Category Archives: Good Friday

A slow-to-believe believer’s thoughts on Good Friday

It’s Good Friday.

There’s a tsunami of meaning in those three words.

Maybe for you it’s just TGIF.

I get it.  Honestly, I grew up hearing the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection, but for years it made no connection with my soul.  If I’m honest the celebration (if you can call it that) of Good Friday has been odd to me at best and often it’s been an offense.  Tim Keller said something I heard the other day to the effect of, “The cross of Christ is offensive in all sorts of ways, and if you haven’t felt it, if you haven’t ever struggled with it, I don’t think you get it...”  That has been the case with me.  Until recent years, I haven’t really stopped to face the ugliness and offense at the center of the Christian message: that Christ was crucified for our sins.

Years of questioning from dear loved ones who don’t believe has caused me to look that horrific, bloody, crucified, historic Jesus I love in the face and wrestle with the offense of the Christian doctrine of substitutionary atonement (Christ dying in our place for our sins).

I am a believer.  But I understand unbelief.  Unbelievers I love have caused me to examine what it is I say I believe on holidays like Christmas and Easter and Good Friday.  And I’m very glad they have.  I’m a slow-to-believe believer in Christ.  The wonder and horror of what Christ endured and did for me, specifically, and for all who would believe in him, is palpably meaningful to me now more than ever.  But I’m thick-headed and slow to get it.  I’m sure the meaning of Christ’s substitutionary death will increasingly become more real for me since it is infinitely full of truth and life.  Increasingly, substitutionary atonement is no longer two big, seminary-graduate words only to be heard from a pulpit.  Substitutionary atonement is the bloody door through which I enter an eternity of grace upon undeserved grace!

But I digress.

I want to try to explain at least a cupful of my thoughts regarding Good Friday as I stand under the Niagra Falls of Christ’s substitutionary death for those who believe in him.

There is much to capture in thinking on what it means that Christ died in my place and satisfied the just requirement of God for me so that I will never experience rejection from the God who made me to know him as Father and friend.   As I say, It’s like trying to stand under Niagra Falls with a tiny tea cup to grab a drink of water.  But here I go.

It’s Offensive Because We’re Evil

Good Friday is about how we have perverted the glory of God and how he makes his glory known rightly again.

The thought that people are basically good and if we just modify “bad” behaviors we would all be happy and the world would be a better place is lost on me.  I’ve had a 2 year old.  I’ve lied so I could look good to another liar.  I’ve been abandoned and objectified as a woman.  And I’ve watched the news and cared for people broken by the evil in others.

We modify “bad” behaviors not because we’re basically good, but because like Imagine Dragons said, “No matter what we breed, we still are made of greed.”  If we’re honest, we know inside us is a drive to make ourselves the center of life at the expense of others.  It’s an insidious evil that seems to lie dormant, but peeks out it’s ugly head and beats its little brother so it can have the ball, or abandons it’s family so it can have a better life… or a thousand other birthed-evils that come out of our hearts.  We have laws, and behavior modification techniques and self-help books, and therapists and jails and multiple forms of restraint and training in our lives because we are trying to tame the beast.  Not because we’re all angels at heart that trip up every now and then.

And all the horror that comes out of us is not just horrible because of what we do to each other.  It’s horrible because we were not random, chance products of evolutionary process. If that’s all we are then there would be no reason to call anything we do right or wrong.  It would be simply part of the process of evolution: survival of the fittest.  But we know we do evil things and we recognize evil in others because we are made to do good.  To be good.  To be godly. To reflect the glory of God in our lives like living testimonies to the universe and each other.  Our human lives are to be like works of art that display the beauty and wonder of the One who made us.  The evil in us is so evil because is a perversion of the image of God in us.

When I look at the cross of Christ and the horrors of his crucifixion and think about the why behind it- Why would God do that to save us?  I realize, at least in part, that the reason the cross of Christ is so offensive and horrific is because billions of people (including me) have perverted the glory of God with our lives and made God out to be a liar and a murderer and a self-centered leech with a message that says, “Your life for mine!”   The cross of Christ is justice.  It’s a making right the message that has been wrongly proclaimed from sinful humanity.  The cross of Christ says God is worth my life.  God is truth.  God is just.  God is life.  God gives life.  God’s message is, “My life for yours!”  The cross of Christ is a historical entrance of God into humanity saying, “This is what you all have done to me.  This is the bloody truth about the evil that is in you that perverts the truth about who I am and who you are.  I am bloodied and broken and bruised by your evils.  You were made to glorify me, but you have defamed me.  And I bear it because I am God and I give my life for you!“

On the cross Christ is taking the truth that, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” in his own body.  His bloody, broken flesh on that cross is the embodiment of our perversion of God’s glory.  He became our sin.

I know that’s not all the cross of Christ says.  But it’s a few drops.  It’s enough to cause me to hate my sin and love my sin-bearing Savior.

All Real Love Is Substitutionary Sacrifice

Good Friday is about what love really is and what only God can do.

In that same talk, where I heard Tim Keller say that if we haven’t really struggled with the offense of the cross of Christ we probably don’t really get what it means, I also heard him say something that captured a few more drops of the cascades of truth pouring from the side of my pierced and broken Lord.  He said, “All love. All real love is a substitutionary sacrifice. ‘My life for yours’. Heart of the universe...”  It’s true.  It’s a truth we can all recognize.  We all know it when we see substitutionary sacrifice.  When a parent gives up their agenda for the day to tend to a child in need.  When a soldier dies to keep an enemy from taking freedom and life from another.  When a firefighter rushes into a burning building to rescue a trapped man.  All of these and so many other examples speak of the universal truth that real love is “My life for yours. I’ll die, I’ll sacrifice, I’ll serve to make your life better, easier, richer.”  Evil is, “Your life for mine.  How can you die, how can you sacrifice, how can you serve to make my life better, easier, richer?”

