I am posting this on the day we celebrate each year as Good Friday. It is called Good Friday, despite the fact that everything that occurred on this day over 2000 years ago can only be described as evil; the betrayal of Jesus by Judas to the religious authorities, the unjust arrest, trial and conviction of Jesus as a blasphemer, the abandonment by His closest friends upon His arrest, and the false charges of insurrection those religious authorities brought to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate. It included the hatred and hostility of the rabid crowd crying crucify him, crucify him, the cowardice of Pilate in giving Him over for crucifixion despite finding no fault in Him, the cruel mocking and beating by the Roman soldiers, the ongoing shouts of ridicule and disdain by the people to whom He had demonstrated nothing but love, and the ultimate travesty of being crucified between two career criminals, one of who would repent of his sin and be welcomed that day into Jesus’ Heavenly kingdom (Luke 23:33-43). (It was most definitely a very good day for him).
What was Jesus’s response to all of this? Father forgive them for they know not what they do (Luke 23:33-34). It is in the midst of this ultimate demonstration of mankind’s Hell deserving sin and evil that God provides a means, a just means by which the Hell deserving sins of rebellious men and women can be Justly forgiven, sins that have separated us from God and made us the objects of His divine judgement and wrath. (Romans 1:18-32) (Genesis 50:20).
And that just means would be through Jesus Christ, the eternal holy and righteous Son of God, the second person of the divine Trinity, coming into this world as a man, and after living as a man the perfectly holy and righteous life God requires of all men to live if we are to live in His presence, willingly substituting Himself as what the Bible refers to as a propitiation, an atoning sacrifice, who would bear the full wrath of God, of God’s hatred and hostility toward sin and His just judgement on it, on behalf of all who would acknowledge and repent of their sin, and trust in Jesus as their all sufficient savior, submitting to Him as their sovereign Lord. By this union with Jesus through faith, God would justly forgive our sin and bring us back to right relationship with Himself in love (Romans 3:23-25) (Romans 10:8-11) ( 1 Peter 3:18) (1 John 4:10).
Theologian John Stott, (The Cross of Christ), states the biblical gospel of atonement is of God satisfying his divine judgement by substituting himself for us. “The concept of substitution may be said then to be at the heart of both sin and salvation. For the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man. Man asserts himself against God and puts himself where only God deserves to be; God sacrifices himself for man and puts himself where only man deserves to be. Man claims prerogatives/privileges which belong to God alone, God accepts the penalties which belong to man alone”.
The concept of a substitute taking the penalty for man’s sin -namely death, was instituted in the Garden of Eden wherein God shed the blood of animals to provide their skins as covering of the nakedness of Adam and Eve that was a result of their sin (Genesis 3:21). The death of an animal, the shedding of its blood as an atonement of sin, is further developed in the Old Testament as we have the animal sacrifices made by Abel, Noah and Abraham in Genesis 4:4, Genesis 8:20-22, Genesis 22:1-14. The shedding of blood represented death, the just penalty for sin being taken by another (Hebrews 9:22).
The most notable example of this was the Passover in Exodus 12:1-30, where God requires the blood of a spotless lamb to be shed by each family to save Israel from the judgement He would bring on Egypt for their idolatry, an idolatry that we see later was in the hearts of the people of Israel (Exodus 32:1-35). The Passover meal was to be reenacted annually to remember God’s miraculous deliverance from slavery to Egypt, and point to the one who would one day save men and women from slavery to sin and its eternal consequences, Jesus Christ (John 8:34) (1 Corinthians 5:7)
In establishing Israel as His people God institutes a system of substitutionary sacrifice for their sin to protect them from or propitiate His wrath (Leviticus 17:11). Daily and annual sacrifices of lambs, bulls, goats and doves were made in the temple to propitiate God’s wrath from coming upon them. The outer court of the Jewish temple where these sacrifices where performed was literally a slaughterhouse – flowing with blood, representing the death that every man/women deserved for their sin.
