Good Friday

Well, the Friday bit, anyone can understand.  It's simply a day of the week.  But why is it called "Good" Friday?  After all, hasn't it got to do with Someone dying on a cross - one of the most excruciatingly painful methods of executing the death penalty that the twisted mind of mankind has invented?  What's good about that?

If it was just any man who had died like that, I suppose that there wouldn't be anything good about it.  But this wasn't just any man.  This was the One known as Jesus of Nazareth; the One Who was the Creator God in human flesh.

Some years later, a man named Paul referred to that crucifixion in a letter to some of the disciples of Jesus in the city of Corinth.  He wrote: “For our sake He (God the Father) made Him (God the Son) to be sin, who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.”  (II Cor 5:21; RSV)

John, one of the earliest disciples of Jesus, affirms to us that “God is love” (I Jn.4:8, 16).  And he isn't claiming that God is merely the highest form of love; but that He is the very essence of love.  Without God, love would not exist; without love, God could not exist. 

Paul, in those words to the Corinthian church, is telling us that when He hung on the cross, Jesus, the sinless, holy, perfect and without blemish Lamb of God, did not merely take my sin upon Himself, and pay the penalty that I owed.  He says that He became the very essence of sin.  He didn’t just die for my sins - amazing 'though even that would have been; He became all that sin is – all the ugliness, and blackness, and virulence, and bitterness, and maliciousness, and pollution, and poison, that is sin.  I wonder, was that what Isaiah saw as he was allowed to look over the horizon of time and get that glimpse of Calvary centuries before the event?  “He had no form or comeliness that we should look at Him, and no beauty that we should desire Him.” (53:2).  No wonder that, for a brief moment of human time, the Father could not even look upon the Son, causing Him to cry out, in anguish, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?”

And He did all of that; He became sin; for you, and for me!  The hymn-writer didn’t quite get the message when he wrote “O help me understand it, help me to take it in; what it meant to Thee, the Holy One, to bear away my sin.” (K.A.M.Kelly).  H.G.Spafford was closer when he wrote “My sin – oh the bliss of this glorious thought – my sin, not in part, but the whole is nailed to His Cross, and I bear it no more; Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul”

And that is why this is Good Friday.  Because it was on that first Good Friday that sin was defeated; the devil conquered; and the way made open for sinful men and women to commune, directly, with their Creator.  And, of course, that wasn't the end of even that part of the greatest story ever told.  But that's for the day after tomorrow!