This was originally posted on Good Friday, 2023. It includes some revisions.
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 Jewish 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 same 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, and the ongoing shouts of ridicule and disdain by the people to whom He had demonstrated nothing but love. He suffers the indignity of being crucified between two violent criminals, one of who would while hanging on his cross repent of his sin, believe on Jesus as his desperately needed Saviour and be welcomed that day by Jesus into His kingdom paradise (Luke 23:39-43). (It was most definitely a very good Friday 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 what was the ultimate demonstration and evidence of mankind’s hatred of God (John 18-25), of our Hell-deserving sin, wickedness and evil that we see also the ultimate demonstration and evidence of God’s infinite mercy, grace and love as He has provided a just means – the only means, a means He planned from the foundation of the world by which rebellious men and women can be justly forgiven of our sins (Psalm 9:17), sins that have made us the objects of God’s divine judgement and wrath which will have its full expression in Hell, and be restored to the glorious relationship with God for which mankind was created to enjoy (Romans 5:8-11) (Revelation 13:8) (Acts 2:22-24) (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, humbling Himself and coming into this God-hating world as a man, in the fulness of our humanity (John 1:14) (Philippians 2:5-8). As a man He lived the perfectly holy and righteous life God requires all men to live if we are to live in His presence (Psalm 24:3-6), and then He willingly substitutes Himself as what the Bible refers to as a propitiation, an atoning sacrifice for our sin, who would bear the full wrath of God, of God’s hatred and hostility toward sin and His just judgement on it (Romans 8:3-4) (Hebrews 2:17) (Romans 3:21-26). He would do so 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 (Acts 3:19) (Romans 10:8-11). By our union with Jesus. through faith, God would justly forgive our sin and bring us back to right relationship with Himself in mutual love (Ephesians 2:8) (1 Peter 3:18) (1 John 4:9-10) (1 John 4:19).
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 and remediate the guilt 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 the animal’s blood represented the just penalty for sin being taken by a substitute, pointing to Jesus as that ultimate substitute.
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 also 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 450 years of slavery to Egypt and to point to the One who would one day save men and women from our 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) (Hebrews 9:22). 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/woman deserved for their sin (Romans 6:23).
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) (Isaiah 53:10-12).
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 (Matthew 26:14-16) (Matthew 26:57-68). We have Him mocked and beaten mercilessly by Roman soldiers and then forced to carry, at least part way, the instrument of His execution, the cross, through the city streets of Jerusalem and up a steep hill called Golgotha (John 19:16-18) (Mark 15:16-25).
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 for six hours 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 (Isaiah 53:4-6) (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 from the cross of excruciating physical pain and unbearable shame and despair, but it is to hear a cry of immeasurable and untenable anguish from Hell (Matthew 27:45-46). This was Jesus bearing our Hell, because this is exactly what Hell is – being forsaken by God the Father to all of the corrupting aspects of sin that causes men misery and provokes God’s wrath toward it (Hebrews 4:15) (2 Corinthians 5:21) (Matthew 17:5). For this one moment in eternity Jesus, the sinless man, the eternal Son of God and object of God the Father’s infinite love now becomes the object of God’s wrath, subject to the ugliness, filthiness, degradation, agony and destructiveness of sin on our soul and body.
This is unbearable 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 in those six hours on the cross. He expresses the completeness of His substitutionary work when He proclaims from the cross in John 19:28-30, “It is finished” and then experiences physical death, in which He commends His spirit into the hands of the Father (Luke 23:46).
Three days later, God the Father demonstrates His satisfaction with the substitutionary sacrifice of the Son, raising him from the dead, sitting him at His right hand, giving Him a name that is above every name and the spoils of His victory – the redeemed elect – men and women from every language, tribe and nation who will forever sing the praises of the Lamb, sharing in His glorious victory over sin and death, 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).
For those of us who know and have come to trust in and love above all else this “Lamb“- our substitute, it was truly a Good Friday.
Grace and Peace ×