How Do Atheists Celebrate Easter?


If you follow atheists to their logical conclusions, their world ends on Good Friday. Death and decay are the end of their philosophy.  There is no Easter. By its very nature atheism necessarily excludes any and all ultimate hope.  It inexorably leads to ultimate, overwhelming, unyielding, existential despair.

If there is no God, there’s nothing ahead of the universe except demise. You will die, and there’s nothing more. Your children will die. Your grandchildren will die. We will all die and our existence will cease forever and there’s nothing more. Eventually this planet itself will die. Given enough time, the sun will burn out, the universe will collapse within itself, and everything will become as though it had never been.

All our progress will collapse. All our joys will evaporate. All human purpose and meaning will be futile, empty, and meaningless. If you are an atheist, your life may have some momentary meaning to you, but it has no ultimate purpose and no lasting meaning.  We’re just the accidental byproducts of matter plus time plus chance that appear for a flash of a moment, then are extinguished forever. That in itself doesn’t mean that Christianity is true; there are other ways of demonstrating that. It simply means that atheism and non-Christian faith systems are one-way roads to meaninglessness and absurdity.

In contrast to this, I’d like to offer the message of the Gospel of John. Exactly fifty times in the fourth Gospel, we find the word LIFE!  As we read through the Gospel of John, this is what we find:

In Him was life, and that life was the light of man…. He who comes down from heaven… gives life to the world… I am the bread of life…. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life…. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that you may have life, and more abundantly…. I am the way, the truth, and the life…. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish…. These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.

Life, life, life, life, life—that’s the message of John, and that’s the message of Jesus. And that’s why I’m celebrating Easter. 

(This is from my 2010 Easter sermon. To read the entire message, check out our TDF website at www.donelson.org.)