It happened on our family vacation to visit my in-laws. We happened to be in Savannah on Memorial Day weekend and had gone down to the river front to visit our annual hangouts: Toy Smart and the Savannah Candy Kitchen. The crowds were enormous so I reminded the kids again that they must stay with us at all times and not wander off. We decided to visit the small toy store our children loved before heading to the Candy Kitchen.
My husband thought our youngest was with me. I thought she was with him. Several minutes of pure, fear-driven adrenaline poured through my veins as I helplessly called our daughter’s name. The store was not large, but no one had seen her slip out the front door.
Please, Jesus! Please, Jesus! Please let her be found! Please bring her back to me!
I was sobbing as I watched my husband make his way into the crowd passing by on the sidewalk as he called her name.
I had never felt such terror in my life.
I had never, until that moment, realized how wrenching and heartbreaking it must have been on a Friday two thousand years ago when Jesus was separated from His Father on the blackest day of their relationship. Good Friday commemorates the one time in all of eternity that the two were separated.
First, the bad of Good Friday
I was thinking about the utter loneliness Christ must have felt during the hours between His arrest in the garden of Gethsemane and when He was separated from His Father as He was nailed to a criminal’s cross.
In those hours, God’s actions of abandoning His only Son seemed anything but good.
By the time Jesus was nailed to the cross on a hill called Golgotha, he had endured enough sorrow to drive anyone mad. He had been forced to bear the burden of his sorrow alone because his disciples had failed to realize that His death was imminent. In between the anguish of pleading before the Father to let the cup of sorrow pass from Him, Jesus returned to three friends who had fallen asleep on Him.
You and I have experienced the bitter sorrow of having to walk through the darkness alone, when no other person on the face of this earth can share the burden of our pain, but not like He has. And my foolish heart can believe that Jesus does not understand what I am going through.
This is a portion of the bad that Jesus experienced on the way to the cross
1) One of the closest in His inner circle betrayed Him with a kiss.
Judas Iscariot had been everywhere with Christ for three years. He sold his soul to Satan for thirty pieces of silver to hand over the One who could have been his Savior. Thirty pieces was an insulting amount of money for the deed committed.
2) Christ was then led to a mockery of a trial.
Justice was denied Him. And those whom Jesus had come to save rejected Him, spit on Him, mocked Him, and falsely accused Him. Rejection is one thing; it is a bitter, horrible pill to swallow. But being falsely accused makes most of us cry out in our defense. Jesus never did. He was looked at as a fool and a coward.
3) After the inquisition before the Roman official, Pontus Pilate, Jesus was scourged and beaten beyond recognition.
And then He was forced to carry a cross on His mutilated back. Simon of Cyrene helped carry the beams of wood to which Christ was nailed to with rusty spikes.
4) He endured six hours of the full wrath of God the Father as Christ who knew no sin became sin for you and me.
The physical pain of the crucifixion would have been enough, but the holiness of God on demanded that He separate Himself from His perfect Son in Christ’s most agonizing time of need. He was utterly alone, bearing the punishment of our sin so that we could be fully rescued from eternal separation from God.
From the a human perspective, nothing Jesus had to endure that was good on that Friday.
Setup for the good
I had never experienced as dark a day as the one when my preschooler was separated from me. My prayers of desperation had never been more fervent. As I stood there crying on the steps outside the toy store, I felt a hand on my arm.
There was my daughter. She had been found by a woman in the alleyway behind the toy store.
I am convinced that the darkest hours of our lives are the very setup for a resurrection of our souls. The bad of Good Friday gave way to the most glorious Sunday ever known to humankind. Death had to come to the perfect Son of God, Jesus Christ, or our sin would have no way of being forgiven. And, sweet friend, if there has been a death, physical or emotional, in our lives, there is a resurrection day coming! It is the nature of our God. Do you remember what the angel at the tomb asked the women early on that Sunday morning when they found an empty grave?
“…Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen!…” Luke 24:5-6 (NIV)
Maybe we have only seen the bad of what we are going through, maybe believing that we have been abandoned by Him.
We have been looking for Him in the wrong places! He is not in the deadness of the despair of our hearts. He is alive; He is risen! The bad of Good Friday is the place of hope. The anguish of our circumstances has already been borne in His body on that cross. Jesus took the wrath. We are given hope. Jesus is more than the Son of God–He is God. He has experienced all that causes us such despair and triumphed over it!
Because He lives, we can cling to the truth that the bad of Good Friday will turn into the glory of resurrection Sunday.
“He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before her shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
By oppression and judgment he was taken away.
And who can speak of his descendants?
For he was cut off from the land of the living;
for the transgression of my people he was stricken.
He was assigned a grave with the wicked,
and with the rich in his death,
though he had done no violence,
nor was any deceit in his mouth.
Yet it was the LORD’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer,
and though the LORD makes his life a guilt offering,
he will see his offspring and prolong his days,
and the will of the LORD will prosper in his hand.”
Isaiah 53:7-10 (NIV)
Please leave me a comment! Share a time when God’s goodness was only seen in your life after you looked back at what it accomplished.
I’ve always wondered why this day was called “Good” Friday. There was nothing “good” about it. Except for its result.
MY sin taken away because Jesus allowed himself to be mankind’s sacrifice. I cannot fathom the pain he must have been in. But I am so grateful for it!
He is Risen, indeed!
Beautifully done Shawn.