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The poet Robert Burns in 1785 was ploughing a field for his garden and as he ploughed the ground, he noticed a scurrying of little mice under his feet. He stopped and realised he had ploughed up a mice nest. That got him thinking about the unanticipated events that happen in people’s lives that tend to wreck the careful plans they make. Burns wrote a poem entitled “To a Mouse” where he inserted the famous line (in modern English): “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry”. This line means that no matter how much of a good plan you make and how much thought you put into doing something right and try as hard as you can to get what you want, sometimes it still does not happen.
How do you react when things do not go the way you planned? In describing the resurrection of Jesus on the first Easter morning, Luke’s Gospel records that the women arrived at the Garden Tomb and found the stone covering the tomb rolled away. The dead body of Jesus was missing and they were at a total loss and consumed with anxiety. They had no idea what to make of the “strips of linen” and “burial cloth” in the empty tomb. But they need not have felt this way because it had all gone according to God’s eternal plan. In fact it happened just as Jesus said it would. In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men (angels) said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; He has risen! Remember how He told you, while He was still with you in Galilee: ‘The Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.’” Then they remembered His words (Luke 24:5-8).
How often do we make our plans without remembering His Words? How different would our plans be if we recallHis Words (recorded in the Bible) as we execute them? Where is your heart in life? Those who killed Jesus thought they had conquered His cause. To the contrary, Jesus showed that His death was a necessary part of God’s eternal plan. He died because He chose to die. Easter is the celebration that even when things do not go according to our plan, everything has gone according to God’s eternal plan. On Easter, God accomplished His eternal plan for all of us – “Hallelujah! He is risen! What a Saviour!”
