How important are the hours leading up to a great game? Open the door to a locker room and a coach’s den: athletes focusing, trainers taping, equipment managers checking every detail, and coaches reviewing final tapes, tweaking plays and nervously reviewing their game plans for the final time. Tens of thousands of hours of hard work, sweat and determination have come down to a final game. A palpable tension fills every crevice of the team’s ready room. The stadium is starting to fill. The time is near. Success or failure hangs in the balance.

Step back 80 years to another situation room in an underground bunker in England. It is D-Day minus one. Eisenhower and two dozen generals and strategists are packed into a smoke-filled room with a huge board-map in the center, representing all of Europe and the surrounding waters. Information is pouring in from weather experts, reconnaissance teams, resistance spies and radio relays. Nervous clerks scurry in and out of the Allied war-room carrying last-minute reports. Lieutenants with long push poles make slight adjustments to model ships, subs and other icons representing the current positions of both Axis and Allied assets. Scenarios are re-discussed, and contingency plans are presented. Every person in the room realizes that the lives of tens of thousands of men are hanging in the balance of their decisions. Coffee, cigarette smoke and the sweat of sleepless men belay an unbearable nervousness. The time has come. The liberation of Europe and the future of the modern world hangs in the balance.

The hours leading up to these great moments are like liquid resources under high pressure being forced through a very small nozzle. The pressure and liquid are so strong they can cut flesh or metal in an instant. Every person realizes the gravity of the task at hand. It is as if every bit of human thought and will is being combined and co-mingled together to direct a laser-focused response that will win the day. Both grand and small, as humans we have all seen or experienced these existential finales: school finals, board or bar exams, that final interview, the lead-up to a huge sale. Hundreds of hours of time and resources compressed into a final event in which EVERYTHING seems to hang in the balance.

Jesus of Nazareth, God come in the flesh, also experienced a night like these. The eternal fate of the world hung in the balance. This was the final night where a plan that had been decided before the world began was about to reach its climax. One could easily argue that on a cosmic spiritual level, this was the most important night in the history of earth. You say, a night that began with a foot washing and ended with a prayer was the most important in human history? How could 12 ragtag Galileans celebrating a common Jewish holiday on the fringes of the Roman Empire be the tip of the spear that would transform the fate of planet Earth? Yet this is exactly our claim! We dare you to come on a 40-day journey to see why this one night is, in fact, the most glorious night in all of earth’s history.

The glory that was intended for humans was somehow lost by our first parents at the First Tree. We have somehow “fallen short of the glory of God.” Paul would later confess in 2 Corinthians 4, “that our minds have been blinded so that we cannot see the light of gospel of the glory of Christ.” We humans, though born physically able to see, are spiritually blind and soulfully disconnected to all the relational attributes of God, leaving us terribly broken and incapable of fulfilling God’s intended plan for inhabiting the whole earth as His image-bearers.

And then one night, in the fields of Bethlehem, thousands of Angels announced, “glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace and good will to all mankind.” Somehow, all those glorious attributes that made up the Godhead were somehow going to be restored to fallen man. The Disciple John wrote Jesus’s introduction this way: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” We have 40 days to gaze at the plan. forty days to see how the glory of God was to be restored to mankind, beginning with 11 Disciples, and eventually to us all. 40 days to ponder what Jesus meant when He prayed in His most intimate prayer, “Father, the time has come. Glorify the Son, that the Son may glorify You … [and praying for us, He said] I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one.” John 17:1, 22.