We are told in Hebrews 10:4-10, the blood of bulls and goats could not take away man’s sin, atone for man’s guilt nor satisfy God’s wrath; it was all symbolic, a type or shadow of the one true and ultimate propitiation for our sin, Jesus Christ, the only substitute who could fully and finally atone for man’s sin.
If this penalty for a man’s sin is to be paid by a substitute it must be paid by a man – since man brought sin into the world (Romans 5:12-15).
That man must be sinless, perfectly righteous, otherwise his death and suffering would be for his own sins (1 John 3:5).
Because the penalty or wage of sin is death – that substitute would have to die to satisfy the penal obligation of sin, suffering the torments of Hell to satisfy the wrath of God for our offenses and transgression of His holy law (Ezekiel 18:4) (Revelation 21:8).
This substitute would have to be an infinite being to absorb the infinite wrath of God that those in Hell will experience, as well as have the power of life in Himself to survive the grave; and only God who is the author of life has this power (John 10:17-18).
Such a substitute is revealed when in John 1:29, John the Baptist introduces Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
Both the horrors and efficacy of Jesus’ substitutionary suffering for the forgiveness of our sin was clearly prophesied 700 years earlier in Isaiah 53:1-12, and His experience of that suffering in Psalm 22:1-18.
We have in the four gospels the account of Jesus’ betrayal by Judas, His unjust arrest and His travesty of a trial by the Jews and before Pontius Pilate. We have Him beaten and mocked mercilessly by Roman soldiers and then forced to carry His instrument of execution, the cross, through the city streets of Jerusalem and up a steep hill called Golgotha.
And before we know it we have Jesus, God the Son, the son born to Mary by God the Holy Spirit, hanging bloody and beaten, weak and helpless on a Roman Cross; put there ultimately not by the Romans, nor by the Jews, but by love – by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God who so loved the world that He gave his only begotten and precious son to suffer the full and exacting consequences of the heinousness and vileness of my sin (Acts 2:22-24) (John 3:16).
On the cross – in Jesus’ body and soul – all of the horror and terror, all of the unimaginable torment of God’s divine wrath necessary to satisfy His divine justice and wrath was poured out on Jesus so that all of the riches of God’s mercy and grace could be poured out on us, both now and throughout the ages to come (Ephesians 2:4-10).
To hear the cry from Jesus lips, “My God My God why have thou forsaken me” (“Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani“), is to hear not simply a cry of excruciating pain and despair from the cross, but it is to hear a cry of immeasurable and untenable anguish from Hell (Matthew 27:46). This is Jesus’ moment of Hell, because Hell is exactly that – being forsaken by God the Father as the object of His love, which Jesus had been throughout eternity, now given over to the ugliness, filthiness, degradation and destructiveness of sin on His body and soul. For this one moment in eternity Jesus becomes the object of God’s wrath, subject to all of the corrupting aspects of sin that causes men misery and provokes God’s wrath toward it (2 Corinthians 5:21).
This is misery and suffering that, though we deserve it, we will never know it if we are truly Christians, because Christ took all of our misery – the indisputable justice and wrath of God we deserve upon Himself.
Three days later, God the Father demonstrates His satisfaction with the sacrifice of the Son – raises him from the dead, sits him at His right hand, gives Him a name that is above all names and the spoils of His victory – the redeemed elect from every kindred tribe and nation who will forever sing the praises of the Lamb, sharing in His glorious existence, enjoying His abundant goodness and glorifying Him now and forever as the object of our deepest love and the source of our greatest joy (Luke 24:1-7) (Ephesians 1:19-21) (Philippians 2:8-11) (Revelation 5:8-14) (Revelation 15:3-4) (Psalm 43:4).
It was truly a good Friday.
Grace and Peace ×
The Apostle Paul’s doxology comes to mind now: “Oh, the depth of the riches and
wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever.
Amen” Romans 11:33, 36.
“Amen” indeed Karen.