On Friday, Jesus was crucified. At the moment He died there was darkness, there were earthquakes, graves opened, and the great veil covering the entrance to the Holy of Holies of the Temple was split in two from top to bottom.

God's Holy Spirit, the Shechinah, the Radiance of God, left the Temple, out from the Holy of Holies of the Tabernacle, from between the Golden Cherubim guarding the Ark of the Covenant, at the very moment of the Paschal sacrifice, the sacrifice of the Lamb for Passover, and the moment when Jesus died, the same moment, three o'clock.

Then on Saturday, it is the Holy Sabbath, or Easter Eve. During this day, Jesus rested in the tomb, until the Sabbath was over. The Jewish Day of Rest is Saturday. The Jewish Sanhedrin set guards by the sealed stone door to the tomb so that Jesus' disciples would not steal His body.

On Easter Day, Sunday, the first day of the Jewish week, the women came to anoint His body. They found the guards asleep, the tomb opened, and the body gone. The linen bandages it had been wrapped in were on the floor near where He had lain. Then they saw two angels in a brilliant light. "Christ is arisen!" they said.

Now I know all about Easter. So does Mommy. She and I want everybody else to know how we're put here to learn to be children of God and how God sent Jesus, His Son, to teach us.

By Easter day, April 6, 1958, the story will be ready, and we can tell everybody about it. First, how the Bible tells us, "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not parish but have everlasting life." (John 3:16)

Second, how Jesus is God's sacrifice for sin. All that the Temple sacrifices symbolized has been fulfilled by the Lord in His sacrificial death.

John, the one who was baptizing the Jews in the Jordan River, said about Jesus, "Behold the Lamb of God, Who taketh away the sin of the world."

The Temple is gone. God still requires sacrifice for sin. In the death and in the resurrection of Jesus, we have this sacrifice, forever, not for just each day, to be sacrificed over and over, like the sacrifices in the Temple. Sin leaves a heavy heart until its punishment has been met in the sacrificial death of another. We all sin; we must all have a sacrifice to offer God.

The most important part of Easter is our thoughts about this and joy and happiness that God gave us our Sacrifice for Sin, Jesus. Everything symbolizes this. We are given new life, and flowers at Easter mean life coming from death.

In the Holy Land, there are many reminders of the time of Jesus, but we must study all the things that were there when He lived if we can understand how things began.

"Linda didn't know Bethlehem. How did that idea suddenly come to her?" That's what Mommy was thinking. This was the springtime of the year 1950, before I became ill, when it was almost Easter. We were driving along Loch Raven Boulevard in the northern part of the city. It was a sunshiny, fairly warm, but a little bit breezy day.

Page 80