness, loneliness and barrenness. Once in the tomb the opportunity for touring it is distinctly absent.
Tombs cannot be escaped from and they are the end result of supernatural transactions conducted between the heavens and earth. The nature of these dealings are completely out of the control of the tomb's occupants.
Yet amidst the annals of the miraculous there truly was one Tomb Tourist.
He was placed with the consuming love of His friends in a new hand-hewn cave. The tomb was secured with a rock large enough to require an earthquake to dislodge it. The rock was sealed and the tomb guarded. This was a secure tomb.
This tomb was never to be a home of decay for the new occupant; it would ever only be a hotel of necesary convenience for Him.
A tourist only ever passes through each destination on their journeys. Jesus was on His path to paradise as He toured through the tomb. It was simply His next step to glory.
In fact the path to glory is always the path of personal entombment. All must arrive at the point of self-death before entering the path to new life.
“I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” (Jn 12:24)
Five days before His crucifixion Jesus taught about self-death. Five days later He lived it.
Jesus had died to Himself long before He ever came to earth. (See Phil 2:6-11)
Any tomb-tourist knows that life on the other side of the tomb is far superior to life before the tomb. Jesus sure proves this.
Yet no-one can become a tomb-tourist without self- death.
Jesus went up because He gave up.
Self-denial becomes soul revival as it is passing through the tomb.
Any tomb-tourist is dying to live for Jesus.