Good Friday

The year was 1941. The place: Auschwitz, Poland. Hitler’s dread secret service, the S.S. had built a huge concentration camp there, and they ruled it with a grip of death.

The Nazis had a standing rule that if a prisoner should escape from Auschwitz, ten innocent prisoners would die. One warm July afternoon, the commandant entered the compound and announced that recent rumors were confirmed. A prisoner had escaped. He then read off the names of ten men chosen at random. These men would be locked into special hunger cells until they died of starvation.

One of the ten prisoners condemned to die was a young man in his twenties. He cried out for mercy. “I have a wife and children.” Just then, another man stepped forward and quietly said “I’ll take his place.” He was led with the other nine men into the hunger cells. For two weeks they endured the agony of starvation as their already malnourished bodies deteriorated. Finally, the Gestapo doctors gave the ten men fatal injections. Prisoner 16670 died on August 14, 1941. His name was Maximilian Kolbe. He was a Catholic priest.

The young prisoner for whom the priest died managed to survive the war and was liberated by the Allied forces. Miraculously, he was reunited with his wife and family. They live in Poland still. And to this very day, every August 14, this man goes to a quiet spot in the woods near Auschwitz. He spends the day in quiet reflection, considering what it means for one man to give up his life for another.

This is why we observe Good Friday. It gives us an opportunity to reflect upon the death of Jesus Christ and what it means to us.

Now when you stop to think about it, isn’t it odd that we call the day that Jesus died a good day? Usually, the day that a good man dies is a bad day, a sad day; a day of loss and sorrow and grief. But think again about that prisoner in Auschwitz.

For that Polish prisoner, that day in July when a substitute took his place, was a terrifying day. But, for him at least, it was also a good day. For it was a day that, although he couldn’t know it at the time, he was given the gift of life.

Such is Good Friday. Although it was a terrible day in so many respects, a day when evil ran rampant, it was also a good day. For it was on Good Friday that Jesus Christ died as our substitute. It was on Good Friday that he took upon himself the penalty for our sins, so that we might have life.

In order to understand this, we must understand the cross. You cannot understand Christianity unless you understand the cross. For although Jesus was a great teacher, and a great healer, and lived a holy life, those things are not the most important thing about him. The most important thing that Jesus did was to die on the cross.

The cross was an instrument of torture and death.

- originated among the Assyrians and Persians as a means of punishing and humiliating enemies.

- adopted by the Greeks, perfected by the Romans

- became the standard Roman means of punishing and executing slaves.

- Cicero: “Let the very name of the cross be far away not only from the body of a Roman citizen, but even from his thoughts.

Yet it was the cross that became the rallying point of the church, the center of the apostles’ preaching, and the focal point of their lives. Far from hushing up the fact that Jesus Christ had died an ignominious death on a Roman cross, the early Christians actually gloried in the fact. Nowhere do we see this more clearly than in the preaching of Paul.

1 Corinthians 2:1 When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

1 Corinthians 1:18 For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles

Galatians 6:14 May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ

The idea of the cross and crucifixion, which Cicero found so objectionable, is mentioned no less than 76 times in the New Testament, by virtually every writer. There are three important things we need to know about Jesus death on the cross:

1. The cross was God’s idea…

Not only was the cross the instrument of human wickedness, but it was the instrument of divine purpose:

Acts 2:23 This man was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.

Acts 3:17 “Now, brothers, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did your leaders. But this is how God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, saying that his Christ would suffer.

The cross was no accident. It was the means God had chosen to use to accomplish our redemption. But why did Jesus have to die on a cross? Couldn’t he have died some other way?

2. The cross was the sign of God’s curse on the sinner…

The main reason that people of the Jewish faith today do not accept Jesus Christ as their Messiah is because he died on a cross. Why is that such a significant problem to them? Because of what the Torah says…

Deuteronomy 21:22-23 If a man guilty of a capital offense is put to death and his body is hung on a tree, you must not leave his body on the tree overnight. Be sure to bury him that same day, because anyone who is hung on a tree is under God’s curse.

