²⁵ He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! ²⁶ Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” ²⁷ And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.
                                                            -Luke 24:25-27
 
So I have several “I wish I could have been there” moments in the Scriptures. But this one might be at or near the top of the list.
 
Can you imagine Jesus, God-in-the-flesh, walking you through the whole Old Testament and explaining what it all means? That’d be like Tiger Woods teaching you how to improve your golf swing. Even if you’re not much of a Bible nerd, you gotta’ appreciate how incredible this little tutoring session had to have been.
 
Jesus walks them through thousands of years of history and prophecy gathered up in the Old Testament Scriptures and he says, “all of this points to my suffering that leads to my glory.”  This is the big reveal! Stories that they thought they understood now took on whole new layers of meaning.  Everything went from 2-D to 3-D. 
 
Jesus’s sacrificial death and resurrection wasn’t an afterthought or a plan B when something else didn’t work. Good Friday was a night 3,000 years in the making—from Abraham to Moses to Ruth to David to Isaiah and Jeremiah and all the people and times in between.
 
As we round the corner to Maundy Thursday tomorrow and Good Friday and into Easter Sunday we’re going to (appropriately) zoom in to some very specific places, people, times, events: Passover, upper room, Judas, Pilate, Peter, Gethsemane. The gospel is never disembodied or abstract. It is always personal, specific, and local.  The work of God is always happening in a specific context with specific people.
 
But for today, let’s zoom out and appreciate that the architect has been laying the foundation and the scaffolding for this weekend for three thousand years. Everything God does in the Old Testament stories all of point to and find the completion in Jesus.
 
How does it change your understanding of Easter weekend to know that God spent 3,000 years preparing for it?