Good Friday

Ah, sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, offspring of evildoers,  children who deal corruptly!  They have forsaken the LORD, they have despised the Holy One of Israel, they are utterly estranged.  Why will you still be struck down?  Why will you continue to rebel?  The whole head is sick,  and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even to the head, there is no soundness in it, but bruises and sores  and raw wounds;  they are not pressed out or bound up or softened with oil. Your country lies desolate; your cities are burned with fire; in your very presence foreigners devour your land; it is desolate, as overthrown by foreigners. (Isaiah 1:4-7)


Ok, granted, not a cheerful passage to start off with.  But can you close your eyes for a minute and get a mental picture of what these words describe?  It's hideous!  Like something out of a horror movie with zombies, and burnt out, desolate, abandoned cities, darkness and hopelessness.  Isaiah says the people are utterly estranged from God.  That's what sin does. We can sugarcoat it all we want to, but the ugliness of our sin, the hideousness of it as compared to the beauty and holiness of God is a reality we cannot change.


Sin is what separates us from God.  If left unconfessed, unrepented, it can harden our hearts to the point that we become  utterly estranged from God; it becomes more and more difficult to hear his still, small voice calling out to us to turn away from the sin and turn to him.  What a dismal picture!


Today is Good Friday, the day we remember and enter into the last hours of Jesus' life on earth, his great suffering and death on the cross, the physical pain and suffering he endured, the whipping and abuse before the cross and the torturous, agonizing hours he endured nailed to that cross.  He also endured spiritual suffering the likes of which we can never know.  By taking on himself the horror and ugliness of our sin, he must have endured an anguish in his spirit that was unimaginable - only God could have withstood it. The King of kings and Lord of lords left the glory and beauty of heaven and the continual, blessed communion with the Father and the Spirit to die the most horrendous death man could devise.  Out of love and obedience, God became man, dwelt among us, walked, talked, taught, healed and saved, only to be crucified as a criminal.  The gentle Lamb of God was slaughtered.

• He was despised and rejected by men; 
  a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; 
  and as one from whom men hide their faces 
  he was despised, and we esteemed him not.  (Isaiah 53:3)
• All we like sheep have gone astray; we have 
  turned—every one—to his own way; 
  and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth. By oppression and judgment he was taken away; and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people? And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth. (Isaiah 53:6-9)
• I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax;  it is melted within my breast; my strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death. (Psalm 22:14-15

In John's Gospel, Jesus told his beloved brothers what was coming and why:  Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.  (John 12:31-32)  In Jesus' life, words, suffering and death, we see the face of God:  LOVE.  Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.  (John 15:13)

On this Good Friday as we remember these events of some 2000 years ago, may we look on them with fresh eyes,  We need to see our own sinfulness that separates us from God - from LOVE - that caused our dear Lord to cry out in anguish from the cross.  We have to face the ugliness of our sin, confess it, repent of it, and leave it at the cross never to be picked up again.

Could it be any clearer? Our old way of life was nailed to the cross with Christ, a decisive end to that sin-miserable life—no longer at sin's every beck and call! What we believe is this: If we get included in Christ's sin-conquering death, we also get included in his life-saving resurrection. We know that when Jesus was raised from the dead it was a signal of the end of death-as-the-end. Never again will death have the last word. When Jesus died, he took sin down with him, but alive he brings God down to us. From now on, think of it this way: Sin speaks a dead language that means nothing to you; God speaks your mother tongue, and you hang on every word. You are dead to sin and alive to God. That's what Jesus did.  (Romans 6:6-11 The Message)