Is a Roman cross a tree? It most certainly is. The Romans themselves referred to the cross as a tree. They referred to the cross as the “arbor infelix”, the barren tree. And the writers of the New Testament went out of their way to refer to the cross of Jesus Christ as a tree. They wanted everyone, especially their Jewish countrymen, to understand that Jesus because he hung on a tree was under the curse of God. You would think that in order to be successful in Jewish evangelism, they would want to hush up the fact that Jesus hung on a tree. But they didn’t. They almost went out of their way to emphasize it.

1 Peter 2:24 He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree

Galatians 3:13 Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.”

When Jesus died on the cross, he became accursed of God. He became our substitute, the one who died in our place. He bore the brunt of sin’s penalty.

Once upon a time, there was a young boy who was deathly allergic to bee stings. A doctor had warned his parents that one sting from a bee could quite possibly kill their son. They had to take great precautions when he was outdoors.

One day, the father took his son fishing. As they were sitting there on the dock, all of a sudden, the father was stung by a bee. Instinctively he swatted it, only to see it land on the arm of his son sitting next to him. But the father did not panic. In fact he had no fear at all for his son’s safety. Why? Because he knew that he had already received the bee sting himself. And he knew that bees can only sting once. The bee that was sitting on his son’s arm was harmless. It had lost its power to sting. It couldn’t sting the son, because it had already stung the father.

When Jesus died on the cross, he took the sting of death and sin for us. The cross was the means whereby the Son of God took away the sting of death by bearing it himself.

Christians are not ashamed to admit that Jesus died on a tree. Quite the contrary: we’re glad that he did. Because the Scripture says that in so doing, he was assuming on our behalf, and in our place, the curse of God against sin.

Far from disqualifying him from being the Messiah, the fact that Jesus died on a tree as our substitute shows that he is the Messiah; the suffering servant of God, the Redeemer of the world.

3. The cross is the reason we glorify Christ today…

The interesting thing about the apostle’s preaching of the Gospel is that they preached Christ crucified. They certainly mentioned the Resurrection, but the Gospel they preached was not a resurrection Gospel, it was a crucifixion Gospel. The crucifixion is where they placed their emphasis.

Because that is where Jesus placed his emphasis:

John 12:32 But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.” He said this to show the kind of death he was going to die.

John 3:14 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.

John 8:28 So Jesus said, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am the one I claim to be

The crucifixion is why we give glory to Christ. Because it was on the cross that love’s redeeming work was done.

Philippians 2:8 And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death— even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

When we catch a glimpse of heaven in the book of Revelation, the climax of the Bible - the completion of God’s great program of redemption, we see Jesus Christ, the central figure. The multiplied thousands upon thousands of his redeemed people and the angels - a great throng that no one can number - bow down and worship him. And what do they say?

Worthy is the Lamb that was slain.

They say that because the cross was Jesus’ greatest accomplishment. By the cross, he purchased our salvation.

1. The cross was God’s idea.

2. The cross was the means by which God placed on his Son the curse for our sins.

3. The cross is the reason we give glory to Jesus Christ.

When Jesus designed a service to help us remember Him, he didn’t design a service that would remind us of his birth. I suppose he could have. He could have had us pass out to one another little pieces of straw to remind us of the manger in which he lay. Nor did he design a service that would remind us of his resurrection. Perhaps he could have had us take in our hands a little stone to remind us of the stone that was rolled away from the tomb.

He designed a service that would remind us of what he did on the cross. He had us eat some bread to remind us of His broken body and drink some wine that would remind us of his shed blood. Because the cross is the reason he came. He came to die for you and me.

That is why we come to the cross on Good Friday. We come to remember. We come to give thanks. We come to express what Charles Wesley felt when he wrote:

O that our faith may never move,

But stand unshaken as thy love!

Sure evidence of things unseen,

Now let it pass the years between,

And view thee bleeding on the Tree,

My God, who dies for me, for me.