Why is Good Friday good?
Why is Good Friday good?
When I was a little girl it confused me that they called it “Good” Friday when it was the day that Jesus suffered and died. This week I’ve had an ah-ha moment right in time for Easter. It came as I studied God’s goodness and learned that the word for “good” used in the Bible is more of a verb then the over used adjective we use it as today. (Especially by one of our current political candidates.) It is the greek word, agathosune, and it means character energized and expressing itself in active good. There is no good without action. It requires doing.
We see God use this word over and over as He created our world and called each thing he created, “good”. Then he created man and said that he was giving them everything he had made, and also called this good (Gen. 1). In the next chapter Satan enters the picture and begins his destructive lie that he’s been spreading ever since, “God isn’t good and he doesn’t want you to eat from that tree because it’s good to eat and it will make you like him and he doesn’t want good for you.” And we believe Satan’s lie and we take the fruit. Our sin separates us from our good God, but God would not have that. He loves us too much and so He began his action plan of goodness to redeem us and bring us back into relationship with Himself. To do that He would send his perfect son to be among us on earth to live through the same suffering and temptations we do yet be without sin (Phil 2:6-11, Heb 4:15). Jesus would willingly lay his life down as the perfect sacrifice for our sins. Jesus even told his disciples before his death, “it is for your good that I am going away” (John 16:7). The betrayal, the ridicule, the insults, the beatings, the blasphemy, the suffering, he took it all on for our good. It was the clearest illustration of good (character expressing itself in active good) that has ever been done. Christ acted on our behalf on that Friday over 2000 years ago as his blood poured out and cleansed our sin, he made a way to save us and give us the good gift of eternal life in heaven. I love Eph. 2:1-10, especially vs 8-9 that says “God saved you by his grace (his goodness) when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. Salvation is not a reward for the “good” things we have done, so none of us can boast about it.” We aren’t saved by our “good” but by God’s goodness. Read the active good of verses 1-10 in the Message:
“It wasn’t so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It’s a wonder God didn’t lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah. Now God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish! We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving.”
God has done the good work of making us and all that exists and calling it good, and when we threw it away in sin He did the good work of rescuing us from darkness and saving us. This is the message of the Gospel, which Jesus called the “Good” News in Mark 16:15 when he commissioned us, “Go into all the world and preach the “Good News” to everyone.” Good Friday is “good” because of the active good Christ did upon the cross writing the story of the Good News we live and share.
2016/03/24 at 10:00 pm