But even though we see this truth in our lives, none of our little displays of the true message substitutionary sacrificial love can save our fellow man from the righteous judgement of God on the evil we all carry around inside.

There’s a line in an ancient Hebrew Psalm in the Bible that says, “Truly no man can ransom another or give to God the price of his life, for the ransom of their life is costly and can never suffice, that he should live on forever and never see the pit.” (Psalm 49:7-9)

It’s the truth.  We all display little imperfect examples of the universal truth of substitutionary sacrifice, but none of us can be an atoning substitute for another human being.  The only person who could ever pay the costly ransom required to love an evil human being and give them a life that lives forever in friendship and intimate relationship with God is God.  I might die a little so that my son can live more.  But only the God-Man Christ Jesus can die so that my son can live forever!

So there’s my little tea cup of truth.  It’s just a drop from a fountain that flows abundantly with truth and life.  Christ died bearing the evil I have lived out which has perverted the truth about God.  And Christ did this for me because only he can give God’s life for mine so that I might live forever!

Maybe this Good Friday you can sip and taste with me and see that the Jesus who died so horrifically for our sins this day in history about 2000 years ago, he is good.

Unashamedly bragging

I’ve been thinking a lot about today. Today, 2000 years ago. The entire center and source of all things, all the purposes of time and history and existence culminating in one Man’s abused and slaughtered body hanging on a Roman cross. There is no god like mine!

All the religions of the world acknowledge that there’s something wrong with us humans.  And they all give their prescription for making us better, which like Propaganda said is like spraying perfume on a corpse and pretending it doesn’t still stink.  But for all the religions and the good ideas man has come up with for how we can be pleasing to God or just be better people, none of them propose what my God has done in Christ.

So maybe you scrap religion altogether.  It’s a crutch that weak man needs, but you’re too intelligent for that.  God, if he (or she) exists is just a nice concept to help us be better people.  Ignoring problems never solves them.  If we’re all just godless products of chance and time why do we even care?  But I digress, that’s another blog post.

There’s no answer like the answer found in Christ.

The perfect One, swallowing up the sure judgement coming against me because I’m not right.  I’m made to image God, but I don’t, and He has a right to scrap His creation turned against Him.  But He doesn’t.  Instead, He stands in my place.  Stands between me and the place of my sure judgement.

Only my God redeems.  Only my God does not count my wrongs against me and promises me a new heart.  Only my God is working to conform me to the image of His Son.  Only my God came, not to be served, but to serve and give His life as a ransom for many.  Only my God became a man and knows what its like to bear the weight of my fallenness.  Only my God bends down to lift me up.  Only my God gives not just a way for me to live right, but the power to live that way by His very life living in me.

There is no god like mine!

What love is this.  
To send His own.  
To die for sin.  
And take us home.  
Got me feelin’ good.  
Forget my feelin’s.  
When you heard a story bout the hero dying for the villain?

– Trip Lee 

So we are Christ’s ambassadors; God is making his appeal through us. We speak for Christ when we plead, “Come back to God!” For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ. – 2 Corinthians 5:20-21

 Quieted,

Sheila

Who would have thought?

1 Who believes what we’ve heard and seen? Who would have thought God’s saving power would look like this? 2 The servant grew up before God – a scrawny seedling, a scrubby plant in a parched field. There was nothing attractive about him, nothing to cause us to take a second look. 3 He was looked down on and passed over, a man who suffered, who knew pain firsthand. One look at him and people turned away. We looked down on him, thought he was scum.

4 But the fact is, it was our pains he carried – our disfigurements, all the things wrong with us. We thought he brought it on himself, that God was punishing him for his own failures. 5 But it was our sins that did that to him, that ripped and tore and crushed him – our sins! He took the punishment, and that made us whole. Through his bruises we get healed. 6 We’re all like sheep who’ve wandered off and gotten lost. We’ve all done our own thing, gone our own way. And God has piled all our sins, everything we’ve done wrong, on him, on him. 7 He was beaten, he was tortured, but he didn’t say a word. Like a lamb taken to be slaughtered and like a sheep being sheared, he took it all in silence. 8 Justice miscarried, and he was led off – and did anyone really know what was happening? He died without a thought for his own welfare, beaten bloody for the sins of my people. 9 They buried him with the wicked, threw him in a grave with a rich man, Even though he’d never hurt a soul or said one word that wasn’t true.

10 Still, it’s what God had in mind all along, to crush him with pain. The plan was that he give himself as an offering for sin so that he’d see life come from it – life, life, and more life. And God’s plan will deeply prosper through him. 11 Out of that terrible travail of soul, he’ll see that it’s worth it and be glad he did it. Through what he experienced, my righteous one, my servant, will make many “righteous ones,” as he himself carries the burden of their sins. 12 Therefore I’ll reward him extravagantly – the best of everything, the highest honors – Because he looked death in the face and didn’t flinch, because he embraced the company of the lowest. He took on his own shoulders the sin of the many, he took up the cause of all the black sheep. – The Message Isaiah 53

So glad He found me ,

Isaiah 51:3