A Good Friday Sermon
The Scriptural account of the events that took place in Jerusalem nearly two thousand years ago on that original Good Friday presents us with an appalling scene, the most appalling scene the world has ever witnessed or ever will. It’s no wonder that it was cloaked in darkness and no wonder that the earth trembled.
Just a week
before, as Jesus made his way triumphantly into Jerusalem, and the people were
rejoicing and praising God and saying, “Blessed is the King
who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” “But some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, rebuke your disciples.’ But Jesus answered, ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”[1]
In other words, if man should withhold his praise, nature itself would find a way to express its joy!
How often do we read of such things in Scripture, where creation itself reacts or is called to react to what God or men have done? Psalm 44, for instance:
Sing,
O heavens, for the Lord
has done it;
O
forest, and every tree in it!
For
the Lord has redeemed Jacob,
and
will be glorified in Israel (Isa. 44:23)
For
you shall go out in joy
and
be led forth in peace;
the
mountains and the hills before you
shall
break forth into singing,
Jesus said, “If these crowds should be silent, the very stones would cry out in praise!”
By the end of the week, nature reacts in a quite different way. It registers its dissent. While Jesus was hanging on the cross, the sun refused to shine. “From the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour” (Matt. 27:45). It was as if the sun were in mourning or that it refused to lend its aid in making such a terrible scene visible.
The sun refused to shine, and the earth convulsed in protest. “The earth shook, and the rocks were split” (Matt. 27:51).
It was the most dreadful thing that could ever happen, the most evil thing that man could ever do. “The world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him” (Jn. 1:10-11). And yet, it was worse than simply a failure to receive him. It’s not just that they politely ignored him. No, they actively opposed him and rejected him. The prophet Isaiah said of him that he was “deeply despised” and “abhorred by the nation” (Isa. 49:7), that “he was despised and rejected by men” (Isa. 53:3).
The learned men of the day, the scribes and the Pharisees, those who were considered to be among the most devout, called him a false prophet. Some people accused him of having lost his senses. Others said he was in partnership with the devil. Some claimed he was a demon-possessed Samaritan (Jn. 8:48). The ruling class (among them the chief priests who composed the majority of the supreme governing council) condemned him and handed him over to the Romans with a demand that he be executed.
The events of that day represent the logical outworking of sin—sin come into its own—the fulness of sin, its end point, the culmination of man’s rebellion against his God. They show us what fallen human beings are capable of.
Lest we be too quick to defend ourselves and say, “I could never have done such a thing; I could never have betrayed, denied, or crucified our Lord,” remember that you are what you are now—you are who you are now—only by the grace of God. He has not left you in your sins. You are no longer a merely natural person, someone who is devoid of the Spirit. He has renewed your heart. He has shaped your current character, your current sensibilities. He has given you a love for himself and for the knowledge of his ways and a desire to be obedient. Had he not done these things for you—had he not done these things for me—we would be capable of the greatest evil, even denying, betraying, and crucifying the Lord.
We should never underestimate the depths to which we would fall if not for the grace of God.
Along these lines, have you ever noticed how David prayed in Psalm 51, his prayer of confession following his great double sin of seducing another man’s wife and having her husband killed to cover it up? Have you ever considered the implications of that part of his prayer, when he pleaded with the Lord, saying, “Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me” (Ps. 51:11, KJV)?
He must have had his predecessor, King Saul, in mind. The Bible tells us that after Saul had stubbornly and repeatedly refused to obey God, “the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and a harmful spirit from the Lord tormented him” (1 Sam. 16:14), and Saul quickly spiraled out of control, continually going from bad to worse.
Having seen this play out in Saul, it frightened David when he was confronted with own sin. And he prayed fervently, “Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy Holy Spirit from me.” “Lord, please don’t let what happened to Saul happen to me.” David feared what he would become if not for the Lord’s presence, if not for the Spirit’s work in his life.
What happened to Saul is what would happen to us, as well, if the Lord should withdraw his Spirit and his sanctifying grace from us. How careful we should be, then (as Paul says), not to grieve the Holy Spirit of God (Eph. 4:30).
It’s a very sobering thing to read what we find written in the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans when he describes the moral degeneration of the human race after the fall, particularly in the case of those who know the truth but refuse to live by it.
“Therefore God
gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity…” (v. 24)
Two verses later: “For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions…” (v. 26)
Two verses later again: “And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done” (v. 28)
Three times in five verses, “God gave them up” to their sins. Other translations say, “he gave them over to their sins.”
There is no more fearful condition for any human being than to have the only One who can save and deliver from sin deliver him over to sin. The Lord could have done just this to the entire human race after the fall. He could have simply let us be, let us go. He could have simply abandoned us to sin and judgment, without working redemptively in our lives, and therefore leaving us with no hope of deliverance. And yet this would not have been entirely consistent with his character.
It is true that God is just, and he would have remained perfectly just had he offered us no hope of salvation, just abandoned us to the day of judgment. But he is also merciful, and he delights to show mercy, and for this reason, instead of giving us over to the power of sin, he gave his Son over to the cross.
For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life (Jn. 3:16)
And we should understand that the love this verse attributes to the Father in giving the Son also belongs to the Son in giving himself, so that it is just as true to say, “Jesus so loved the world that he gave himself over to death, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”
Both statements are true. Jesus would never have laid down his life for us, had he not also loved us like the Father himself loves us.
It was not out of compulsion that Jesus laid down his life for us. He was not forced to do so against his will. As he said, “I lay down my life for the sheep… No one takes [my life] from me…” Not:
§ The Jewish leaders who conspired against him
§ Pilate, who issued the order of condemnation
§ The Roman soldiers, who nailed him to the cross
§ Not even the devil himself, who entered into Judas to betray him, and did everything else he could to destroy him
“I lay down my life for the sheep… No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord” (Jn. 10:15b, 18a).
There was no external compulsion whatsoever, only internal compulsion. He was compelled by love, the most powerful motive of all. “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (Jn. 15:33).
The Father’s love for us is displayed in giving us his Son. The Son’s love for us is displayed in giving us his life.
Some have spoken of these things in ways that don’t properly represent what was going on. They have presented it as if God was the angry judge and Jesus the merciful savior, as if the Son persuades a reluctant Father to show us mercy, as if there was a division between the interests of the Father and the Son—the Father inclining to justice, the Son inclining to mercy. But the truth is both Father and Son are equally committed to justice, and both equally committed to mercy. There is no division between them.
Or because of the scene in Gethsemane, where Jesus had a mighty struggle, mustering the courage to face the cross, and prayed, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will” (Matt. 26:39), some have supposed that Jesus was a reluctant Savior, compelled by the Father to yield his life a ransom for sin.
But no, our redemption proceeds equally from the love of the Father and of the Son: the Father who willingly gave the Son and the Son who willingly gave himself. And this, not as a mere afterthought, a plan B developed as a contingency when things went awry in Eden, but as part of God’s eternal purpose, as Paul writes in his second letter to Timothy, God “saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began” (2 Tim. 1:9).
The truth is that he has loved us with an everlasting love (Jer. 31:3) and the depth of that love has never been more fully expressed—nor could it be!—than in what he did for us in Christ Jesus on that dark day we call Good Friday, when man’s darkest hour proved to be a revelation of God’s greatest glory.
[1] Luke 19:40
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