Today is Good Friday.
Today is the day that we remember that a man walked the Earth and was punished, tortured, beaten, scourged, and nailed by his hands and feet to a rough-hewn log.
That man had committed no great evil, but yet he hung suspended over the crowd on a modest hill.
Who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
He was just a man, like me. He walked, talked, befriended, ate, slept, had fears and doubts, and yet he was thrown down. Shattered. Crushed. Buried.
Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
It was my inability to obey the law. Every lie I told, I spoke against Him. Every malicious thought targeted Him. Every wrong, evil, regrettable thing ever done by me was against Him.
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 its shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
By oppression and judgment he was taken away.
Yet who of his generation protested?
For he was cut off from the land of the living;
for the transgression of my people he was punished.
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.
Even more so, not only as the target of my anger and sin, but He willfully replaced me in the cross-hairs of an Almighty God who cannot tolerate sin no matter how small or trivial. My King stood there while I spat in His face and scourged his back with a whip and took the punishment that I deserved in addition to the punishment and insolence that I doled out.
Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer.
On this day, Christ reached forward and backward through time. The battle was to take place there, on that rough-hewn log. God would crush sin once and for all. Christ hung, afflicted, because of me. Christ took all of the world’s sin, past and present, on to Himself and offered Himself as the target of the wrath of God’s righteousness.
His love, His desire for my freedom from the terrible burden of blackening sin, His desire for me to return His love held Him there, not the nails.
For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.
